A Bold Move Netanyahu Will Regret : Mideast: By provoking the Palestinians and mocking the sacred role of Jerusalem, he wants to derail the peace process.

Israeli peace activists are deeply depressed and right-wing Israelis exuberant for the same reason: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has almost succeeded in derailing the Middle East peace process. Those on the right who worried that Netanyahu had abandoned his opposition to the Oslo accords, particularly after minor territorial concessions in Hebron, have been reassured by Netanyahu’s latest moves: reaffirming military control over 91% of the West Bank’s contested territory and commencing construction of a new Jewish settlement in the Arab section of Jerusalem.

Netanyahu’s Jerusalem strategy is particularly brilliant from the standpoint of those who hope to derail the peace process because it forces peaceniks to face a contradiction in their previous positions. Yes, we in the peace movement supported the Palestinians’ right to national self-determination and said that we would exchange land for peace, but we also would show that we were no pushovers by never, never, never allowing for the possibility of negotiations on Jerusalem. In fact, to show how tough we were, we peaceniks would extend the borders of Jerusalem and incorporate into the Jerusalem municipality 12 Arab villages to the east that had been conquered by Israel during the 1967 war.

For those of us who come from the Jewish religious community, Jerusalem mostly means the Old City and the Western Wall. It was a scandal that Jordanian Arabs kept Jews from visiting the wall in the years when Jerusalem was under Arab control, and I, for one, would never agree to any arrangement that allowed for a return to that situation.

The Arab villages that became known as East Jerusalem, however, have little in common with our Old City. Very few Jews have even visited these Palestinian communities, and very little would be different in our Jewish life if they became the seat of the capital of a Palestinian state living at peace with Israel.

There are tens of thousands of Palestinians living in the expanded East Jerusalem, and very few of them are willing to be part of a Jewish state.

The Oslo accords sought to finesse Palestinian concerns by leaving Jerusalem to be the last matter to be negotiated after everything else had been settled. Israeli negotiators imagined that if Palestinians were offered a full-bodied autonomous reality that might soon evolve into a state, Arafat’s crew might be talked into an arrangement that gave them a symbolic presence. While Israel would retain military control, Jerusalem could become capital of both states, and this example of power sharing would fulfill the biblical promise of Jews being “a light unto the nations.”

Netanyahu’s evil genius was to recognize that if he placed this issue on the front burner by beginning to expropriate Arab land in East Jerusalem, he could touch a powerful nerve of Palestinians who have suspected all along that the peace process is really just another method to extend occupation. Grabbing Arab land has always been the name of the Zionist game, according to Palestinian perceptions.

The second victor, of course, is Hamas. No longer constrained by Palestinian public opinion that condemned last year’s bus bombings and hoped that Israel would honor its promise to leave the West Bank, the Islamic fundamentalists feel freed by Netanyahu’s undermining of mutual confidence to return to their (disgusting and unjustified) terror against Israeli citizens. That, too, plays into Netanyahu’s grand strategy, recreating fear and making it even more difficult for the Labor Party to find the courage to question whether it really serves Israeli strategic and defense interests to insist on control over East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu is derailing far more than the peace process. As their American Jewish elders rally round the flag and proclaim that they would sacrifice peace for the sake of a “UNITED JERUSALEM, THE ETERNAL CAPITAL OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE,” increasing numbers of younger Jews wonder why they should stay loyal to a Judaism that seems indistinguishable from blind nationalism (or, for that matter, from the fundamentalist distortions that have led a group of Orthodox rabbis to declare that Reform and Conservative denominations are not Judaism, but another religion).

For those of us who know that the Torah insists that every human being is created in the image of God and deserves to be treated with love and caring (hence, its warning that “When you come into your land, do not oppress the stranger; remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt”), Netanyahu’s undermining of the peace process is a tragedy not only because we understand peace to be in the best survival interests of Israel, but also because Judaism’s future depends on transcending a narrow tribalism that was railed against by our prophets. The image of Jerusalem as a city of peace and an international city (“For my house shall become a house for all peoples” promises God to Isaiah) is very far from the stingy nationalist whinings that have led Netanyahu to use this moment to extend Jewish power by building a Jewish settlement in Palestinian East Jerusalem.