Common Ground Quickly Eroding : Arab Unrest Killing Hopes of Coexistence for Israel

Coexist--To live together without hostility or conflict despite differences.

--Webster’s New World Dictionary Symbolizing 4 1/2 months of erosion in what little common ground Jew and Arab had established during a century of struggle, a 2-foot-high wooden fence stood at the center of a Jerusalem stage one morning last week.

The fence separated Palestinian and Israeli panelists who participated in a “town hall” meeting arranged by the producers of ABC’s “Nightline,” which was being broadcast live to the United States.

It was demanded by the Palestinians as a condition of their participation--a constant reminder that although they might agree, reluctantly, to appear, they were there to address an audience thousands of miles to the west, not the panel of Israeli politicians a few feet away.

To some who have watched the growing desperation of the conflict on both sides since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, last December, the wooden fence might have been a memorial to the dream of coexistence between the estranged peoples who jointly inhabit the Holy Land.

Seldom have Jews and Arabs alike been so embittered toward each other and so foreboding in their assessments of the future. If the dream of coexistence is not dead, they say, it is at least in intensive care, badly in need of some redefinition that will give it new hope.

‘A Myth Invented by Israelis’

Coexistence, one Palestinian journalist said, “is a myth invented by the Israelis. And the Arabs pretended to go along with it for their own purposes.”

Jerusalem Post columnist David Krivine wrote: “The old-time utopian dream of two communities living together in peace and harmony is shattered beyond repair.”

Even Cabinet Minister Moshe Arens, whose rightist Likud Bloc is seen as the chief defender of the status quo in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, wrote in another column in mid-April that “next to nothing” has been done during the years of Israeli rule in the territories to establish good relations with the Arab residents.

“Just about the only significant connection existing between them and Israel these past 20 years has been the daily entry of about 100,000 Arab laborers into the Israeli economy to do the work that Jews were not ready to do,” Arens wrote.

But since the intifada began, even that tenuous economic connection has been badly frayed by resignations, dismissals and strikes.

Rather than fundamentally changing the underlying struggle, some would argue that the uprising has simply ripped the mask from it. Although there has always been a degree of violence and recrimination between communities, they say, large segments of both populations either had come to ignore the underlying problem or to live relatively comfortably with it.

Bare-Knuckled Struggle

For many, the struggle had been gentrified over the years--sort of a Marquess of Queensberry approach to national survival. But to whatever extent that was true, it is no longer. Now the battle is bare-knuckled all the way, within the physical limits of the respective sides.

“The Israelis played a very smart game since 1967, and we all fell under their plan,” said one young Palestinian businessman in Nablus. “I admit that we were stunned by the Western civilization that was introduced to the West Bank. We don’t like to admit this, but we have to. Money was poured on us. And people were happy from a material point of view.”

Now, the businessman said, “Our hatred is our weapon. Let’s see if the Israelis can live with our hatred. I guarantee they can’t live with it for more than 50 years.”

From the Israeli side as well, “the uprising has changed some of the rules in various domains, from the extent of administrative detentions (arrests for six months without trial) down to instructions concerning the use of live ammunition,” wrote Zeev Schiff, the respected military correspondent of the Hebrew-language newspaper Haaretz. “Yesterday’s prohibitions are no longer valid. . . . The feeling is one of an all-out war.”

‘Less Than Animals’

At the funeral last month of Tirza Porat, a 15-year-old Israeli killed during a rock-throwing melee in a West Bank Arab village in which two Palestinians were shot to death by an Israeli guard, Deputy Prime Minister David Levy thundered that the stone throwers were “less than animals.” (An army report on the incident released last week confirmed that the girl was accidentally shot to death by the Israeli guard, not stoned to death by the villagers. But the report went on to say that the primary blame for the incident rests with the local Arabs who initiated it by throwing stones at Porat and her companions.)

The next day in Idna, a West Bank village near Hebron, a 70-year-old Palestinian grandmother with thinning hair and gold-capped teeth showed no empathy when a visitor asked about the killing of the Jewish teen-ager.

“Such a fuss!” she said of the outcry among Israelis over the incident. “But they kill us every day!”

Moreover, no term is too insignificant to be overlooked in the struggle to be understood as the underdog.

‘Settlers’ and ‘Martyrs’

To most Israelis, the teen-agers who were out hiking with Tirza Porat were “children.” The Arab teen-agers who stoned them were “youths.” To the Palestinian press, Porat was neither a “child” nor a “youth.” She was a “settler,” because she lived with her parents in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh. Dead Palestinian teen-agers are “martyrs.”

During “Nightline’s” televised “town hall” last week, two telling outbursts underlined the seeming inability of either side to recognize the most intimate sensibilities of the other.

Palestinian political scientist Saeb Erakat, during a passionate condemnation of Israeli practices in the occupied territories, referred obliquely to Nazi Germany, which oversaw the World War II extermination of 6 million Jews. He seemed to recognize almost instantly that he was treading on forbidden ground, but then compounded the error when he responded to an agitated, mostly Jewish, studio audience: “I hate Hitler more than all of you!”

Angry Response

A few minutes later, after a Palestinian-American activist in the audience asked if the Israeli panelists recognized the significance of the fact that this was an unarmed uprising, rightist Knesset (Parliament) member Eliyahu Ben-Elissar lashed back.

“What you are actually doing is to send women and children into the streets to cope with Israeli soldiers. You’re afraid to do it yourself,” he charged. Israelis, Ben-Elissar added, have “a very special attitude” about women and children “that perhaps is not known in your circles.”

For too many participants on both sides, said West Bank researcher Meron Benvenisti, this conflict is a “zero-sum game”: One side’s security can be achieved only by the other’s humiliation. One side’s national aspirations can come only through the negation of the same aspirations of the other.

A middle-age, educated Palestinian woman from a well-to-do Jerusalem family, and previously as close to apolitical as one finds here, confessed the other day that after her first couple of experiences she has stopped speaking before Jewish peace groups.

“I can’t in good conscience go talk about a ‘two-state solution,’ ” she said, referring to the idea, itself unacceptable to an apparent Israeli majority, of establishing an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank, next to Israel.

Shock Waves in Israel

Like an apparent majority of Palestinians, this woman sees hope only in the abandonment of Zionism. “We want to live with them, but we can’t cohabit with their ideology,” she said, “because their ideology is our negation.”

A similar sentiment, expressed in verse by the best-known Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, was published in March. It reads, in part:

.. Oh those who pass between fleeting words

It is time for you to be gone.

Live wherever you like, but do not live among us.

It is time for you to be gone.

Die wherever you like, but do not die among us

For we have work to do in our land.

The poem, wrote Susan Hattis Rolef, editor of the left-of-center monthly Spectrum, was seen by the Israeli peace camp “as a slap in the face.”

But the Palestinians are at least as suspicious of what they see as Israeli lip service to coexistence, one East Jerusalem Arab activist said. Whether or not they realize it, he contended, many Israelis describe a colonial coexistence, not a genuine one--such as the West Bank settlers who say they know all about the “Arab mentality” from dealing with their Palestinian maid or the Palestinian laborer who helped remodel their house.

Destined to Be Together

The one thread of hope holding the situation together nearly five months into the intifada is the belief that whatever happens politically, Jews and Arabs are destined to be rubbing up against one another in the Middle East for a long time.

Using the biblical designations for the West Bank favored by most Israelis, Cabinet minister Arens wrote: “Even those proposing that Israel leave Judea, Samaria and Gaza certainly are aware that there would be no return to the conditions existing before 1967, where neither Arab nor Jew could cross the border. The physical contact between Israel’s population and the population of the territories has become a fact of life.”

Until the nature of that contact is changed from violence to “understanding and friendship,” Arens added, “no real peace seems to be in sight.”