Because it is so important, let me say it again: The establishment of a fence without an agreement means that Israel would give up most of the occupied territories without the Palestinians giving up the right of return.
Furthermore, the establishment of a fence without peace also means that most of the settlements would be included within Israel. But in building the fence in such a way that they are on the Israeli side, Israel would also have to take in a large number of Palestinian towns and villages that lie close to these Israeli settlements and to the roads that lead to them. According to some estimates, this would involve the “annexation” of about 150,000 Palestinians. If we add in the Arabs of East Jerusalem, the number of Palestinians on the Israeli side of the fence may well reach 400,000. These people would not, of course, be Israeli citizens. Israel, after all, does not want them. They would have no clear legal status. Obviously, they would not be able to participate in elections. What, then, would be done with them? How, for example, would Israel pay for their social insurance? (Israel paid for it during its period of military rule and it cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year.) Does anyone seriously believe that these Palestinians would not become a new incubator for terror of an even more violent and desperate kind? When that happens, they would be inside the fence, not outside it, and they would have unobstructed passage to Israel’s city centers. Or would Israel confine them behind yet another, second fence? Israel fears the right of return, because it threatens to return several tens of thousands of Palestinians to within its borders. So it is impossible to understand how Israel could so easily be prepared to take in hundreds of thousands of hostile Palestinians by building a fence.
Another question. Has anyone given thought to how Israel’s million Arab citizens would react? Those whose wide-ranging ties with their families in the Palestinian Authority would be severed by the fence? Would Israel not be increasing the bitterness and frustration they feel, and would not this lead them to adopt even more extreme positions (and this at a time when their connection with their country, Israel, has been growing more tenuous)?
So, when we examine the issue, we reach the conclusion that the fence’s major drawing power for most Israelis is that, unlike other ideas being floated right now, it is one that has never actually been tried. So it can be believed in, for a while.
The borderline between Israel and Palestine can be set only through full agreement by both sides. Dialogue, as difficult as it may be, has tremendous importance in shaping the nature of the peace to come. Dialogue also contributes to the political maturation of its partners. True, an agreement seems detached from reality today, but even if it is hard to believe in, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of despairing of it. I think it’s even better to wait and live for a few more years without this fence of illusions than to be tempted to build it now. It won’t, after all, put an end to terrorism, but only make perpetrators seek other ways to attack, perhaps more vicious ones. Even worse, the unilateral erection of a fence (it would really be better termed a wall) would be a move that would declare our absolute and final despair of reaching a peace agreement in our generation, of integrating a normal Israel into the region around it. In other words, the establishment of the fence may make the conflict permanent and push any possibility of a solution beyond reach.
Too many unilateral moves have been made here. Too many acts of political and military force and coercion. The unilateral establishment of a wall will bring a new and dangerous nadir in this process. A wall would allow the extremists—who are all too numerous—to argue that there would be no one to talk to in the future, either. A wall would allow stereotypes to take root and flourish in the minds of both peoples. Xenophobic and racist thinking would spread even more. Putting the Other out of sight will not solve the problem. It will only make dehumanization easier, and justify a more extreme struggle against that Other.
So, instead of being tempted by dubious ideas like the establishment of a border and the unilateral erection of a wall, it would be better for Israel to invest its energy in the immediate recommencement of negotiations. If Arafat is unacceptable to Sharon and Bush, let those leaders explain to us how they can create a better situation, and how they can assure us—if one could be reassured by such a thing—that Arafat’s successor will agree to accept their dictates. Until they can do so, they bear the responsibility, no less weighty than Arafat’s responsibility, for the immobility, the insensibility, and the despair on both sides, and for the continued violence and killing.
Two Years of Intifada
September 2002
On the second anniversary of the Intifada, Arafat was under Israeli siege for the second time; terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel and in the occupied territories continued, keeping Israeli security forces on constant high alert; the sides were not negotiating a cease-fire; and President Bush was busy building a coalition for an attack on Iraq, planned to take place sometime in the near future.
I might begin this piece on the second anniversary of the second Intifada precisely two years ago, with the day when Ariel Sharon made his entry into the Temple Mount, on September 28, 2000, and set off a conflagration in the occupied territories. But the story could actually begin in any of the seven years that preceded September 2000. During that period, Israel and the Palestinians did everything in their power to disrupt and confound the delicate agreement they cobbled together at Oslo. Israel doubled the number of its settlers in the territories, and the Palestinians smuggled in weapons, hoarded ammunition, and prepared for war.
Those who were attentive then to the Palestinians’ complaints and warnings about the Oslo agreement and the reality it was supposed to make permanent could have seen something was amiss. It offered the Palestinians a tiny state, sliced into segments by a massive Israeli presence. More than anything else, this reality served Israel’s stringent security needs. The prescient could have understood then what had to happen.
Few in Israel were capable of listening to the warnings. That is our, the Israelis’, historic mistake. The Palestinians themselves joined in the march of folly by responding to Sharon’s provocation with an outbreak of unrestrained violence. What happened next is already history, and a tragedy. Two years have gone by. Two years of unlived life for both peoples. Two years of living with our senses, our reason for living, our habits, our hopes dulled and constricted. Two years of gradually congealing thought that could be expressed only in large red headlines.
More than 625 Israelis have been killed in a total of 14,280 incidents in these past two years. Some 1,370 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military forces. A total of 4,500 Israelis have been injured in terrorist attacks, and among the Palestinians, the numbers are much higher—the Palestinian Red Crescent organization reported two weeks ago a total of 19,649 wounded.
Yet each side is certain that the other side has not suffered sufficiently. That being the case, it’s clear that the conflict has yet to exhaust the reservoirs of hatred, and has yet to bring both peoples to the state of exhaustion that will be necessary for them to begin making concessions. Almost the opposite is true—the Palestinians’ bloody terrorist attacks have led to a metamorphosis. The thirty-three years of Israel’s repression in the territories that it conquered in 1967 (a conquest that was instigated, let’s not forget, by the hostile acts of Arab countries against Israel) have nearly been expunged from Israeli consciousness. It’s very convenient for most Israelis to believe that now accounts with the Palestinians have been settled, and the blame for the current situation lies entirely on their shoulders.
And this may well be the root cause of the prevailing despair that any mutual understanding can be achieved. The Palestinians begin their timeline of the conflict from, at the latest, 1948, when the State of Israel was founded. Israelis, for the most part, place the starting point of their timeline at September 2000.
According to this Israeli perception, there is no chance of any compromise now, because “there’s no partner,�
�� because “the Palestinians are all terrorists,” and because “they rejected the generous offer made them by Ehud Barak.” The Palestinians also despair in advance of any compromise. In their perception, any agreement that could be achieved now, in the current international climate, would favor Israel, and would certainly not meet even the minimal requirements of the Palestinian people.
In hindsight, the Palestinians’ strategic choice to use terrorism as their weapon worked like a boomerang. It severely weakened the moral force of the Palestinian struggle and branded Yasir Arafat as a terrorist in the United States and other parts of the Western World. It also provided a not insignificant justification for Israel’s harsh and massive military response. Now, nearly every Palestinian action, even if it is justified resistance to the occupation, is perceived by policymakers in the West as terrorism. To a large extent, this paralyzes the Palestinian cause.
There’s an astonishing paradox on the Israeli side. Israel is worse off than it has ever been in the last thirty-five years. Its security, economy, and national morale are in decline. Yet Ariel Sharon, its failure of a prime minister, remains the most popular man in the country. There’s a simple explanation. Sharon has succeeded, with no little help from Palestinian terrorism, in getting the Israeli people to restrict their view of their complex conflict with the Palestinians to a single question. Israelis now think solely of their personal security. It’s certainly an issue of decisive importance, especially in the current state of affairs. Yet Sharon’s political cunning is such that he has succeeded in reducing it to a single dimension, so that the only answer to the great and complicated question “How does Israel make itself secure?” is “By force.”
This is Sharon’s expertise. Force, more force, and only force. The result is that any time some small flicker of a chance appears, every time there is a decline in violence, Sharon rushes to carry out another “targeted liquidation” of one or another Palestinian commander, and the fire flares again. Any time Palestinian representatives declare their willingness to renew negotiations and halt violence and suicide attacks, the response from Sharon’s office is dismissal and derision. As far as the current Israeli government is concerned, even if the current Palestinian leadership were to swear fealty to Sharon’s Likud Party, the act would be labeled a sinister gambit aimed at gaining legitimacy for the armed struggle against Israel.
Sharon has loyal allies—the extremists among the Palestinians, who are also quick to incite the mob and send endless suicide bombers to Israel’s cities each time there seems to be a respite. Each side is thus playing on the fears and despair of the other, each chasing the other around the familiar vicious circle—the more violence increases, the less chance there is of persuading people on either side that there is any possibility of a compromise, pushing the violence up to even higher levels. Day by day the temptation grows to view the opponent as other than human, making any action against him permissible. But those who permit themselves to do anything to their enemies are, for all intents and purposes, declaring that they, too, are inhuman, thus inviting a similar kind of vengeance from their opponents.
So two years have passed. Who has won and who has lost, as of now?
On the surface—and this is true only for this given moment—Israel has undoubtedly won. Arafat is losing his international legitimacy. Until just a few days ago, he was losing his hold over his own people as well, as they became ever more aware of his corruption and his failure as a leader. He is now trapped and isolated in the three or four rooms that remain in his headquarters in Ramallah. The senior command level of most of the Palestinian organizations has been killed or captured by Israeli security forces. The people on the second and third command levels are inexperienced in combat, in organizational skills, and in field security. The result is that Israel has been hugely successful in preventing most of the terrorist attacks that the Palestinians have tried to commit.
At the beginning of the Intifada, and especially when suicide attacks increased in frequency, it seemed to the Palestinians that Israeli society was weak. They believed, as one Palestinian leader put it, that Israel was no stronger than a spiderweb. Today it is clear that the severity of the attacks and the large number of victims they have claimed have reinforced Israel’s sense of national unity and common identity. Israelis today are willing to suffer heavy losses to achieve Sharon’s goals.
Yet Israel is paying a high price. Two years into the Intifada, Israel is more militant, nationalist, and racist than it has ever been before. The very broad national consensus has placed all criticism and minority opinions outside the bounds of legitimacy. There is almost no significant opposition. The Labor Party, the shaper of Israel’s national ethos in the country’s first decades, has been digested entirely in the bowels of the right-wing government. Anyone who opposes the brutality of the Sharon government’s actions is suspected of disloyalty bordering on treason. The media has, for the most part, aligned itself with the right, with the government, and with the army, and serves as a clarion for the most hawkish and anti-Palestinian line. Sanctimonious self-righteousness, disdain for the “spineless values” of democracy, calls for the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens (in addition to the Palestinians in the territories) have become an accepted and legitimate part of the public discourse that no one gets exercised about.
The power of the extremist religious parties is increasing. A wave of crude and sentimental patriotism is sweeping the country. It wells up out of the authentic, historic, and almost primal sensibilities of “Jewish destiny” in its most tragic form. The Israelis, citizens of the strongest military power in the region, are once again, with strange enthusiasm, walling themselves up behind their sense of persecution and victimization. The Palestinian threat—ridiculous in terms of the balance of power but effective in its results—has forced Israel to return, with depressing speed, to the experience of living in fear of total annihilation. This fear, naturally, justifies a brutal response to any threat.
Israel has won, for now, but what is the meaning of victory when it brings no hope for a better future, not even a sense of security and relief? The Palestinians have lost for the moment, but they are now fighting with their backs to the wall, and it is hard to believe that they will surrender and accept Sharon’s diktats. It may turn out that, as with the first Intifada, the Palestinians have no stamina for a struggle of more than two years and that, as they did then, they face a period of social disintegration and bitter internal struggle. It would behoove Israel not to rejoice should that happen, because in the end Israel has, or at least should have, an interest in a strong and resilient Palestinian society led by a leadership with a broad base of support. Only such a Palestinian society can sign a stable peace agreement with Israel that will include historic concessions. But such a sophisticated argument cannot today penetrate the dullness of the Israeli spirit and mind. And since Israel is stronger than the Palestinians, the conflict is, seemingly, doomed to continue as is for an unpredictable length of time.
Two years have gone by and there is no hope. The situation can be summed up in several ways. I choose to do so by citing two facts that stood out in the reports of the last month. The first: According to data provided by UN agencies, more than a quarter of Palestinian children now suffer from malnutrition as a result of the situation. The second: Israeli schoolchildren will soon be given special classes in early identification and detection of suicide bombers. Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to see the connection between these two facts ensure that for many years to come we will all be each other’s hostages, agents of gratuitous and pointless death.
A Note on the Author
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been translated into thirty languages around the world. He is the recipient of many prizes.
By the Same Author
Novels
The Smile of the Lamb
The Book of Intimate Grammar
The Zigzag Kid
Duel
Be My Knife
Someone to Run With
Lovers and Strangers: Two Novellas
Non-Fiction
The Yellow Wind
Sleeping on a Wire
Writing in the Dark
Also Available by David Grossman
Be My Knife
‘Exhilarating … The peeling away of lies and social restraints to disclose the naked soul is gripping’ Daily Mail
An awkward, neurotic seller of rare books writes a desperate letter to a beautiful stranger whom he sees at a class reunion. This simple, lonely attempt at seduction begins a love affair of words between Yair and Miriam – two married, middle-aged adults, dissatisfied with their lives, yearning for a sense of connection – and reawakens feelings that they thought had passed them by.
‘Impressive, extraordinary and exotic’ New York Times Book Review
Someone to Run With
‘Brings together the differing aspects of his writing in a book that unites social realism and dizzy teenage romance … This is a book about feelings, about highs and lows, chemical, emotional, religious’ Daily Telegraph
Assaf has reluctantly taken a dull summer job working for the City Sanitation Department. But the days take a strange turn when he is ordered to find out who owns a distressed stray Labrador and ask them to pay a fine. Across the city, the dog’s lonely owner, Tamar, is preparing her own mission - to rescue a young drug addict caught up in Jerusalem’s dangerous underworld. As Assaf searches the streets of Jerusalem for Tamar, his life is about to irreversibly change. All he can do is hold onto the rope around the dog’s neck as together they start to run…
Death as a Way of Life Page 16