Another question nagging all those who wanted this summit to succeed: Did Barak have a real partner at Camp David for his far-reaching moves? True, there is no symmetry between the concessions the two sides can make. Israel holds almost all the cards, while the Palestinians have more restricted options. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the sense that Arafat was the less bold, less creative, and more stubborn of the two leaders. Even one who has great sympathy for the long suffering and the impossible position of the Palestinians cannot avoid the impression that Arafat was at fault this time in his analysis of the situation, as he has been more than once in the past.
Had Arafat shown any flexibility at all on the question of Jerusalem, he might have succeeded in getting Barak to take even larger strides, in the end breaking through the psychological snare that now paralyzes the entire process. Had Arafat been freer of the pressures exerted by the extremists among his people, and of the pressure of other Arab leaders, perhaps he would have avoided the scenario that now casts its shadow over many in Israel—the likelihood that the extremists on the right will gain power and Benjamin Netanyahu return to the political arena. If such developments occur, it will be almost impossible to achieve peace in the future.
*
But perhaps what is required is superhuman courage of a kind that the two leaders are not yet ready for. This they must have in order to dare change anything fundamental in their attitudes toward Jerusalem.
I wonder whether anyone who is not part of the local drama, and who observes it only from outside, can really appreciate the force of the emotions, the yearnings, and the compulsions that the old city of Jerusalem rouses in those who live in or around it. It is an area of less than a square kilometer, but it is so charged with history, myth, memory, wars, and the profound essence of so many cultures and of the three major religions, that it has become a kind of black hole of incredibly dense mass that threatens to suck the whole region into it.
Despite this, Ehud Barak became the first Israeli leader to agree to put Jerusalem on the table. Barak did this, and Arafat was not prepared, or able, to make any move toward him. Barak withstood enormous pressure from his own people, yet he did not rule out flexibility or a re-examination of ossified historical positions. Arafat turned him away with a categorical refusal. In this, Arafat bears greater responsibility for the summit’s failure.
But the minute that the Jerusalem question was made a subject of negotiation, many Israelis dared come out of the closet and admit that Israel’s claim of the “sanctity of united Jerusalem” is but an empty slogan. Jerusalem has never been united. Two hostile nations live within it. They maintain largely separate social and government institutions. Suddenly, in the past week, many Israelis discovered the huge gap between the authentic, real core of historical and religious Jerusalem, about which our forefathers dreamed throughout thousands of years of exile, and real-life Jerusalem. The latter contains twenty-six Palestinian villages that Israeli governments annexed to the city for political reasons. They then began swearing in its name and endowing it with the sanctity of biblical Zion.
This past week I visited some of those villages, together with minister of justice Yossi Beilin. I sought to discover whether they create any sort of religious frisson in me. Does any sort of national, historic shiver run through me that would testify to my connection with these places? When my grandfather in Warsaw closed his eyes and directed his heart to Jerusalem, did his soul long for the Palestinian village of Wallageh? Was it for the Qalandia refugee camp that the twelfth-century Jewish poet Yehuda Halevy yearned from distant Spain: “The savor of your soil delights my mouth like honey”?
I felt nothing. I discovered what I had long known: the boundaries of Jewish-Israeli identity actually need much less Jerusalem than what the municipal boundaries contain. The question is only whether Israel will—as its right-wingers demand—put up its future as collateral in order to battle for such an illusory identification with this manipulative Jerusalem, or whether Israelis can now define for themselves what their true spiritual, security, and religious interests are—and strive for them alone.
Now, after the acute despair of last night, it is clearer than ever that the peace process must go on, because if it stops for even a moment, despair and extremists will take control. The process will continue on its agonizing, bumpy way, requiring all of us to ask the most difficult questions of ourselves, about our identity, our faith, and our courage or cowardice. I hope that this is not just my own dream: I believe that there will be flexibility on the question of Jerusalem, on both sides. When the moment comes—may we not need another round of bloodshed before it does—both sides will realize that not only Jerusalem is holy; the lives of the people who live there are no less holy.
Boy Killed in Gaza
October 2000
The tragic killing of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy on September 31, 2000, was televised and broadcast live around the world. Muhammad al-Durrah, who died in his wounded father’s arms, became an instant international symbol of the Palestinian uprising. To this day, neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli Army has accepted responsibility for the death of the child in the crossfire between them.
Everyone who lives in this disaster area—the Middle East—has seen many horrific sights. But these pictures, the pictures of Muhammad’s death, are among the most harrowing ever seen here. They signify that even if we eventually have peace in the end, it may arrive too late.
Because war and violence have blinded our eyes, and have turned some of us into killers, and many others of us into tacit collaborators with murderers.
Of course, there is still no way of knowing who shot him, Israelis or Palestinians. In the madness that rages here, anything is possible. But there can be no absolution for such an act—for the execution of a twelve-year-old boy. When I hear Israeli army officers explaining that the father shouldn’t have taken his son to a riot zone, I feel nauseous.
For more than one hundred years we, Israelis and Palestinians, have been giving birth to children in battlefields, bullets shrieking past us. Yet another generation and another generation are thrown into the fire immediately at birth. Our parents did this to us, and we are doing it to our children. Fathers cannot defend their sons, but it also seems that they do not have the strength to rise above this fate for their families, to change this verdict. As if all of us here, Palestinians and Israelis, are doomed to be either murderers or victims.
As if we no longer have any other way.
In the meantime, for the last year and a half, Barak and Arafat have not stopped talking about the need to make peace, for the sake of the children. But they are apparently speaking of some abstract peace, of figurative children.
A twelve-year-old boy now lies between them, a boy with a name and a face, a face contorted with fear. A very tangible dead boy.
Were Barak and Arafat braver, really brave, this boy might still be alive. Now, even if they reach an agreement in the end, we will carry Muhammad al-Durrah’s face in our minds like a curse.
Who knows how many more innocent people will die in the days to come, until the two sides understand that the look that was in the eyes of that boy before he died will be the look we all have, if we continue to sit passively, easy prey for violence.
Letter to a Palestinian Friend
October 2000
The second Intifada broke out after the failure of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians at Camp David. It was instigated by a visit of opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif) in the old city of Jerusalem, on September 28, 2000. Palestinians regarded the visit to the site, sacred to both Muslims and Jews, as a provocation, and the riots that erupted the next day resulted in many deaths. The wave of violence that spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza was met with overwhelming force by Israeli security forces.
On October 12, 2000, two Israeli reservists lost their way near Ramallah and were stopped by the Palestinian police.
An angry Palestinian mob invaded the police station and brutally stabbed the Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Shocking film footage of the murders convinced many Israelis that there was no hope of achieving a negotiated peace with the Palestinians.
Dear B.,
First, I hope you are well, and that no one in your family has been hurt in the events of these last weeks.
I was thinking how strange—and sad—it is that we have not spoken on the phone since the disturbances began. Up until then, after any event that took place during the peace process, joyous or violent, we always spoke, or even met (though the meetings were rarer). And now—absolute silence. Perhaps because we are both in shock, shock that paralyzes our ability to respond and our strength to continue to believe. Being in shock, we might both be thinking at this moment that we may have erred. Maybe we only imagined that we saw the incipience of hope in both our peoples. Maybe the whole concept of peace was the naive illusion of a few bleeding hearts that were weary of war and oblivious to the volcano of primal instincts and hatred churning under their feet.
Or perhaps we don’t dare call each other because somewhere, in your heart also, I’m sure, nestles the fear that the friend, the Other, has already despaired completely of conciliation. Maybe even he, moderate and judicious, has finally been inundated by the wave of hatred that has broken over all of us now.
But no. I don’t believe that this is what happened to you. We’ve known each other for eight years, talked about literature and politics, about life, about our children. It feels strange to me to address you in this way, publicly, and even now, at the opening of this letter, I feel a slight change in my normal manner of speaking to you. Over the years we have freed ourselves from the natural tendency of every Israeli and Palestinian who engage in dialogue to turn themselves into representatives of their people. But at this time, the new situation threatens to relegate us to that position, whether we like it or not.
You know, when I watch the television broadcasts, I always try to watch them through your eyes. I see a Palestinian throng storming an Israeli Army position and I try to single out an individual face, which might be the face of one of your children. I know that you don’t approve of this kind of demonstration, that it is foreign to your character, as one who opposes all forms of violence. But perhaps, under these new circumstances, it is hard to control a teenage boy who was but a toddler at the time of the first Intifada. Perhaps he has grown up on the proud, heroic stories of the teenage boys of that time and now longs to take part in his people’s resolute, violent struggle for independence. I gaze at the photographs, seeing how the hands are raised, holding stones; how the faces are contorted with hatred. I see the Israeli soldiers taking aim and shooting, and think of my own son, who will soon enlist in the army. Will his face and body also quickly adjust to those attitudes of war and hatred? I look, and suddenly all of them, our children and your children, have the same faces and the same gestures, and it is so clear the extent to which the long conflict has succeeded in claiming them for itself, all of them. All look to me like toy soldiers, lacking individual volition, marionettes manipulated by politicians and army commanders on both sides.
And I try to think of what you are experiencing, you with your sober, accommodating views, within a society that from the outside looks to me as if it is ablaze with a fire for revenge. You are within a nation that is now roaring at me, at least on the television screen, with a single voice, without nuances. But perhaps I am mistaken. Maybe you, and other common friends of ours, are making their voices heard. Maybe it’s the media—ours and yours and the world’s—that chooses to show only the harshest, most extreme scenes and stir up our feelings against each other. But even if the media is guilty, as we always claim in Israel, how is it possible that I have not heard a single note of true Palestinian condemnation of the horrible lynching of the two soldiers in Ramallah—and I mean an explicit condemnation, with no buts and with no “you must understand Palestinian anger.”
And are you over there, beyond the present wall of alienation, aware that among us you can still hear, even after all that has happened, voices that insist on questioning whether Israel indeed did every thing for peace, and what is the real nature of the peace that we imposed on the Palestinians, and whether we did not again fail by viewing reality through our spectacles of bottomless fear, our permanent blind spot? (But, after all, it is an eminently justifiable fear, a voice shouts within me, because in the face of all that we have seen, it is all so rational to fear!) I know that it is impossible to compare the limitations that you are subject to, to the freedom of expression that I have here, in Israel. The worst thing that can happen to me if I express an opinion that is far off the consensus is that someone will write a venomous article against me. But you might be physically harmed. But I so much want to hear, at this hour, in a private conversation, what you are thinking now.
If it’s at all possible to think now as the riots rage outside, and inside. All day—arguments. I drive my car and argue with myself. Friends testify that even in bed, with their spouses, they talk almost solely about politics. The human spirit cringes. I also realize that for every argument I make, I have an incontrovertible counterargument. The situation is so complex and unavoidable that suddenly even opinions I always opposed suddenly bear an ominous attraction. People accost me angrily in the street. Everything you believed in was just a dream, they say. You can’t make peace with the Palestinians. How can you believe Arafat, who has already signed four agreements in which he committed himself to refrain from the use of violence? How can you believe beasts like those who lynched the soldiers? What a horrible, criminal blunder it was to give the Palestinians weapons, with which they are now shooting and killing us.
I don’t know how it is with you, but here close friends, and even relatives, who always believed in peace, and hoped that most of the Palestinians were undergoing a similar process, now feel truly brokenhearted and betrayed. What was the point of offering Arafat so much, of compromising even on Jerusalem, when he encourages such violence, when there is no certainty that he can control his people, and when the schools and mosques of the Palestinian Authority continue to teach and preach the destruction of Israel?
And beyond that, Israelis say today—you can hear it everywhere—even if we give the Palestinians everything, all the territories, and evacuate the settlements and even hand over all of East Jerusalem—the following day they’ll want the rest of Jerusalem and Haifa and Jaffa. They’ll always find a new pretext for violence, for nurturing their hatred and their yearning to throw us into the sea. I have my own answers to those questions, nowadays somewhat more hesitant. I still believe there’s truth in these answers, but I feel how weak this reasoning is, in light of the fire and the fury of hatred.
*
Suddenly, in an impulse of despair, out of isolation, and in protest of the situation that prevents me from doing something so simple and natural, I call you.
You recognize my voice at once, and I hear your relief. We speak for a long time. Your family is unharmed, but the little boy next door was killed. I tell you that bullets were fired tonight on the Jerusalem neighborhood where my brother lives. We both still observe a kind of symmetry, a balance in our reporting, which of course balances nothing, nor does it comfort; despite it all, we are still representatives. You sound agitated and beyond hope—I have never heard you sound this way. It is a nightmare, you say, never has the situation been as awful, and there is no way of knowing how it will end. You blame Israel. The way it dragged out the negotiations for years, far beyond what was agreed on at Oslo. You speak of the impossibility of reaching peace without evacuating the settlements. About how Israel humiliated the Palestinians in the negotiations, and then went so far as to demand that they consider intra-Israeli political problems, while completely ignoring Arafat’s shaky position. Israel tried to impose peace on him under conditions that no Palestinian, even the most moderate, would accept.
I agree wi
th you that the way Israel conducted the peace process was faulty, aggressive, hostage to profound Israeli fears, and unable to empathize with the Palestinian point of view. For years I’ve thought that the peace agreement itself, as it was engineered in Oslo, was the product of brusque Israeli dictation, and that the reality it was meant to create was not going to ensure neighborly relations. Despite that, I say, look at the change that has taken place in Israel with regard to peace since the Oslo process began, especially in the past year, under Barak’s administration. Can you deny the man’s courage, his willingness—which astounded and incensed many Israelis—to hand over most of the occupied territories to you, and to give up parts of Jerusalem, the innermost heart of the Jewish people? Don’t you know, as I do, that a generation’s worth of years will pass before there is another Israeli leader who is both so courageous and able to retain the confidence of the Israeli people in his defense policy? And if you miss this opportunity, you’ll find yourselves facing Sharon (and we, too, I think to myself, we too will find ourselves in that dangerous position).
You are familiar with my arguments and respond to them with your arguments, which are familiar to me. It is as if both of us have to quote them repeatedly, are trapped within them, and feel that our positions never completely comprehend the whole dilemma. There’s always that humiliating sensation that we—the Israeli and the Palestinian—are nothing but a pair of actors sentenced to acting on stage, generation after generation, a grotesque and bloody tragedy whose denouement no one can write, a scene that would offer a hope of relief, of the lifting of the curse.
What frightens me, you say, is that the debate now is not only between governments, or between our armies and police, but between the peoples, the civilians. And the worst is that after Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, it has once more become a feral, tribal, and religious battle.
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