Losing Ground

Jerusalem is a bleak place these days. The night of the triple-suicide bomb downtown on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, Israelis, as is traditional after such tragedies, spent the wee hours cleaning the place up and repairing what could be repaired, and then returned to the scene of the tragedy en masse the next day to eat ice cream and buy Swatches and stuff themselves with falafel and prove, by this show of insouciance, that they remain tough and resilient and Israel will not be cowed.

But, in some ways, Israel has been cowed. Now is the moment of truth, and the bombings seem to have destroyed the Israelis’ capacity to imagine a way out of their terrible predicament. Centrists like Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, a former Army chief who was supposed to help lead Israel peacefully and prosperously into the 21st century, now advocate “separation” of the two populations. This means, in essence, that a Berlin Wall should be erected between Israel and whatever Palestinian entity emerges from the ashes of Oslo.

Separation is quintessentially unimaginative--it contains no solutions. No more Palestinians on the Israeli side, and vice versa. As Israelis like to say in English: “Det’s det.” In the full heat of his anger after the bombing, one liberal Israeli told me he was for separation: “We’ll have full employment in Israel, and no one will be able to come here to blow himself up and, as far as I’m concerned, the Palestinians can starve to death.” Ugly words at an ugly moment, and there appears to be no real leader left to take Israel down another path.

Some days, it seems as if the suicide bombers are running the peace talks. Certainly, no one else is speaking out in such unmistakable terms. In spite of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright’s frenzied to-and-fro across Jerusalem and the West Bank, the bombers seem to be the only ones contributing actively to the process; certainly, they have been speaking with a booming voice at the (by now) largely theoretical negotiating table. “You have given me nothing,” Yasser Arafat seems to say as each bomb goes off: Here are the consequences.

On the Israeli side, the suicide bombers also have a role to play. Helped by Yigal Amir, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s killer, they bombed Benjamin Netanyahu into the premier’s office, in a classic example of left and right extremes working toward the same ends. Now the bombers’ tactics seem like part and parcel of the Netanyahu government’s “peace” policy. Every time a bomb goes off, Netanyahu uses the crisis as an excuse to retreat further from the Oslo accords.

Especially, it seems, he is eager to put an end to territorial givebacks: Under his administration, three Israeli withdrawals agreed to in the interim accords have failed to take place. He ran on a platform of peace with security and has given the Israelis and the Palestinians neither.

Everyone here is hoping the Americans will, in the now-threadbare cliche of this threadbare peace process, “jump-start” the talks. But that would take a miraculous transformation in U.S. thinking. It is clear from the lackluster performance of Albright, and from the plain lack of new ideas and creativity the Americans have been bringing to the talks for the past two years, that the Clinton administration is not going to revive this Lazarus.

Do the Americans even want to? State Department policy has veered sharply toward the Israelis in Clinton’s second term, and Albright’s visit--her long, “cordial” talks with Netanyahu (how could a superpower that desires peace have a “cordial” talk with this man right now?) and her seeming indifference to the Palestinian side--is further evidence of this. The Americans are not going to rescue peace. Clearly, they are not interested in saving the Palestinians from their fate. Now, only if the Israelis want peace, can peace come.

But there is apparently no leader among them brave enough to remind the Israelis--in these painful, frightened times--about the benefits of peace with their next-door neighbors. It’s a reminder that they should be hearing, but a hard one to absorb. Israelis today live in continual fear, certain that what seems the most normal place on the most normal day--the market, the bus, the movies, the mall, the ice-cream stand, the park--may explode at any moment into something unimaginably destructive and bloody.

Across the checkpoints, Palestinians also live in fear, in what are rightly called Bantustans, small cities and surrounding villages among which travel is not permitted. Their economy is destroyed. Their young people cannot get to universities outside their towns, cannot find jobs, have no hope and no future. Many spend most of their time throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and breathing tear gas.

No peace and no security is not a good policy for any of the parties involved. The stalemate is creating another generation of alienation and hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. Already, more than 30% of Israeli high-school students say they “hate” Arabs (the percentage is far higher at religious schools), and the political philosophy of Hamas is becoming ever more popular among young people on the West Bank.

The other chasm that the bombings and the failure of talks seems to open up is the wide one in Israeli society between right and left, and between religious and secular. Last week, this began to take on menacing tones that are a reminder of how deeply the society is riven. A Knesset member from the United Torah Judaism Party claimed the latest spate of bombings was the direct result, not of Palestinian intransigence, but of the recent desecration by members of the left-wing, pro-peace Meretz Party of 15 mezuzas, the small entryway prayer holders used by religious Jews to remind them of God as they enter their homes and businesses. “When people allow themselves to burn mezuzas, catastrophes happen,” the Knesset member said. Roughly translated, this means the non-belief of the secular is bringing Jehovah’s wrath down on Israel, which seemed to ring true when 12 men in an elite naval commando unit died in a fiery Hezbollah ambush in Lebanon.

Another rumor circulating among the religious is that a man praying not more than 10 feet from the suicide bomber at the open-air market in July was only slightly singed, while other, not-so-pious people farther away from the explosion ended up in small pieces around him.

Not surprisingly, the Palestinian suicide bombers seem to make no difference between one Jew and another: The market they bombed is at the heart of the conservative religious community; the pedestrian mall where they blew themselves up two weeks ago is the nerve center of Jerusalem’s small secular and liberal population.

This is the demography over which Netanyahu must preside. His backpedaling on peace is one way he appeals to the religious over the secular, the nationalists over the peaceniks, in a relentless bid to keep his conservative-religious coalition united and stay in power.

Meanwhile, the Americans, as usual, have run full bore onto the scene with their clumsy, patently pro-Israel stance--as if they expect a ringing endorsement of Netanyahu’s demands to alter the political landscape. Albright’s visit has done nothing to end the stalemate, because the Clinton administration is unwilling to challenge Israeli policy on any serious issue, and it is Israel that has created the current stalemate. The Israelis don’t use suicide bombers, but they know how to torpedo the peace process just the same.

Last summer’s aggressively timed opening of the Hasmonean tunnel that runs near the Dome of the Rock, and this spring’s groundbreaking of a new quasi-settlement near Bethlehem, are two cases in point. With Netanyahu on one side and the Hamas bombers on the other, it seems sometimes as if Arafat is the only party who believes in Oslo. And then you catch him kissing Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi. With Arafat as its sole supporter, peace is not likely to go far.

The Americans ought to be able to remember what the Israelis often forget; There are--or should be--two parties to the peace process. After all, you wouldn’t need a peace unless there were two parties. Unfortunately, the party most often forgotten is the injured party.

It must be remembered that the Palestinians are the victims, whose land was taken away in 1948 and then taken away in 1967. That dispossession is the problem the peace process was invented to correct. Understandably, it’s hard to see through to that truth through the smoke of suicide bombs, but it’s equally easy to use those terrible bombs as a pretext for refusing to right old wrongs.

That is what Netanyahu is doing. If he succeeds, there will always be more bombs.