And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram’s cattle
and the herdmen of Lot’s cattle … And Abram said unto Lot:
Let there be no strife, I pray thee … between my herdmen
and thy herdmen; for we be brethren. Is not the whole land
before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me; if thou wilt
take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart
to the right hand, then I will go to the left.
—Genesis 13:7–9
I personally don’t like Arabs and Arabs don’t like me. Forty years in the same bed. There hasn’t been love; there hasn’t been sex. I want a divorce.
—Israeli Major General (Res.)
Avigdor Ben-Gal, former commander
of Israel’s northern front, 1988
After this book was first published in the United States, many readers wrote me to say that while they appreciated the way I had diagnosed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, they regretted that I had not provided prescriptions for a solution. This was intentional. First of all, I wanted readers to focus on my journey from Beirut to Jerusalem and not debate any proposals I might have. Equally important, as I made clear in my concluding chapter, I believe that until the parties themselves are “ready to get pregnant”—ready, that is, to make the fundamental compromises and sacrifices for a settlement—there is very little of use that any outsider can suggest.
History teaches us that in the Middle East, only overwhelming pain or pleasure—only war or a Sadat-like overture—will really make the parties ready to get pregnant. Neither appears to be on the horizon. As I write this epilogue in the autumn of 1989, Israelis and Palestinians are arguing about how to organize a dialogue that would discuss how to elect Palestinians to negotiate with Israel on its offer of autonomy for the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In other words, they are negotiating for a negotiation about organizing negotiations for an interim solution. Even if one or two of these hurdles were surmounted, a settlement would be a long way off.
So what to do? Most likely, Israelis and Palestinians will do nothing, other than learn to live with the status quo, with all of the unpleasantness this will entail. I myself think the status quo is very destructive for both communities. Hence, I have put all of my energies into trying to imagine ways in which one party or the other might take some bold, unilateral initiative to unlock the present deadlock—without the stimulus of either overwhelming pain or pleasure.
What follows, I am the first to admit, is something of a fantasy. It is, however, the way an Israeli leader could break the impasse. Let me emphasize, I don’t see any Israeli leader on the horizon who would adopt my approach. For all the reasons given in the previous chapters, Israelis will respond only to overwhelming pain or pleasure, and the Palestinians at this time cannot produce either. Nevertheless, with that caveat in mind, this is how I would proceed.
I base my approach on several assumptions. First, Israel holds virtually all the cards. By that I mean it controls all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are the bargaining chips for any agreement. So, the only relevant question is, What might induce Israelis to trade part or all of those territories for a secure and stable relationship with the Palestinians? Palestinians can demand or claim all they want, but the fact is only the Israelis are in a position to unilaterally initiate a settlement.
Second, there are many aspects of my approach that Palestinians might find offensive, even cruel. I mean no cruelty or offense to anyone. But Palestinians will have to learn to distinguish between what they want and how they get it. A Palestinian state is not going to come to them wrapped in a dainty bow. It is not going to come to them accompanied by the soothing tones of a Mozart concerto. I believe that the only way it is going to come to them is if Israelis, for their own reasons of self-interest, brutal self-interest, convince themselves that they are better off allowing such a state to come into being than opposing it.
Third, such a momentous step for Israel as withdrawing from the territories in exchange for a new relationship with the Palestinians cannot be based on a narrow majority. Like the peace treaty with Egypt, it must be based on the approval of at least a two-thirds majority of the Israeli public. Otherwise, it would not be stable and there could be serious civil strife.
Therefore, in my opinion, the most important question for the peace process today is what it will take to patch together such an Israeli majority for territorial compromise, because only such a majority can change the history of the region in the immediate sense.
Before I offer an answer, let me first remind the reader of my grocer in Jerusalem. As I noted in Chapter 14, “The Earthquake,” there was a supermarket in Jerusalem where I shopped for fruits and vegetables almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family who had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in the early 1940s. The patriarch of the family, Sasson, was an elderly curmudgeon in his sixties. Sasson’s whole life had left him with the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to liquidate the Jewish state. Whenever Sasson heard Israeli doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, but that they just couldn’t always come out and declare it, it sounded ludicrous to him. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor declarations by Yasir Arafat—nor the Palestinian uprising itself—had convinced him otherwise. As I said, as far as Sasson was concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians was not that they didn’t understand each other, but that they did—all too well. Sasson, I should add, did not appear to be ideologically committed to Israel’s holding the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was a grocer, and ideology did not trip easily off his tongue. I am sure he rarely, if ever, went to the occupied territories. Like a majority of Israelis, he viewed the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip primarily in terms of security.
I believe that Sasson is the key to a Palestinian–Israeli peace settlement—not him personally, but his world view. He is the Israeli silent majority. He is the Israeli two-thirds. You don’t hear much from the Sassons of Israel. They don’t talk much. They are not as interesting to interview as wild-eyed messianic West Bank settlers, or as articulate as Peace Now professors who speak with an American accent. But they are the foundation of Israel, the gravity that holds the country in place. And, more important, years of reporting from Israel have taught me that there is a little bit of Sasson’s almost primitive earthiness in every Israeli—not only all those in the Likud Party on the right side of the political spectrum, but a majority of those in the Labor Party as well; not only those Israelis born in Arab countries, but those born in Israel as well.
Indeed, the Israeli public is not divided fifty-fifty on the question of peace with the Palestinians. The truth is, the Israeli public is divided in three. One segment, on the far left—maybe 5 percent of the population—is ready to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza tomorrow, and sincerely believes the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with the Jews. Another segment, on the far right—maybe 20 percent of the population—will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are committed to holding forever all the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments. In between these two extremes you have the Sassons, who make up probably 75 percent of the population. The more liberal Sassons side with the Labor Party, the more hard-line Sassons side with the Likud, but they all share a gut feeling that they are locked in an all-or-nothing communal struggle with the Palestinians.
Today the Sassons of Israel, and many of their American Jewish friends, are confused. The Palestinian intifada has made it clear that the price in physical and moral terms of maintaining the status quo is going to get higher every year, yet none of the alternatives seem very appealing. Arafat’s hints about finally accepting a two-state solution based on the 1967 boundaries, with a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, do not really attract them—because they have no confidence in what Arafat says and no desire to return to the pre-1967 lines. The Labor Party’s talk about withdrawing from densely populated portions of the Gaza Strip and West Bank may be appealing, but Labor has no Arab or Palestinian partner for this concept. Labor Party leaders would still like to negotiate with Jordan over the future of the West Bank, but King Hussein has declared that he will have no more to do with the future of the West Bank. The Likud and other right-wing parties talk about holding on to the West Bank and Gaza Strip forever and offering the Palestinians living there autonomy according to the Camp David accords, but there are no Palestinians who will accept such an arrangement. So the situation remains deadlocked.
I think this deadlock can be broken with the right kind of Israeli leader and the right kind of plan. The kind of leader it will take will be what Leon Wieseltier has described in another context as a “bastard for peace”; only a son-of-a-bitch for a solution will be able to gain Sasson’s confidence, and show him at the same time that Israel has an alternative to remaining in the West Bank and Gaza forever. Sasson is the key. You can talk about what is just and you can talk about what should be, you can talk about UN resolutions and Palestinian rights and you can talk about fancy peace plans and declarations by Yasir Arafat, but unless you talk about what will move Sasson, you’ll be talking to yourself. The problem with the Israeli peace movement is that for so many years now they have been talking to themselves. Instead of validating Sasson’s fears and emotions, they dismiss them as “fascist.” But Sasson is no fascist and his fears are for real. The only way to begin building a stable majority for peace is by letting Sasson know that you and he share the same gut emotions. Once you have established that, he will listen—and he may even move.
I have two suggestions as to what might move the Sassons of Israel—one I call a tribal solution to a communal war, and the other a diplomatic solution to a communal war. Both approaches, I must emphasize, are based on unilateral Israeli initiatives. This is because I believe that Israel not only holds all the cards but has the power, and the incentive, to shape its own future without waiting for international conferences or outside mediators or even for a Palestinian partner. An Israeli leader, an Israeli “bastard for peace,” interested in using my first approach—the tribal solution—might present it to the Israeli public with the following speech from the podium of the Knesset:
“My friends, we live in a wilderness of tigers. We are in a struggle for our survival. The Palestinians and the Arabs have never wanted us here and will never want us here. Any chance they get to drive us off the land, any weakness we expose, they will exploit. That is who they are. But the real question is, Who do we want to be? We live in a unique moment in Jewish history—the moment when the third Jewish commonwealth has been created, and when the Jewish people in Israel have an enormous power to determine their own future. Do we want to be the kind of people, or see the kind of Israel, that is sure to develop from us having to hold under occupation 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the rest of our lives, our sons’ lives, and our sons’ sons’ lives? According to our own Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 1985 there were more Arab children under the age of four in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip than there were Jewish children. By the early twenty-first century, if present demographic trends continue, Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza put together will outnumber Jews in the same area. In other words, a continuation of the status quo promises an Israel that is not going to be Jewish, democratic, or secure. Is that what you want? If your answer is no—that is not the kind of Israeli you want to be or the kind of Israel you want to see—then we have the same starting point. We both agree that in their heart of hearts the Arabs want to erase the Jewish state, and yet we both agree that, if it were possible, we would prefer not to spend the rest of our lives, and our children’s lives, sitting on top of them in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. So what can we do about it?
“Frankly, when you have an Anwar Sadat to negotiate with on the other side, then you can think about peace treaties like that negotiated at Camp David. But the Palestinians have no Anwar Sadat—not in King Hussein and not in Yasir Arafat. If you don’t have an Anwar Sadat, then I believe your only option is south Lebanon. What I mean by that is that we reached a situation in Lebanon in 1984 in which the status quo was untenable for us. Our army was sinking in the Lebanese mud and being transformed from a conventional fighting machine into a police force. Back home our nation was deeply and bitterly divided over Lebanon policy. Worse, there was no Lebanese government or militia whom we trusted to implement a peace arrangement to cover our withdrawal. The idea of leaving looked bad, staying looked even worse. After much debate we decided to choose bad over worse. We decided that peace simply was not an option for Israel in Lebanon, but that some degree of security could still be salvaged. So, what did we do? We rearranged our security. In the language of the American Wild West, we circled our wagons in a different formation. We unilaterally withdrew from almost all of south Lebanon, save for a small zone that our army said was necessary to ensure a reasonable degree of security for our northern border. You will recall that when we prepared to do this many people said, ‘How can you just withdraw like that? Are you crazy? The minute we go, the Palestinians and Iranian-backed Shiites will rain Katyusha rockets down on the Galilee, the sky will fall.’ To which the army general staff responded, ‘Better we should deal with these threats as a conventional army, where our real strength lies—that is, with artillery, the air force, and helicopters—than a policeman sitting in every Lebanese village trying to control every family.’
“When we withdrew from Lebanon, then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned the various Lebanese and Palestinian communities living in south Lebanon not to interpret this as a sign of Israeli weakness. He told the Lebanese point-blank that if they threatened Israel’s security, the Israeli army would make sure that ‘life for them will not be worth living.’ So far, that deterrent has worked—not perfectly by any means, but as I said, peace was not an option for us in Lebanon. Our only option was more efficient security arrangements consistent with the values of the kind of society we want to build and the kind of people we want to be.
“I think we should adopt the same approach in the West Bank and Gaza—unilateral withdrawal, in phases, from those areas and settlements not essential to our security. Many Israeli generals believe that Israel can withdraw from significant portions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip without endangering itself, provided the army is allowed to retain whatever areas and security arrangements it deems necessary. These would include positions along the Jordan River and along the strategic mountain ridge running through the middle of the West Bank, as well as buffer zones around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Since 85 percent of the West Bank Jewish settlers reside in ten urban areas clustered around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, most of them would be able to remain in their homes; others falling outside the security plan would have to be relocated. As in south Lebanon, we would act unilaterally. We would not ask anyone’s consent—not the world’s, not Jordan’s, and not the Palestinians’—for the security arrangements we would leave behind. These security arrangements would be determined by us and maintained by us alone. Once we pulled out, the rules of the game would be, as they were in south Lebanon, Chicago Rules: You pull a knife, we’ll pull a gun; you put one of ours in the hospital, we’ll put 200 of yours in the morgue; you start in with Katyusha rockets, we’ll come back with artillery; you start in with artillery, we’ll come back with the air force; you create problems along the border, we will not allow any of you to work in Israel.
“My fellow citizens, will this approach bring peace? The answer is no. There will be incidents along the border, just as there are in south Lebanon—hopefully, as few as there are in south Lebanon. What I am offering you is a way to rearrange our security in a manner that will be more consistent with the Jewish and democratic society we are trying to preserve, and in a manner that will get our army out of police work—which is sapping its strength and morale every day—and back to being the conventional fighting machine it was trained to be. This will make us stronger as a nation, more unified as a nation—a nation that Jews around the world would not only remain proud of but want to live in. I believe we should undertake this unilaterally because to wait for the day when Yasir Arafat, George Habash, Hafez Assad, and King Hussein all agree on a formula for negotiating with Israel is to wait forever. And even if by some miracle they did agree among themselves, we wouldn’t trust them anyway. So what are we waiting for?”
My prime minister would then conclude his remarks with an address to the Palestinians, saying, “My neighbor, my enemy, we would prefer to live in the Land of Israel, all of the Land of Israel, without you. That is who we are. The question before you is, Who do you want to be? Do you want to be stone throwers and victims all your life, or do you want to try to build a little dignity and a national home of your own? I am giving you that opportunity. You can establish whatever state you want in the areas we evacuate. You want a Maoist state, have a Maoist state. You want a Jeffersonian democracy, have a Jeffersonian democracy. You want an Islamic republic, have an Islamic republic. Whatever it is, it won’t be as big as you would like or as militarily powerful as you would like. But that is the price you are going to have to pay for forty years of rejectionism. This is the best opportunity you are ever going to get within the current power realities. I urge you to exploit it. But understand one thing. Our withdrawal from these areas is not a sign of weakness. We are doing what we do out of a clear sense of our own strength, and out of a clear desire to preserve our own identity. We are ready to enter into normal relations with whatever state you build, and we are also ready to obliterate whatever state you build if you use it to threaten us in any way. If I have to send my army back, it is not going to be to sit on you again. I’m tired of that. It is going to be to throw you over the Jordan River. Have no doubt about it.”
That is a tribal solution for a tribal war. It is a solution that Sasson can intuitively understand, because it grows right out of his gut. It is a solution that assumes the worst about both sides—which is exactly what most Palestinians and Israelis assume about each other—and then attempts to draw from that assumption a workable formula that would break the status quo. As solutions go, it is not pretty. As my mother would say, “It’s not nice.” But you can’t always build a settlement on what is nice. The “nice” Israelis, the “dovish” Israelis, the Israelis who like to do the right thing for the right reasons, they’ll always be there for any settlement that calls for withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They’re not the ones who need to be reached, because they are not the majority. Those who need to be reached are the Israelis who will only do the right thing for the “wrong” reasons, for the harsh reasons, for Sasson’s reasons, because without them there will never be a stable majority for a territorial compromise.
Now someone might legitimately ask, Why must there be a tribal solution? Why can’t there be a diplomatic solution? After all, before Sadat came to Jerusalem in November 1977 many Israelis looked at the Egyptians with the same visceral mistrust and gut fear as they do the Palestinians. That is true, which is why I have a second alternative for those who impute slightly better motives to the two sides.
Let us begin by examining the key features that made the Sadat initiative work—how it managed to galvanize a majority of Israelis behind a withdrawal from the Sinai—and then try to see what it would take to apply those same features to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in a way that might be acceptable to the Sassons of Israel and produce what I call a diplomatic solution to a communal war.
I believe the Sadat initiative succeeded because it was able to overcome the three major obstacles to any Arab-Israeli peace. The first obstacle it overcame was the traditional obsession of both Arabs and Israelis with their “legitimate rights,” as opposed to their legitimate interests. As long as any party to the Arab–Israeli conflict is focused entirely on obtaining his historical or God-given “rights,” as he sees them, he is not going to be able to make decisions exclusively on the basis of interests. This always creates problems because rights are derived from the past, from gods or ancestors, and are therefore immutable and do not allow for compromise, while interests derive from today, from the ephemeral and from immediate needs and limitations. Therefore they invite compromise.
The genius of the Sadat initiative was its ability to transform the debate within Israel about relations with Egypt from a debate about rights to a debate about interests. How? Sadat, by recognizing Israel’s right to exist, by going to Jerusalem and guaranteeing Israelis psychological space for their own dignity and independence, removed the question of sacred rights from the table and allowed Israelis to debate the question of peace with Egypt almost exclusively on the basis of their interests. The security and economic advantages of holding the Sinai buffer and its oil wells could be rationally weighed against the benefits of peace with the largest Arab nation. To put it another way, by assuring the Israelis a seat on the subway, Sadat got them to stop worrying about whether or not their reservation would be honored and to concentrate instead on how much of a seat they really needed in order to be comfortable. What the Israelis discovered under these new conditions was that they would actually feel more comfortable and secure vis-à-vis Egypt with a smaller seat.
It is true that the Israeli state had never claimed a “right” to the Sinai as part of its historic claim to Palestine. Nevertheless, the Israelis’ occupation of the Sinai had become an extension of their claim to the right of statehood in Palestine. Israeli took the Sinai from Egypt in 1967 when Egypt challenged Israel’s right to exist. Had Sadat not been willing to recognize the right of Israelis to statehood within their pre-1967 borders, Israelis would have continued to hold on to the Sinai at virtually any price.
The second traditional obstacle the Sadat initiative overcame was the deep-rooted Israeli obsession with stated Arab intentions, as opposed to actual Arab capabilities. The Israelis, like all Jews, are a text-oriented people and they read the Arabic press and speeches with great scrutiny. Because an Arab country like Egypt is made up of many political streams—from Islamic fundamentalist to Arab nationalist to liberal democratic—there was, and always will be, some politician making a speech or some poet writing a verse calling for the elimination of the Jewish state. These words always provided ammunition for the Sassons of Israel, who would stand up, wave the offending article, and exclaim, “How can you make peace with such people? Look what they are saying about us!” This behavior is not surprising. Many Israeli Jews are still haunted by the fact that Hitler clearly laid out all of his plans for the Jews in Mein Kampf and other publications long before he came to power, but no one paid attention.
In order to overcome the Israeli obsession with Arab intentions, Sadat agreed to demilitarize the Sinai Desert. He consented not only to limit the number of Egyptian troops that could be stationed there and the weapons they could carry, but also to accept the presence of an American-dominated multinational peacekeeping force to monitor the demilitarization. Only after the Israelis were able to limit the capabilities of Egypt’s soldiers were they ready to ignore the intentions of her poets.
The third obstacle the Sadat initiative overcame was the deep mistrust Israelis had in any kind of land-for-peace agreement with a country that had been seeking their destruction for forty years. Even Sadat’s kissing of former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir on the cheek could not undo the trauma many Israelis felt toward their neighbor to the west, with whom they had fought four wars. Too many things had been said for too many years. Too many people had died. Words alone were not sufficient to undo that. There had to be a new living reality. Only behavioral therapy, not Freudian analysis, could produce an accumulation of experiences that might heal each side’s suspicion. Therefore the Camp David agreement was implemented gradually, in phases, over a three-year period. Each phase of Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai was conditioned on Egypt’s fulfillment of certain obligations for demilitarization and normalization of relations. Both sides not only got to hear the other’s words, but got to feel them, before the agreement was culminated.
All three of these obstacles exist between Israelis and Palestinians. The only difference is that they are ten times as high. Take, for instance, the question of rights. Egypt and Israel were two distinctly different countries, with different boundaries and different capitals. There was a natural dividing line between them, which made mutual recognition of each other’s rights to statehood relatively easy. That is not the case between Palestinians and Israelis. There is no natural dotted line separating them. The Israelis claim Jerusalem as their capital and the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital; the Israelis claim Haifa and the Palestinians claim Haifa. Many Israelis claim the West Bank not, like Sinai, as an extension of their right to statehood in Palestine, but as an integral part of that right. Many Palestinians claim Jaffa not as an extension of their right to a state in the West Bank, but as an essential part of it.
Because of these overlapping historical claims, it is much more difficult for Israelis and Palestinians to recognize each other’s basic rights in Palestine without feeling that they are undermining their own historical positions. Imagine how difficult it would have been to solve the problems of Europe if there had been no Berlin and no Paris, but just Germans and Frenchmen each claiming Paris as their rightful capital.
What about intentions and capabilities? Here, too, the problems between Palestinians and Israelis are enormous. Egypt was an authoritarian state, which could exert some control over its press and public officials. But the PLO is an umbrella organization encompassing eight different Palestinian factions spread out all over the Middle East. Some of those factions take their orders not from Yasir Arafat, but from Arab governments. There are also Palestinian organizations, such as the Moslem fundamentalists in Gaza, who are very strong on the ground and answer to no one but themselves. The result is that the Israelis can always find some egregious Palestinian statement or poem calling for their destruction, which is then used to discredit any Israeli or Palestinian moderate who dares to claim that the Palestinians are ready to live in peace with a Jewish state.
As for mistrust, what the Egyptians and Israelis had to overcome seems like a minor tiff compared with the tribal-like feud between Jews and Palestinians. The Palestinian—Jewish conflict doesn’t date back just to 1948, but goes back a hundred years. Moreover, it is not a conflict between strangers separated by 200 miles of desert, but rather a conflict between neighbors, between cousins, who have looked each other in the eye before shooting each other in the gut. This Cain-versus-Abel-style conflict has bred so much mistrust and so much hatred that there is nothing Yasir Arafat could say to Israelis that would have the same instantly reassuring impact as did Sadat’s recognition. Moreover, the Palestinians, unlike the Egyptians, don’t have a state. The PLO is a movement with a leadership that lives on airplanes and with institutions scattered in a dozen Arab countries; it has no fixed address. Israel could make peace with a state like Egypt—with its capital, flag, and army—because a state can make promises and be held accountable, but a movement spread out all over the Middle East cannot. Therefore the Palestinians, in their current dispersed state, cannot, by definition, recognize the Israelis in a way that would be truly meaningful and reassuring to them. If the PLO, formally and unequivocally, recognized Israel tomorrow, many Israelis would say, So what?
I have always felt that a good deal of the Israeli interest in making a deal for the West Bank with Jordan, rather than with the PLO, was generated not solely because negotiating with Jordan was a way to avoid recognizing the Palestinians but, equally important, because Jordan was a concrete state, a fixed address, which could be held accountable and which had a long, credible record of keeping its border with Israel quiet.
Despite the lofty heights of all these obstacles, I don’t believe they are insurmountable. You just need the right pole to vault over them. I think there can be a diplomatic solution to a tribal war that might just satisfy the Sasson in every Israeli, and I also believe it can be initiated through a unilateral Israeli gesture. A prime minister of Israel could present it with the following speech:
“My friends, if there is one lesson that we can learn from the past hundred years of conflict with the Palestinians, it is this: As long as your neighbor is your enemy, your house will never be a home. It will be a fortress, and in a fortress you can never really take your shoes off and relax. What this means is that we will never really be able to feel at home here in Palestine, we will never really be able to end our exile, unless the Palestinians, our neighbors, feel at home as well. I wish this were not the case. But the truth is we cannot save ourselves unless we save them too. And they cannot save themselves unless they save us too. But can we save them without committing suicide, which my friend Sasson here is not going to do? And can they save us without totally surrendering, which they are not going to do?
“In order to make a settlement with the Palestinians both possible and meaningful, I believe we Israelis, for our own self-interest, must begin by doing for the Palestinians what Anwar Sadat did for us: give them at least part of a seat on the subway, or at least recognize the validity of their reservation. Specifically, we should declare our readiness to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Just as it was Sadat, the one who had the seat on the subway, who had the strength and self-confidence to move over a bit for his own good and make room for the ones who had no seat, so we Israelis, who have a seat, should use our strength and security in order to move over and make some psychological and physical space for the Palestinians so they can stop focusing exclusively on their rights and start thinking more about their interests. The Palestinians will have a real incentive to curtail their demands and control their most extreme elements only when they have some real interests to lose. Today the price for Palestinians of attacking Israel is bad headlines and a few casualties. If they had their own state, the price of attacking Israel could be the loss of everything they had managed to build.
“But we are not in the charity business. We would make our offer to the Palestinians only if their representatives—whoever they might be—accepted the following three conditions.
“First, the Palestinian representatives would have to agree to explicitly recognize our right to exist as a Jewish state in the Middle East.
“Second, the Palestinian representatives would have to agree that their state would be permanently demilitarized, and that Israel would be allowed to maintain all the early-warning and security systems which its army deemed necessary to ensure that this Palestinian state could never—ever—threaten Israel’s existence, even if it wanted to. Israel and Israel alone would monitor the demilitarization of the Palestinian state through such measures as advanced observation posts and checkpoints at the Jordan bridges and all other potential entry points to ensure that no heavy weapons whatsoever could be brought in. There would be no UN troops and no multinational forces. We will not entrust our vital security to third parties. Only by totally controlling Palestinian capabilities will it be possible to get a majority of our people to overlook Palestinian intentions, poetry, and PLO charters. Neither we nor the Palestinians can be expected to dispense with our dreams about Palestine; they are fundamental aspects of our identities. But we cannot allow each other’s fantasies to prevent a settlement in reality.
“Third, the Palestinians must agree that implementation of this plan would occur in stages over a period of five years. It would begin with free Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (in which outside Palestinians could vote by absentee ballot) to form a government. Only when the Palestinian movement is transformed into a concrete state-like autonomous government based in the West Bank will it have the attributes, incentives, and credibility to recognize the Israelis in a way that will be as meaningful and reassuring as the recognition from Egypt. That Palestinian government will be granted autonomy over all those areas that will eventually be relinquished to it by Israel at the culmination of the transition period. Only such a lengthy transition period, which puts the declarations of each side to the test, can produce the kind of healing and trust that will make an agreement workable and lasting.
“Now you will ask, What if the Palestinians, when presented with such a state by us, don’t behave according to their rational interests, but instead on the basis of their rights, as they see them? What if they use such a state not to heal their dreams about recovering all of Palestine, but instead to feed them? The answer is that their state will only come to them in stages of autonomy, after they have proven their willingness at each stage to be responsible neighbors. If at any time in that process they physically endanger us in any way, the entire process will be scrapped. But we will be as much a loser from that as the Palestinians.
“Let me add a few remarks to our Palestinian neighbors. My neighbor, my enemy, I know many of you will look at this plan and consider it insufficient. You are only going to get a ministate in part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—less even than what you were promised in the 1947 UN partition plan. And even that is not going to be a fully sovereign state, because you will be in effect surrounded by Israeli troops, subject to Israeli security measures, and only be allowed to maintain a police force with light weapons. But to these complaints I can only say two things. First, what you could have had in 1947, you cannot have now; and what you can get today, you won’t be able to get tomorrow. I urge you to stop focusing only on what you think is right and just and to think instead only about what is possible. This is the most that is possible today. As for not being able to have an army of your own, you have to make a choice. Do you want a state or do you want an army? If it’s an army you want, then you already have one in the PLO. If it is a state you want, then it is a state I am offering—but these are the terms.
“As for my Israeli critics, I can only say that while this plan may seem to you to be a noble offer—too noble, too moralizing, too naive—I consider it quite Machiavellian. I am trying to turn my enemy who never allows me to feel at home in my own house into a neighbor with whom I can live comfortably side by side. I have a healthy respect for the ability of all parties to this conflict, both the Palestinians and ourselves, to behave in totally irrational ways. I am in no way suggesting that this approach is risk-free. It is not. But the status quo is not risk-free either. Real Israeli security can never come from the club, but only from having a neighbor who is a dignified, responsible, and self-determining human being. Maybe the Palestinians are not willing to be such a neighbor and maybe the Arabs are not willing to allow the Palestinians to be such a neighbor. But better for us to take the very limited risk of putting the Palestinians to the test and possibly create a new relationship than to continue with an equally risky status quo that promises only an endless war between neighbors and a future filled with yesterdays.”
“Did you want to kill him, Buck?”
“Well, I bet I did.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Him? He never done nothing to me.”
“Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?”
“Why, nothing—only it’s on account of the feud.”
“What’s a feud?”
“Why, where was you raised? Don’t you know what a feud is?”
“Never heard of it before—tell me about it.”
“Well,” says Buck, “a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time.”
“Has this one been going on long, Buck?”
“Well, I should reckon! It started thirty years ago, or som’ers along there. There was trouble ’bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit—which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.”
“What was the trouble about, Buck?—land?”
“I reckon maybe—I don’t know.”
“Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?”
“Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago.”
“Don’t anybody know?”
“Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people; but they don’t know now what the row was about in the first place.”
—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn