Israelis & Palestinians : Two Tongues, Two Histories, Two Faiths, Two Dreams, One Turf

Last year the Bush Administration joined Yitzhak Shamir in what was exaggerately called a “peace process.” They avoided all four central peace issues: the location of secure boundaries for Israel; the status and identity of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; the question of who would eventually rule those Arab-populated territories, and the structural relations between the Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian peoples who inhabit the territories of the former Palestine Mandate.

While these basic issues were sidestepped, the United States invested great effort in the “small steps” that were supposed to be more responsive to conciliation.

The process was reduced to the worthy but unsensational idea of electing a few Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to negotiate with Israel.

The Israeli Labor Party was persuaded to be satisfied with this miniature progress, although its own platform advocated a broader principle of “territories for peace,” which is also the unanimous international consensus. The United States, however, made no effort to make this consensus a part of the process.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III went to unusual lengths to satisfy Likud Party sensitivities. He agreed that Palestinian representatives had to be “satisfactory” to Israel. This meant that we could choose our own team and then virtually choose our adversary’s team. The United States, powerfully supported by Egypt, even got the Palestine Liberation Organization to conceal its name under the neutral word “Palestinians.”

This, of course, is subterfuge; the only relatively pragmatic Palestinian group is the one occupying its Tunis headquarters. The most Baker could do was supply a group that imaginative Israelis could pretend to consider as non-PLO, and which the rest of the world would regard as PLO.

With all formulas and fig leaves in place, it appeared that there would soon be an Israeli-Palestinian encounter in Cairo, creating a new dimension of Middle Eastern history.

At that decisive stage Shamir decided to break the coalition with Labor, to dismiss its leaders and to end the 10-month peace process without a single ambition fulfilled.

Now the Shamir government has collapsed. There is no consensus about the basic issue of national structure. Nor any tradition of civility. Let my readers imagine an adviser urging Churchill after World War II to dismiss Attlee and all his colleagues in order to hold an election in a more favorable electoral atmosphere for his own party.

Shamir understands that an election in the West Bank and Gaza is incompatible with his ideology of an undivided Land of Israel under exclusive Jewish rule. He is in retreat from his own initiative. An election of Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza has a soothing procedural sound. But in practice it would dismantle the entire system and fabric of Israeli rule in the territories.

Palestinians would be free to say what they like, celebrate their leaders, assemble freely. None of this is possible in the territories today.

An election in the territories would mark a long step toward disengagement from Israeli rule. Shamir, who opposed the Egyptian-Israeli treaty, the withdrawal from Lebanon, the Hussein-Peres agreement for a Jordanian-Palestinian solution, former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s friendly peace plan and even the renunciation of an inconsequential hotel on Egyptian soil in Taba, is a sincere territorialist.

If the first crucial opportunity of a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations is not to be wasted, Israeli leadership will have to pass to other hands. If some of us thought a West Bank election was too narrow to be called a peace process, Shamir found it too large a hazard to risk. The United States must belatedly understand that there is no hope of progress by small steps without knowing the ultimate destination.

The American illusion--that peace can emerge from a broadly based Israeli government with Likud in the center--is in collapse. Israel’s only chance of peace, social harmony, democratic integrity and international understanding lies in a return to the policy of its founding fathers.

They knew that sovereignty and territory in the area must be shared by two groups, not monopolized by one. Since Israeli security and sovereignty are not going to be compromised, the West Bank and Gaza are the only places where the Palestinian idea can find real expression.

There is no political arena in the world marked by such a sharp and total discontinuity as the territory where democratic Israel meets a population under Israeli military rule. Neither of these two worlds seeks harmony with the other through any compromise of its separate nature.

Our land is a land of two histories, two tongues, two faiths, two national dreams, two identities. Duality is written so sharply into the very texture of the land that any unitary solution subjecting one nationalism to domination by the other is bound to be explosive and morally fragile.

The forces in Israel ready for a reawakening are more impressive than they have appeared to be during the suffocations of the coalition regime. More than 1 million Israelis in the 1988 election supported platforms calling for termination of Israeli rule over the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

The religious parties now move toward a new attitude dominated by the need to avoid permanent conflict and tension. The Labor mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, has described the West Bank and Gaza as “a millstone around Israel’s neck” and the Likud mayor of Tel Aviv, Shlomo Lahat, has called for talks with the PLO. Dozens of former military leaders agree.

Israeli mainstream security experts proposed last year, in a Tel Aviv University study, that “Israeli security can be maintained through continued military deployment but without physical control over all of the territories and all their Palestinian inhabitants.”

In these areas of lucidity, U.S. and European diplomacy should exert a healing influence. Europe has pioneered the idea of balance between separate sovereignty and regional integration. Only in a context of institutionalized regional cooperation can the three harassed peoples--Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians--find their mutual salvation.

JERUSALEM: Battle for the divided city. M5