Jewish Ethics and the Palestinian-Israeli Problem

 

As Published in Tikkun:  A Bi-Monthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society

July-August 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4

 

By

Gidon D. Remba

 

“God told Moses to make war on Sihon (Deut. 2:24), but Israel did not make war: they sent messengers of peace (Deut 2:26).   God said, ‘I ordered you to make war, but you made overtures of peace.’  ‘There is no peace,’ says the Lord, ‘for the wicked.’ (Isa. 48:22).  How great, then, must be the words of peace, if Israel disobeyed God for peace’s sake, and yet God was not wrath with them.” (Tanhuma B., Debarim, 3b)

 

“Great is peace, as the whole Torah was given in order to promote peace in the world, as is written:  ‘Her ways are the ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.’ ”  Maimonides, Mishneh Torah

 

 

Under the leadership of Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Government of Israel relinquished most of Hebron to Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, agreeing to withdraw from other portions of the West Bank in stages by mid-1998, and to embark on the Oslo Accord’s plan for negotiations over a final resolution to borders, Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.  No sooner had Netanyahu taken a first step towards pragmatism—dealing a death blow to messianic Greater Israel ideology—did he paint the dismal tableau of a final settlement:  pre-empting, prior to negotiating, all Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem with the Har Homa fait accompli, serving up so meager a West Bank withdrawal that Palestinian aspirations for statehood seemed all but emasculated.  Re-opening in Pandora’s Box a reprise of the intifadah, thus did the apostle of “peace with security” bring Israel neither peace nor security.  Yet the Netanyahu Government’s reluctant embrace of the Oslo process has evoked vociferous criticism from the Israeli and American Jewish Right.  Is the political Right morally right?  What does an ethically defensible Jewish position require of us?

 

The Palestinian-Israeli problem poses a profound challenge to our moral sensibilities as Jews, Zionists and human beings.  Should Israel retain military control over most or all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its two million Palestinian Arabs, in the name of security or theology, as the Right insists?  Or should Israel promote Palestinian autonomy, even statehood in some form, as the Israeli and American Jewish “peace camp”—and a clear majority of the Knesset and Israeli public—maintains?   Ought the Jewish marriage to Jerusalem—historical, religious, emotional, political—accommodate Palestinian human realities, symbols and hopes?   Are we, as Jews, obliged to pursue reconciliation and peaceful co-existence based on mutual recognition of rights to national self-determination?   Must we betray our Judaism—as some conservative critics contend—in order to embrace Western Enlightenment values of liberal democracy and respect for human rights?  Jewish ethics must guide us in deciding among these competing claims and commitments.

Outline for a Jewish Ethics

The concept of equality owes its origin, in large measure, to the very genesis of Western moral thinking in the Hebrew Bible, in the doctrine known in Hebrew  as “b’tselem elokim”:  Human beings are created in the image or likeness of God (Genesis 5:1).   Coupled with this is another principle, which the  rabbis of the Talmud held could be derived from that of humanity's Divine creation:   You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18).  For if all human beings are created by God, then we are commanded to love all men and women no differently than ourselves.  The idea of the kinship of humanity expresses this dual truth.  Rabbi Hillel summed up the Torah in this supreme commandment:  “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor:  that is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” (Tractate Shabbat 31a)   The Love of Neighbor Principle has become known as “The Golden Rule.”  Some critics allege that this principle in the Torah strictly refers only to one's own countrymen, so that a Jew’s neighbors in a Jewish state would be his fellow Jews.  The text itself  gives  the  lie to this  thesis,  a  scant fifteen  verses later: (Lev. 9: 30 - 34): “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him.  The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”  The Love of Neighbor Principle in the Torah has universal form, encompassing Jew and non-Jew alike.  To those who would cite a contrary anti-humanitarian reading of Jewish ethics from biblical or rabbinic sources, we must recall the interpretive principle urged by the medieval Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Saadia Gaon:  there can be only one truth.  If a given reading of Scripture conflicts with the results of rational reflection, it must be understood in such way as to harmonize with reason.   We know, through human reason, that all human beings have—deserve to be treated in accordance with—equal rights to life and liberty.  By this logic we can conclude that any scriptural reference which appears to conflict with what we know to be a moral truth must be read so as to accord with it.  We must give primacy in our hierarchy of Jewish values to traditions which reflect the moral truths of equality and human rights.

The Love of Neighbor Principle, in its original universality, is pregnant with implications for an ethical system, based on human reason, whose principles every person—atheist or theist, Jew, Moslem or Christian—must follow.  Why must one follow the rules of such an ethics?  Because every moral judgment or claim I make for myself or my own group, every right I arrogate to myself, implicitly contains a rule which forces me to apply my values in a universal way.   If I have rights to life and liberty in virtue of my worth as a being created by God—or because I am capable of rational reflection and free autonomous action—so then does any being who has this quality, on the very same grounds.  While every rule has exceptions, these must be general, applicable indiscriminately to anyone who fits the bill.  Unless the scope of my claims for myself and my own group can be consistently generalized to all similarly situated persons, I cannot successfully justify any benefit I hope to appropriate for myself and my own circle.  The moral point of view is defined by this root idea, originating in the Hebrew Bible, of the equal worth of all persons.  In enjoining me to love my neighbor as myself, the Torah is propounding the radical view that any “other” is worthy of equal love and respect as “I”.  I can no longer give preference to myself (or my own nation or group) in virtue of the immediate and profound experience I have of my own (or my people’s) needs and desires, in contrast to the more remote inferential knowledge I have of others’ “foreign” feelings and needs.  To adopt this impartial view about my own needs—or those of my people—is to take a moral stance toward them.  The failure to do so represents what Amos Oz has called “moral autism.” 

Jewish Ethics and the Palestinian-Israeli Problem

Since the Six Day War of 1967, many religious nationalists in Israel and America have placed the sanctity of the Land of Israel above the moral imperative to seek and make peace with our Arab neighbors.  The belief has taken root that the capture of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) by the Israel Defense Forces was a divinely sanctioned act which must not be reversed for practical reasons (e.g., security, non-belligerence treaties), or for any other religious value (e.g., peace, moral relations between Israel and other nations) as it is a fulfillment of the divine will and a harbinger of the messianic era.  In this messianic idea, the world is redeemed not through acts of loving-kindness or righteousness, nor through lives immersed in the totality of the  commandments, as the Torah and prophets urged on the people of Israel, but through the apocalyptic exercise of Jewish national military power and dominion over the land.  By contrast, many traditional Jews hold that righteousness—tsedek—is the primary value in Judaism.  It behooves the religious zealots to recall another, more fundamental, biblical requirement:  “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live and occupy the land . . .”   (Deut. 16:20).  Justice, in man’s relation to man—Jew or non-Jew, individual or nation—is viewed in traditional Judaism as the condition of the Jewish people’s living in the land of Israel:  “You shall faithfully observe all My laws and all My regulations, lest the land to which I bring you to settle in spew you out.” (Lev. 20:22)   We make the land holy only by living a holy life, guided by a recognition that all people are “carriers of divinity.”  At the heart of the Jewish messianic idea is a belief in the renewability of the human spirit, in the possibility of a world governed by the spirit of God where, in the words of Rabbi David Hartman, “violence and bloodshed . . . dehumanization and humiliation no longer deface the divine image in human beings.”  The Talmud teaches:  “The whole of the Torah  . . . is for the purpose of promoting peace.”  (Gittin, 59b)

 

It is ironic that such American Jewish critics of the peace process as Norman Podhoretz of Commentary magazine characterizes efforts at reconciliation with the Palestinians as “so premature that they could be thought of as a secular version of the sin known to Judaism as ‘forcing the end.’”  “Forcing the end” refers to the following of “false messiahs,” attempts by Jews to bring about the messianic redemption of the world through improper means:  what could be a better description of the settlers in their messianic zeal to re-invent the Jewish state in the graven image of Greater Land of Israel geo-theology?  And who in our time are better deemed “false messiahs” than the rabbinic leaders of the settler movement, in their abandonment of Judaism’s moral core and prophetic vision of peace and justice?

 

The commandments “You shall love the stranger as yourself” and “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:20) illuminate our moral responsibilities towards the Palestinians who live under Jewish rule.  To rule, however benevolently, over nearly two million Palestinian Arabs who wish their own civil and political autonomy is to commit an oppressive act.  For to deny the right to freedom and self-determination of another individual or people is surely to wrong and oppress them.

 

1)     The Jewish people claim a right to political self-determination in our own territory.

2)     This claim is based on our sharing a culture, history, language, geographic proximity (in Israel), and on our religious and cultural sense of peoplehood,  heightened by our experience of persecution as a people.

3)     The Palestinian Arabs share a common culture, history, language and geographic proximity, and maintain a cultural sense of peoplehood.  That sense is also magnified by their tragic experience as refugees.

4)     We saw that a rational Jewish ethics, based on the Love of Neighbor Principle,  implies that for an action or belief to be genuinely moral, we must be able to generalize its underlying principles to all other relevantly similar people:  if I have a right to x because of quality y,  so does anyone else have a right to x if they too possess quality y.

5)     The Palestinian Arabs therefore too have a right to political self-determination in their own geography.

6)     Both peoples, Palestinian Arab and Jewish, have this right to national autonomy and statehood.  One cannot be a consistent Zionist without also being committed to Palestinian Arab political rights.

 

Now the Right may protest:  “We do not justify our national rights to sovereignty over the Land of Israel on the basis of common culture or language or a sense of peoplehood.  Our claim rests on God’s gift of the Land to the Jewish people.  Hence we do not have to generalize from your assumptions.”  As we have seen, this maneuver has already been blocked:  the biblical justification for Zionist national claims in Eretz Yisrael must be tempered  by the countervailing Jewish values of peace, justice and love of neighbor.   The Jewish state may exercise its historical connection to the Land only to the extent that it does not conflict with these higher Jewish moral values.  This may mean relinquishing sovereignty over some areas of biblical significance—including Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem (a position the Labor party is now considering, according to the May 1 edition of the Jerusalem Report).  Whether it chooses the religious or secular universe of discourse, the pretension—whether Palestinian or Jewish—to absolute hegemony over the land is checked. 

 

7)   For historical reasons, both peoples inhabit the same parcel of land:  Palestine-Israel.

8)     This creates two limitations on each people’s right to political autonomy and statehood:

·        The rights of each to autonomy are limited by the basic rights of the other.  Israel, for its part, cannot exercise its political autonomy by annexing the West Bank and Gaza, and its Palestinian inhabitants.

·        Palestinian political autonomy, in turn, is limited by Israel’s right to self-defense and security, which preclude certain activities from a Palestinian polity:  raising a large army, producing or importing heavy weapons, controlling Israel’s water resources or the airspace west of the Jordan River, importing millions of refugees.  “But everything else,” in the words of Netanyahu advisor David Bar-Ilan, “Israel neither wants to, nor can, interfere with. . .  There’s very little doubt that the Palestinian entity will call itself a state, and that the world will recognize it as such.” (The New York Times (NYT), 1/19/97)

 

Labor leader-in-waiting Ehud Barak has now lent his support to a new plank in the Labor Party’s platform which, for the first time, does not rule out the possibility of a demilitarized, limited-sovereignty Palestinian state.  Netanyahu may have unofficially acquiesced in such a state, but has sabotaged its viability by insisting that the Palestinians abandon their hope for the majority of the West Bank (Jerusalem Post (JP) interview, 5/3/97).   This is an invitation to dead-end negotiations, dealing the coup de grace to the peace process.  Nor does it square with the original Oslo bargain, which stipulated Israeli transfer of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, with the exception of Jerusalem, settlements and “specified military locations.”  Having been led to the well of Oslo by Labor expecting to drink of a more sumptuous solution, the Palestinians may well forestall agreement, destabilizing the situation until the Israeli electorate—disillusioned with Netanyahu’s lack of success, nauseous from another heaping helping of political and military instability, and the economic downturn it fuels via foreign investor skittishness and depressed tourism—turns Netanyahu out, to give Labor an opportunity to offer up a more thirst-quenching brew.   As Israel’s Chief of Military Intelligence has recently warned (Ha’aretz, 5/11/97), Netanyahu’s choice is clear:  revive the intifadah, or realize a final settlement with a Palestinian state in most of the West Bank and at least a symbolic foothold in Jerusalem, the original promise of Oslo.

 

Labor and Likud Knesset leaders have already agreed to a joint document calling for “an independent Palestinian entity,” forming the basis for a national consensus.  Few in Israel harbor the illusion that one can permit Palestinian political autonomy without an inevitable evolution into some form of Palestinian statehood.  During Labor’s reign, while in the Opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu himself predicated his rejection of the Oslo Accord and Palestinian autonomy on this very argument.  (See Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism, 1995, p. 104.)  Comments Mark Heller of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University:  Support in Israel for a Palestinian state “is now so conventional that any government that endorses it—especially  a Likud-led government—will enjoy the support of a working majority in public opinion.” (JP, 2/1/97)  The latest polls show 51% of the Israeli public accept it.  Judah the Pious, a medieval Jewish mystic, cautioned:  “On the Judgment Day, the Holy One, blessed be He, will call the nations to account for every violation of the command ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ of which they have been guilty in their dealings with one another.” This vision of justice and equality, of universal human rights, compels us, Israelis and Jews, to promote co-existence and mutual respect for political autonomy and self-determination for both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples.

 

Rejoinder to An American Jewish Conservative

 

Norman Podhoretz’s latest salvo in a long rhetorical battle against conciliation with the Arabs appears in his recent contribution to Commentary, (December 1996) “The Tragic Predicament of Benjamin Netanyahu.”  Podhoretz believes that Netanyahu’s “tragic predicament” lies in inheriting a peace process which is no longer reversible.  He is convinced this places Israel in “mortal danger,” for “this process [will] bring not peace but another major war.”   Why?  Because Podhoretz holds that Palestinians and Arabs alike still regard Israel as illegitimate, and remain “determined to rectify the injustice . . . by wiping the Jewish state off the map. . .  Guided by this perspective,” Podhoretz interprets “what looked like moves toward peace by the PLO not as a change of heart or mind but rather as a change of strategy.  Instead of relying on the old hope of destroying Israel in one fell military swoop, the Palestinians were now putting their faith in the ‘strategy of stages’ (also known as the ‘phased plan’).  It was a strategy that called for them to establish first a foothold, and then a state, on as much territory as they could get the Israelis to surrender, and finally to use it as a base for future terrorist or other military operations which, on one pretext or another, the whole Arab world would join in a mighty effort to achieve a final solution of its Israel problem.”

 

What is Podhoretz’s evidence for this spin on Palestinian intentions?  He finds it in the speeches of Arafat to his people.  But if we are to trust the rhetoric of leaders as a guide to their actions, Netanyahu would still be building new settlements in the West Bank, and holding steadfastly on to the Greater Land of Israel.   Both Arafat and Netanyahu engage in hard-line rhetoric as a fig-leaf for their actual practices, which zigzag from immoderate to moderate, but in any event never rise to the extravagance of their slogans.  Podhoretz reads political speeches much as fundamentalists read the Bible—with an overweening literalism.  He is insensible to the role of internal political rhetoric in neutralizing the opposition of those segments of Palestinian society which have not yet signed on to the peace process.   Seeing the world through ideological blinders, rather than through the lens of pragmatism, the Palestinian-Israeli problem seems intractable.

 

In the “ideological” perspective, a perfectionist standard is applied to judging the emerging relations between Israel and the Arabs.   Perfectionism expects absolute change on command, historical brakes that can stop on a dime; any flaws are considered sufficient for abandoning the project.  Podhoretz is quick to remind us of the cases in which Palestinian police killed Israelis during the protests over the opening of the Jerusalem tunnel entrance, construing this as evidence of pure Palestinian perfidy:  pack up the peace tent, the experiment has failed.  That in the majority of instances these very police protected the Israelis from harm goes unmentioned.  Nor do critics of Oslo trouble to acknowledge that cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli security services has—according to Israel’s own testimony—prevented numerous acts of terrorism.   Their analysis of the problem is flawed, for several reasons.  First, it fails to grasp that peace is a gradual, long-term process, to be built over one or more generations; it is not an instantaneous change.  Devoid of historical sense, Oslo’s critics discount the role of evolutionary progress in Arab-Israeli relations.  Genuine peace evolves through growing trust between peoples and governments.  Such growth may not be entirely linear, but its unmistakable forward thrust must never be overlooked.  Because we cannot create the full “warm peace” suddenly, in one giant step—eradicating with a stroke of the pen entrenched cultural antagonisms and prejudices—we should not in desperation declare the process a sham, disguising the true hostile intent of the other side.  The reality is more complex than either/or.  Hostile rhetoric, even sporadic extremist violence, will continue as we move along the path to peace.  That violent resistance to change cannot be magically excised from Arab or Israeli society overnight should come as no surprise.  Peace is not about falling in love at first handshake; only the naïve reproach the peace process for failing to convert the Arab masses into philo-Semites (or insist on such conversion as a precondition.)   There will always be a reason for Podhoretz and the Right not to compromise, not to reconcile with the other side.  Until the last radical Islamic state, the last extremist Muslim Palestinian faction, vanishes from the earth, Podhoretz is apt to fear peaceful co-existence as the portal to catastrophe.  Critics of the “cold” peace with Egypt (who generalize to Oslo) forget that, for all its shortcomings, it has inaugurated the longest period of non-belligerence in history—a quarter century—between Israel and the largest Arab state, saving countless Jewish lives.  It has freed the Jewish state from suffering a single major war of survival like those of 1948, 1967 and 1973.  Israel, I believe, stands at this same threshold today with the Palestinians.

 

Second, we must look more closely at the PLO’s failure to fully amend its Charter to remove the ultimate goal of a state in all of Palestine.  Having recognized “Israel’s right to exist in peace and security,” Arafat may be holding the amending of the Charter as a final bargaining chip in exchange for Israel’s acceptance of a limited-sovereignty Palestinian state.   At the same time, he may well not have sufficient support as yet in the Palestine National Council to amend the Charter.  When the Israeli Labor Party under Rabin and Peres, which devised the Oslo Accords, was voted out of office by the Israeli electorate in 1996, and replaced with a Likud Party which avowedly opposed Oslo, can we, in fairness, begrudge Arafat if he too still lacks sufficient support for this step?   Third, Podhoretz’s view of war suffers from a gratuitous, if dangerous, fatalism.  There is no outcome which would serve either to confirm or disconfirm his world-view.  If war is the inevitable result of an unabated Arab rejection of Israel, then war will ensue whether Israel pursues peace or continues subjugating the Palestinians under military occupation—so everything is permitted, as Dostoevsky lamented.   And so long as there is no war, Podhoretz can always insist that the appearance of peace is nothing but a masquerade, an artifice disguising the Procrustean bedrock of conflict which is about to bubble up.  In this way, the pursuit of peace becomes a Zen paradox, a Chinese finger puzzle—the first step can never be taken.   And the Sisyphean cycle of hate becomes a self-perpetuating prophecy, a whirlwind from which there is no escape.

 

If war or terrorism should occur during or after the peace process is consummated, Podhoretz will countenance no other explanation than that the Arabs intended it all along.  In fact, the true causal workings which foment violence are ignored—provocations by religious settlers, Hamas suicide bombers, a confidence-sabotaging Netanyahu government, a radical Arab state intent on stirring up the poisonous pot of pan-Islamic or pan-Arab unity.  Can extremists like Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran or Iraq attack Israel after a peace agreement is implemented with the Palestinians or even with the Arabs as a whole?  Of course.  Will this prove that the peace process was a chimera and that “the Arabs” never sought peace?   Of course not.  The outcome of such a war is bound to be favorably influenced for Israel by peaceful relations with Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians.   We already have seen indications of this in the first years after the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord when Israel fought Syria and the PLO in Lebanon—in an act dubbed by Begin as “a war of choice,” not necessary for self-defense—and Egypt refrained from attack.  Israel’s muscular economy, invigorated foreign investments and new trade and diplomatic relations with Arab, African and European nations have been widely attributed, in no small measure, to the Oslo process.  The exponential growth in Israel’s markets which Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement augurs can only strengthen the Jewish state as an economic and military power.  At the same time, the Bank of Israel governor has already warned that the deterioration of the peace process is responsible for a decline in foreign investment.

 

What, then, of the argument that territorial compromise and the emergence of a demilitarized Palestinian state threaten Israel’s security?  We must consider two radically different concepts of security:   The Right supports a narrow vision of Israel’s security under which the Jewish state is most secure if it has potent armed forces, and maximum territory, irrespective of the strategic political, economic and moral implications of this tack.   Supporters of the peace process embrace the broader, more justifiable concept under which Israel’s security is maximized not only by military strength but by developing more stable political relations with the Palestinians, which in turn attracts high levels of foreign investment and trade, at the same time transforming Israeli society from an ethically precarious position to one which is in harmony with its Jewish moral values.

 

What effect did the lethal cycle of intifadah have on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the vaunted protector of Israel’s security?  Would the morale and cohesiveness of its citizens’ army have been enhanced had it not lost the moral high ground during this uprising?  Indeed, Israel’s State Comptroller has now released a report calling attention to an alarming lack of combat readiness in the IDF’s reserves, a decline which began in 1989, at the intifadah’s zenith, when reserve units were involved in “security work” which distracted them from their primary mission of defending the state from major military attack.  Would so many Israelis have died, and even more been wounded, had Israel rescinded military administration of Arab towns in the West Bank and Gaza earlier, moving its forces to strategic defensive positions, as it is now doing?  Let us recall that the intifada did not end with a military solution, despite the extraordinary efforts of the IDF from 1987 to 1993.   It was ended by political solution:  the Oslo Accord.   Former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Shomron told the Knesset:  “There is no such thing as [militarily] eradicating the intifada because in its essence it expresses the struggle of nationalism.”   With the uprising and its attempted suppression a continuing source of vicious Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the potential for wider strife with other Arab states increased.  This led Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies to conclude that a demilitarized Palestinian state would provide Israel with greater overall security than the “unstable status quo.”  Along with other critics from the Right in Israel, Podhoretz urges the Jewish state to return to this very status quo—which he dubs “tolerable” and livable—or to stop the peace process in its tracks.  Likud Knesset Member Meir Sheetrit responds:  “The result of freezing the process would be a descent back to the conditions that existed at the beginning of 1992, when Israel was for all practical purposes at war with the Palestinians.”  Rabbi Moshe Bleicher of Hebron warns:  “I don’t see the process as irreversible.  The battle we face has not ended. . .  We’ll do our part, and the Almighty will do his.”  (NYT, 1/29/97)  Might the Jews of Hebron try to sabotage relations between Israel and the Palestinians there, provoking violence in the hope of drawing Israeli forces into re-occupying the city?  And if such an eventuality comes to pass, will Podhoretz cynically claim that this too proves the Arabs’ unremitting hostility toward Israel, and that peace, in his Orwellian doublespeak, equals war? 

 

During the late 1970’s, when I translated his Knesset speeches for the foreign press, no less a security hawk than then-Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan advocated that Israel unilaterally withdraw from Palestinian Arab population centers in the West Bank and Gaza, and institute civil and political autonomy.  Dayan did not seek Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist, or proof of benign Arab intentions, as a pre-condition for his plan.  Imagine, if you will, what an alternate history of Israel in the nineteen eighties and nineties would have looked like had Dayan’s advice been followed:  with no Israeli troops or military administration in Arab cities, the intifada might never have come to pass.  What impact might this have had on the level of rancor between Palestinians and Israelis?  Where might we be today in the process of reconciliation?   In just-published conversations from 1976, Dayan reveals that “the conquest of the Golan was a historical error, a result of lust for conquest and greediness for land by the farmers in the north; that most of the border clashes with Syria (‘more than 80%’) were caused by Israeli provocations; and that [Rabbi] Levinger's piratical settlement in Hebron was a ‘disaster.’” (as summarized in Ha’aretz, 5/4/97)  This revaluation of one of Israel’s secular orthodoxies and founding myths—that Israel must not withdraw from the Golan for the sake of peace lest innocent farmers be fired on again by the Syrians—does  not transform the Arab-Israel conflict into one between righteous Arabs and evil Israelis; the Arabs, including the Syrians, retain a wholesome share of responsibility for their own bellicose refusal to compromise with the Jewish state, and the blood and fire it has wrought.  It does demythologize the conflict from a metaphysically irreconcilable struggle between perennial, blameless Jewish victims and anti-Jewish genocidal Arabs, into a more prosaic battle over political power and land which may be amenable to resolution in the real world.

 

If we wait for Arab attitudes to change on their own, while permitting ourselves to act toward the Palestinians in whatever manner we choose—as  Podhoretz would when he urges Israel to preserve the status quo of the occupation—we  perpetuate the illusion that Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians has no effect on Arab behavior.  And we thereby risk prolonging the conflict, holding back the very change in attitude that Podhoretz claims to be awaiting.  The question responsible Jews should be asking is:  What policies will foster growth of the pragmatic Palestinian moderates over the radical Islamic rejectionists?  If Podhoretz or Netanyahu worry that after withdrawing from the West Bank, civil war will ensue and Hamas prevail, I would urge them to consider whether martial control and the intifada contributed to the growth—or decline—of Hamas and radical Islamic politics among Palestinians.  What is more likely to enhance the appeal of the radical Islamic message to Palestinians?  An ongoing Israeli military occupation in most or all of the West Bank, the continued shackling of Palestinian national dignity, with all that entails in violent protest, brutality and death on both sides?  Or viable Palestinian political independence, an end to Israeli military dominion, and the first fruits of coexistence and prosperity for both Palestinians and Israel?  Which vision will, in the end, corrode and which ennoble the soul of Israel, its true source of strength?

 

 

Gidon D. Remba served as Foreign Press Translator in the Israel Prime Minister’s Office during the Begin-Sadat era.   He is presently writing A Guide To the Morally Perplexed: Universal Ethics in a Jewish Key, from which this essay was condensed.