Personal Palestinian Issues Mirror the Political : PLO’s Drive to Establish a State Has Broad Implications for the Israeli Psyche

Munir Fasheh, a Palestinian sociologist who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, recalls how he tried twice over a 10-year period to visit his family home in Jerusalem, abandoned during the early years of the Arab-Israeli conflict after war sent many Palestinians into exile.

Each time, the Israeli woman living in the house greeted him with fear, a broom and a refusal to let him tour the premises. “She became nearly hysterical. She thought I had come to take it back. No matter what I said, she would not let me in,” Fasheh said.

“My presence set off a whole string of emotions. I reminded her that this is perhaps not her home after all. I felt she just wanted me to disappear.”

Personal and Political

This personal scene, one encountered by a number of Palestinians who seek to view the land they left behind decades ago, is also being played out on the political level as Israel resists calls to talk with the Palestine Liberation Organization about possible solutions to the Middle East conflict.

In the diplomatic case, the problem is not only that the potential visitor--the PLO--has proved willing to kill to try to get some or all of the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea.

More profoundly, it is also a question of the content and implication of the PLO’s message: the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel and the effect such an event would have on the Israeli psyche.

Philosophy Challenged

Although public discussion in Israel of the Palestinian quest for a homeland usually centers on the country’s fears for its security, the issue also is viewed as undermining the philosophical basis for the Israeli state and the sense of its citizens that they belong in the Holy Land.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, in an interview Friday with the Jerusalem Post, declared flatly that a Palestinian state “negates our existence as a state.”

Commentators say they see a reflection of deeply rooted fears in Shamir’s words.

“The Palestinians are touching the existential threat to our being at home, as if we Israelis were some evil wind that blew in here and took over,” said Jewish philosopher David Hartman, an Orthodox rabbi.

Would Diminish Moral Right

Former Israeli diplomat Shaul Ramati added: “When Zionists came here, we were sure that we had the moral right to come and live here. To recognize the Palestinian state would diminish that moral right. It would suggest we took something from someone else.”

The complex web of resistance to the PLO and to Palestinian national rights is bound up with the troubled history of Israel as well as the long history of the Jews and their persecution at the hands of non-Jewish communities worldwide, observers say.

Hartman notes out that the PLO’s standard anti-Israeli campaign focused on pushing Israel into the sea, reviving memories of other persecutions in other places. PLO chief Yasser Arafat’s recent renunciation of terrorism cannot erase an Israeli suspicion that Arafat himself, and Palestinians in general, think Israel should disappear, he argues.

‘Touches a Deep Fear’

“The traditional Palestinian delegitimization of Jews touches a deep fear. They say we do not belong here and thus tamper with the most transformative event in Jewish history--the creation of Israel,” Hartman asserted.

Political scientist Shlomo Avineri added: “Here is an organization (the PLO) that for 20 years has said that Israel is a fascist, racist state, the product of imperialism, and has no legitimate right to be here. That idea may be changing, but one must recognize that it will take time for Israelis to change also.”

In a recent newspaper article, historian Shaul Friedlander took the view that the rejection of Palestinian nationalism and the PLO originates in scars from the Holocaust. “Inside society, there are fears concerning Palestinian matters wrapped up in other things. . . . These fears are connected to the Holocaust,” he wrote.

Friedlander argued that Israelis are faced with the possibility that the Arabs have some measure of right on their side and thus will never give up in their quest to eliminate Israel.

‘Based on a Just Claim’

“The fear today still derives from the feeling that the Arab striving for revenge is so total exactly because it is based on a just claim,” he said.

The very proximity and visibility of the Arabs, Friedlander added, challenge the idea, widely held at the beginning of the mass Zionist movement into Palestine, that the area was “a land without people for a people without land.”

“Well, after a while, it was discovered that there is a people living here and their living here is a very live reality,” he wrote. “The wish was precisely that the problem will disappear somehow, that the land will be emptied of this disturbing people.”

Other observers say they think that fear is less an obstacle to meeting with the PLO than the Israeli’s view of himself as a victim of history, coupled with an unwillingness to consider that another victim of history lives nearby.

Scenario Rewritten

In effect, the 13-month-old Arab uprising, with its daily image of underdog Palestinian stone throwers up against armed Israeli soldiers, is upstaging a previous scenario that featured underdog Israel up against the Arab world and PLO terror.

“Before, we were the victims of the world. When the PLO espoused and practiced terror, it fit into our world view: We were still the victimized,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University. “By talking to the PLO, we would be suggesting that we are victimizers as well.”

Ezrahi and other political experts view Israel’s efforts to counter the PLO’s diplomatic moves by emphasizing the terrorist threat as a means of painting Palestinians as the aggressor and Israel the perpetual victim.

Both Are Victims

But Ezrahi notes out that the Palestinians share with Jews similar feelings of being eternally aggrieved. “Both, in essence, are victims, and it seems hard to get victim to talk with victim,” he said.

In any event, should the PLO prove to have truly abandoned terrorism--a still-unsettled question--Israel could find itself without the means of resisting peace talks.

“The more moderate the PLO appears, the worse it is for the Israeli government,” Ezrahi said.

Fasheh, the Palestinian sociologist, noted that the United States’ decision last month to open talks with the PLO helped reduce the feeling among Palestinians that they are unfairly judged in the Middle East conflict and that this has helped put Palestinians in a negotiating mood.

“Palestinians were sitting in refugee camps away from their homes and yet were called the criminal,” Fasheh said. “The United States’ action lifted that onus. It is not completely lifted, but it was a start.”

‘We Can’t Ignore Them’

Jewish philosopher Hartman said he thinks Washington’s decision forced Israel to open its eyes and gaze on its neighbors: “Washington is the dispenser of grace. The Palestinians have taken on the mask of reality. They exist. We can’t ignore them.”

With stiff resistance to both the PLO and a Palestinian state, it is not clear what ideas Israel would bring to peace talks. So far, the Israeli government seems willing to give in on certain questions about the form of the talks, but not their substance.

In the Jerusalem Post interview, Shamir hinted that he would accept an international conference as a backdrop for peace talks. This had long been a proposal made by his chief political rival, Finance Minister Shimon Peres, but generally rejected by Shamir.

The United Nations or Washington and Moscow together could moderate the talks, as long as “the external bodies do not intervene in the content of the negotiations,” Shamir said.

“It just shows how far we are willing to go, even to take certain risks,” he added. “I stress that this is not a risk, because it cannot affect the substance.”