A Heart Aches as Peace Slips Away

Some years ago, I met a 5-year-old boy in the Palestinian refugee camp of Dahaisha. I asked him if he had been born in the camp and he said “yes,” but immediately added: “But I’m from Zakira.” I was surprised: Zakira is a village that was conquered by Israel in its War of Independence in 1948 and no longer exists. But the boy insisted, “We had a huge house there, a castle and a grove of orange trees, each orange this big.”

I asked him if he had ever visited the place he was from, and he said he hadn’t, but added that inshalla, he would soon return there. I went with him to his kindergarten, a depressing building, suffocating and dark. There was not a single picture there because the walls were damp and you couldn’t bang a nail in. I asked the teacher, a young, sharp-tongued woman, if she would not leave the camp for some better place if it were offered her. “Only for my homeland,” she answered me. “Even if they offer me a palace in another place, I won’t go.” I asked her if she did not sometimes dream of living in a better place than this one, and she laughed. “Dreams? I have a duty toward the suffering my parents endured. I will return to my land. And not via a peace treaty. What was taken by force will be returned by force.”

The right of return is a concept that has been in the air in the Middle East for the past 52 years. While it has always been the principal Palestinian Arab demand toward Israel, it is only in recent weeks that it has penetrated Israeli consciousness as a concrete and threatening possibility. It now looks as if the Palestinian insistence on the right of return will lead even the most steadfast of Israeli doves--myself included--to the reluctant and heartbreaking conclusion that peace cannot be achieved at this time.

Every nation wants to preserve its values

Many Israelis live with an inner conflict between their moral and natural desire to repair a decades-old injustice and their profound apprehensions about the right of return. The prospect of the return of the Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from Israel during and after the War of Independence confronts every Jewish Israeli with the most problematic roots of Israel’s definition of itself as the Jewish state. The Jewish majority’s explicit desire, almost embarrassingly transparent in recent days, to retain its numerical superiority is one that, when it comes down to it, beats in the hearts of every nation. Every nation wants to preserve its values and heritage and pass them on to the generations to come; such an aspiration is neither jingoistic nor racist. In the case of the Jewish people, with their tragic history, it is even more comprehensible, even if it remains an unresolved discrepancy in the democracy they desire.

Accepting the Palestinian demand would be a dangerous move for Israel as a Jewish state and as a political entity. Israel must accept its partial responsibility, as should the Arab countries that created the refugee problem when they started the war in 1948. Israel must help raise the funds to resettle the refugees and must allow some refugees to return for purely humanitarian reasons. Likewise, Israel must recognize the refugees’ links to the places they were torn away from. But there is a great distance between a link and a right to return.

When Israel handed over Hebron and Bethlehem to the Palestinians, it should be remembered, it conceded its right to these biblical places but not the Jewish people’s historical attachment to them. The Palestinians have been trying to reassure Israelis by explaining that even if the agreement refers to the right of return, it will be only a formal right. In practice, they say, only a few hundred thousand refugees will resettle inside Israel, where today there are 5 million Jews and 1 million Palestinians.

I don’t understand this distinction. A right is a right, and if a right is granted, it exists, in full. Anyone with a sense of responsibility for the generations to come must consider how, 50 years from now, his great-grandchildren will explain to the great-grandchildren of today’s refugees that the right of return that Israel recognized was only a theoretical one.

Most of these Jews are members of refugee families

For decades, the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps have worked to disseminate the concept of two states for two peoples: a Palestinian national state that lives in security and peace alongside the state of Israel, the Jewish national state. Yet the demand for a sweeping right of return will lead in practice to a situation in which the Palestinians have a national state--Palestine--while Israel becomes a Jewish and Palestinian state--a political entity whose identity gradually will become blurred.

Jewish villages and cities have been built during the past 50 years on the ruins of the villages in which the Palestinian refugees once lived. This is a heart-rending fact for the refugees, but changing it would require tearing millions of Jews away from their homes. And to where? Let us not forget that the great majority of these Jews are themselves members of refugee families who fled ancestral homes in Europe and the Islamic world. Will committing yet another injustice bring the two peoples closer to peace?

What do you mean, my Palestinian friends ask me when we blow up at one another, time after time, over this issue. If Israel accepts the principle of the right of return, they argue, and the refugees indeed return, an entirely new reality would be created--a reality of conciliation and mutual forgiveness, of true peace. If it could only be true. I desperately want to believe it; it so fits my natural inclination to dream, as my friends do, of a peace that will come despite the violence around and among us. I long for a world in which all the hate, hurt and suspicion of the past are nobly set aside.

But as one who lives here in this deeply divided, extremist, fundamentalist region, I know that a good solution is one that tries--at least in its early stages--to do everything possible to avoid friction between rival populations. It must be a solution that does not impose too difficult a test on our faith in the good will of either Jews or Muslims and their ability to rise above their instincts and fears. Many conflicts of the 20th century were resolved with compromises that did not include mass repatriation of refugees. Such was the case, for example, with the Sudeten Germans, and in the conflict over the refugees from the German territories that were annexed to Poland in 1945. These former enemies understood that the return of millions of refugees could destabilize the new reality. They preferred to dampen the pain of the past for the sake of an opportunity for the future.

If we accept the right of return, hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of Palestinians will move into a country that they have for years sworn to destroy. Before long, they will become the largest population group here. Yet their principal aspiration has been to fight Israel and its symbols, and it is this heritage that they have passed on to their children. Is there a country in the world that can agree, of its own free will, to take in such a population? Can Israel, whose civil society is fragile in any case, do so without falling apart?

Just as bad, even if the Jews continue to be a majority in Israel for another 20 or 30 years, they will not be one for long. When they become a minority, my fear is that they will be tempted--just like any nation that senses that its hold on its own country is slipping out of its hands--to establish a dark apartheid regime based on military might or on prejudicial and draconian legislation. This inevitably would lead to an explosion and the collapse of the country’s political framework.

I don’t want to be a Jewish minority in Israel

Yet if an Arab majority rules and makes the laws in Israel, it will be able--by the most democratic of means--to erase the state’s Jewish character, to rescind its status as a land of refuge for the Jews of the world and to merge it with its sister Palestinian state.

No thanks. I don’t want to be a Jewish minority in Israel. This, keep in mind, is the only country in the world that was established by decision of the United Nations, so that Jews no longer would be a stateless minority dependent on the mercy of others.

I believe with all my heart that the Israelis and the Palestinians can maintain good neighborly relations and heal the wounds that they have inflicted on each other in the past. But I also know that this takes a long time. If we can gradually heal the wounds of our wars, we will be able, in the future, to reach a reality in which, perhaps, national definitions will soften a bit and even borders will be no more than lines on a map. Perhaps then Israelis and Palestinians will be able to mix naturally and normally. When that time comes, they will be able to live together as exemplars of coexistence.

In the meantime, we must make do with repairing what can be repaired, healing what can be healed and trying to achieve a partial justice for both sides rather than absolute justice for either. Then we can, finally, set out on a new life for all.