Benvenisti On Israel’s Elusive Peace

 

By

Gidon D. Remba

 

Published in the Chicago Jewish News, December 1997

 

November 28, 2002 Preface:  This article, which describes Meron Benvenisti’s view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, is in many ways even more relevant today than it was when published five years ago.  While I differ with Benvenisti’s bi-national prescription—he has long believed a two-state solution impossible—and with other of Benvenisti’s judgments, many of his insights into the struggle for peace remain invaluable.   (GDR)

 

 

Why does peace seem so elusive between Israel and the Palestinians?, asked Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem’s former Deputy Mayor, speaking at Chicago's Loop Synagogue on November 2nd.  He is also the celebrated author of many books on Jerusalem, Israel and the Arabs, including “Intimate Enemies:  Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land,” and most recently “City of Stone:  The Hidden History of Jerusalem,” and a columnist for the respected Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz.  Benvenisti urged American Jews to radically re-think their understanding of peace and conflict in the Middle East.  Unlike sovereign states which “go to war and then make peace, in a linear progression,” the struggle between Palestinians and Israel is an “inter-communal conflict” which exists in what Benvenisti calls “the twilight of peace and war.” For Benvenisti, there is no ultimate solution to such struggles—neither victors, nor vanquished.  They have more in common with the strife in Bosnia or Northern Ireland.   They are “undeclared wars, waged not by soldiers, but affecting the entire community.”  Peace between such contending groups will not be modeled on France and Germany, or Canada and the United States. 

 

Many expected diplomacy would usher in the peace of the biblical prophets, the messianic perfection of the “end of days,” says Benvenisti.  When the Oslo Accords were followed by renewed bouts of terrorism from Islamic extremists who oppose any compromise or coexistence with Israel, many people lost hope, becoming disillusioned with peace. In Benvenisti’s eyes, their disappointment stems from a case of heady, inflated expectations.  Oslo does not represent full peace, he maintains; it is only a stage on the way, a necessary pre-condition for a protracted reconciliation process. 

 

Benvenisti describes himself as a pessimist, yet unlike conservative pessimists who believe Israel must forever live by the sword in its relations with the Arabs, Benvenisti, in an ironic twist, draws a cautiously optimistic conclusion.   The solution, he insists, will be an evolutionary process of rapprochement between Palestinians and Israelis which will be “so undramatic as to be nearly imperceptible” on a day-to-day basis.  When we look back over time, however, we will clearly see improvements in relations between the two communities.  Americans, he observes, live in a solution-oriented culture in which everything seemingly has a fix.  But not every problem has a straightforward answer, like a cross-word puzzle.  He recommends we adjust our hopes, re-orienting them to a more sober course of piecemeal change, rooted in what he calls “the mud of reality.”  In this world-view, adversity, continued difficulties, do not result in daily disappointment. This progression towards peace will be unheroic, gradual, yet real as Jerusalem stone.  In Benvenisti’s prosaic perspective, we must think “not like messianists but like social workers.”  We should focus not on “solving the malaise of the world, but on what can be done tomorrow morning to make things a little bit better.” 

 

We must learn to live with our condition, advises Benvenisti, for it is not a problem to be solved by peace agreements.  We must change our focus to better “managing” an ongoing conflict, for it will be with us for a long time to come.  Practicing the art of peace-making is a matter of coping more effectively with what is, in Benvenisti’s view, “an organic, endemic condition.”  We may resolve problems associated with our condition, but we cannot readily escape the condition itself.  He suggests we think of the conflict with the metaphor of aging, rather than that of illness.  A disease may have a cure, a treatment, bringing the patient back to health.  Aging is a condition intrinsic to living; it has no cure.  It can be coped with using better or worse methods.  But the analogy breaks down at the end point—aging ultimately brings death in its wake, whereas Benvenisti holds that communal reconciliation is an eventual possibility.  Is the diplomatic peace process then futile?  Benvenisti is convinced it is needed because it gives people hope, providing a framework within which relations can be bettered between Palestinian Arabs and Israelis. 

 

The perfectionists claimed that Rabin’s handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn was a tragic, even treasonous, error, for the war goes on.  But Benvenisti argues that this perspective overlooks the momentous breakthrough which it symbolized:  both collective entities, Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, recognized each other for the first time after a century of denial.  The peace negotiations which were made possible by this mutual recognition transformed both parties from what Benvenisti calls a “demonic enemy” into a “legitimate enemy:”  now, he fights for his interests, I fight for mine.  Before, both opponents thought of the other as having no national rights, as agents of an unjust cause.  Oslo represented the beginning of a new phase in Arab-Israeli relations, one which most Jews applauded. 

 

But there are some Jews, in Israel and the United States, who maintain that peace is an impossibility, that the demonic enemy cannot be recast into a legitimate enemy.  And there are many Jews who believe we must “give peace a chance,” that compromise will not harm Israel, but rather strengthen it.  Among the Palestinians, observes Benvenisti, there is the same split.  There are those who think it is time to transcend the century of bitterness and make peace with the Zionists, while the opposing camp, mainly Islamists, insists that you cannot make peace with “those who took the land from you.”  Benvenisti thinks that both Israel and the Palestinians gave up on their maximalist fantasies at Oslo.  Israel, by agreeing to withdraw its military forces from portions of the West Bank, relinquished the dream of a “Greater Israel” encompassing the whole Land of Israel.  The Palestinians, in turn, gave up on the refugees outside Palestine, on their reveries of conquest and return, for Oslo will not truly address their situation, predicts Benvenisti.  

 

Both Palestinians and Israelis fantasize about “ultimate solutions” to their hundred years’ war:  some imagine perfect peace, others expulsion.  Both sides sometimes wished, in their heart of hearts, that the other would simply disappear, says Benvenisti.  Of physical expulsion, he observes:  “This is a dream the Arabs dream about us, and a few of us dream about them.”  Some dream of “conceptual expulsion”—they, the Palestinians, are people, but not a nation; the Palestinians, for their part, imagined Jews were a religious group, not a nation.  

 

The inter-state conflicts between Israel and the Arab states have yielded readily to diplomatic formulas—Egypt and Jordan first, Syria and Lebanon next—because “sovereign states reach decisions based on concrete, pragmatic considerations, in which ideology plays a secondary role,” notes Benvenisti.  “The conflict between Jews and Arabs is now limited to two groups, two peoples, who call the land west of the Jordan River homeland,” he avers, and “we share the land with them.”  He holds that while enmity will long remain between Palestinians and Israelis, it need not forever express itself in violence.  The enmity will continue in the form of a “low-intensity conflict,” as ethnic friction, but can, asserts Benvenisti, be channeled into political forms.

 

Though he passionately believes more pacific relations can evolve between Palestinians and Israelis, Benvenisti thinks the Oslo Accords rest, nonetheless, on a faulty premise.  The idea of Oslo is to separate the two peoples, “a policy which has limitations because both communities inhabit the same land.”  A “surgical solution”—what was once called “the partition of Palestine”—is impossible, argues Benvenisti.  He is of the opinion that all attempts to neatly divide “Western Palestine”—whether the Allon Plan, Netanyahu’s Allon-Plus Plan, or Labor’s more ambitious blue-print—are doomed to fail.   Surgical approaches, whether expulsion or separation, are “solution-oriented.”  They attempt to divide the indivisible, separate the inseparable.  The Temple Mount and the Kotel  (Western Wall), he offers, cannot be separated by a border.  Because the Temple Mount, sacred to both Moslems and Jews, houses two mosques, Israel has honored its continued Moslem religious administration since 1967, while the Kotel serves as a synagogue and is under Jewish rabbinic authority.  Yet neither we nor the Arabs want Jerusalem divided, he observes.  At the same time, forcing our way into Arab neighborhoods will only ignite the powder-keg, causing new explosions, warns Benvenisti. 

 

One questioner asked whether a Palestinian entity could join with Jordan in a federation, on the theory that “Jordan is Palestine.”  King Hussein, Benvenisti assured his audience, does not want the West Bank back.  Another criticized Hussein for allowing Hamas’ political wing to operate in Jordan.  “Hussein controls the Palestinians on his side of the border, we control the Palestinians on our side,” responds Benvenisti.  “King Hussein protects Israeli security,” he continues.  To suggest a policy which undermines him, fueling confrontation between Jordanian Islamic groups and the King, only sabotages Israel’s own security.  A final questioner, who said he survived the 1929 Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron, pointed out that in some of the peace agreements between Israel and the Arabs the Arabic term “salaam” is used, as opposed to “sulkh,” which connotes permanent reconciliation and forgiveness.  Benvenisti replied that the intent of this critic is to arouse the public with the feeling that the Arabs don’t want peace, the better to encourage us to fight another war with them.  “If the Arabs don’t want peace, what do we do?,” Benvenisti asked rhetorically.  “Wage another war?  There is no war that will resolve the conflict.  Lebanon, Afghanistan and Vietnam showed there are limits to state power”—limits not only to Israel, but even to great powers like the United States and the former Soviet Union.  There is no alternative but to press on with the work of learning to live together, despite recurring setbacks and provocations from both sides, he implored his listeners in his basso profundo, sounding every bit the latter-day prophet from Jerusalem.