The Death of Compromise
BROOKS, DAVID
The Death of Compromise There's no more middle in the Middle East. BY DAVID BROOKS Jerusalem For the past half century, most people thought the Arab-Israeli conflict was a fight over land....
...This renewed commitment has changed the atmosphere in all sectors of Israeli society...
...Resolve hasn't weakened yet, but it might as the years go on...
...if they did, they'd have to take Israeli citizenship...
...Ben-Ami went to Camp David believing that each side had made a big compromise to get the Oslo process started, and that now it would take one more big compromise to achieve peace...
...But they are also enjoying the fact that everybody blames Arafat for the talks' collapse...
...As a result, the range of debate across the region has narrowed...
...They have to rally around those abstractions, enduring terrorism and fear for their sake, even when it seems easier to appease their rivals with apologies and other displays of post-colonial guilt or multicultural relativism...
...The Palestinians' position, as Ben-Ami saw it, was to wait until Israel decided to satisfy their demands...
...In this day and age, it is rare to find a commitment that is more powerful than commercial calculation...
...Even among the students who do volunteer, there is a growing religious conservatism...
...But now anti-Semitic attacks are routine...
...How could they have been so wrong in thinking that he wanted peace...
...Israel's superior military and economic strength carries its own weaknesses...
...Israel is an ever more individualistic country, ever more commercial and more affluent, yet the Israeli people, at this moment more than at any time in the recent past, seem able to be patriots as well as yuppies...
...On our trip, we met several U.S...
...But the events of the last nine months—the failure of Camp David and the subsequent intifada—have transformed the Middle East as radically as the events of 1948 or 1967...
...This conversation—among the cream of Arab society, sophisticated, humane, and generous—is symptomatic of how the Arab world has closed ranks on the question of whether Israel is a criminal state...
...Not since 1948 has the issue been so stark and each side so unified...
...Some want to destroy Palestinian television and undermine the Palestinian regime, feeling chaos couldn't be worse...
...It's like being in a land of tinkerers—everybody has a scheme...
...But they certainly did not talk as if their role were to stand up for American values...
...Ala is as intelligent and sophisticated as Ben-Ami...
...These issues—the Temple Mount and the Right of Return—have nothing to do with finding a place where Palestinians can live in peace and prosperity...
...There would be no more...
...Israelis are bitterly disappointed that the Oslo process didn't work out...
...Others beheve that he simply couldn't make the transition from PLO fighter to Palestinian Authority administrator, worrying about sewers and education funding...
...We met Sharon in the cabinet room Israeli founder David Ben-Gurion used to use in Tel Aviv...
...The day we met with him, Sharon knew that the Tenet cease-fire was wonderful from an Israeli perspective...
...during the Rabin period they gave in to romanticized hopes...
...That wasn't even worth talking about...
...It is a patriotism infused with democratic pride, and with respect for individual opportunity...
...The Palestinians are not ready to make a compromise on their dream of greater Palestine...
...Instead, they challenge the very idea of the dominant power...
...The Palestinians] came to the negotiation under the assumption that they had already made their compromise," he says...
...The Nazi style of anti-Semitism has no roots in Egyptian society, the foreign minister told us...
...Some of the young men ^^^ in one office asked the young women Bf to stop going to the swimming pool with them because they considered the * ^ women's bathing suits an affront to the modesty codes...
...The Egyptian government recently arrested and sentenced to seven years in prison Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a human rights activist and writer...
...It's not often that Israel does so well in the propaganda war...
...It's interesting for Americans to watch the evolution of this conflict, because this is what happens when one state is militarily and economically dominant over its rivals...
...Sharon smiled through our entire hour-and-fifteen-minute meeting...
...If the conflict were about land, it would already have been solved...
...Then, they hope, the Palestinians would fracture into four competing emirates...
...A few extremists (outside the government) talk of bumping off Arafat, or of exiling him, or of simply waiting for him to die...
...Judging by the shabby surroundings, they hadn't changed the furniture since...
...If there is one person who can stand in for all the Israelis who have changed their thinking, it is Shlomo Ben-Ami...
...The country that a few years ago seemed exhausted by conflict, enamored of the NASDAQ, and too rich and sophisticated to bother with military service, is now thoroughly mobilized...
...But the Palestinians can hope to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Jewish state...
...Some of the channels are quite professional and regularly beat Israeli stations to stories, but with their graphic shots and lurid commentary, they also serve to organize and stoke Palestinian hatreds...
...To secure this, the Palestinians are willing to endure another century of refugee camps, road closures, violence, and conflict...
...In America, people on average move every seven years...
...During Desert Storm, I recall watching two Israeli politicians, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, bicker on the evening news...
...Those are America's values as well as America's interests...
...He is a man, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy jokes, who thinks in 55-minute soundbites...
...At Camp David, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered to dismantle over 100 settlements, return over 90 percent of the West Bank, large chunks of Jerusalem, and all of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians, and to swap other land to compensate them for the last few bits of territory that would remain Israeli...
...The Islamic nationalism of the Palestinians will go up against the Lockean nationalism of the Israelis...
...But now that fighting has resumed, he's again chosen to spend his life away from his family, in the barracks and in the field, once again at constant risk of ambush...
...But it's dead now, and what has taken its place is a war over moral visions...
...Even among politicians, there is relative civility...
...Diplomats would draw lines on maps, hoping to find some territorial arrangement that would be acceptable to both sides...
...But Clinton broke that vow...
...Anybody who dissents from this line, or who tries to have contact with Israelis, is known as a "normalizer," a status that can cost you your friends, your job, or your freedom...
...And it's not clear how many refugees would actually take advantage of the right to go back to their original towns...
...This was the conventional view among Israelis, and it still is the conventional view among most diplomats from Europe and the United States...
...Nonetheless, Arafat remains popular with Palestinians, and the intifada is the oxygen in the blood of Palestinian nationalism...
...The struggle will be long, and it will force the people in the area—and the American people—to come to grips with the full implications of their political ideals...
...You disgust me," Shamir said...
...for them to apologize for what their existence has done to the Palestinians...
...But this was not simple Palestinian intransigence, Ben-Ami came to realize...
...But the content was slightly different...
...Israelis have the wherewithal to adopt the California lifestyle...
...If so, let's hope we behave as well as Israel, a regional power, is now doing...
...Ben-Ami came to see that his opposite numbers had in fact developed such a vision, which he calls Palestini-anism...
...In the midst of the peace euphoria, he went back to school and got an MBA so he could be a businessman and live a normal life...
...As for partition, a rising idea in Israel, especially in the Labor party, it is hard to see how it would work, because the populations are intermingled...
...He was delighted, not only because he is now riding high, but also because he had just boxed Arafat into a corner...
...Arab populations have swung behind the idea that it is, and the Jewish population has swung behind the idea that it isn't...
...This will never happen...
...he says...
...diplomats in the region...
...The Palestinians are paying an awful price for this position...
...We are preparing ourselves and the IDF for years of struggle," says defense minister Benjamin Bin Eliezer...
...Many students do not want to work for such organizations because they view the whole idea of a human rights organization as a Western import, alien to Arab culture...
...He is no crude nationalist, no thunderer...
...This is not to excuse the violent excesses Israeli troops commit against the Palestinians, or the anti-Arab prejudice that is on the upswing, only to note how difficult it is to infuse a self-seeking, affluent populace with a sense of national purpose...
...Only the fact that the bomber had killed himself in the process, thus apparently violating the Koran's prohibition of suicide, raised concerns...
...Leaders would propose slogans like "Land for Peace...
...The role for the United States is clear: to stand with the democratic nationalists over the blood and soil nationalists...
...They were men in their sixties and seventies, and anybody who saw The Sunshine B^oys will get a sense of their posture and intonation...
...Three American journalists and I recently toured Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and Israel on a trip organized by Satloff's Washington Institute for Near East Policy...
...The United States or the United Nations would come in and dictate terms for an end to the conflict...
...But the experience of Camp David transformed Ben-Ami's view...
...It was a contest between historical and spiritual visions...
...America, the world's dominant power, may soon face this kind of challenge...
...Their ratings soar with each new incident...
...No, what the future holds is a war over intangibles...
...You could see they were adamant to assimilate some of the mythological issues of Zionism," he says...
...Almost all Israelis— of left, right, and center—are unified behind the proposition that Israel must fight to defend its moral legitimacy...
...The decision to shut down negotiations at Camp David last July and the subsequent intifada have been disasters, measured by any rational cost-benefit analysis...
...They could not sign a document that acknowledged even the possibility that the spot might be legitimately holy to the Jews...
...He served as foreign minister under Ehud Barak and was Israel's chief negotiator at Camp David in July 2000...
...The governing institutions of the Palestinian Authority barely function...
...American diplomats will find, as the people in the region have found, that you can't hover impartially between moral visions, because there is no there there...
...Avraham Burg is one of Israel's most prominent left-wing politicians, likely to be the next leader of the Labor party...
...Our Arab hosts were as committed to their cause as any people could be, and as determined to achieve final victory...
...As Muslims, the Palestinian negotiators sought to gain control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, or, as it is known in the Arab world, Haram al'Sharif, where the al-Aksa mosque stands...
...for the Israelis to admit that their state was founded on a crime...
...It is organized instead of spontaneous...
...Ben-Ami realized that this was not like haggling in a bazaar in order to reach a middle price...
...But after more than 50 years in refugee camps, in Arab-Israeh towns and in Jordan, the Palestinians remain committed to the idea of their struggle...
...The rivals give up even trying to compete on the battlefield or in the marketplace...
...In other words, the Middle East conflict has been polarized and simplified...
...What will he do next...
...The media in the Arab world have tied our hands," he says, not making clear that he would do anything differently if the media fell silent...
...If Arafat goes, there is no indication his successor will be less radical...
...A couple were caricatures of old-fashioned State Department Arabists...
...On the third day of the talks, Clinton finally exploded at Abu Ala...
...if opportunity is lacking in the place where we are, we move on...
...The mediator role had value as long as the Oslo process was alive...
...He used our meeting to announce Israel's acceptance of the cease-fire proposal hammered out with CIA director George Tenet...
...In an interview, one of the lead Palestinian negotiators, Abu Ala, confirmed that this was the Palestinian posture...
...What did him in was his pro-Israeli stand," said one over dinner...
...In other words, the Palestinians could see that the Israelis had a moral vision that was half religious, half secular...
...Patriotic rhetoric rings in the most unlikely places, the politicians are actually working together, and the idealists who believed in reaching out to Yasser Arafat now acknowledge their past misjudgments...
...But then Ben-Ami asked them to put words into the agreement making clear why the Israelis didn't want the Palestinians digging, and the Palestinians vehemently refused...
...The Palestinian economy is in near collapse as a result of the suffocating closures Israel has imposed on roads in the territories...
...But it's wrong to say that this is an artificial uprising imposed by Arafat and a few henchmen...
...For many years the peace camp lived with a 1960s conception of 'Make peace, make love.' The question was, Did you hug a Palestinian today...
...Everywhere we went we heard how the Israelis murder Palestinian children with F-16s and similar brutal firepower...
...Some of these men do have records of fighting antiSemitism, and all of them recognize that the pervasive anti-Semitism in their official organs hurts them in the court of world opinion...
...That's true, but by all evidence, the Palestinian people also love the Palestinian cause more than they love the Palestinian people...
...He's in his mid-thirties and has a couple of young kids...
...The Israelis have done that...
...But he insists that it is not up to his side to make counterproposals...
...To the highest government official and the poorest refugee alike, it seems, this is a crusade more important than money, comfort, opportunity, or life itself...
...The Russian immigrants feel thoroughly Israeli, having shed their own blood at the disco bombing...
...We say we want people to believe in causes larger than their self-interest...
...The resumption of the terror war with its attendant Israeli reprisals has caused the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians...
...Ala says that he and Arafat warned Bill Clinton of their position before Camp David, and Clinton promised that if the talks broke down he would never blame Arafat...
...until the Israelis acknowledge the justice of the Palestinian cause and absolve the Palestinians of all guilt for the terrorism perpetrated in their name...
...But those illusions are gone...
...I don't feel that there will be any serious breakthrough but with the next generation...
...Others may lose heart and try to buy some peace...
...I am ostracized, my father is ostracized," one Jordanian high-tech entrepreneur told us...
...For while Palestinian nationalism looks a lot like 19th-century blood and soil nationalism (laced with a large dollop of Islamic fundamentalism), Israeli nationalism is Lockean nationalism...
...Some dream of an internationally imposed solution...
...He was thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of embezzlement and "defaming the state," though his real crime was uncovering fraud in Egypt's electoral system...
...Ben-Ami noticed that the Palestinians' real concerns were intangible...
...The human rights activists we spoke with note that it is becoming more difficult to recruit volunteers for their organizations on Egyptian university campuses...
...It has a religious element, Islam, symbolized by the crescent, and a secular element, which Ben-Ami calls refugeeism, symbolized by the brass keys that Palestinians hold up at rallies, representing the keys to their original homes in what is now Israel...
...You disgust me and you frighten me," Peres responded...
...The consolidation of Arab opinion has also led to an upsurge of anti-Semitism in the government media...
...This symbolic position could not be compromised because it goes to the core of the moral claims...
...In Egypt, for example, a prestigious commentator at a government-run newspaper twice wrote items lamenting that Hitler failed to finish the job...
...In fact, the Palestinian media regularly deny that there ever was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount...
...His guests included several pillars of the Amman establishment, a former speaker of the parliament, a religious affairs minister, a former attorney general, and so on...
...Most of them are cockamamie...
...Their attitude was "We don't have a problem, you have a problem," namely, the crimes committed in the name of Zionism, especially the seizing of land in the 1967 Six Day War...
...The Palestinians agreed never to dig...
...I remember thinking sarcastically, "Isn't it wonderful how Israelis have come together during the Gulf War...
...The Israelis and Palestinians each try to negotiate cease-fires such that the other side will be forced to break them first...
...More than anything, it now seems, this is what they want: for the Israelis to capitulate intellectually and morally...
...The Israelis and Palestinians know they are in for another generation of warfare...
...Western diplomats, at least the smart ones, come to the Middle East merely trying to manage the conflict...
...On the contrary, they saw themselves as mediators...
...The whole dispute hangs on a simple question: Is Israel a criminal state...
...In the end, the men decided that given the evils of the Israeli occupation and the need to fight against it, the young suicide bomber was not really committing suicide but merely waging war...
...They have to remind themselves of the ideals for which their nation was founded...
...And the people in that dominant power have to do something that is very difficult for a bourgeois democracy...
...But in the end, the new Israeli patriotism is more admirable...
...The cynic in me wanted to say, "Congratulations—after 3,000 years of anti-Semitism, you've invented a new variety...
...The talks at Camp David soon focused not on land, but on two core issues fraught with symbolic and moral significance...
...The Palestinians will not, it now appears, stop fighting David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There...
...The Palestinians know that they cannot threaten the existence of Israel in a material sense...
...Israelis sometimes accuse Arafat of loving the Palestinian cause more than the Palestinian people...
...None of the men had any doubt about the legitimacy of murdering the young people...
...Earlier in his career he was caught in a Palestinian ambush and spent a year in the hospital recovering from his wounds...
...There is simply no middle position on this central question, and so all those who were trying to span the divide between the two peoples—the businessmen who want to trade with the other side, as well as the peace activists who want to build bridges—have found that the ground has vanished from under their feet...
...It is impossible for now to 1,000 years that the Palestinians will decrease their size from the 1967 borders...
...The first subject of conversation among Israelis is Yasser Arafat...
...Having lost sensation over large areas of his body, he is classified as 72 percent disabled...
...But it is supremely important for them to have control of the mosque and the right to move back, as symbols of their legitimate claim to the land and of Israel's corrupt birth...
...They have revealed that it is a struggle over the assignment of historical guilt...
...He is also a politician...
...They're like a man in a bitter feud whose enemy's opinion begins to matter more to him than anything else: He craves his enemy's admission of guilt...
...They have stripped away the notion that this is a struggle about land and material things...
...It's sometimes said that global communications will bring us all together, but in this case, the technology serves to whip up animosity...
...There was almost no grumbling about Arafat and his methods...
...They would be so weakened they would have to deal...
...A distinguished academic, Ben-Ami is a historian of economic development and medieval Spain...
...I cannot give proposals," he says...
...To me they looked like Upper West Side elderly Jews kibitzing...
...From the left, there are waves of self-castigation and bouts of rethinking...
...This second intifada may be different from the first one several years ago...
...Some may just opt out of this exhausting mess and move...
...The second subject of conversation is the future...
...It forces Yasser Arafat to perform a series of politically unpalatable tasks—like arresting terrorists and confiscating illegal weapons from his troops—before it forces Israel to do anything politically unpalatable, such as freeze settlement construction on the West Bank...
...They longed for their own all-embracing ideology...
...Arafat's refusal to negotiate has cost him dearly in the court of world opinion (if Yasser Arafat wants to visit the White House, he'll have to buy a ticket and stand in the tourist line...
...the Palestinians do...
...Some people, like former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believe that Arafat refused to make peace because he feared assassination...
...Many Israelis are thinking of unilateral partition: Simply build a series of walls and fences to keep the Palestinians and Israelis apart...
...Would Israel really build a Berlin Wall through the heart of Jerusalem...
...Arafat rejected this without even making a counter-offer because Barak's deal would have amounted to a step away from what Arafat and his people really care about...
...The Palestinian negotiator remembers, "He screamed, 'You have personal responsibility for the failure of the process!' He blamed me in front of the Israelis...
...The suicide bombing outside a disco in Tel Aviv that killed 21 young Israelis, most of them recent Russian immigrants, had just happened...
...It is waged by soldiers using mortars and rifles, not boys throwing stones...
...There have always been stories in the Arab press about Israeli merchants shipping bubble gum with the AIDS virus into Arab countries...
...There is a national unity government led by Ariel Sharon that shows every sign of lasting for a while...
...Jews believe that somewhere below the mosque lie the remains of the Jewish temples, and that in those temples was the Holy of Holies, the sacred spot where the ark of the covenant was kept...
...But what has been striking since his arrest and conviction is how relatively few of his fellow human rights activists have leapt to his defense...
...For all the pervasive anti-Semitism, and for all the admiration for the suicide bombers (polls show about two-thirds of Palestinians see heroism in blowing up teenagers), the Palestinians' commitment to their cause is striking...
...those who used to sympathize with the Palestinians and urge concessions are now quiet or shamefaced, and the center of the Israeli electorate has shifted behind Ariel Sharon...
...Saad Eddin Ibrahim's "pro-Israeli" position consisted of going to Israel to talk with the leftist fringe of the peace camp...
...One day we surveyed the central region of Israel with an Israeli Defense Force commander...
...The Palestinians have utterly lost the Israeli public...
...Therefore, Arafat will have to break the cease-fire first and bear the brunt of the ensuing American disapproval...
...This rhetoric has become somewhat embarrassing for Arab elites, and so even before the subject is raised they are quick to reassure American visitors that they themselves are not anti-Semitic...
...One night we sat in the home of a prominent Jordanian newspaper editor...
...As believers in the creed of refugeeism, they sought to secure the right of refugees to return to their original hometowns...
...One day while talking about the disposition of the Temple Mount, the Israelis proposed that the Palestinians control the top of the mount, where the mosque is, but agree not to dig down into the earth below the mosque plaza...
...If there were peace, Muslims could worship at the al-Aksa mosque today (as indeed they already do whenever the roads are open...
...So now there is a chance to think broadly...
...Still, there is no sign of a let-up...
...We also heard this idea proposed on the Palestinian side...
...They'd served the bulk of their careers in Arab countries, and they'd never had a thought they hadn't picked up from some Edward Said essay...
...Why did he kill Oslo...
...We asked whether the Koran endorses that kind of violence...
...But this time they actually have...
...It made it difficult for people to support him...
...He was grandfatherly and said nothing that any Israeli would have disagreed with...
...Still, their thinking has shifted...
...Even the Palestinian Authority's Abu Ala agrees...
...To ask me, is to ask how many kilograms I will cut from my own body...
...The bulk of the diplomats were intelligent, informative, honest brokers of information...
...Israel's GDP per capita is over ten times that of its Arab neighbors, and its military might is unquestioned...
...At the end of the process, we found the Palestinians did not have a 1960s conception of peace," Burg continues...
...The fervor that fuels the Palestinian crusade is perpetually reinforced by pan-Arab satellite TV The several Arabic-language satellite stations from the region offer blanket coverage of the intifada and the Israeli reprisals...
Vol. 6 • July 2001 • No. 40
