by Ari Shavit
Perhaps this is the reason that even today, the sights I saw and the sounds I heard in the Gaza Beach facility still haunt me. I am haunted by the notion that we hold them by the balls and they hold us by the throat. We squeeze and they squeeze back. We are trapped by them and they are trapped by us. And every few years the conflict takes on a new form, ever more gruesome. Every few years, the mode of violence changes. The tragedy ends one chapter and begins another, but the tragedy never ends.
(photo credit 10.1)
TEN
Peace, 1993
LIKE THE SETTLEMENTS, PEACE, TOO, WAS AN OUTCOME OF THE 1967 AND 1973 wars.
In the abstract, the desire for peace had always been a part of Zionism. It was there in the late 1920s when Herbert Bentwich’s son Norman realized that the Jews were not alone in Palestine and joined the Jerusalem intellectuals who formed Brit Shalom, the Jewish Peace Alliance. It was there in the early 1930s, when Yitzhak Tabenkin settled the Valley of Harod and Jewish radicals rose against Zionist colonization that led to the dispossession of Arab tenants. It was there in the late 1930s, when the Rehovot writer and orange grower Moshe Smilansky warned that we have partners in the land and that we must learn to live with them. It was there in the early 1940s, when Shmaryahu Gutman led his cadets to Masada and Jewish humanists denounced the militaristic chauvinism that was capturing the hearts of the young. It was there in the late 1940s, when Palmach battalions emptied the Arab villages and conquered Arab Lydda, and Smilansky’s nephew Yizhar wrote Khirbet Khizeh, a seminal novella about the savagery of expulsion. It was there when the young State of Israel was building and arming itself in the 1950s, and left-wing parties demanded a peace initiative that would deal justly with Palestinian refugees. And it was there in the early 1960s, when Ben Gurion built the Dimona reactor and men of morals denounced the nuclearization of Israel and the Middle East.
For seventy years the yearning for peace existed on the fringes of Zionism, trying to restrain the baser instincts of the Jewish national movement. But after the Arab uprising of 1936, mainstream Zionism wanted more and more land, more and more power. It paid lip service to peace, but it was not willing to pay a real price for it. It saw immigration, settlement, and nation building as its main goals, and it did not consider peace to be an absolute value or a supreme cause.
The real, mainstream Zionist peace movement was born only after the wars of 1967 and 1973. Only the new horizon opened by the Six Day War and the trauma of the Yom Kippur War turned the battle for peace into a central struggle of Israel’s public arena. In those same years the Greater Israel idea and the demand to annex the occupied West Bank sprouted, too. The decade of the first settlements was also the decade of the first peace demonstrations. From the tectonic shifts of the late sixties and early seventies rose both the New Right and the New Left. Both rebelled against Labor’s intractable ways. Both rebelled against a stagnant reality. Both offered a radical solution and a recipe for instant utopia. As they wrestled against each other and defined each other and empowered each other, the peace movement and the land movement became the shaping forces of the new Israel.
This time I don’t have to travel far; Yossi Sarid lives just five miles from my home. From the corner window of his roomy apartment in north Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean Sea beckons, blue and placid. The man who was an icon of the Israeli Left welcomes me with a weak handshake. We’ve known each other for years. In one election campaign, I even volunteered to be his unofficial adviser. But over the years we’ve had our differences. This time Yossi knows I’ve come not to argue but to understand. Where did the peace movement come from, I ask. What was it all about? What did it get right and where did it go wrong? Why has it lost its way?
Sarid was born in Rehovot in 1940. Both his parents were raised in the bleak Polish town of Rafalowka and made aliyah in 1935. Several years later, the Nazis arrived in Rafalowka, led the Jews to the forest, instructed them to dig holes in the ground, and shot them into the holes they had just dug. Yossi’s mother, Duba, lost her mother and father, sister and brother. She became clinically depressed. His father, Yaakov, lost his entire family but kept an optimistic, upbeat attitude toward life. In 1945, Yaakov seated his son Yossi on a kitchen stool and told him why he had decided to change their surname from Schneider to Sarid (remnant): because they were the last remnants. For Yossi, that moment in the kitchen was formative. Listening to his father, he was certain that they were all alone on this earth.
Yaakov Sarid did well. Within a few years the schoolteacher became school principal, then director general of all socialist schools, and then director general of Israel’s Ministry of Education. Yossi Sarid did well, too. He was a gifted child who excelled in every field, often surpassing his peers. But Duba Sarid remained sad all her life. On the nineteenth anniversary of the Rafalowka massacre she took her own life.
From an early age, Yossi was bound for great things. His mother wanted him to be a poet and professor, while his classmates were convinced he would become a great national leader. Wherever he went, Sarid stood out for his quick thinking, sharp tongue, and arrogance. As a boy and as a teenager he was brilliant, rebellious, and conceited. He never accepted authority. He was a sore loser. A stark combination of ambition, talent, and a provocative disposition pushed him from one achievement to the next. At sixteen he published poems in Israel’s most prestigious literary journal. At twenty-three he was a leading news editor at Israel’s state-run radio. At twenty-four he was the youngest spokesperson ever of the long-ruling Labor Party.
Sarid defines himself as one who was born of Labor’s womb. His parents were both active members of the Labor Movement. The neighborhood was Labor, school was Labor, and the youth movement was Labor. Labor was his only frame of reference. No wonder the young party spokesman quickly won the trust and affection of the party elders. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir, and Secretary General Golda Meir all treated him as a beloved son. The inarticulate, aging rulers groomed their eloquent spokesman and, in a sense, adopted him. They gave him the backing of an all-powerful establishment, while he gave them access to a young Israel and a news media they did not understand. By now it was clear that in due course Sarid could inherit Labor and become prime minister.
Immediately after the Six Day War, Sarid went to study in the United States. Liberal New York, where he spent his graduate school years, was absorbed in the struggle against the Vietnam War. The dynamic Israeli joined the struggle. He identified with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), took part in protest marches, and became part of the antiwar movement. When he returned to Israel in 1969, he was a different person. Now Israeli policy seemed to him combative, thoughtless, and outdated. Although he ran Labor’s election campaign, he was at odds with the government’s hawkish line. When he realized that Golda Meir was reluctant to give back the occupied territories for peace, he was outraged. The Meir-Sarid lovefest became an ugly mutual hate relationship.
In the early 1970s, Sarid had already made up his mind: occupation was a disaster, the settlements were a fatal mistake, peace was essential. Israel must retreat to the 1967 border and negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Among the radical Left and liberal intelligentsia, some agreed with him. But in Labor he was an outcast, and his new political position—absolute heresy. Under Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, Israel was bewitched by the empire it had just won and would not listen to the sober warnings of an arrogant prince who had been indoctrinated by the American antiwar movement.
The Yom Kippur War shattered the imperial delusions of Meir and Dayan. It also gave birth to a new political culture based on protest. Sarid became its champion. He mastered the media and fought passionately against the establishment, the settlers, and corruption. The 1977 electoral upheaval that brought Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud to power made Sarid even stronger. Labor was now in the opposition, and so were the elite associated with it. Many in academia, the media, the business sector, the judiciary, and the ci
vil service felt alienated.
Opposition and alienation suited Sarid just fine. They were compatible with his defiant, haughty nature. Now he was the star. He stood up against Likud and against the settlers and against the rise of a nationalistic-religious Israel. More than any other Israeli he expressed the critical, bitter mindset of post 1973 and post 1977.
Sarid’s finest hour came in 1982. As Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon led Israel to a deceitful and outrageous war in Lebanon, Sarid was the first Zionist member of the Knesset to oppose it. For a while he was public enemy number one: reviled, attacked, ostracized. But when it turned out that the war was indeed folly, Sarid was vindicated. For the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took part in antiwar demonstrations, Sarid was the undisputed hero of the Israeli peace movement. As the peace protest movement gathered steam, so did Sarid.
Two years later, Sarid quit Labor and joined the left-wing Meretz Party. Although he eventually became leader of the small party and even served for a while as education minister, he never regained the stature he had enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. Breaking away from Labor led the promising maverick to a life of frustration and resentment on the fringes of Israeli politics. Although much respected, Sarid embodies a resounding missed opportunity. His is the road not taken.
Sarid’s face is heavily lined, etched by disappointment. He is slim, almost bald, and is dressed in a strikingly unfashionable manner. The coffee he drinks is milky and weak. The furnishings in his living room are functional. Although he is still a consummate storyteller, quick-witted and wry, he cannot mask his discontent. The hours I spend with him leave me bewildered and disheartened.
“I’m here not only because you are the icon of the Israeli peace movement,” I tell Sarid. “I am here because your biography is the biography of the Left. You were the pillar of the new peace movement that replaced the fading Labor Movement. But the transition from Labor to peace was not only political. It was a deep mental shift from building to protesting, from doing to talking, from leading to opposing. And you are the embodiment of that transition. You are the incarnation of the shift from the Labor culture of socialist-Zionist action to the peace culture of liberal-Israeli protest.”
Sarid doesn’t deny this. He sees the correlation between what happened to the Left and what happened to him. “What shaped me,” he says, “were the disappearance of my parents’ home in Rafalowka, the happiness I experienced in Rehovot, and the sanity of Israel in its first nineteen years. But the Six Day War undermined the order of things. And then America opened my eyes. The Yom Kippur War enraged me because it could have been prevented. So when I came of age, politically speaking, I could not be the prince of continuity I was expected to be. I was the wayward son. Rather than walk in the footsteps of the elders, I wanted radical change. I wanted to topple and destroy the national leadership that had betrayed us.”
“Therein lies the problem,” I say. “Both you and the peace movement were always against. Against Meir, against Begin, against occupation. But though you were right to be angry, your failing was that you were always about negation. Protests. Demonstrations. Unlike the old Laborites, you never built anything. You never put up a home or planted a tree. And you never accepted the heavy responsibility of dealing with the complexity of Israeli reality. Emotionally, you remained stuck in the adolescent protest stage of the 1960s and 1970s. The naysaying character of the peace culture made it sterile and eventually unattractive. Politically and emotionally it was unproductive and barren, even corrosive. There was not enough love, not enough compassion. And there was too much judgment. That’s why you couldn’t fill the vacuum left by the fading Labor culture. After you performed the grand acts of patricide and matricide, you didn’t succeed in becoming fathers and mothers yourselves. You did not nurture, you did not inspire, you did not lead. You didn’t offer the nation a mature political choice. At the end of the day, your generation achieved only a fraction of what the founders had. It was on your watch, not theirs, that Israel became a rudderless nation, lost at sea with no captain and no compass and no sense of direction.”
Sarid has a reply at the ready. As he fiddles with his frameless glasses with his small, nail-bitten fingers, he begins shooting long salvos of sharp words.
“Focusing on occupation was the right thing to do,” he says. “Occupation is the father of all sins. Occupation is the mother of atrocity. When we occupied the West Bank and Gaza, we opened a door, and evil winds swept through it. All the depravity you see in today’s Israel is because of the occupation. The brutality. The deceit. The decay. Even the army is now rotting because it was forced to be an occupying army. Because of occupation we have been held captive by an insane gang of messianic zealots who may yet destroy us like their forefathers destroyed the Second Temple. Don’t you see it? I am afraid we are doomed. And I saw it all coming. I saw it in advance. When I saw the first seeds of occupation, I knew they were the seeds of destruction.
“There is something else,” he continues. “You asked me what the real impetus of the peace movement was. Well, let me put it this way: The Israeli peace movement was actually a struggle for normalcy. What we wanted was normalization. The previous generation told us that war was our lot. This is the way things are. In this region and this country, war is normal. But we raised our heads and looked around and saw that in other parts of the world, perpetual conflict is not normal. This is not how others live. This is not how nations sort out their differences. Germany and France, for instance. Vietnam, China. Later the Soviet Union. So we rejected Moshe Dayan’s notorious statement, ‘The sword shall devour forever.’ We looked for a way that would guarantee that the sword shall not devour forever. It is not fair to say that we were all about protest and negation. We are the ones who brought a new hope of peace. We said that war upon war is not a decree. We said that peace is within reach. We said we want the normal life other people have, and we want to enjoy the peace other people enjoy.”
“That’s just it,” I challenge Sarid. “You discovered the world, but you ignored our own history. You forgot 1948 and the refugee problem that it created. You were blind to the chilling consequences of Zionism and the partial dispossession of another people that is at the core of the Zionist enterprise. You also failed to realize the gravity of the religious conflict and identity clash between the Western Jewish democratic Israel and the Arab world. You didn’t take into consideration the fact that given our history and our geography, peace is hardly likely.”
Sarid understands me, but he answers as if he doesn’t understand a thing.
“History is not a train station,” he says. “Because even if you’re stuck at the most remote train station, you can be certain that if you missed the train, another will come. It might take an hour, a day, a week—but the next train will come. Not so history. In history, if you missed the train you were supposed to get on, there is no certainty that there will be another. That’s why I am so angry now. And exasperated. And disillusioned. I have no doubt that had I been prime minister in the late 1980s, I would have reached a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Perhaps I would even have managed to save a few settlements. Perhaps an inch of east Jerusalem. But because the Israeli leadership of the day was cavalier and callous, time slipped by and opportunity slipped by and the train left the station. Now I don’t see another train coming. No train at all. And that only makes me more pessimistic and gloomy. I don’t love the land as I once did. I don’t feel I belong to the nation as I once belonged. In my nightmares I see millions of Palestinians marching to Jerusalem. I see millions of Arabs marching on Israel. I am well over seventy now. I have nothing to lose but the grave I will be buried in. But sometimes, when I look at my grandchildren, my eyes tear up. I am no longer certain that their fate will not be the fate of the children of Rafalowka.”
I meet with Yossi Beilin in his posh office in a Herzliya high-tech tower. His suit is light, his tie white, his hair silver-gray. Even though he is in his midsixties, the face of the pea
ce statesman turned business adviser is the face of a boy, marked by only a few lines. Although eight years younger than Sarid, Beilin is far more mature. Throughout the years, he has been the responsible adult of peace: not a man of protests, but a man of deeds; not a man of overwhelming emotions, but a man of calculated action.
Beilin was born in Tel Aviv in the same summer as the State of Israel. His home was imbued with Jewish history and a commitment to Zionism. Years earlier, his grandfather had been a delegate to two of the first Zionist Congresses. His father was the well-read bookkeeper of Tel Aviv’s Journalist Union, his mother a teacher of Arabic, Bible, and archaeology, who contributed to the Labor daily Davar. Their home was the humble apartment of a family that had lost much of its fortune but not its pride or its passion for learning. On the walls hung photographs of the founders of Zionism and victims of pogroms and the Wailing Wall. Both of Beilin’s parents felt that they were privileged to live in the time of redemption, and they instilled this feeling in their young son Yosef.