Mideast Ache Goes On and On

A recent visit to the dentist to prepare a crown for one of my front teeth brought back a flood of memories inextricably linked to the tortured and winding path of Middle East peace.

The tooth was damaged by a rock thrown by a teenage Palestinian on a brisk, sunny morning in Gaza City 11 years ago.

I had just finished endless months of intensive training for service in an elite unit of the Israeli army. I was excited about my unit’s first “combat” posting.

The first intifada was on its last legs by the time we arrived in the squalid Gaza City. We passed our days patrolling the streets, somehow believing that quelling protests by bored teenagers and unemployed young men in this city of more than a quarter-million Palestinians was essential to Israel’s security.

I quickly learned that the moral, economic and emotional toll of the occupation was undermining the future physical and spiritual health of both Israelis and Palestinians.

I despaired looking at the hate in the eyes of Palestinian children passing us on the way to kindergarten. And I was mortified when teenage girls hid behind their parents when we searched Palestinian homes for fugitives. It was a rude and tragic awakening to realize that the educated Palestinian populace actually believed the groundless rumors of raping and pillaging by Israeli soldiers.

There also was something sad about heavily armed Israeli troops facing off against stone-throwing youth, periodically crouching into firing position to frighten the protesters. What the protesters probably did not realize was that we also were scared, heavily outnumbered and secretly hoping that the scare tactic would keep the approaching mob at bay.

I came to the realization that the Israeli occupation had to end--not for political, religious, historical or moral reasons but for simple reality.

The Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank, already densely populated by Palestinians, leave no room for Israel as an occupying force or a settling population. What did 400 Jewish settlers hope to do in the city of Hebron, home to more than 100,000 Palestinians? Equally, the Palestinians should realize that Tel Aviv’s 400,000 Israelis leave little room for resettlement of Palestinian refugees in that area and many others of Israel proper.

Ironically, it seems that only the extreme left and extreme right of Israeli politics shared my conclusion, disagreeing with each other only as to who should be moved to solve the problem. Sadly, the mainstream Labor and Likud parties somehow believed that the status quo in the occupied territories could be fixed with some tinkering. They disagreed only about who should be inconvenienced at the fringes of that process.

In the meantime, a military occupation has continued, allowing more youths on each side to be brought up in an environment of hate, distrust, fear and despair.

That rock to my mouth came not long before the historic Madrid peace conference, the precursor to the Oslo process a few years later. At the time, an army dentist repaired my tooth with a synthetic filling, explaining that it was a temporary fix that would last for about a year. Sadly, it has proved more lasting than the Madrid and Oslo stations on the way to a permanent settlement based on the “land for peace” formula.

It is time for the parties to the peace process to abandon interim solutions. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat must seize the opportunity of the recent Saudi initiative to seek a permanent settlement of their differences. They must put aside ideology, history, religious extremism and personal animosity.

A permanent peace centered on the creation of a viable and democratic state of Palestine on virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza, in exchange for full recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders, will represent a triumph of the one factor that matters most: simple reality.