O PROMISED LAND!
Knoll, Erwin
O Promised Land! It has been promised to too many Erwin Knoll The old British prison in Jerusalem does not appear on the "must" list for tourists. We came across it by accident while meandering...
...After all, the West Bank and Gaza are only 20 per cent of Palestine...
...He has a "scenario" for Israel's survival: f Israel withdraws to its 1967 borders, returning the occupied territories to Egypt and Syria and relinquishing all territorial ambitions...
...About 20 per cent, on the average, is rejected, el-Sayyed estimates...
...The press is full of news about the upheavals in Iran and speculation as to the possible consequences...
...Perhaps half that number, knowledgeable Israelis told me, could be persuaded now that such a solution would require an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza...
...aid — official aid from Washington, unofficial aid from America's supportive Jewish community — the Israeli economy would swiftly collapse...
...Athens, I point out, there is growing concern about the effects of auto fumes on priceless monuments...
...A poll by the newspaper Ha 'aretz at the end of 1978 showed that almost 70 per cent of Israelis now accept the need for a solution to the Palestinian problem as a precondition for peace...
...I talk to a historian about the exhaust fumes in Jerusalem's traffic-clogged streets...
...Ecologists charge official indifference to the encroachments of pollution and environmental damage...
...I have no religious attachment to Jerusalem, but I can see why it has been coveted and conquered time and again through the centuries...
...It permits problems to be deferred — indefinitely...
...there is much talk of "black money" that escapes the tax collectors...
...On occasion, items picked up from the Israeli press have been refused publication in Al-Fajr...
...Israel is, after all, a garrison state, beleaguered by enemies...
...There is tension between the Western Jews, who provide most of Israel's economic and political elite, and the rapidly growing population of "Oriental" Jews — most of them refugees from ancient Jewish communities in the Arab world — who have been described as Israel's second-class citizens...
...The annual inflation rate is about 50 per cent...
...Others served long sentences in the cramped isolation cells...
...You'll still have Israeli exploitation of the Arabs here...
...Professor Tuviah Shlonsky, who Speaks with intensity and animation about Israel's problems, warns me against the "delusion and misrepresentation" that a viable political alternative exists...
...Why, I wonder, does every Israeli — Left, Right, or Center — with whom I have talked look to the United States for a solution...
...People ask me what kind of a state a Palestinian state will be...
...Iran...
...If there can be no peace without agreement on Jerusalem, I suspect there can be no peace...
...That happens to be my message, too...
...To possess Jerusalem is to be heir to the Ages...
...But who will do the saving...
...Were it not for the massive infusions of U.S...
...The day we left Jerusalem, several thousand "Peace Now" demonstrators massed outside Prime Minister Israel's moral strength "The moral strength that millions of people the world over attribute to Israel is the wish for liberty, independence, and self-determination — the self-determination of Israel...
...He takes no active part in politics of any kind...
...The University is subject to military control by the Israeli authorities, and its publications must submit to military censorship...
...The major force which prevents a reasonable solution in the Middle East is the United States...
...One of these, he says, is "a commercial paper, looking for profit only...
...It is necessary for me, as a Jew, to have it there, even though I do not choose to live in it...
...He points to Israeli support for the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua...
...Isn't it possible that more injury will be inflicted in the next decade than in the last few centuries...
...We know," he replies...
...Isn't there similar danger in Jerusalem, the site of some of humanity's most treasured shrines...
...If it were someone else's, I would want it...
...He pounds on his desk for emphasis: "Doesn't the United States realize that we are their soldiers in the Middle East...
...There was a time when the "Palestinians" were Jews...
...The Arabs have an image of Israel as a bridgehead of Western imperialism — which evokes their bitter past — and Israel does everything in its power to substantiate that image," Amit says...
...Pierre Mendes-France (The former Prime Minister of France delivered these remarks on November 21, 1977, at a symposium marking the twentieth anniversary of New Outlook, a monthly magazine published in Tel Aviv and "dedicated to the search for peace in the Middle East and to cooperation and development of all the area's peoples...
...the Irgun or Stern Gang (Israelis now call it the Stern Group), who fought a guerrilla war for creation of a Jewish state...
...Mamoun el-Sayyed is a Palestinian, the editor of Al-Fajr, an Arabic daily that circulates some 10,000 copies in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank...
...1f A Palestinian state, led by the PLO or any other political force of the Palestinians' own choosing, is created on the West Bank of the Jordan and in Gaza...
...That is our mission," he shrugs...
...The Heroes were Freedom Fighters: Jews, members of Erwin Knoll, the editor of The Progressive, visited Israel in January...
...it has also prevented it from facing up to its problems — and the catalog of those problems is almost endless...
...The leaflets are protests against British oppression, announcements of planned "actions," warnings that British soldiers may be seized as hostages and executed...
...But how else is one to assess the American President's public doubt of the Shah's ability to withstand demands for his removal...
...People are too comfortable...
...Endless discussions are being held on the future fate of the Palestinians...
...He rates the chances at better than fifty-fifty — a more optimistic estimate than I heard from any Israeli...
...Along Tel Aviv's splendid Mediterranean beaches, the luxury hotels are packed with affluent refugees from Teheran who have deemed it prudent to go into temporary or permanent exile...
...Fears of a radical Palestinian state are delaying a solution, especially on the Arab side," he concedes...
...At times, when the very survival of Israel was threatened, its moral force, to which the whole world responded, lay in its self-determination, its desire to be a free nation and to survive all the threats surrounding it...
...When peace is achieved," he replied, "Jerusalem will not be a problem...
...We worry about it...
...If the United States were to stop its economic assistance to Israel, Israel would be willing to come to terms with the idea of a Palestinian state within two months...
...We have," he assures me, "a voluntary totalitarian society...
...The Emergency" — the constant, continuing emergency that has been in effect since 1948 — is Israel's preoccupation and its cop-out...
...But Mamoun el-Sayyed speaks hopefully, nonetheless, of the prospects of peace based on "mutual trust" between Israelis and Palestinians...
...young people who want to establish their own households have little choice but to leave the city...
...Nine out of ten Israelis, he guesses, are untroubled by such relationships...
...E.K...
...But there are no solutions...
...It is, says el-Sayyed, "a complicated and ridiculous business...
...To see the sunlight on the golden walls...
...There is a practical basis for peace," he says...
...It is important, I believe, that Israel succeed and essential that it survive...
...A Palestinian state can pose no military threat to Israel, he insists: "We still remember what happened in 1967," when Israel routed the Arab armies in the six-day war...
...It has fought four wars in its thirty-year history as a modern nation, and it might fight the fifth at any time...
...We are trying to form the nucleus of an alternative...
...Sometimes he rejects material that I expect to have accepted...
...More recently, Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan astonished all segments of the Israeli political spectrum — including the government in which he serves — by acknowledging that the PLO could not be ignored in discussions of how to achieve peace in the Middle East...
...After carefully detailing that scenario, Amit volunteers that its achievement is "clearly impossible...
...It will listen to no moderator, hear no philosopher, lend an ear to no preacher so long as its national demand is not answered...
...But el-Sayyed is not concerned only about possible Israeli action against his paper...
...Four times a day a messenger carries copy scheduled for publication to the censor's office...
...There is understandable concern about this "destabilizing" turn of events in the Middle East, and about Iran's oil — Israel's main source of supply, though the United States has promised to replace it...
...And ultimately there will be another war...
...It would be an unimaginable catastrophe if Israel were destroyed — but I talked to serious and sober Israelis who feared that such destruction may be only a few years away — five, perhaps, or ten — and that the destruction would be of Israel's own making...
...And if such pressure were applied, "Likud" — Prime Minister Begin's conservative governing coalition — "would be in a better position to accept a Palestinian state than a Labor government would be...
...But only a minute fraction would consent to giving up an inch of Jerusalem...
...But the myth of American invincibility remains largely intact in Israel: If Washington failed to save the Shah, it wasn't because the Shah could not be saved, but because America lacked the will to save him...
...If a Palestinian state ever comes into being, a substantial segment of its leadership is likely to consist of Bir Zeit graduates...
...I can understand that...
...A true friends is one who promotes the real interests of Israel — building a just society attractive to young, idealistic people...
...A real peace, a just peace, a lasting peace is the solution for Israel and the Arab world," says Mamoun el-Sayyed...
...No problem — not even the most vital — will win its attention except the matter of its unity and national liberation...
...they may be denied access to legal counsel for fourteen days or longer...
...The story under the headline reported findings of a survey by the Israeli Productivity Institute: The annual output of Israeli workers ranked lowest among thirteen industrial nations...
...It is a museum now — the Museum of the Heroes...
...Why should Palestinians on the West Bank accept Israeli assurances of 'full rights' when Israeli Arabs have been living in Israel for thirty years without full rights...
...The University may be characterized as the intellectual core of the Palestinian movement...
...It is the promised land, but it has been promised to too many...
...As I sip coffee in his austere office in East Jerusalem — The Progressive's modest quarters seem palatial by comparison — el-Sayyed tells me with patient resignation about the circumstances in which his newspaper is produced...
...But there must be peace...
...But I am unprepared for the startling question Israelis keep putting to me: "How could Carter allow the Shah to be deposed...
...Output of Israeli worker still among world's lowest," said a headline in The Jerusalem Post in mid-January...
...O promised land...
...But the "doves" were delighted...
...The legitimacy of the Israeli cause stems from the fact that it is based fundamentally on the right claimed by the Israeli people to be free in its own home — within its frontiers, and in its rights...
...Mamoun el-Sayyed and I had talked for more than an hour, and I had heard no mention of Jerusalem...
...But I know something I learned in my twenty years as a schoolteacher: When you have a naughty boy in your class, you call him in and make him the prefect — you give him responsibility...
...No one has the right to determine it arbitrarily...
...Sometimes he is generous and permits material that I expect to be rejected...
...Our security depends on the United States, and the security of the United States depends on us...
...Amit is one of those Israeli "doves" who have maintained contact and sustained dialogue with the PLO...
...priorities" get in the way...
...It is nothing new...
...Shlonsky estimates that the benefits received by the average Israeli from the government are, in cash terms, perhaps as much as seven times greater than the benefits received by the average Arab villager in Nazareth...
...asks Tuviah Shlonsky, a professor of comparative literature at the Hebrew University...
...But I had also found an utterly unlikely scenario for Jerusalem...
...Suppose you have a Palestinian state...
...Because it is distributed in the occupied territories, A l-Fajr is subject to military censorship — censorship established under the Emergency Decrees of the British Mandatory government and preserved intact by the state of Israel...
...Amos Wollin, a "dove" who writes for a newspaper in Copenhagen (but has no outlet for his views in Israel), told me, "Israel has to be saved from itself...
...policy: Taiwan...
...Peace must come from here...
...It was necessary for the world, in the wake of the Holocaust, to provide a homeland for Jews...
...Under the old Emergency Decrees, martial law prevails on the West Bank and in Gaza...
...An American involved in legal aid to Palestinians told me he would guess that at least 90 per cent of the male population aged eighteen or older has spent at least one night in jail...
...This is my first visit, but Israel has been part of my consciousness for most of my life...
...Taxes are high...
...He must also shun the sometimes violent factionalism in the Arab world...
...f The entire region is demilitarized...
...We are no stronger than that," Baram admits...
...It is, despite all the contradictions, conflicts, and hopes betrayed — it is, despite all that, an amazingly vital, vibrant, impressive land — a land of heroic achievement...
...There are constant tensions with Israel's zealous minority of orthodox, strictly observant Jews...
...Five years ago, the founding editor of Al-Fajr was kidnapped from this office, and he has not been seen since...
...Old leaflets of the Irgun Tsevai Leumi are on display at the Museum of the Heroes — leaflets that date back to the time when the Irgun was led by Israel's current Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, or his mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky...
...A true friend of Israel," Baram continues, "is not one who blindly supports the disastrous policies of an ultra-nationalistic establishment...
...We came across it by accident while meandering around the city on the first morning of our visit...
...And there is more: A fledgling feminist movement complains vehemently that this is a patriarchal society...
...The occupation," says Daniel Amit, "is a horror which 'If the Palestinians are a group of naughty boys, lets give them some responsibility' corrupts Israeli society, aside from the pain it inflicts on the people in the occupied territories...
...SHELI has two seats (out of 120) in the Knesset, and won 28,000 votes in the last election...
...to walk where David walked, and Jesus, and Mohammed...
...The men and women of Arab Palestine themselves are the only people who can determine it...
...Most Americans, I suspect, have come to understand, since Vietnam, that their Government can no longer manipulate and control events around the world...
...A necessary and vital condition to building such a society is a just and durable peace with Israel's Arab neighbors — including the Palestinian people...
...People talk willingly — even eagerly — about Israel's problems, and they are not reluctant to assess the blame...
...The next day he is well behaved...
...Mamoun el-Sayyed speaks carefully, with circumspection...
...It was the first time any Israeli leader had made such a statement, at least in public, and it drew a prompt rebuttal from Begin...
...But first there is the problem of peace...
...The censor tends to be capricious...
...Why are these proud and obstinate and fiercely independent and contentious people willing to entrust their destiny to another power...
...it has no definite policy or line...
...There is no place like it on Earth...
...it has been going on for decades...
...he means a Palestinian state that exists alongside Israel...
...If it were mine, I would refuse to give it up...
...Housing is scarce, particularly in Jerusalem, and incredibly expensive...
...I had found someone, at last, who did not look to the United States for a solution...
...By its economic, military, and political support it gives substance to the worst instincts in Israeli society...
...But there are priorities...
...The office of the Dean of the Arts Faculty at Bir Zeit displays a plaque on which is inscribed a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "If you destroy a people's nationhood — it will know no other thought than its reconquest...
...He is an activist in the Israeli peace movement and a member of Israel's small, isolated, and often divided Left...
...Irony: With the change of a few words, they could pass today as tracts of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO...
...But, I persisted, what if the United States were to exert pressure on Israel to permit creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza — a possibility, if not a likelihood — but allowed Israel to retain Jerusalem...
...It was virtually deserted — an elderly gatekeeper and a couple of sightseers...
...Military censorship is not the only surviving vestige of the British military regime' It's true — people are comfortable, though there are many reasons why they should not be...
...Military service is universal, and soldiers are everywhere...
...Military expenditures claim about 30 per cent of the gross national product, and the resulting economic dislocations are horrendous...
...Was he suggesting, I wondered, that Arabs would relinquish their claim to Jerusalem in return for creation of a Palestinian state...
...The only party which can change anything in this area is the United States," he says...
...It is no mere catchphrase to say Israelis have made the desert bloom: At the kibbutz called Sder Boker, in the middle of the Negev, we talked to earnest, devoted, incredibly energetic young people who have made the desert bloom...
...Perhaps that is why el-Sayyed mentions Jerusalem only at my prompting...
...Hardly a week goes by without an incident — a bomb on a bus or in a marketplace...
...The third-class citizens are the Israeli Arabs, who provide much of the unskilled workforce but live, for the most part, in rigid segregation reminiscent of America's racial ghettos...
...We must keep looking here...
...Will it be communist, moderate, conservative...
...People work hard, but productivity is low...
...the constant, continuing emergency that has been in effect since 1948 is Israel's preoccupation and its cop-out' The Cold War image of a Manichean world — a world in which the forces of light are arrayed against the forces of darkness — still casts its spell in Israel, and not just among bankers...
...Some were executed by the British occupation army that governed Palestine from 1917 to 1948 — hanged on the gallows that still stand in the prison...
...The hardest problems will come after there is peace...
...Each settlement," Mahmoun el-Sayyed had told me, "is like an acupuncture needle paralyzing the Arab villages in the vicinity...
...Palestinians accused of security offenses have no rights of due process...
...a few innocent victims injured or killed...
...But Israel cannot refuse to others the principle of self-determination to which Israel herself so justifiably and proudly lays claim...
...Even Yasser Arafat can't answer this question...
...Only Israel, he explains, stands in the way of Soviet domination of the Middle East and its oil riches...
...Self-determination is an inalienable right for Israel, and Israel will enhance even further the value of that principle and that law by recognizing that all the other peoples of this region are entitled to this same right...
...Israel lives from day to day," an Israeli journalist tells me...
...The British arrest records are on display, too, and they compound the irony: "Nationality: Palestinian...
...When he speaks of peace, he does not mean something based on the Camp David accords, no matter how interpreted and resolved...
...He is convinced that Israel's security would not be jeopardized by creation of a Palestinian state — a state that would be "small, weak, and beset with acute problems that it would take thirty or forty years to solve...
...1 Israel and the Palestinian state move gradually toward unifying into a single, secular, democratic state...
...But the aid, critics charge, has not only sustained Israel...
...The speaker is Daniel Amit, a young physicist on the faculty of the Hebrew University who is about to depart for his annual tour of duty in the Israeli army...
...If the Palestinians are a group of naughty boys, let's give them some responsibility...
...Softly, without threats or bombast, el-Sayyed hints at what he thinks will happen if Egypt and other Arab nations come to terms with Israel without providing for a Palestinian solution: No Arab regime will be safe, and Anwar Sadat's will probably be the first to go...
...I can't answer this question...
...Switzerland was first, Italy twelfth...
...I wish I could have read the old graffiti on the whitewashed walls...
...And others have built cities and industries, fashioned (or refashioned) a dynamic culture, built a nation-state...
...Finally, I asked...
...The second is "considered moderate and preferred by the authorities...
...He asks me to deliver a message to Americans — especially Americans sympathetic to Israel: "The best thing for Israel would have been to solve her internal problems and the peace issue by herself...
...Still, there are stirrings on the Left — and stirrings for peace even on the Center and the Right...
...we are asking for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and for national self-determination and independence...
...That is no one's fault...
...It encourages people to be comfortable...
...In Rome and Paris and 'A people's nationhood' Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah on the West Bank of the Jordan, enrolls about 1,100 Palestinian students, among whom a substantial number are active and articulate supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...Begin's home, carrying banners and torches and demanding an end to new Israeli settlements on the West Bank...
...His is one of three Arabic papers permitted to reach the West Bank and Gaza...
...No, he quickly set me straight, he merely meant that once Israel was prepared for a "just peace," it would also be prepared, at the very least, to grant international status to the Old City: "Without Jerusalem, peace will not have a chance...
...There are frequent charges of official harassment, intimidation, and persecution of students and faculty...
...As might be expected in these circumstances, corruption is rife...
...But there was a time when the terrorists were Jews...
...When you have responsibility, your behavior must be responsible...
...Israelis in every walk of life expressed similar sentiments to me — and those who disagreed acknowledged that theirs was a minority position...
...A peace that is not based on justice will not last...
...There is immense security — even comfort — in knowing that there is one place on Earth from which you cannot be turned away...
...Israel — one by one the United States is abandoning its closest allies in the struggle against communism...
...In his view, the treatment of Israel's 500,000 Arab citizens is as vexing an issue as the Palestinian question: "Suppose you have a settlement with Sadat...
...We are not asking for the moon...
...Such reflections are extremely troubling...
...There is an irony here: This is a museum to enshrine the memory of terrorists in a nation obsessed — and for good reason — with the fear of terrorism...
...Israeli "doves" fear such repressive tactics are intensifying Palestinian hostility and damaging the chances for an eventual peace...
...Manufactured imports are expensive, and import duties double the costs...
...Some of us, at least, are profoundly relieved that this is the case...
...Military censorship is not the only surviving vestige of the British military regime...
...In fact, any officer may hold a suspect for up to forty-eight hours without even making a record of the arrest...
...There are no positive political energies in this country," Amit says...
...People are suspicious of unattended packages in public places, and often enough those packages turn out to be explosives...
...Most Israelis are not yet ready to pay the price of peace," says Chaim Baram, the young spokesman for SHELI, a two-year-old alignment on the moderate Left...
...My God, man," I exclaim, "do you want to be soldiers for the United States...
...Unless the Palestinian question is resolved, Amit believes, Israel will ultimately be destroyed...
...The majority of the people here," he says, "have been cut off from any sense of history except Jewish history — and even Jewish history has been distorted...
...to absorb the history of the ancient stones — is an extraordinary experience...
...I use the Biblical phrase with no intent at sarcasm or irony...
...Peace can't come from America," Mahmoud el-Sayyed replied...
...I sit across a bank officer's desk in Jerusalem and listen to him voice his grave misgivings about U.S...
...It is up to the Palestinian people to answer this question...
...But the situation now calls for a little help from our friends, as the Beatles used to say...
...What, then, is possible...
...A more serious obstacle, he implies, is the apprehension among conservative Arab regimes that a Palestinian state will serve as the spearhead of revolution in the Middle East...
...Though he refers time and again to "Arab unity," it is clear that no such unity exists...
...Iranians, like the rest of us, may have their moments of collective disorientation," The Jerusalem Post editorialized last December, "but a man in Jimmy Carter's position cannot afford to be swept along...
...His political commitments were formed, he tells me, when he attended Brandeis University at the height of student resistance to the Vietnam war...
Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4
