The Fruits of Peace?

It was all the way it used to be during the old intifada--only more so: A party atmosphere at the back of the crowd--there were young people, there was flirting, there was excitement, gossip and the singing of sentimental, patriotic songs. A little boy carrying a pretend Kalashnikov like a cliche, pointing it, laughing, pointing it again. Older people coming to watch, interested, but shaking their heads. Hamas boys carrying the pretty green flag of their organization. Beir Zeit students carrying the black, white, red and green Palestinian flag. Banners waving. People crouching and running at the sound of gunfire. And at the front of the crowd, at the Israeli army checkpoint: blood, and plenty of it.

Things that were different: This time, the Palestinians had uniforms--and guns. This time, the Israelis were shooting live ammo, not rubber bullets. This time, Israeli helicopters fired down on the crowd--and it was not tear gas. This time, Israeli tanks entered the Palestinian towns, machine guns blazing. This time, the death count was far higher, on both sides. These are the advances made by peace.

Force is the one thing Israel thinks it knows how to respond to, so it is not easy to put the squeeze on the Israelis by attacking--especially if you are the notoriously short-staffed, ill-trained Palestinian Authority Security Forces, an army with no country, supplied with weapons by the Israelis themselves and platooned--no, marooned--in little islands of autonomy created and surrounded by Israel. There are no Gandhian philosophers in the Israel Defense Forces, no cheek turners. Whip out the Cobras, and send in the tanks--that is how they strategize. “We promise that everyone that shoots at us, we will shot back at them and injure them,” IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak said of the latest round of Palestinian protests.

And that is what they have done. The Palestinians may embarrass the IDF by putting it in the way of killing civilians, but the Palestinians will not get something new out of the Israeli government by allowing Palestinian Authority security forces to shoot at the IDF.

By resorting to protest and intifada, the Palestinians are pointing out that diplomatic means have proven fruitless with the Netanyahu government. Yasser Arafat’s tactic in bringing the lads out into the streets again may bring the peace stalemate back to the world’s front pages, but the Palestinians will still have to reckon with the Israelis, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hanging tough--at least for now.

In the face of the suffering and bloodshed, his attitude can be explained but not excused. The press conference he gave Friday after returning from Europe was bullet-headed and insensitive--as if Israelis were the only people watching. He attempted, with no shame, to put all the blame for the recent violence on the Palestinians, even though, unquestionably, it was his government’s intransigence and unwillingness to budge on the peace process--and not the opening of an Israeli tunnel in the vicinity of a major mosque--that led to last week’s terrible violence.

Amusingly, to Palestinians, Netanyahu is peeved that the Palestinians are directing their fire at the Israelis. “Those firearms, firearms provided by the state of Israel, which were supposed to be directed toward terror, are being directed instead against Israeli soldiers,” he says, outraged. What he means, translated by Palestinians, is: You were supposed to use those guns on your own people, not on us.

Yet, for Palestinians, the single nugget of value that has emerged from the recent violence is the solidarity it has created between the Palestinian Authority’s security forces and the Palestinian people. “We are very proud about what we did,” said one young Palestinian soldier who had shot at the Israelis on Wednesday in Ramallah. “The kids are our people, and we were defending them.”

It is quite a change from the security forces who were shunned and despised by young Palestinians for collaborating with the Israelis in a peace process that seemed to be bearing no fruit as far as the Palestinians were concerned. It was, until recently, unthinkable that Arafat’s people and Hamas and Beir Zeit students would march together in the same parade. The Israelis have managed to bring their deeply divided adversaries together.

But the unity among Palestinians is sure to be brief. Two days after the PA forces were heroes in Ramallah for firing on the Israelis, they were on the receiving end of the stoning for attempting to defuse the rioting and keep the protest away from the Israeli checkpoints. Arafat, who may well have directed his men to fire on the Israelis, is reconsidering the wisdom of such actions.

Meanwhile, Israelis are concerned that their deepest fear, a continual guerrilla war by the Palestinians, 30,000 of whom are now armed, is about to be realized. They are confused: One would imagine that the last stage of nation-building would be the establishment of an army. A constitution, perhaps a currency, a few judicial institutions, and then, maybe, an armed force. But from the start the Israeli government wanted the peace process to include a security force--a “police” force--for cooperative Palestinians. The security force was conceived as armed units that would help the Israelis contain and control rogue elements within the Palestinian towns. Now, the security force is a monster that can--and has--turned on its creators.

Netanyahu talked feelingly on Friday of a young Israeli soldier whom he said he had visited in the hospital. “The guy who shot me,” the prime minister quoted the soldier as saying, “I’m sure it was a Palestinian security force guy.”

“How do you know?” Netanyahu asked.

“Because I did joint patrols with him last week,” the injured man answered.

“He recognized him from joint patrol duty,” Netanyahu said triumphantly, as if some trust had been violated. Many Israelis would agree. They participated in joint patrols and their motto would be: You don’t shoot your buddy, ever. It’s a shocking betrayal to Israelis, almost all of whom have served in the army.

But Israelis repulsed by this behavior overlook one major point: Joint patrol or no, Israelis and Palestinians are not buddies and never will be. You don’t spare your “buddy” if he’s shooting your brother. “There is a thick cloud of sentiment hovering over the peace process,” the Israeli writer Amos Oz said Friday, sitting in his desert home and brooding, as all Israelis are, about what has gone wrong. “Sentiment should not be allowed to obscure efforts for peace. They used to say ‘Make love not war,’ but this is sentiment. Making peace has very little to do with love. The opposite of war is not love, it is peace. Peace is not necessarily what exists between lovers, but it is what must exist between good neighbors.”

With his warlike stance and tough-guy talk, Netanyahu is talking to his constituency, the people who put him over the top in last May’s election: Jewish settlers, and other ultranationalistic, hypermilitary types, the small but ideologically entrenched slice of the Israeli population that--along with the ultraorthodox--brought him to victory. It is for them that he refused to redeploy from the West Bank town of Hebron as negotiated in the Oslo accords; for them that he has continued to build settlements on the West Bank and to trumpet that construction, and for them that he has kept the borders closed between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, a policy that is destroying the fragile Palestinian economy.

Although Netanyahu talks with the voice of the ultras, he ought not to forget he is the prime minister of all Israelis, most of whom believe in the peace process and do not wish to encourage a revival of the intifada--all decent Israelis hated the intifada and were ashamed of it. It was one thing to hear former Prime Minister Shimon Peres talk tough after the bus bombings of February and March; at least then the prime minister was seizing on the mood of all Israel, was talking in the language of the majority of the people. Back then, Israelis felt that Hamas and the militant Palestinians were responsible for Israeli insecurity. Peres, who was considered weak, needed to talk tough.

Today, no one believes Netanyahu is too wimpy for peace, and no one believes it is exclusively Arafat’s fault that the violence has begun again. Netanyahu himself has always argued that his own toughness and shrewdness will make him supple when dealing with peace negotiations. Yet, he has shown no sign of flexibility, or even any compassion for Palestinian losses (at least, not in Hebrew--his English was just slightly more temperate). There is no indication that the prime minister is willing to advance toward peace, and he is a bully who gets even meaner when challenged. In the face of Palestinian cooperation, Netanyahu did not move toward peace; in the face of Palestinian unrest he apparently intends to follow the same tack.

If Netanyahu really wants to end the violence, there are a few simple steps he can take. He should redeploy from Hebron, in accord with the Oslo agreements signed by the Israelis. He should ease the closure of the borders. He should stop new construction of settlements. He should publicly consider closing up the tunnel opening that ostensibly caused the uproar--even if everyone agrees privately that it’s not the real problem. And he should meet over and over with Arafat and reconvene the team he has set up to continue the peace talks. Or he should do at least one of these things.

In doing so, Netanyahu would not be knuckling under, he would not be crying uncle or doing any of the unmanly things he has said he would never do. He would merely be doing what he was supposed to be doing all along: moving toward peace with security. What he has on his hands now is certainly not security, and is certainly not peace.

(...), MATT MAHURIN / for The Times