by

Ami Isseroff

Israeli independence day is an occasion of great celebration for Israeli Jews, and a day of mourning for Palestinian Arabs. It is an opportune time to look at Israeli-Palestinian history, and to try to understand where we are and where we are going.

Like many countries born in the last hundred years, Israel was fashioned and gestated in conflict, but the conflict did not end on Independence day. Israel was born in war, and has grown in war. Memorial Day is held one day before Independence Day, War and Nationhood, one and inseparable. Palestinian nationalism was fashioned in the same conflict and the same wars, so Palestine and Israel are one and inseparable too.

Each side has evolved their own self-justifying history, a chronicle of horrors committed by the other side, that omits the acts of their own that brought about those horrors. From each half of the history, one gains no understanding. When we put them together, the dialectic that formed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes clear. Each turn of the wheel of violence from either side precipitated a corresponding reaction from the other side. We are like Siamese twins - twins who hate each other. We have built a peculiar kind of hell for each other.

Israel was the gift of the Palestinian and Arab extremists. All that Israel has, Israel owes to them. If they had not pressured Great Britain to choke off Jewish immigration when the Holocaust was imminent, there would have been no international support for an Israeli state. If the Arab countries and the Palestinians had not defied the UN partition resolution, there would have been no war in 1948 and no nakba. Israel would have been even tinier than it is today, with a large Arab population, and might never have been an attractive and viable Jewish homeland. If Gamal Nasser had not instigated a war in 1967, Israel would not have conquered the West Bank and Gaza.

The achievement of a homeland is the centerpiece of modern Zionism. The visible and tangible fruits of achievement are the cities, the industries, the farms, the forests the schools, the symphony orchestras and museums, the society that could absorb a million immigrants from the Soviet Union in a place that was once virtually a desert.

Palestinian extremism was in large part the product of Zionist insensitivity. In "One Palestine, Complete," Tom Segev chronicles, in part, the conscious efforts of Zionists to build a segregated society, to exclude Arabs not only from work in Jewish industry, but from integrated education and cultural endeavors. The sentiment was mutual. Palestinian society grew, in part, as a mirror image of its Siamese twin. When Israelis found a home and pride, Palestinians lost their home and dignity. The loss of a homeland is the centerpiece of modern Palestinian existence. The refugee camps, the loss of homeland and dignity are at the heart of Palestinian Arab national identity.

The pattern was broken for a brief time beginning in 1993, or so it seemed. For the first time in nearly a hundred years, good sense, mutual respect and constructive approaches seemed to replace lunacy and hatred in Israeli-Palestinian relations. But as the 'Peace Process' evolved, it became increasingly evident that the patients were not cured. In the manner of experienced lunatics, each twin was using the therapy of the peace process to advance its own ends. In this case, to make a 'peace' that would destroy the other side, and allow them to achieve, respectively, Arab Palestine from the river to the sea, or Israeli domination and control of the major part of the West Bank, and of the lives and destinies of the Palestinians.

Each side played its own game, violating the letter and the spirit of the agreements. The Israelis built settlements and destroyed Palestinian homes and olive groves, planning ways to keep larger and larger chunks of the Palestinian territory taken in 1967. The Palestinians taught hate in their schools and summer camps. They trained soldiers, collected illegal arms, encouraged terrorist organizations. Palestinian leaders called for holy wars and expressed admiration for suicide bombers. The Palestinians named a square in honor of Yihyeh Ayash, a terrorist who aimed to destroy the peace process. An Israeli fanatic, Baruch Goldstein, committed mass murder in the tomb of the patriarchs. Israeli authorities did virtually nothing to stop the repugnant cult of adulation that grew around his person and his grave. As always, the extremists of either side took care to help each other out in time of need. Timely Palestinian bombings helped elect Benjamin Nethanyahu and stall the peace process for three years. Israeli land confiscations and house demolitions helped keep alive the spirit of hate among Palestinians.

The Palestinians had gotten nothing but disaster and woe in the long period of violence that began in 1920. In eight years of relative peace and quiet, they had achieved their first modest gains, taken the first steps on the road to nationhood. Only madness could have caused them to return to violence in September 2000.

The violence was a signal that the madness was no longer in remission. It elicited the expected, the desired Israeli response. For the Israelis too have learned nothing in 80 years. Conquests and bombing other people and shooting at them are not the way to bring peace.

The dialectic of hell had been renewed in earnest. The extremists, who may have feared for a short time that the peace process would leave them unemployed, could breath easy. The Israeli land speculators and Yeshiva-in-the-West-Bank promoters, and the heads of the Islamic Jihad Holy Radical Socialist Humanitarian Suicide and Murder Squads have work aplenty.

If an agreement was difficult in September, it is impossible now. The Israelis will not again make an offer as generous as that proposed by Ehud Barak, as it would never pass a referendum now. It is not likely that any Israeli government would begin negotiations at the point that they left off. On the other hand, the Palestinians would never be able to accept an offer that was not better than the one made by Ehud Barak, since it would be an admission that the Intifadeh was a waste of lives and an error. So the Palestinians are demanding complete withdrawal and return of the refugees, and the Israelis are touting an "interim" plan that would leave most of the land of the West Bank in Israeli hands. It would be "temporary." After all, everything in life is temporary. The First Temple lasted for only a few hundred years, the Roman Empire, at the longest count, lasted less than two millennia, as did the Jewish exile. So this too, would be temporary.

Each side has put forward impossible negotiating positions. Each day that the violence continues is a victory for the bad guys and a perpetuation of the hell that has been with us for nearly a hundred years. There is no diplomatic or political formula that will put an end to the madness. It did not begin with the Israeli conquest of 'the territories' in 1967, and it will not end just by withdrawal from those territories. It did not begin with the 1948 war either, and would not be ended by return of the refugees.

Peace must begin with the recognition that there is no other way to end the hell then to make peace. There will be no Israel and no Zionism without peace, and no Palestine either. If both sides understand this, the "peace process" can begin in earnest. Peace must become national priority number 1 for both sides. In a hundred years, there will either be two states celebrating independence on this day, or none.

Ami Isseroff

Rehovot,

Israel