The Great Divide

When Palestinian suicide attacks on civilians in Israel are followed by Israeli military actions against Palestinians, it is easy for the rest of the world to shrug, dismissing the events as “a cycle of violence” that defies reason. But such easy analysis ignores history.

Last week’s government crisis in Israel, which could lead to early elections, may exacerbate some aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations. But it does not change the basic facts of the conflict.

In order to understand the current crisis, one has to look back to the Oslo agreements in 1993, signed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Hope was in the air. Israel and the PLO publicly recognized each other; Israel committed itself to withdrawing from most of the West Bank and Gaza; the Palestinians forswore violence. Most important, Arafat’s return from Tunisia and the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian Authority meant that by the late 1990s more than 80% of the Palestinians would be living under Palestinian rule. It appeared that a compromise was achievable.

But then came the failure of the negotiations at Camp David in June 2000 and later at Taba in the fall and early winter of 2000-01. With the support of President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the Palestinians a series of offers that most observers thought Arafat could not refuse. But he did. Camp David and Taba became the defining moments in recent Middle Eastern history -- just as 9/11 later became a defining moment for U.S. history.

Israel’s offers would have changed history. To recapitulate:

* Barak accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. No previous Israeli leader -- including Nobel Peace Prize laureates Rabin and Shimon Peres -- had agreed to such a proposal.

* Barak committed himself to an Israeli withdrawal from 93% to 97% of the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza. This would have entailed the uprooting of up to 30 Jewish settlements and the displacement of some 30,000 Jewish settlers.

* In exchange for those Jewish settlements that would remain in the territories, Barak offered equivalent land within Israel proper -- an idea never before considered.

* Contrary to the avowed Israeli position that Jerusalem would remain forever the undivided capital of Israel, Barak agreed to redivide Jerusalem, so that the Arab part could become the capital of a Palestinian state.

* Again without precedent, Barak offered power-sharing with the Palestinians on the Temple Mount.

* Finally, Barak was ready to consider, on humanitarian grounds, the return of a limited number of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

These were offers made at considerable political cost to Barak. Two of his coalition partners left his government in protest; in the end, Barak lost his parliamentary majority and had to call early elections. In February 2001, soon after the collapse of Taba, he was defeated by Ariel Sharon.

The Palestinian response to Barak’s offers was not simply to refuse them but rather to make further demands that Israel simply could not meet. Arafat insisted that Israel agree to the right of return for Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war -- and for all their descendants. Accepting this concept would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state -- and Arafat’s insistence on it signified to most Israelis that the Palestinian leadership has not yet reconciled itself to the existence of Israel.

In the Israeli mind, it appeared that the Palestinians were not focused on addressing the consequences of the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza: Their aim was rather to undo the events of 1948 -- to undo the establishment of Israel.

Arafat’s rejection of the Taba offers was accompanied by a reversion to terrorism and suicide bombing. There is no doubt that Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount during the fall of 2000 was an unnecessary provocation, and even Israelis would have understood a few days of rage and protest among Palestinians. But the wholesale reversion to terrorism that followed was not triggered by Sharon’s visit. It now appears to most Israelis that the violence is part of a strategy by Arafat to wrest from Israel through terrorism what he could not achieve with negotiations.

It is not that Arafat initiates or directly orders all suicide attacks. The situation is more complex -- and in a way, more ominous. But any doubts about the Palestinian Authority’s tacit approval of the violence are dispelled by its actions: When the physical remains of a suicide bomber are turned over to the Palestinians, the bomber is given a state funeral by the Palestinian Authority, with an official armed guard of honor. He or she is declared a martyr whose family receives a special pension. The day after the funeral, Palestinian schools receive a fax from the Palestinian Ministry of Education, with a CV and photo of the suicide bomber. Schools are urged to teach the “martyr’s” life history as a role model for Palestinian children.

This is the reality Israelis have been facing in the last two years. It has left them, even those who are unhappy with some of the more brutal aspects of Israel’s response, hard-pressed to offer an alternative. Barak made the Palestinians a generous offer -- independence, sovereignty, even a part of Jerusalem. Most Israelis -- about 70% according to polls -- have concluded from the Palestinians’ rejection of this offer that their aim is not a workable compromise. They want to see Israel eliminated.

So what is to be done? To revive a failed peace process is even more difficult than starting a completely new one; Humpty-Dumpty cannot simply be put back together again. Urging both sides to return to the negotiating table sounds reasonable, but it’s almost certainly an exercise in futility. Hatred and mistrust on both sides are deeper than ever. There is no effective opposition to Arafat except from the even more extremist Islamic Hamas, because his anti-Israel views reflect those of most Palestinians.

The only reasonable path at the moment is a “nonsolution” like those in Bosnia, Kosovo and Cyprus. In none of these conflicts has a solution been found. Nobody knows how Bosnia will look in five years; nobody has an idea whether Kosovo will eventually become an independent state, a part of Albania or remain a province of a reformed and democratic Yugoslavia. But despite the fact that none of those conflicts has been resolved, there is stability. The daily clashes and bloodshed have stopped. Something akin to this type of stabilization is the most that can be expected for the foreseeable future between Israelis and Palestinians.

Israel should move unilaterally now to disengage from the territories. It must dismantle a significant number of settlements and create an effective and enforceable boundary between it and the territories as a barricade to suicide bombers. Only after a period of stabilization and cooling tempers would a return to the negotiating table be possible.

The Palestinians at Camp David and Taba made a terrible mistake -- similar to the one made by the Chechens in 1999 when they decided not to abide by the de facto independence granted to them by the Russian-Chechen treaty of 1996. Camp David and Taba were diplomatic moments of grace -- and the Palestinians rejected them. We have now to opt for second best, for a series of stopgap measures.

Both sides need time off, in much the same way Serbs and Albanians needed time off. We tend to see only two options: a fully negotiated peace or all-out war. But we must now look to a third way. The international community has learned to live with such ambiguities elsewhere; it must accept them in the Middle East too. Another utopian attempt at “solution” may be as counterproductive as the well-intentioned attempts at Camp David and Taba turned out to be.