To Get Leaders’ Attention, Israelis First Need a Message

Secretary of State George P. Shultz was recently asked why the Reagan Administration does not press some of its views more vigorously on Israel. His answer was that, as in most democracies, the government of Israel listens most closely to “the folks at home.”

What the folks at home appear to have learned from the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza is that the status quo is not an acceptable situation. This has long been obvious to people willing to think about analogous situations elsewhere or listen to the Palestinians themselves. However, there have always been too many Israelis convinced that there is nothing to learn from the experience of others, and too many experts on “the Arab mentality” eager to dispense the placebos that the politicians and the public wanted to swallow. Now it seems clear that the status quo must be removed from the list of policy options from which Israel can choose.

Relatively few Israelis ever really thought that the occupation was benign, and even they could delude themselves only because the force that was needed to maintain it was usually limited, sporadic, out of sight and therefore out of mind. Whatever the immediate course of the current wave of protest, the future will not resemble the past, and the luxury of keeping the occupied territories “on the cheap” will not be restored. Israel has the physical capacity to continue repressing Palestinian opposition for as long into the future as anyone can foresee, but only by eventually turning all of its sons into riot police and jailers. This kind of moral and social debilitation is a higher price than most Israelis are willing to pay. Hence, the widespread recognition in recent weeks by virtually all shades of the political spectrum that a political settlement is necessary.

That, however, is the extent of Israeli perestroika. To be sure, both the mind and the conscience have been sorely exercised. “The problem” dominates public and private debate as never before. Some high officials are even acknowledging that Israel’s control of the territories has become a Frankenstein’s monster. The settlers’ movement, which the political Establishment has either encouraged or been too fainthearted to confront, is now described by one of the Establishment’s leading members, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, as a “heavy security burden.”

But, despite all this soul searching, most Israelis are still unable to take “new thinking” to its logical conclusion: that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, meaning peace based on mutual recognition of the right to self-determination and independence. Instead, the major political parties continue to push their timeworn positions--for the Likud, it’s autonomy; for Labor, the “Jordanian option”--as if, after 15 or 20 years of evidence to the contrary, these had suddenly become real alternatives rather than just prescriptions for the status quo under other names. So unless some deus ex machina appears, Israeli troops will probably still be patrolling the streets of Nablus and Gaza long after Soviet forces in Afghanistan have packed up and gone home.

Why don’t “the folks” tell the government something different? Because the Israeli public, as in most other democracies, cannot challenge entrenched leaders and ideas with political abstractions. For more than 20 years both the Likud and the Labor Party have ruled out a Palestinian state as a basis for a peace settlement. But since they do argue passionately about their own solutions, however spurious, there is the pretense of a serious political debate going on. The essential frivolity of this debate cannot be exposed by intellectual processes alone. Since no one has actually made Israel an unambiguous offer of peace in return for agreement to a Palestinian state, this alternative is just as hypothetical as the other two. And the standards of evidence demanded of political heretics are much higher than those required of mainstream politicians, whose very centrality confers on their pronouncements a mantle of credibility.

In short, the Israeli political system is incapable of generating on its own a real alternative to the status quo. A compelling argument for change will be articulated only when both the costs of the status quo and the reality of the alternative are made much starker and more concrete. And only forces outside the system can do this.

The most important of these forces are the Palestinians themselves. They have made their rejection of the occupation abundantly clear. They still have not communicated what they want--or, to be more precise, what they will settle for and what they will give in return.

However, Secretary Shultz’s modesty is also misplaced; what Israelis tell the Israeli government can be influenced by what they hear from Washington. After all, the United States is Israel’s closest ally, and Israelis take American attitudes very much into account when they think about the risks and opportunities for various courses of action.

Political leaders are particularly responsive to vox populi when they think that it echoes their own views, and most of the time it does. But people in Israel also hear voices from abroad. So if you think that government leaders won’t listen to you, Mr. Secretary, why not send the folks a message?