Imagining Peace : In the Middle East, Peace Is More Than a Change of Borders; It Is a Freeing of Souls

“Imagining Peace,” I wrote at the top of the page a year before the Israeli-PLO accord. At that time, these two words held the magic of a password. I underlined them with a strong, straight line, then with a squiggle, then with a few faint dots, and I resolved to continue. Tomorrow.

A week went by, and again I wrote the two words at the top of a page, and again they held a promise, like the pleasure of suddenly taking a deep breath. But so strange and impenetrable was the void that opened up in the secure act of writing these words that I immediately relaxed my grip.

You have to think slowly, I told myself. There are things here that take some getting used to.

For instance, the unexpected joy that awakened in me. Because to imagine peace means that we have a future. And I am not yet talking about a good future, nor a bad future, only about the possibility of having a future. And maybe the root is that in our consciousness, to us as Israelis, the word peace is always associated with a wish, with a nonexistent state of being, as if peace in our language is a unique word, a noun that harbors a verb--a stowaway verb--that is forever conjugated in a future tense.

Yet, if we imagine a state of peace, then it necessarily follows that we have a future. And this is no simple matter. It seems to me that there are not many nations that have such a suspicious and doubting attitude toward the possibility of future. When the newspapers tell us that the United States is planning its space program for the year 2019, the wheat crops of 2015, it sounds perfectly natural. But what Israeli will speak nonchalantly and calmly about the milk production of Israeli cows 30 years from today? About the number of children who will be born in Israel in the year 2033?

I will speak of myself. When I think in such future terms about Israel, I feel an anxious pang in my heart, as if a hidden seismographic indicator is warning me: Danger Zone. Even though the Jewish people are one of the most ancient peoples, with a continuous historic consciousness and memory, it seems as if an essential part of its internal self-expression is the sense of imminent doom. And it seems that by simply allowing myself a future so wide and bountiful, I have desecrated the taboo. I may even have betrayed some kind of collective obligation to a unique fate that was “bought” with thousands of years of suffering.

Because of these two words, imagining peace , I felt as if a tightly coiled spring had come loose within me. As if I had been given permission, or an invitation, to go in there for a moment, into the yearned-for future.

I want to write about this, I thought. Now. Tomorrow morning.

Another week went by, and then two. The two words kept on flashing in front of me, but an empty space seemed to have lodged itself between me and their meaning.

As an experiment, I tried the opposite route. I tried to imagine war, or even something smaller than an actual war: a catastrophe, an atrocity for beginners. Immediately I was flooded by nightmarish visions.

There is no doubt, imagining war is easy: because of my personal experiences, because of our collective historical memory, because of the movies we’ve seen, books we’ve read. All of this knowledge is activated by lightly pressing the trigger of consciousness, and this intensifies the flow of adrenaline, grinds the nerve endings and pours the mind and the body into one stiff mold. The work of the imagination is then accomplished with an almost physiological precision. The soul reduces, as it were, its inner, vulnerable surface area, wraps itself up with body, and grants the right of action to the instincts of defense, survival and aggression.

It might be difficult to understand that a man like myself, descendant of a people with a past and present such as ours, becomes suspicious when offered--even only as an exercise--a chance to give himself over to a promise of a better future. I felt, in a very real sense, how the soul is suddenly required to move in an opposing direction, in an almost unnatural direction--to open up. This poor little soul (as Gogol wrote) is forced to increase its vulnerability and bareness, to unburden itself of all the survivor’s wisdom that had collected daily for 2,000 years in the Jewish DNA.

In the Nahum Stutchkoff Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language, the most extensive one available, the word peace and the terms associated with it are accorded only two columns. The word war and all that it encompasses--the military, the firearms--is given 10. In this thesaurus, the main synonyms for peace are a state of noncombat, an armistice, a disarmament. And in the index, it says peace --a state of non-war. So that a state of peace is understood as a state of no war, just as a secular Jew bashfully defines himself as not religious.

But the word war has conscripted quite a few verbal troops; there are battles and campaigns and encounters, and a war on land, a war at sea, a war in the air, a war of honor, a holy war, a blitzkrieg, and guerrilla warfare, a defensive war, a preemptive war, and total war, and a civil war and a Cold War, and a war of nerves and a world war, even two.

There is no doubt that much more has been invested in war, even verbally. Enough. We must begin to imagine peace. Because, suddenly, an inevitable diplomatic move has given us a shortcut to the future.

IMAGINING PEACE. TO GIVE ONESELF OVER TO ALL THAT ARISES IN THE heart and in the mind when one hears these two words. It is impossible, of course, to take into account all of the possibilities revealed in the crack of light when this door is opened. Peace will probably have many faces and will touch upon all aspects of life, in all their depth. I have dared here only a few guesses, and these, of course, are tinged with hope and with anxiety, but mostly with a pathetic belief that we have some kind of control over the events of our lives. As my grandmother would say in Yiddish, “Man thinks, and God laughs.”

In my guesses about peace, I would like to begin with the changes I foresee in the Arab world. This, too, is part of my difficulty in giving myself over at the outset to the most immediate change about to occur, the internal one. But soon enough, I will work my way to the Israelis and the Jews in Israel.

What will peace look like?

If the Arab countries sign peace agreements with Israel, I venture to guess that the change in such a solid and long-established stand against a sworn enemy may create a new dynamic in aspects of life that have nothing to do with the diplomatic relationship with Israel.

It is easy to find examples in the recent history we already know: At Camp David, the Egyptian leadership agreed to internalize the possibility of another way of thinking, different from the one that had guided that country for decades. And at Camp David, a new kind of relationship was established between Egypt and the United States. Many of us still wistfully remember the moment when Anwar Sadat descended the stairs from his plane at Ben-Gurion Airport. It seems to me that the sweetness we felt then was also the fruit of a breaking of barriers. And the thawing of the freeze in which the entire region had been suspended for decades.

Perhaps life in a prolonged state of war makes us forget the simple things. Just as there are in the mind of man tendencies and traits of aggressiveness and suspicion toward strangers, there exists also a natural desire to open up to the other. There is a natural, initial curiosity toward the other. We would all like to feel the childish wonder of a happy ending to the story, to experience one of the only victories within our reach--the victory against the sobriety of despair and cynicism and our bitter life experiences. Even the “cool accord” with the Egyptians had already created mechanisms and ties that have an inherent interest in the continuation of this peace, helping to weave hundreds of personal attachments that necessarily dismantled the mutual stereotypes. True, this is only one drop in a great ocean of hate and alienation, but we must begin somewhere, and surely we, the Jewish Israelis who live here because of a dream that glimmered in the eyes of 20 young Zionist men and women in Russia, are allowed to believe in the power of dreams.

Because of the peace agreement with Egypt, we now have enthusiastic partners in the most important state in the Arab world today. This formal and reserved peace survived the Lebanon War, the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilities and the intifada. And this peace makes Egypt an eager partner in the attempts to hitch other elements in the region to the peace process. The Mishna tells us, “The subject of a miracle does not recognize his miracle,” and we have probably become accustomed to the miracle far too quickly and have become arrogant. It is unlikely that what happened to Sadat, a change of such magnitude, will happen to Hafez Assad. Or to the Syrian people. But the possibility of relating to the Israeli enemy who for 100 years was frozen into a matrix of a monolithic and stereotypical posture may liberate certain levels of Syrian society in a deep and not always conscious manner.

Perhaps this change may cause some prominent and influential Syrians, Jordanians and Lebanese to experience suddenly a taste of true freedom. A deliverance from a situation in which they were victims. Because he who is imprisoned, he who denies the possibility of being flexible both intellectually and emotionally--this man is a victim.

A multitude of sentiments, some cautious and covert, exist in Syria, as they do in other societies. With the progress of the peace process, these might be more openly and frankly expressed. These future overt pronouncements hold great significance.

WHAT ELSE CAN THIS SUDDEN SENSE OF FLEXIBILITY CREATE? WHAT CAN IT bring about in a society that for decades did not allow itself, or was not allowed, this dynamism, this freedom?

Here, the more I give myself over to the imagination, the more complicated is the future that erects itself in front of my eyes. Even a threatening one.

Because one of the possibilities still enfolded in the bosom of the future is that if we remove the Israeli problem from the Middle East quagmire, new questions and aspirations will awaken and free themselves. Not immediately, not within a decade. But gradually.

There could arise a growing aspiration to change the system of government. Egypt underwent a process of relative democratization after the signing of the peace accord with Israel. Perhaps the new flexibility of consciousness--the possibility of considering an alternative--helped give a more profound weight to the freedom to choose.

It is possible to dare to assume that peace between Israel and her other Arab neighbors will create dynamic processes whose directions cannot be completely anticipated. The peace agreements could bring about a set of demands within Arab countries to rethink other aspects of everyday life. If it is possible to make peace with Israel, with the eternal enemy, might it not be possible to arrive at other, more profound changes in the relationship of the citizen to his government? If inflexible governments have allowed themselves to change their approach to such an essential question, can it not be possible to widen the cracks that were wedged open?

Some weeks ago, President Assad declared that for 50 years Syria has subordinated itself to the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Most of his life--and most of his time today--has been given to this conflict. Even if he exaggerated, there is no doubt that the prolonged conflict with Israel gave many Arab nations a convenient pretext for not dealing seriously with equally important problems that have nothing to do with Israel: the conflict between tradition and progress, the lack of education, the passivity and apathy caused by poverty, the population explosion, the degrading attitude toward women in Muslim society, the struggle against the ever-growing power of religion and fundamentalist fanaticism, the measure of violence in society, the struggle of individualism against the family and clan framework, the nonexistence of democracy as a means of government and as a philosophical outlook on life.

There are, of course, some in the Arab world who attempt to wrestle with these problems. But surely the choice in the Arab world, even among the elite, has been to deflect their attention to a marginal course, one more comfortable for the ruling bodies--to the problem of Israel.

And when these deep, massive blocks begin to move within the Arab countries, when this region is free to deal with these other problems, more questions will arise.

It will become extremely clear that there are in this region some countries with an internal self-identity and self-expression problem. Questions can arise about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan. To what extent does a sense of a common identity, a common fate and common interests prevail in these countries? What will happen to the aspirations of the minorities and the large communities that were joined together by colonizers but were never united nor integrated? That 18% of Iraq’s population is Kurd? That in Iraq, Sunnis, who make up only 20% of the Muslim population, rule over the majority of Shiites? What will be the reverberations from the fact that in Jordan there is a Palestinian majority that feels blocked and deprived? What effect will the existence of a Palestinian state, a democratic (I hope) Palestinian state, where the Palestinians can realize their identity, have on the Palestinians in Jordan? What impulses will carry from Palestine to Jordan with its Palestinian majority? How will a post-King Hussein Jordan contend with this internal pressure?

There is a quiet agitation in Arab countries today. An agitation among the oppressed minorities or among a majority ruled by a violent and stronger minority. The fundamentalist Islamic powers are stirring up animosity. And an ever-growing rancor is being expressed by poor countries against the comparatively artificial ones who hold in their hands a large part of the world’s wealth. We saw what this brought about in August, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. What will happen when these pressures are intensified, following possible political tremors, even if they are for the most part positive ones? Will we witness a Balkanization of the Middle East in a few years’ time? What then will be the fate of the peace agreements signed by Israel and the current political entities?

OF COURSE, SOMEONE WILL COME ALONG AND DEMAND: IF THIS IS WHAT you suspect will happen, how dare you attempt to persuade others of the need for peace? Perhaps, they will say, the current situation, vile and complicated as it is, is preferable to the bloody anarchy that will take place here if your scenario comes to life.

And to this I will answer: It seems far more moral that a country be free to contend with its essential problems, even if this brings about a temporary instability and violence, than that it invest all of its energies in an external problem, a problem inflamed artificially and manipulatively.

From a purely egocentric Israeli point of view, it seems to me that in a situation (imaginary?) of peace for the entire Middle East, Israel will be much more secure than it is today. Not only will an army be able to better prepare itself for possible wars instead of wasting its might as a police force dispersing demonstrations. This security will also mean a stronger economy, a better education system, a stronger, more democratic government. In this situation, Israel will better tackle any challenge that the capricious and violent reality of the Middle East may present.

I hope that our personal security, which is a part of our national self-identity as Israelis, will be much greater after we evacuate the Territories and disconnect ourselves from their Palestinian population. It seems to me that part of the division among Israelis over the question of occupation stems from the fact that in the consciousness of most of the Jews in Israel, the boundaries of the Territories do not coincide, consciously or emotionally, with the boundaries of the Israeli identity. It might be said that the fervor of the Israeli identity ends with, for most Israelis, the Green Line (the pre-1967 borders). Beyond that line, this fervor changes: It either cools down and fades into indifference, or it turns into the raging flames that emanate from the settlers.

I venture to guess that surrendering the Territories will bring the Jewish Israelis back into the authentic experience of their identity. For the first time in many years, and maybe for the first time since the founding of the state of Israel, the borders of identity and the physical borders of the state will coincide.

It is impossible to pronounce these as borders of a “national consensus,” because there will be many in Israel who will not like surrendering the Territories. But within these new-old borders the sense of internal conviction will necessarily grow stronger for most people in Israel, as will the determination to defend these borders. Not because of a fear that stems from a reduced territorial ownership, but because the identification of a people with its state--as an organic body that has an emotional and “neural” relationship with all of its parts, with all of its borders--will become more clear, more tangible.

IT’S STRANGE. I AM WRITING ABOUT IMAGINING PEACE, AND I’M DREAMING A war. But even when I do imagine peace, I do not envision a loving relationship.

It is difficult to free oneself from the sense that part of the kitsch that often characterizes the hysterical and sentimental reasoning of some Israelis stems from the most simple and basic need--to be loved by the Arabs.

Yes. To really be loved. And in passing: Often, in my encounters with Palestinians, I sense the same need in them--the longing to be loved. To be appreciated for your true value by your sworn enemy. And this, of course, is a very human desire, the desire for a reconciliation, the desire to recuperate from the emotional deformity that exists in a prolonged state of war, to disencumber yourself, finally, from the burden of hate. The desire that he who sees you as a monster suddenly will open his eyes and he, yes he, will strip you of the tatters of the stereotype, and you will stand there, pure and good, like a newborn baby.

True, this may be the aspiration that is at the root of the desire to make peace with the enemy. But one should not give oneself over to the unreal dimension of this desire. Because sometimes, in the journey back to babyhood, you get stuck in the infantile.

And I am certain, and this is the only thing I’m certain about, that if Israel makes peace with its Arab neighbors, it will be a bitter peace, paved with small and large acts of violence, acts of terror and incidents along all of the fresh borders that will each time cause us--and them--to scream out because of the insult: Look to what extent you cannot be believed, look to what extent they should not be trusted.

It is certainly too early to speak of trust. Trust can emerge only from the moment that peace is made. And only then will the first seeds be sown. Every day of non-peace only distances that moment.

In order to arrive at peace, we must immediately sober up. We must not dream of love between ourselves and our former enemies. This is not a tear-jerker with a good ending, filmed in Cinemascope, but a split-screen cable-television menu, one that shows us many, many movies at once.

In one square, we watch the Muslim brothers proclaim their tenets from atop the mosques; in other squares, we witness Iran’s nuclear arsenal. And Iraq’s secret nuclear facilities. And a nationalist--or religious--uprising in Jordan. Or one of Moammar Kadafi’s more insane moments. And a terrorist from one of the opposing extremist Palestinian organizations--and there will always be more and more extreme ones--aboard an El Al flight.

And in order to really frazzle my nerves, I will attempt to envision one more square, in which the prime minister of Israel orders that the fuses be set in place at the nuclear facility in Dimona.

But in one square, just as small as the rest, there will be another picture: not one with a digitalized dove carrying a digitalized olive branch, but one in which an Israeli and a Jordanian surgeon work together to implant a heart in a Syrian cardiac patient at a new medical facility in Jedda, one that will be named Shiba (Hebrew) or Ship a (Arabic), meaning “to convalesce.” The patient will receive this heart from the Middle East Organs Bank in Beirut. Or we might watch a report on the operation to nab drug lords launched by Intra-East, the Interpol of the Middle East, made up of the different police forces of the region, or a session held by the commission appointed to investigate the colossal defeat suf fered by the Israelis at the hands of the Egyptians. In soccer. We may watch the launching of a new, Israeli-Jordanian irrigation plant in the Arava or an Israeli rock band in a musical dialogue with an experimental Yemenite band in a benefit staged to raise money for the drought-stricken citizens of southern Iraq; a meeting between Israeli and Syrian educators attempting to plan the textbooks for the next generations; a heated debate between an Israeli and a Palestinian professor at the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Department of the Middle East University in Nablus, or Beersheba. . . . Yes, we are all allowed to dream and to remember that many things are impossible until the moment they happen.

And in one small square, the one in which my dreams come true--it is difficult to write this, my instincts are immediately set on edge--a controlled explosion, a voluntary dismantling of the nuclear facility in Dimona, the facility that is both a nuclear arsenal and a metaphor, whose dismantling may be the strongest expression of renouncing an entire way of thinking.

But before we set our sails for such distant parts, it might be better to dream of the attainable: of the signing of a free-trade agreement between Israel, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. And, of course, Palestine.

When writing fiction, it is of utmost importance to be meticulous with the facts. Castles in the air soar infinitely higher when constructed with tangible building blocks. Even more so, when we dream of a future reality, we should be meticulous and build only with tangible, concrete elements. The key word in this imaginary world is interests. A dense network of partnerships and common goals. And if there is someone who holds reservations about the hope I have expressed here for prosperity in the Arab world, he should be reminded that Israel’s basic interest is that the countries in this region shall be sated, stable, advanced and reliant on one another--as well as on Israel and the West through a wide network of ties. The first man to understand this was Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who has always been inclined toward the future, and that is why he was the fastest among the politicians and statesmen to become accustomed to the new situation. Though there were those who sniffed in distaste when he attempted to raise funds for the Palestinians, Peres, the most practical visionary of them all, simply knew. If the current, blazing, destructive relationships are translated into commercial ones, into regional economic development projects, into financial and investment markets, the chance that these partners will try to erase one another becomes smaller--not nonexistent, but smaller.

Again, I am not talking about love, I only pray for restrained animosity. For constructive suspicion. There is usually no great love between nations. But as years go by, a painful internalization sets in, that with this certain people we can no longer wage war on the battlefields. Instead, we go to battle on the fields of commerce, tourism and financial investments.

Can all this happen in the little square in my split-screen anxiety-cable-television menu? Is this only an imaginary square? I am thinking of 1945 Europe. A split continent. A devastated Germany. The atrocities performed by the Nazis only beginning to come to light. The economies of most states in shambles. And nine years later, the European Community is launched. A man can cross the continent with one document in his hands--a passport. Only nine years. It is possible, not necessary. These are not identical situations. But it is possible. And we are allowed to dream, to allot one square within the thicket of nightmares.

And then I reconsider, I remind myself of the cast of characters, and ask: Is all this possible here, too?

An Egyptian man once said to me near the Pyramids, “We will sign a peace agreement with you, we will do business with you, we will buy from you and sell to you. There are quite a few things you can teach us. But you will never enter our hearts.” OK, I say to him now. I am not looking for love, but can you internalize the simple and decisive fact of our presence here? And this is the question: Is there a chance that Israel will one day be accepted into the Middle East? Will the Arab world internalize--after 10 or 20 years of a cold and formal external peace--Israel, not just the fact of her existence but her right to exist here, as an inseparable, organic part of the Middle East?

I have grave doubts that this will occur in the next few years. The peace talks are, of course, a good beginning, but many years will pass before this considerable change in the Arab world will be completed, so that the attitude of the next generation toward Israel can be different. In order for this to occur, for this desire to arise there--not only to make use of Israeli agricultural and technological acumen, and the wealth and power wielded by the Jews (these are legendary in their eyes)--they must acquaint themselves with the rich spirituality of Judaism, with Jewish and Israeli culture, with the special, tragic fate of the Jews.

The same question should be put to Jewish Israelis. Will Israel ever internalize the fact that it is part of the Middle East? Will the Jewish Israelis begin to understand that the fact that we are here, in the heart of the Arab world, is not a random occurrence but one of the foundations of our lives, even a great challenge? Will Israelis show some curiosity toward the Islamic canon? Toward Arabic art and philosophy? Will they embrace Arabic literature just as they have embraced South American literature? Will Arabic be taught here as a second language from the second grade and on? What will the Israelis’ attitude toward the tapestry of Arabic life be? Will we adopt new norms of behavior from this world?

Will we cease to prefer, to praise automatically, all that comes from the West, and become more open to what the East has to offer? We are, after all, here, in the East. And it is always somewhat embarrassing to remember that the enlightened West caused us infinitely more hardship and sorrow and death than did the Arab world. Hitler and Stalin--they are not from here. We have, of course, no intention of turning our back on the West, to whom we are connected through thousands of cords, but only to remember that our being here can serve as a special junction of relationships and emphases and combinations that only we--with our unique historical and cultural background--can create.

I do not know if a man can internalize his existence in a place where he is not wanted. But perhaps another reason we are not wanted (not the only--another) is that from time immemorial we have radiated in all our being a separatism from here. And perhaps this declamatory separatism is perceived by the Arabs as our sense of transience, a clear indecision on our part whether we would like to be here. Perhaps if this sense also changes, the belief that we can be eradicated will grow smaller. And perhaps, if we know that we are no longer to be eradicated, we will allow ourselves to want to be here.

I HAVE TALKED ABOUT THE SPLIT-screen television of the imagination. When I get even closer, I see that in the small square, the bashful one of the longed-for peace, a question is flashing, and it is the most important and essential question of them all: What is it like to live without an enemy? I do not know a life without enemies. I assume that because of the nature of the peace to come, I will not have to face this problem in my lifetime. But I hope that future generations tackle the following question: What is it like not to live with a constant mortal threat? This will be a great challenge: to learn to live a life no longer defined by antagonism and a state of war, and an outlook not shaped by fear of death.

This is not simple. It is often hard to be free of a flaw around which an entire personality was built, with all of the cumbersome apparatus that was meant to allow this person to live with his flaw. In the end this person becomes enslaved to the apparatus, and when he is offered a remedy that will free him of the flaw, he grows wary: How will I know to live my life without it?

We are all familiar with this from our everyday life: how the inescapable needs of a situation become values. How anxieties create ideals. How we learn to perfect to a loathsome extreme that horrible talent--the talent to be an enemy.

The German philosopher Hegel once said that the wicked are the makers of history. It seems to me that we in the Middle East are also familiar with the reverse of this statement--that history makes people wicked. The need to be for many years a tougher and more cunning enemy, suspicious and more ruthless, kills something in the soul. And this necessity congeals around consciousness and even language, like an internal mask of death.

One thing is clear: In Israel, too, minds will be freed to deal with internal problems. Where will this process lead? Will a cultural battle between the secular and the orthodox finally be launched? Will the economic change between Israel and the Palestinians in the Territories cause certain levels of the Israeli populations to become menial workers? Will we again witness riots of an economic and social nature? What effect will the permeation of values and norms from the Arab world have on an Israeli society mostly made up of Jews who only a generation back came from that world? And, in general, how will we cope with the fact that we no longer have one well-defined enemy against whom we vent all of our aggressions and whose presence unites us?

Perhaps the disappearance of this enemy will broaden our scale of emotions toward any and all others. Perhaps we will open up to the many more shades that lie between enemy and lover, that lie between to be or not to be. Perhaps we will be able to loosen our grip over the pathetic need for a consecrated unity, for a consensus in every walk of life. Perhaps we will shake loose some of our Israeli conservatism, the love of precise definitions and clearly marked boundaries in everything including art, fashion and the relationship between men and women. Perhaps the public debate in Israel and the vehement manner in which it is conducted will become more moderate if the “life on the edge of destruction” sound system is cut off. Perhaps we will be more calm, more forgiving, and more human toward one another.

Generally, in a constant state of war, too many words sound like the beating of a drum. And we might no longer need this kind of rhythmic encouragement. Perhaps, we will begin to speak--and write--in a language whose amplifier is much weaker. In a language that will not echo for so many generations. A functional language of the present, simple and self-indulging.

Then, perhaps, we will be able to understand, in a more tangible sense, the meaning of the question, “Who is an Israeli?” We will know how to integrate it into the eternal debate--who is a Jew? Perhaps, if we no longer feel that we live in mortal danger, an indication will emerge--for the first time in many years--of the prominent and essential difference between those of us who are here and the Jew as a symbol, as a myth. The Wandering, Persecuted Jew, the one who survives again and again. The one who thrives on death, the Jew in a ghetto somewhere--in Europe, in the Middle East. Then we will be able to--shall have to--define to ourselves the Israeli experience in a positive sense: no longer “How we differ from the Jews of the Diaspora,” but who we are here. What are the Jewish values that can be assimilated here in Israeli everyday life? What memories from Jewish history do we choose to emphasize to our children? There is no doubt: We have an opportunity to change our angle of vision of ourselves. To face our memories anew.

Millions of Jews in the different diasporas will then have to determine: Do they, now that life in Israel is becoming more normal, now that this life possesses so many new challenges, not the least of which is the meaning of being Jewish--do they now come here?

And if they’re not coming, will we, the managers of Hotel Zion, continue to keep the rooms reserved in their names? Or should we decide upon an expiration date for the problematic Law of Return (of course we would not take this right away from those who come here from a place in which they were persecuted, in which their life was threatened)? And as a byproduct, will we begin to solve the question of absolute equality for the one-fifth of Israelis who are not Jewish? Will there then be no more absentees (in the Israeli Declaration of Statehood, these men and women are called Present Absentees), only men and women who are present and demand for themselves full equality under the law? And how forcefully will they make these demands? And with what measure of irritability or tolerance will the Jewish majority greet more demands, after the many concessions that this majority--a majority that perceives itself as a minority--will already have made? And perhaps the Israeli Palestinians will then decide to put on the table in Israel--and not only in Israel--their aspirations for self-expression. Will there then begin an overt and active effort toward creating the threatening Galilee State that had hitherto, at least in public discussions, been denied?

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin knows that in the past year, he single-handedly created the Palestinian state. Yasser Arafat understands that he has permanently given up the dream of creating a big Palestinian state that would appropriate some Israeli land. Israel is making immediate and very tangible concessions in the Territories. Israel is giving up measurable security assets. The Palestinians are giving up, at least for now, some dreams and hopes. I don’t know which of the two is making the more painful concessions.

The Palestinians have been standing outside of history for many years. They have been living in the memories of a glorious past, with fanciful aspirations for the heroic future destined for them. Like the child who weaves fantasies of revenge and solace from the threads of his humiliation, they, too, looked for a shelter from the degrading and depressing present, from the lack of hope for the future. Under these conditions, dreams and hopes become absolutely divorced from the attainable.

The current accord returns the Palestinians to the folds of history. To the natural, developmental process of a people. If a people receives a place for itself, then it will also be able to come back to time, to reality, to all of its possibilities and its limitations. The reality that will now be created for the Palestinians has quite an enticing power, but it also conceals hardships and complications, and the demands that reality always presents to those who live a full life. There will be Palestinians who will be eager to reopen the Pandora’s box of delusions and fantasies that had for so many years poisoned the Palestinian blood cycle.

How, and for how long, will the Palestinians now struggle to overcome these impulses? They, whose lives were decisively shaped by continuous and violent struggle against the Israeli enemy. The occupation does not only ruin the occupier. And the Palestinian society, side by side with the formidable accomplishments of the past few years, has also undergone a difficult process of moral descent, of becoming extreme and ugly. Families disintegrated, and the moral framework of society was tarnished. An entire generation of children missed out on five years of orderly education and schooling. And, indeed, that generation feels the essence of freedom but also the essence of anarchy. How will a society in such a fragile state face these challenges?

We were all, Jews and Arabs alike, actively shaped by this prolonged, bloody and very violent conflict. The experiences, the skills and the instincts of the professional survivor are etched in our earliest memories.

Look at the leaders of this region: Assad, King Hussein, Arafat, Saddam Hussein. Among the last four Israeli prime ministers, three (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Rabin) are former commanders of military underground movements, warriors, absolutely security-minded men; time and again, we--the citizens, the leaders, the communities--survived all manners of calamities. And we were caught up in the paradox: First we survived in order to live, but now, the only way we know how to live is to survive. No more than that. It is very difficult to dream dreams in this situation. It is difficult to hope, to open up, even only a sliver, to your enemy. It is very difficult to take a risk, but it is apparently also very difficult to take a chance.

Who knows what price we have all paid for this complex emotional situation in which we were shaped? Who knows how many more generations of children, scarred like ourselves, will be born? Look at how difficult it is right now for so many, both Palestinians and Jews, to make peace. How close we are to missing the rare opportunity accorded to us. This band of survivors, specialists in avoiding traps, has fallen into its own trap, a trap that has been perfected ad absurdum.

The Jews who live in Israel are now called upon to make not only geographical concessions. We must redeploy--or evacuate completely--entire areas of the soul. If, finally, there is to be stable and lasting peace, we will have to reassess--and perhaps even forgo--an entire set of terms. Perhaps we will be able to examine honestly some of the myths that have been a part of our lives during the conflict, like our purity of arms ethic or the edict to pursue peace at any price (with which we adorned ourselves all these years, when we could have reached peace, but did not pursue it). It would be interesting to examine honestly the validity of such phrases as the Chosen People--and what this phrase has meant to us. How will we forge for ourselves a new experience that is not saturated, to the point of being stifling, with the myth of the sacrifice of Isaac, with the myth of Massada, with a one-dimensional lesson to be learned from the Holocaust?

Elias Canetti said that survival is actually a repetitive act of re-experiencing death. An exercise of sorts in death and the fear of it. I sometimes feel that a people of sworn survivors is a people more attuned, in some sense, to death. A people whose true partner in dialogue, the profound one, is death, even more so than life. And I am not talking about that thing that exists in Germanic culture, that romantic falling in love with death. No. I’m talking about something deeper. About a certain firsthand knowledge, a knowledge that is passed along through the umbilical cord, an absolutely sober knowledge about the concreteness and the everyday quality of death. About the unbearable lightness of death. A knowledge expressed in, for example, a sentence I heard from a young Israeli couple, who, in an interview, described their plans for the future and hoped that they would have three children. “So that if one is killed, there will still be two left.”

Often, when I hear people, even very young people, talk about themselves, about their lives, about their anxieties, the power of the memory of the tragic side of Jewish history is revealed to me in them and in myself. And I feel, in the shuddering sense of the word, that we sometimes have that sick tendency--to treat life as latent death.

In a life of absolute and continuing peace, all this will change. For the first time since the creation of the State of Israel, we will have a real opportunity to express our abilities. To check, under natural and normal conditions, what we are capable of as a people. To discover if we are capable of creating a reality of a fully spiritual and material life, an enticing and truthful reality. To burst into the future from within the stifling cloak of apathy and fatalism that has settled around our shoulders in the past few years.

Not only to the Palestinian people are we about to grant the “right of self-expression” but also to ourselves. After years of erring, of spiritual impoverishment, of stepping in place and weakening, we are given the almost unbelievable opportunity to experience again, for the second time in 45 years, the miracle of rebirth.