Uri Avnery

...The wall is being built for this purpose...

...You must get Israelis to understand the feelings and the hopes and the traumas of the Palestinians...

...Then you put up hothouses of tomatoes or flowers...

...It is a very complicated thing, complicated politically, militarily, economically...

...I left it because I did not approve of the methods and the aims of the Irgun...

...I think it is the height of stupidity on our part if we don't grasp this opportunity...

...It would be an illusion to believe you can put an end to this overnight...

...Unfortunately, the behavior of the Sharon administration, and before this of the Barak administration, has shown the Palestinians the opposite: namely, that they will achieve nothing without violence...

...It will not happen...

...There is the moral aspect, the political aspect, and the practical aspect...

...I joined because I wanted to fight for our freedom and a state of our own against the British colonial administration of Palestine...

...The whole town was lying on the ground, roof next to roof next to roof...

...There is no symmetry here...

...They are ready after fifty years to accept a state of their own in 22 percent of what used to be the country of Palestine...

...We at Gush Shalom have published a draft text of a peace agreement, and I am fairly certain that when peace comes about, it will be more or less on these lines...

...It is our responsibility as the stronger party, as the occupying power, to convince the Palestinians that they can achieve their basic national aims, their just national aspirations, without violence...

...Uri Avnery: I joined the Irgun when I was just fifteen years old, and I left when I was nineteen years old...

...It involves some good will, and a readiness to give up historic myths on both sides...

...Jon Elmer is a freelance photojournalist who reported from the West Bank and Gaza Strip from September to December...

...It is a kind of checkerboard leaving the Palestinians 45 percent of the West Bank...

...The basic fact is not the violence...

...He wants to give up some positions which are untenable, or which cost too much to keep, and to withdraw to where he wants Israel to be...

...Therefore, the first responsibility is to put an end to the occupation...

...Q: Can you talk a little bit about your years in the Irgun...

...I have always been conscious of the importance and the strength of nationalism, and this has led me straight to the acknowledgment of the nationalism of the Palestinian people...

...And everybody knows by now exactly the parameters of a peace solution...

...There are lots of signs that average Israelis want peace...

...When Sharon wants to annex 55 percent of this, it means that what will be left to the Palestinians will be about 10 percent of the small country which used to be called Palestine...

...All parts of the conflict have been amply debated and discussed...

...Q: Sharon has said that he will evacuate settlements in the Gaza Strip...

...This is not a plan for peace, it is a plan for war...

...He does not need these settlements...

...Some are volunteering for army combat units but are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories...

...There are altogether about 7,000 settlers in all of the Gaza Strip in the middle of a million and a quarter Palestinians...

...Q: What about the Palestinian right of return...

...It has been the major task of his life for the last forty years...

...Avnery: There are lots of grounds for hope in Israeli society...

...The Gaza Strip is not really a part of the settlement scheme of Ariel Sharon...

...It guarantees that the war between us and the Palestinians will go on forever...

...Avnery: The Palestinian right of return has many different aspects...

...The Green Line, the border that existed before 1967, will come into being again...

...The route looks completely surreal...

...The army is investing huge resources to defend these people...

...Avnery: The solution is perfectly clear...

...It is manifestly idiotic to believe that Israel, with five million Jewish citizens and one million Arab citizens, will concede to the return of four million refugees...

...We have lots of people come out to Gush Shalom demonstrations against this terrible wall...

...there are occupiers, and the occupied...

...This 10 percent will be cut up into five, ten, maybe, twelve enclaves and this will be called the state of Palestine...

...They want to live in freedom...

...Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with the Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership in 1974...

...you take the very Arabs from whom you grabbed this land and employ them as laborers in your hothouses...

...This is all part of the picture in the mind of Sharon...

...I spoke with him twice, the first time on September 14 of last year and the second time on February 15 of this year...

...He is the author of numerous books on the conflict, including My Friend, the Enemy and Two People, Two States...

...It will be connected by, perhaps, a series of bridges, tunnels, and highways, which can be cut off at any moment at the whim of the Israeli government or Israeli army...

...Israeli law does not apply in Gaza: There is no minimum wage, no annual vacation, no compensation for dismissal- so you get the work very, very cheap...

...It is a big job, and we are committed to this job, and we will win in the end...

...There is the Jewish Agency, which gets a lot of money from the United States, from American Jews, whose sole job it is to create settlements...

...He also served three times as a member of the Knesset...

...We have the elite of the Israeli army, the air force pilots, some of them refusing orders which they consider illegal...

...This is what I, as an Israeli patriot, tell my own people...

...What was left to the Arabs was 22 percent, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...the basic fact is the occupation...

...I believe there is no way around this: We have to have a solution based on two national states, which will hopefully live and grow together and establish a relationship between them in something like a European Union...

...Can you describe how this might play out...

...I saw it after...

...Avnery: When we in the Irgun put bombs in the Arab markets of Jaffa and Jerusalem and Haifa and killed scores of people-men, women, and children-in retaliation for similar acts by the Arabs, I didn't back this...

...I believe that Israel must concede to the Palestinian right of return in principle...

...He has been a journalist since 1947, including forty years as editor-in-chief of the newsmagazine Ha'olam Haze...

...You will not find one single Palestinian leader who would agree to this...

...Israel must, first of all, assume its responsibility for what happened in 1948, as far as we are to blame-and we are to blame for a great part of it, if not for all-and we must recognize in principle the right of refugees to return...

...Palestinians want a state of their own...

...We have a movement of people who support the so-called Geneva Accords, a draft peace agreement between Israel and Palestine...

...Individually, it is a beautiful thing to be there...

...What is the alternative to peace...

...I am quite sure, because there is no other alternative...

...And as the occupier, we have the responsibility to lead this process...

...It was surrealistic...

...And if you ask me, they could make peace in one week...

...To an American reader, these numbers may be without meaning...

...You can declare we should leave, but between this declaration and its implementation there is a huge gap...

...He is the creator and editor of the online journal FromOccupiedPalestine.org...

...But I understand people who believe that without violence they will not achieve anything at all...

...And how does it relate to current Palestinian terrorism...

...We can wish it, we can think it's just, that it's moral- it will not happen...

...To turn the settlements over to the Palestinians would be, politically, a very difficult decision to make...

...It is not an abstract problem...

...They cost a lot of money...

...The solution is this: There will be a state of Palestine in all of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...On these lines, there will be peace...

...We are seeing Israelis getting fed up with war, looking for solutions...

...What Sharon wants to do is "shorten the lines," in military slang...

...Sharon did this because he could not stand the idea that the Egyptians would take hold of this beautiful settlement...

...As a teenager, Avnery was an independence fighter in the Irgun, the armed Jewish resistance, and later a soldier in the Israeli army...

...Avnery: There are Israeli institutions whose raison d'être is to create settlements...

...Avnery: Violence is part of the resistance to occupation...

...A lot of Israelis who do not believe in God believe that God has given us this country...

...To give them up is really a great benefit to the state, because these resources will now be employed in order to keep the settlements in the West Bank...

...Edward Said once said: "Since when does a militarily occupied people have responsibility for a peace movement...

...It is a continuation of the war by other means...

...The route of the wall is not a straight line...

...Avnery: Contrary to the impression that has been created in Israel and all over the world-that Sharon is zigzagging, that he doesn't know what to do, that he has no plan-he does have a very clear plan...

...Israel will cut through the West Bank, east and west, north and south, in three or four ribbons or strips...

...No country commits suicide...

...All settlements must be evacuated...

...They are quite superfluous...

...Q: Perhaps you can describe some of the motivations Israelis have for living in a fortified Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip...

...All the other territory-55 percent-will be annexed to Israel...

...In practice, we have to find a complex solution to a very complex problem...

...Q: According to the United States and Israel, it is the Palestinians-more specifically, Arafat- who must take the initiative in ending the "cycle of violence...

...In order to avoid this in the Sinai, Sharon destroyed the whole town of Yameed, which was the pride of Israel...

...Q: So what's the solution...

...One has to see the map to believe it...

...The security must be arranged for both people, and there must be a moral solution and a practical solution...

...And when I say both people, I don't want to establish a symmetrical situation...

...But after such a long war-this conflict has been going on now for 120 years-you have a fifth generation being born into it on both sides...

...Jerusalem will be the shared capital-East Jerusalem will be the capital of Palestine, West Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel...

...It will mean that Sharon will see on his television screen the next day the Palestinians taking over Israeli settlements...

...It snakes through the landscape around and around and around, cutting off several Palestinian towns and villages, surrounding them completely, leaving one little gate for them to come and go...

...Many plans have been put on the table-hundreds...

...the occupation is the disease-a mortal disease for everybody concerned, the occupied and the occupiers...

...Because, if you are a Jewish Israeli, you go to Gaza, you get the villa of your life, the villa which you did not dream of ever getting in Israel, a beautiful two-story villa with green meadows and so on, practically for nothing...

...Israel will keep all the highways and all the settlements-except a few isolated ones...

...This is a joke, this is a farce...

...You have to fight for the soul of your people, you have to fight for the souls of millions of people on both sides, to overcome the legacy of this struggle and create a readiness for peace...

...It is a wonderful setup economically...

...It involves four million human beings, and more than fifty years of various sorts of misery...

...You have to get the Palestinians to understand why Israel is behaving the way it does: What is the legacy of the Holocaust, what are the fears of average Jewish people...

...Is it the responsibility of the Palestinians to end the violence...

...During the war on Lebanon in 1982, he crossed enemy lines to meet with Yasser Arafat...

...I am against violence on both sides...

...The trouble is that both people find it very difficult to come to this point...

...Violence is a symptom...

...It enlists people all over the world-especially in Russia, and in the United States, by the way-to come and settle in the Occupied Territories as a kind of religious statement, a kind of nationalist statement: "This is a country given to us by God...

...Now the question is: How do we solve the problem by allowing a number of refugees to return to Israel, allowing a number of refugees to return to the Palestinian state, and allowing a number of refugees to settle, with general compensation, where they want to settle...

...Q: Do you see any signs of hope...

...But it is not an insolvable problem...

...They want to get rid of the terrible misery in which they are living...

...The youngest soldiers are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories...

...Such a conflict creates hatred, fears, stereotypes, and demonizations of the other...

...A catastrophe for both peoples...

...If President Bush and the government of the United States give Ariel Sharon the OK for this plan, it means that President Bush is opting for war...

...In 1949, the country of Palestine was partitioned after the war in such a way that the State of Israel-proper consisted of 78 percent of this country of Palestine...

...But it left me with a lasting understanding of what gets people to join such organizations, and I understand the Palestinians who join these organizations...

...What he wants to do in the Gaza Strip is to evacuate most of the settlements...

...Q: Can you describe the impact of the wall on the peace process...

...It is six, eight, maybe twelve, Palestinian enclaves, big and small, each of them surrounded by Israeli territory...

...His so-called two-state solution will be, let's say, twelve Palestinian enclaves, which will be called a Palestinian state...

...And in order to put an end to the occupation, you must make peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people...

...There is a whole military division employed just for the Gaza Strip...

...Avnery: One of the main aims of Sharon is to prevent a Palestinian state-a real, viable, sovereign, free Palestinian state...

...Q: Can you discuss your 1945 essay, "Terrorism: The infantile disease of the Hebrew revolution...

...This is the real aim, this is the real task...