The Pains of Peace 

The New Year brings no promise to Israelis or Palestinians, except the promise that what was, the deadly reality that has ruled out lives, must be. To outsiders, it seems simple. Quiet can be restored in Israel and Palestine, and eventually peace, by following the recommendations of the Mitchell Commission Report. The Palestinians will cease the violence and the accumulation of arms, the Israelis will stop the reprisals and the building of settlements, and both sides will sit down and talk about dividing the country and forming a Palestinian state in the "occupied territories."

What seems simple in the outside world, is unattainable here. There cannot be seven days without an incident on the Palestinian side, as there cannot be seven days without a provocation on the Israeli side.

In the normal world, peace, compromise, and religious freedom are considered positive goals. Not here. In the Middle East, peace, compromise and religious freedom are evil and threatening ideas introduced by outsiders trying to destroy our way of life.

Who will dare to say that peace is good? A pacifist billboard advertisement campaign in Israel claims timidly that the pains of peace are better than the horrors of war. Nobody, on either side, talks about the advantages of peace any more. A Palestinian who speaks out for compromise on the refugee issue is branded as a traitor. An Israeli who advocates negotiations is considered a coward.

When the Oslo agreements were signed, western politicians tried to show that the peace process is not a zero-sum game. Everyone would gain from peace. The advantages to an outsider are clear: no more violence, no more deaths, no more fear, no more kids raised in hate, prosperity for everyone. That was the model.

That model does not work here. It could only work if ending violence and prosperity are priority national goals. But Israelis and Palestinians have other national goals: revenge, expanding territorial conquests, destroying the other side, capturing holy rocks. The right to dream of future conquests is more important than the enjoyment of present peace. Chief among all those goals, is the continuation of the conflict itself. No wonder there can be no resolution.

Palestinian and Israeli leaderships long ago came to the conclusion that peace would put them out of business, because no peace could be concluded that was consistent with national goals. The supreme goal is perpetuation of the conflict. Any solution that may be acceptable to the other side, is therefore unacceptable. Any loyal Israeli Jew considers that the right to settle in Ma'aleh Edumim or Efrat or Hebron is more important than the right to live in peace. Any loyal Palestinian Arab considers that the "Right of Return" of refugees is more important than the right of those refugees to live in a reality free of want and to build a future for their children. The right of the Jews to hold sovereignty over the temple mount and not build a temple there is more holy than life in Israeli society. The right of Palestinians to dream about liberating the "occupied territories" in Haifa and Tel Aviv is more important than the right to live peaceably in Nablus and Ramallah. Peace is considered painful in itself. Being a Shahid, a martyr, is a great honor. Wallowing in the self-righteousness of being victims of terror or victims of Israeli oppressions is a precious right that will not be given up so easily. Waging war has become part of the self-identity of both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Camp David negotiations were doomed from the start. The Israeli public could never agree to any arrangement that allowed an actual Palestinian state rather than a collection of Bantustans, because there was a danger that Palestinians could agree to it, a danger of peace that would entail "painful compromises." The Palestinians could never agree to any compromise that allowed Israel to remain intact over the long run, because there was a danger that the Israelis would agree to it. The working assumption of each side is that the other side is negotiating in bad faith, attempting to gain a better position for the next stage of the conflict, rather than attempting to make peace. This is reinforced, on each side, by the knowledge that they themselves are negotiating in bad faith.

Faced with outside pressure to make peace, to give up the dream of destroying Israel, the Palestinians responded with the Intifadeh. The Israeli public, at first shocked, rapidly adapted. We became apathetic both to suicide bombers and to killing of innocent Palestinians. We too realized the convenience of the Intifadeh, which obviates the necessity to make "painful sacrifices" such as giving up the Jewish settlement in Hebron. The violence has become an asset for both Palestinians and Israelis, used to resist the pressure of the United States and the EU to bring about the "pains" of peace.

The magic seven days of quiet now sought may never happen, for they would lead to negotiations. The negotiations would have to produce "painful" compromises. Any government or leadership that proposed such "painful" compromises would be dismissed by a populace that wants "peace" only on their terms - total victory and final defeat of the enemy. This idea is engraved deeply in the national programs and individual identities of both sides. In some sense, there can be no gain from peace, because the struggle is by definition a zero-sum game.

The non-progress of the peace process is not the result of a good plan being ruined by coincidental violence and errors. It is the result of systematic blocking of the prospect of peace, that is anathema to both participants.

Occasionally, the voice of reason is heard - by mistake, on one side or the other. Sari Nusseibeh called on Palestinians to give up the "Right of Return" - the insistence that Palestinians have the right to flood Israel with four or five million refugees - in return for peace and a Palestinian state. Israeli right-wing sources hastened to find "proof "that Nusseibeh was in fact a dangerous war monger rather than an advocate of compromise. Nothing is more dangerous for the other side than moderate voices. They need not have bothered. Nusseibeh's call fell on deaf ears among Palestinians. Israeli President Katzav wanted to go to Ramallah and propose an armistice. This very dangerous idea might have led to negotiations, and was therefore shot down very quickly both by Israeli PM Sharon and the supposedly dovish Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres.

Negotiations are necessary, to satisfy the whims of the US and the European Union. But each attempt of negotiations must be accompanied by measures that ensure their failure: assassinations of Palestinian leaders, assassinations of Israeli leaders, suicide bombs, boatloads of illegal armaments. None of these are "coincidental." Any means justifies the ends of preventing peace. Each side is willing to pursue any peace negotiation idea, as long as it is guaranteed not to work. The Palestinians are willing to arrest any advocates of violence, as long as they do not interfere with the production of violence itself. The Israelis are willing to take any measures to alleviate the suffering of civilians, as long as they give Israel free reign to continue building settlements and maintain sufficient provocation to ensure Palestinian violence.

The red lines of each side are always set just beyond the red lines of the other side, to ensure perpetuation of the conflict. The West Wall of the temple (the Wailing Wall) became important to Palestinians because they knew that the Israelis could never give it up. Keeping Yasser Arafat out of Bethlehem became an important issue for the Israeli government, because they knew it would be unacceptable to the Palestinians.

The conflict defines who we are and how we think. It has shaped our national institutions and made us who we are. Ending the conflict means ending life as we know it, so the conflict must go on. Therefore, no solution that ends the conflict can ever be acceptable. The biggest pain of peace for Israelis and Palestinians would not be giving up undefendable land gains and imaginary rights, but the agony of changing our national identities.

Ami Isseroff

Rehovot, Israel

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