Blame the Government for Israeli Deaths

TEL AVIV — Twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, I began writing about the need for and possibility of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. I predicted that Jewish housing projects in Arab East Jerusalem, then in the planning stage, would harm the prospects for peace and endanger the relative calm then still prevailing in Jerusalem.

Now, after the latest of these housing projects, Har Homa, has brought the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to a halt, my prediction has come true for my own family in the most direct and terrible way. On Sept. 4, my 14-year-old niece, Smadar, was killed with four others in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Smadar’s grieving parents, Nurit Peled-Elhanan and Rami Elhanan, have courageously put the blame for their daughter’s tragic death right where it belongs: in the lap of the intransigent government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. To give concrete expression to their feelings, they invited a representative of the Palestinian Authority and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, architect of the peace process, to speak at Smadar’s funeral.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on her visit to the region this week, urged a freeze on Jewish settlements in occupied land; Israel bluntly rejected the call. Albright said a freeze in settlements and other Israeli actions seen by the Palestinians as provocative would create a climate for finally achieving peace, but a Netanyahu spokesman said: “We cannot freeze settlements any more than we can freeze life.”

In the favorite phrase of anti-terrorism experts, “to kill the mosquitoes you need to drain the swamp.” But draining the swamp in this case does not mean, as the Israeli government would have it, dismantling the political and social organizations of Hamas, the Muslim movement blamed for the terrorist attacks. Such a strategy can only lead to civil war among the Palestinians themselves, a war that would mean the end of the peace process for many years to come. (Some Israeli commentators argue that this is precisely what the Israeli government wants.) The only effective way of dealing with the terrorist threat is to reduce the willingness of the Palestinian people to give aid and comfort to the terrorists by demonstrating that peace with Israel could actually improve their lives.

So far, what the Palestinians have gained from the peace process is the removal of direct Israeli rule from much of the Gaza Strip and from the major cities of the West Bank (covering about 5% of the land area of the West Bank).

On the other hand, their freedom of movement and employment opportunities in Israel have been drastically curtailed, resulting in a worsening of economic conditions, compared to the period before the Oslo agreement of 1993. Unemployment in the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority is 29%, and many people, especially in Gaza, are on the verge of starvation. It is no wonder, then, that the terrorist organizations have no difficulty finding recruits for their suicide missions.

It has been reported that Israeli President Ezer Weizman told Albright that the U.S. might have to “knock heads” to get Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace talks. If Weizman was referring to Netanyahu, this would be a serious breach of his constitutional role, which is largely ceremonial. Weizman, a former air force chief and minister of defense, is as knowledgeable about Israel’s security needs as anybody. If he found it necessary to overstep the bounds of his position in such a blatant way, it is only because he realized that progress toward peace is the only way of achieving security for this country.

The Oslo agreement was a historic compromise between Israel, which agreed to withdraw from the territories it captured in 1967, and the Palestinians, who agreed to forgo their desire to return to the land from which so many of them had been expelled in 1948. There are people on both sides who have not accepted this compromise and are determined to fight it.

The Palestinian suicide bombers and those who send them are the enemies of Yasser Arafat and of the peace process, as much as they are enemies of Israel. Using their horrible deeds as an excuse to renege on Israel’s commitments not only serves their purpose but also guarantees that war and terror will continue to reign in this area for a long time to come.

Americans who deem themselves friends of Israel should impress upon their government and upon the Israeli government that only peace--meaning the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel within mutually agreed-upon boundaries--can prevent more lives, Jewish and Palestinian, from being so senselessly lost.