Even before the shooting it was clear that the century-old conflict between Arabs ann Israelis, particularly these last 30 years of occupation, had created deep reserves of violence in both our societies. It’s not the kind of violence that can be dissipated by partial peace agreements, and gradualism hasn’t bred acceptance so much as anger: the massacre of Arab worshipers in a Hebron mosque, the slaughter of Israelis by suicide bombers. And now the murder of Israel’s national hero.
As Israelis search their souls, it’s reasonable to hope their view of themselves, their past, their goals will become more realistic. There was a tendency to see Palestinians, always, as the source of trouble. Settlers were a problem; the right was a problem. But somehow they were problems no one could solve, or would. The Palestinians had to bear the brunt of their activities, and make concessions that would allow their incitements to continue. That could be changing now.
We Palestinians have to be aware of our own repressed violence, too. A strong, democratic process is needed for a peaceful transfer of authority in the Palestinian territories, and also for our leaders to shape the productive society of the future. Without that democracy, Palestinians will be unable to wage the battle of peace.
King Hussein, the Arab who mourned Rabin’s death the most, has long been Israel’s preferred partner in peace, and stands to gain the most. Acting Prime Minister Peres has advocated plans in the past that would join Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian National Authority in a trilateral agreement on West Bank security arrangements. In the past, the Palestinians have acted like spectators to the warm courtship of the Israelis and the king, as if their only choices are to support “the Jordanian option” as they define it, or to oppose it. Yet they’ve already accepted the idea of confederation, if they get statehood first. They would be wise to embark on their own dialogue with the king. Yes, he has a lot to gain. Yes, some of what he gets will be at the Palestinians’ expense. But that’s the reality.
The Israeli leadership needs to stop trying to please all Israelis. But Arafat has acted as if he needed to please no one but himself and his close advisers. He needs to bring the Palestinian people into the process along with him. These steps won’t guarantee that no more violence will erupt. But without them, more deaths, more tragedies are inevitable.
MARWAN BISHARA is director of the Jerusalem Council on International Relations. and spiritual disaster, corrupting and brutalizing. Ending it, he said, “will be our salvation.”
That is one vision of Israel’s future–optimistic, tolerant and driven, Peres believes, by the momentum of history itself. There is another, which takes a darker view of progress. It spans a spectrum that begins with Israelis who have no philosophical objections to a deal with the Palestinians but want to hold on to the West Bank for military reasons. It includes families who settled in the West Bank for the cheap housing, and who suspect that at some point in the future their presence will become a chip for the government to bargain away. And it stretches to the fanatical Jewish chauvinists who want to expel the Arabs from the land they call Judea and Samaria–a territory that, depending on how you read the Bible, could stretch past the Jordan as far as the Euphrates. Says Sternhell: “The minimum the religious Zionists can live with is the West Bank.”
AND THE FANATICS’ ambitions are unquenchable because-unlike almost any other irredentist movement in modern history-they are not based on strategic necessity, on trying to control natural resources or even conventional nostalgia for a lost homeland. (From Biblical times until this generation, relatively few Jews have lived on the West Bank; the immediate ancestors of most of the settlers, needless to say, lived for centuries in Europe.) The extremists are motivated by a Biblical imperative, to redeem the land of Israel for the Jews and bring about the coming of the Messiah. “The motives of Gush Emunim [a radical settlers’ group] . . . were basically Messianic,” says Shulamith Hareven, an Israeli author and peace advocate. “They believed they were living the beginning of redemption. The dichotomy in Israel today is between the Messiah and the Knesset.”
The extremists are driven, also, by the same fundamentalist impulses that are at work almost everywhere in the world today, from California to Tehran. Many of them seem to be from that hotbed of modernity and assimilation, the northeastern United States. “There is a spiritual holocaust happening here,” says Lenny Goldberg, who left Queens, N.Y., to settle in Kfar Tapuah on the West Bank. “It’s a cultural war. The battle is over whether we’ll have a Hebrew nation or a Jewish Times Square. I left that garbage behind in America.” Although none of the first group of Israelis arrested in the Rabin plot was from the United States, American Jews have been active in extremist groups in both countries. Many Americans may have been shocked to hear of Jews dancing in the streets of Brooklyn at the news of Rabin’s assassination, but not those involved in the peace movement. In 1994 bombs were found outside the New York offices of two organizations promoting reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, along with notes announcing that the Jewish “civil war has begun” against liberals. (There have been no arrests.)
Two Jewish groups, both claiming to follow the teachings of the radical Zionist Rabbi Meir Kahane (who was assassinated himself in 1990), are suspected of harboring terrorist tendencies. Both were on a list of potential terrorist threats to the “Middle East peace process” whose assets in the United States were frozen by presidential order this year, although they lost only a few hundred dollars in the bank, compared with some $750,000 belonging to the Islamic organizations on the list. Israelis take the threat from America so seriously that since the assassination some officials have suggested trying to keep them out by modifying one of Israel’s most sacred principles, the Law of Return, which guarantees that any Jew can always settle in Israel.
Of course, most Americans in Israel aren’t extremists, most Orthodox Jews aren’t fanatics, and in a nation of 5.5 million, the number of “hard-core activists” is probably no more than 50, according to Ehud Sprinzak, Israel’s leading expert on the radical right at Hebrew University. But they are inspired by the words of others and draw strength from the sympathy of thousands more. “Every rabbi who did not stand up and say ‘This is a perversion of Judaism’ was aiding and abetting it,” says the American Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. There are, says liberal Israeli novelist Meir Shalev, “two camps in this country: one of peace, of compromise, of hope; the other of extremism, violence and hate. In both camps there are religious and secular people, young and old, Ashkenazim and Sephardim . . . But in only one of these camps are there murderers.” So it would seem-at least until the next turn of events–and the tragedy is, it is the camp with the murderers that believes it is acting on the will of God. “God protect us,” says Foxman, “from anyone who says that God told him to do something.”
