With our three guests — historians and political scientists, all three of whom have written numerous studies on Israel and Zionism — we will attempt to address first the past and then the present, a burning present, so true is it that the past is often used to help understand the present, just as the present often makes use of the past to legitimize itself. For in Israel as in the Arab countries, the weight of the past often defines present-day political attitudes.
I proposed to you that we speak of the term Zionism in the plural, hence that we speak of “Zionisms,” for what is striking, obviously, is this multiple, sometimes contradictory dimension. Under the sign “Zionism” one places, in fact, thinkers and bodies of thought, collective dimensions, that are very diverse. One may wonder what brings together a thinker of integral nationalism such as Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, ancestor of the Herut and of the Likud, and a Meir Yaari, mentor of Hashomer Hatzair and later of Mapam, the heart of Borochovist Marxist Zionism. Or again, what brings together the “mainstream” of the center-left, social-democratic Zionist movements and religious Zionism, or the “cultural” Zionism of Ahad Ha’am, or, finally, the particular Zionism of Martin Buber, at once religious, socialist, or communalist.
We see that there is here a very broad palette of political choices, and that they all have in common the wish to create a new Jew, a new man on a new land, or, to use Herzl’s formula, Altneuland, an old-new Land. But this man they want to create is not the same for all, nor are the means envisaged, any more than the structures imagined to receive the future immigrants. The vision of the future of this society, which was the Yishuv before being the State of Israel, is likewise different: there is the “iron wall” such as Jabotinsky calls for, a wall that must ensure the future of the Jewish populations of Palestine, for to him no acceptance of these populations by the Arabs is imaginable; there is the binational state imagined by Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, of Martin Buber, or by Mapam. Necessarily, the visions of Peace are, likewise, different, contradictory.
So let us go back several decades, after the Balfour Declaration, to the arrival of the Jewish immigrants, in the heart of Palestine where the Palestinian Arabs also live. It seems to me that it would be good to focus the light first on the great ideological tendencies of the “Zionisms,” for these tendencies have continued to exist and the current Israeli leaders often lay claim to these various tendencies. So, more precisely: before the creation of the State of Israel, how did the different Zionisms see the possibilities of peace with the Palestinian people and their Arab neighbors? Was peace then simply imaginable? And which peace?
Ilan Greilsammer — I think that from the beginnings of Zionism and up to today the Israelis — the pioneers and those who came to Israel later — have always been divided into two major tendencies. One of these tendencies thinks that if Israel, if the Jewish State and the Jews content themselves with a part of their aspirations, that is to say with a Jewish State that is restricted, moderate, perhaps even minimal, while respecting the other side, while granting it its rights, its State… in short, if we make concessions, if we make compromises, if we use conciliation with the side facing us, we will be able one day to arrive at an understanding with our environment, with the Arab world. And that one day, by the very fact of our tendency toward conciliation, the side facing us will recognize us and accept us. And it is this that we call the Israeli left in its different tendencies, which can range from the extreme position of the “we must give everything back and concede everything” style to the moderate left.
What you asked me to speak about is the other tendency. The other tendency, which has always existed, is that of those who say: “The Arabs will never accept us of their own free will. However many concessions we make, however much we content ourselves with the minimum of the minimum, the Arabs will never accept us; for a very simple reason, namely that they consider this land to be an Arab land, that it is a land of Islam, and that this land belongs to them, that it does not belong to the Jewish people. The Jews who have arrived are colonists, and consequently there is no reason why, even if there is an attitude of concessions, the side facing us would admit us and accept us.” The principal ideologue of this tendency, which is called the Israeli right, is Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, born in 1880, died in 1940, and who was a great intellectual. Obviously, when one speaks of the Israeli right and of great intellectuals, that seems strange, but the Israeli right has not always been Benjamin Netanyahu. In the case of Jabotinsky, he was truly a great writer, a great poet, an intellectual of the first rank, who reasoned in an extremely intelligent and logical way. He kept repeating that the Jewish left in Palestine held the Arabs in contempt. Here is what Jabotinsky said: “You think that because you are going to leave them pieces of Palestine, because you are going to leave them a rump State, that you are going to give them this State in the Occupied Territories (I paraphrase), you think that this is why they will accept. But if you did not hold them in contempt, you would have to recognize that they are authentic nationalists, and that as authentic nationalists they will never recognize this Jewish State that we want.”
And so Jabotinsky’s conclusion is that one must demonstrate the strength of Israel, what he called “the wall of steel,” that is to say a situation where the other side, the Arabs, come to the conclusion that the enemy cannot be destroyed, that it is there to stay. That there is nothing to be done. For Jabotinsky, the Arabs would manifest tendencies toward moderation and would end up accepting coexistence with a country indestructible by virtue of its military strength. Jabotinsky died in 1940 in New York. If he were reborn today, what would he say? He would probably say: “I was right.” If he found himself in the situation in which Israel finds itself, in a situation where it is confronted with a Palestinian movement that denies the existence of the State of Israel and even denies the agreements concluded between the Palestinians and the State of Israel, he would say: “That is exactly what I thought.” The criticism one might level against him is that he thought that the strength of Israel would bring about the moderation of the adversary, and in fact it has not brought about the moderation of the adversary, and the adversaries we have are harder and harder. I would like to add that there were tendencies even further to the right than Jabotinsky, very tempted by fascism. What was called the Alliance of Brigands, that is to say an extreme right that is the ancestor of today’s Israeli extreme right. They thought not only, like Jabotinsky, that one had to show one’s strength, but that one had to carry out aggressive actions, and that it was only through brutal actions, warlike actions, that one would obtain the regard of the other.
I would like to add that these two tendencies — that of conciliation and that which says that it is only through force that one will make oneself respected — are near-permanent tendencies of Israeli society, and probably also of the Jews who observe Israel from afar, and who divide between these two tendencies.
Izio Rosenman — Denis, would you like to speak about the other extremity of the political chessboard?
Denis Charbit — Instead of beginning by explaining how Martin Buber’s Brit Shalom current distinguishes itself, how it is diametrically opposed to that of Jabotinsky, I would like, somewhat paradoxically, to underscore what unites them. At the level of perceptions, of course, and not of conclusions. We will see how this identity of perceptions but not of conclusions has something current about it. The point in common between Jabotinsky and Buber — and one could add Hashomer Hatzair, the Mapam group — is that both recognize the authenticity of the Arab claims on Palestine. And Jabotinsky treats Mapai with contempt, telling it: “You believe that you are going to win them over by offering them economic and social prosperity, hospitals, education, etc.” And in this respect, Jabotinsky like Buber — and the latter more strongly — recognize the reality of the Arab attachment to the land of Palestine. And if Buber goes further than Jabotinsky it is that he holds that, starting from there, one must take care not to fall into the apologetics into which the Zionisms, of course, could not avoid falling, and which consists in hierarchizing the difference of the national claims: there may be a national claim on both sides, but ours is all the same more important; the Palestinian claim cannot exhibit roots as ancient as those of the Jewish people, the fidelity to the land of Israel… I insist on this, to show that Buber’s point of departure is a realistic apprehension, whereas Buber and the Brit Shalom are always accused of being utopians.
The point of departure is the Arab refusal that declares itself from the 1920s on, an Arab refusal in the face of the Jewish claim, even of an autonomy, not necessarily of a State. How to situate oneself in relation to this refusal? Buber’s originality is to take this Arab claim seriously. Where he will distinguish himself from the position of Jabotinsky, but also from that of Ben-Gurion, is in the conclusions. What does one do with the recognition of the hostility on one side, and of the attachment to the land of Palestine on the other? Where Jabotinsky, and the right in general, will say: “It is too late, there is nothing to be done. And it will always be too late,” Martin Buber says: “Everything is still possible.” He would say today, perhaps less optimistic: “There is always something possible.”
The conclusion he draws from it on the political level is that, in order to try to harmonize the positions of Arab nationalism and Jewish nationalism, one must create an original, new structure, which would be a binational state. From this point of view, one is not obliged to adopt Buber’s position, nor to think that he would still hold to it. Indeed, in 1947, when the partition plan was voted, Buber bowed to it, Mapam bowed to it, and renounced the binational state, thinking it better to divide the territories than to divide the competences and authorities.
There, then, is Buber’s position. And this position proceeds not only from what I have called spiritual Zionism or cultural Zionism; it proceeds from an ethical Zionism. That is to say a Zionism whose fundamental principle is indeed a national affirmation, hence an affirmation of particularism, but which does not intend to disqualify, as Jabotinsky would, nor even to subordinate the ethical preoccupation to a national preoccupation. And where this thought will have a legacy, even if it should not necessarily be in the form of this binational state, it is in the form of a principle: the affirmation of a line of demarcation between necessary injustice and superfluous injustice. An essential notion.
Once again, Buber is not an idealist. He is not a pacifist; he thinks that to enter into history is to dirty one’s hands. But he intends to make the leaders of the Yishuv understand (and he did so also after the creation of the State of Israel and until his death in 1965) the necessity of asking themselves the following question: is the injustice committed necessary or is it superfluous? And that seems essential to me. First, because he is the first to break with Zionist good conscience, by accepting that the creation of a State be done at the expense of another group and may create a problem, instead of denying this reality. For Martin Buber, one must always ask oneself whether, in our acts, we have always respected this line of demarcation. And one may wonder whether, in the recent operation led by Israel [the Gaza war], this principle was strictly respected.
Ilan Greilsammer — Buber is dead now.
Denis Charbit — But his idea has remained. It is this demand that characterized his current. To which I would like to add two final observations. Of course, the test of Buber’s ideas was not the diffusion they could have among the members of the Yishuv, but the impact they could or could not have among the Arabs of Palestine. This appeal to a binational structure, this appeal to a dissolution of the very structures, which called into question certain of the very objectives of Zionism, was not heard on the Arab side. But in this sense, although its impact was relatively limited, it was not negligible within the Jewish population, insofar as it was a kind of laboratory of ideas — one would say today a think tank. This demand should never leave us. It should be a kind of goad for deciding, for judging, what we do.
In this sense, contrary to those who think that Buber was a dissident of Zionism, I think on the contrary that he was an accomplished Zionist. He was the first to internalize the true meaning of Zionism on the level not only political but moral: no longer to owe to the other the responsibility for one’s own fate. The notion of responsibility was for him essential. And this dimension endured, beyond his movement, a circle that was not composed only of intellectuals of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as has been said, but also, for example, of Arthur Ruppin, who was one of the patrons and one of the founders of the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, which also included a circle of Arabists and orientalists.
I add also, and I will end with this, that Buber held that Arab consent was a precondition. It is in this sense that he distinguished himself from Jabotinsky, for whom Arab consent was impossible, and even from Ben-Gurion, who said: “if there is consent, why not, but if we do not obtain it, we go ahead all the same.” For Buber it was a very important precondition because for him the objective of Zionism was the rebirth of Jewish civilization, and he had the feeling, the conviction, that if this were not the case, if there were not this prior consent, this State would become a garrison State, a Sparta, obliged to concern itself permanently with its security, its survival, and that this would be, in the long run, contrary to the objectives of national rebirth. Where he was not entirely wrong is that it is true that this objective of Israel’s security has become an obsessive preoccupation. That does not prevent us from having a press, a literary, cinematographic production. The Lebanon War also inspired a film like Valse avec Bachir (Waltz with Bashir). Buber feared greatly that, starting from this absence of Arab consent, this narrow nationalism, reduced to its essence, would become an exacerbated nationalism, and turn into what would finally be for him the most formidable assimilation of the Jewish people to the Western spirit. To create a Sparta, that is to say something that would be contrary to the cultural objectives of national rebirth. If it is only the balance of forces that should dictate the future of Israel, then of course it is better to win than to lose. But would not such a victory be a kind of Pyrrhic victory? This is yet another of Martin Buber’s profoundly current messages.
Izio Rosenman — Unfortunately Buber was rather quickly marginalized within the Zionist movement. I do believe that in the years 1910-1920 he was even a salaried official, and that he resigned from his post precisely because he no longer agreed with the mainstream. So, Élie, I would like to ask you why this kind of idea never passed into the mainstream, and what was the attitude of this current that itself groups together rather different currents, but that was very largely in the majority, since the revisionist current was very much in the minority until well into the 1970s.
Élie Barnavi — The mainstream is Ben-Gurion. As my friends have focused on Jabotinsky and Buber, it is Ben-Gurion we have to speak about here.
And my first observation will be that it is not the Bubers who make States, it is the Machiavellis. And Ben-Gurion was Machiavellian, and in my mouth that is an immense compliment. Not Machiavelli in the vulgar sense, but Machiavelli in the sense of the Prince, of the one who conceives a great action and carries it through to its term by his virtù and with the keys of fortune. And there is not much ideology in this, contrary to the two extremes, which are very ideological. What you call the mainstream has very little ideology. There are currents in the Zionist-socialist family that are harder, others less so. But insofar as Ben-Gurion represents, on the whole, the force that is going to found the State, he has no ideology. He had one, in his youth. He dreamed of a class front with the Arab workers. He quickly understands that all of this is mere reverie.
He sets as a war aim the founding of the Jewish State, and from that moment on, without saying so, without proclaiming it, he adopts in broad terms the ideology of Jabotinsky. It is he who proves Jabotinsky right. And here I would say that if Jabotinsky came back today he could say that he was right, insofar as it is the policy of the iron wall that has made possible today the emergence of currents prepared to accept, without enthusiasm, as a fact of life, a Jewish State. Buber, for his part, is completely marginalized, not so much by the other Zionists as by the Arab currents. He is first marginalized by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, by the lack of enthusiasm, to say no more, of the leaders of the Arab national movement, and of the Arab masses who understand nothing at all of what he was saying….
He is really an idealist. There has to be someone who is a kind of ethical, moral marker, but it is not with that that one builds a State. So he is marginalized by the situation itself. And he realizes it. It is once the State is created that one needs someone to hold up a mirror to this society and to say “watch out, for we risk losing our soul.” But as long as the State is not there, what serves as ideology for this mainstream, as you call it, is activism. An activism that says: “we are going to do what is necessary to create a State, acting with as much wisdom as possible, returning blow for blow, but showing a certain diplomatic elasticity.” And only the genius of this mainstream could create a Jewish State in Palestine. A national movement led by Jabotinsky alone, even though he was right in the end, was not likely to lead to anything whatsoever, and an attempt led by Buber would not have either.
The only way was to do what Ben-Gurion knew how to do, and he knew how to do it because he was not the prisoner of an ideology, save that of creating a Jewish State in Palestine. So what Ben-Gurion does is to take what is given to us, what is possible. And each time things present themselves, and his adversaries say “it is a betrayal,” he knows that it is the only way to lay down markers for the future, to take what is given to him. And, passing himself off as a moderate in the eyes of the world, he is in fact extremely activist, almost to the point of going-all-the-way in the practice of power. I speak with regard to the Arabs, but I could extend these traits to what happens inside the country. He is an activist for that too, and he commits very great faults, and only very great men are capable of committing very great faults. I speak here only of the aspect that concerns peace. We must still say a word about the great catastrophe, about the Shoah. What does Ben-Gurion say? And this is extraordinary as a maniacal capacity never to detach himself from the objective, that objective being the State. The catastrophe arrives, and Ben-Gurion does nothing, or almost nothing. Not because he is not interested in the victims but because he understands that he can do nothing, and that at least, there, in Palestine, there is something to be done.
That is to say that he pushes Machiavellianism — and in my mouth that is a compliment — to the point of understanding that the Shoah can serve him as a formidable lever to attain his goal in Palestine, and there is this extraordinary sentence, at the moment when the Shoah is in full swing, he says “the most important work is the work in the party.” Because the party is the instrument of choice for the promotion of the goal he pursues with a formidable determination. And when the War ends and the survivors find themselves in the displaced-persons camps, in Italy, in Austria, in Germany, and elsewhere, he goes there, he recruits men for the war that is being prepared, that is going to break out as soon as the British mandate ends. Once the State was created, there one might have seen an ideology take shape, but he does not have one. It is only on the eve of his death that he discovers that he has one… We are always in the same configuration, that of a hyper-realism that takes what is given to it, that maneuvers, that tries to strengthen as much as possible the new State, without worrying too much about the ethical consequences, without worrying about not missing the slightest promise of peace that might arise. And it is there that the new policy begins, which is to speak of peace with great enthusiasm, to proclaim that peace is the ultimate policy of the State of Israel, whereas in the end it is not really a serious objective. No one occupies himself seriously with peace, everyone occupies himself with strengthening the new State, with seating it on solid foundations, and with building a military force capable of facing every eventuality. One speaks of peace, but in fact one prepares for war. That is what in fact was the policy of Israel between 1948 and 1967.
You wonder whether there was a choice? I will tell you in all sincerity, no. And the missed opportunities? Between ’48 and ’67, there was not much to be done, because the Arab governments of the Near East were not prepared to accept a Jewish State in their midst. And there was the War of Independence, which they immediately called the Nakba, the catastrophe. I have often said and written it. It is a pity that some do not want to understand it: one must not bring charges out of due time. Between ’48 and ’67 there were no Occupied Territories other than those that the international community recognizes for us today. In fact Israel had nothing to offer. One makes peace with an adversary only if one can deal with him and arrive at a compromise. Until ’67, there was no possible compromise because Israel had nothing to offer but its own disappearance. And it is in ’67, in fact, after the Six-Day War, that one perceives what I have just said: namely, that Israel has no genuine peace policy; because, from the war of ’67, from the occupation of the Territories, there is this formidable reversal, where little by little the Arabs, conscious that the iron wall has worked, conscious that Israel is there to stay, and that it is a power that it will be impossible to eradicate, begin to travel the road in reverse, saying: “Give us back the Occupied Territories.” The pretension to destroy the Zionist entity gives way to a much more realistic claim: “Give us back the Occupied Territories that we lost during the Six-Day War,” and it is at this moment that Israel begins to turn a deaf ear, and to think that in the end these Occupied Territories are not so bad after all. And then begins the destructive, criminal phenomenon of the settlements, which prevents the promise of peace from being realized, insofar as it exists. I suppose we will speak of it later.
There, then, is what seems to me to have been the policy of this mainstream, which became exactly what Buber feared most: that is to say a democratic society, a creative society, a society of liberty for its Jewish members, but which has become obsessed with its security, to the point of imagining that its fate will be forever to survive by the sword.
Izio Rosenman — Can we close the question without having evoked the small parenthesis of Moshe Sharett, since there was a confrontation between Ben-Gurion’s policy, his activism, and this attempt to make peace? Was it not really a failed attempt?
Élie Barnavi — Sharett never had power. Each time Ben-Gurion coughed, Sharett caught a cold. Sharett was not cut from the cloth of a party leader. There are absolute necessities that raison d’État commands; one must take account of that. Sharett’s problem is that he doubtless had an ethical, moral idea, but that first of all he did not have power, and that too often he neglected raison d’État. In this region of ours, one must not imagine that one can live without possessing an overwhelming force and without showing that one is prepared to use it. That too is important. One can make peace only if one is truly powerful, only if the other party knows that it has no interest in tangling with you. Hence the maniacal care that Ben-Gurion brought to building his army. It was the apple of his eye. Hence too the disproportionate place that the army has taken in the Israeli social and political fabric, an absolutely disproportionate place. And Sharett saw that. But he was not cut from the cloth that would have allowed him to stand in Ben-Gurion’s way.
Denis Charbit — I rather agree with Élie that from ’48 to ’67 the prospects for peace are extremely limited. There were possible prospects, but with the reintegration of all the refugees and the return to the borders of ’47. It is obvious, as the new historians have underscored, that the Arabs did not rush to sign a peace of this kind, but that Israel above all did not want it. And the war of ’67 was, in this, a windfall for Israel, since one could no longer go back over this objective that would have made the existence of Israel very difficult, namely the return to the borders of the partition plan and the reintegration of the refugees. And it is true that the war of ’67 sweeps away completely these two claims. There remains what is called the famous right of return, of which we are ceaselessly told, on the Palestinian side, in any case on the Fatah side, that a formula will have to be found, an arrangement found, but that this is in the end not what should prevent a reconciliation.
I will all the same add one thing about Ben-Gurion, and here, Élie, I do not follow you completely. I believe that Ben-Gurion gambled, in 1948, on the evaporation of the Palestinian problem. And there, there is something tragic. From his point of view, 700,000 Palestinians found themselves on the other side of the State of Israel, twenty or thirty or fifty kilometers away, almost the width of Palestine. They were going to find themselves in Arab states, hence in the end in a milieu — linguistic, political, religious, cultural — that is their own. It is not an indictment of Ben-Gurion that I am making. I am simply saying that one has the right to gamble. One has the right to say to oneself, in 1948: “seven hundred thousand are no longer here. We are going to act as if they were no longer there. We are not going to speak of them anymore.” The only problem is that if one loses the gamble, the responsibility falls to us. We believed they would forget. And what is tragic is that the Palestinians, precisely because they are on the other side of the border, because with binoculars they see the Palestine they have barely left, say to themselves “it is still possible.”
On the Israeli side one says to oneself: “We are in the same region. They are in an Arab milieu. They are going to integrate.” One can lay the stress on the refusal of the Arab countries to integrate these refugees. The fact is that they did not do it. And now one must take account of it. And so if this gamble could be legitimate before ’67, it is no longer so after ’67, from the moment the Territories are occupied, from the moment a potential cradle of a Palestinian national home is in our hands.
Élie Barnavi — Ben-Gurion is no longer in power in ’67. In his last political declaration, he says that all the territories must be given back. He understands at that moment.
Denis Charbit — Everything except Jerusalem and the Golan.
Ilan Greilsammer — Today what we say to ourselves, what the Zionist left to which we belong says to itself, is that a mass of monumental errors was made. If one had to define the most obvious error, the one I cannot manage to understand: how is it that after the war of ’67, the successive Israeli governments let the settlements develop in the Occupied Territories? It is a matter of a very long term, of many years. It is a matter of a process similar at each stage, since the activist groups, the right-wing groups, the religious groups, and others create outposts. These outposts are integrated into military camps. Then sooner or later, they are recognized as localities, as settlements. Then time passes, and today one wonders how they were so blind. Élie, you may have an idea, all the more so as you have had diplomatic responsibilities that I fortunately have not had. Perhaps you have an opinion on this? How to explain, above all, that we did not leave ourselves the possibility of deciding?
Today the situation is such, the balance of forces between the Israeli government and these activist groups on the ground is such (and I say it to those who hope in this possibility) that even if President Obama summoned the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the Israeli leaders in particular, to tell them that this is enough, giving them a month to remove the illegal outposts that they had committed before the United States to remove long ago, I am not sure that the Israeli government would manage it. Because in the events we have seen, in the clashes between the military forces and the settlers, the inhabitants of the settlements, this balance of forces is not at all obvious. In the evening, the soldiers go home and during that time, in the course of the night, the trailers and the settlers come back. And so I wonder whether there is even the material possibility of arriving at peace. My friends tell me: “You saw what Ehud Barak did when he evacuated that house in Hebron.” The army waited until there was no longer anyone in the house and it carried out this evacuation like a military operation with the special units. So one may wonder why, over the course of all these years, the successive Israeli governments — and until 1977, the left was in power — did not realize that we were depriving ourselves of the choice of peace, one day.
Élie Barnavi — I think that over the course of all these years, the mainstream emptied itself of all ideology. Zionism, after having succeeded in giving a State, found itself empty, hollow, a phraseology. That is why it did not know how to resist those who presented themselves as the last living, powerful, young, enthusiastic avatar of Zionism, those who were the youth of a national-religious party, which astonished its own grandees. What happened is that this religious Zionist youth, which was the fifth wheel of the Zionist cart, found itself propelled to the front row of History, since the others no longer existed except as an ideologically empty State apparatus.
I remember well, at that time I had political pretensions, so I was militant in the youth movement of the Labor party and in all sorts of dove circles. So I would hear the political leaders speak; it was pathetic, there was nothing. It was small-time, day-to-day politics, whereas the others came with the faith of the revolutionary. One had, moreover, to be well structured intellectually and ideologically not to fall victim to this rhetoric. It was formidable. And what did these young people say? “What do we do that is different from what you did? We are today the true Zionist vanguard. Except that you colonized the Philistine coastal space, whereas we colonize the biblical space of Israel. We are at Sebastia, at Siloam. We are where the past of the people is to be found.” It was very difficult to argue with them. Men and women of a different mettle were needed at the head of the country. Ben-Gurion was needed, who was no longer in office. Now there were at the head of the country people who were intellectually very far from the challenge posed. To this is added that, facing them, there were the three “noes” of Khartoum, there was the opaque refusal, there was terrorism. All of this conspired to obscure the intelligence of the Israelis.
Ilan Greilsammer — I would like to raise another question. Today, there is a consensus of the international community on the fact that there must be two States. Broadly, that the State of Israel must become again what it was before 1967, and that the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza will become the Palestinian State. Which necessitates removing all the settlements that are in these Territories. But what Israeli political scientist aware of what is happening in his country and in his people can think that such a thing is materially achievable? How does one do it on the practical level?
Élie Barnavi — Personally, I think it is possible. If I did not think that, I would have nothing left but to put a bullet in my head; it would mean that the adventure, that the Zionist enterprise is dead. For either this is possible, or there will be a State that will resemble an apartheid State, or there will be civil war.
We must all the same say to ourselves that the bulk of the Israeli political class, left and right combined, as well as most Israelis, are resigned to a solution of this kind. For peace with the Palestinians the disengagement served no purpose. We must draw the lesson of the disengagement to define the balance of forces inside Israel, and that was a formidable lesson. We must see that when there was dissidence, the army broke the dissidence before an Israeli people perfectly indifferent. And I am persuaded, although it is much more difficult in the West Bank, that we will have the same configuration. All the more so as it will not be necessary to remove all the settlements. That the Palestinian Authority accepted throughout the negotiations we had with it. It accepted the principle of the annexation of the large settlement blocs along the green line (located in the Occupied Territories) in exchange for the retrocession of equivalent areas on the near side of the green line, of sovereign Israeli territories. That is the model of the agreement. So it will be necessary to remove the settlements that are located inside the Occupied Territories, and that were declared null and void, obsolete, by Sharon already, since that is what the Wall is. The Wall, which leaves them outside, is supposed to define the new border of Israel. It will be hard, but it is still possible. On condition that someone comes to help us do it. I agree with you, alone we will not manage it.
Denis Charbit — I find you very indulgent toward the Israeli authorities. One says it is the settlers. And I am far from minimizing their responsibility. It is true, an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty would have been easier had there not been the presence of this population. But must one not also castigate, stigmatize, this Israeli pragmatism that made possible the creation of the State of Israel and its flourishing, but which has become a kind of boomerang? This short-sighted pragmatism according to which one says: “Well, they are there.” And of course, if this abscess exists, it is due to that energetic will you spoke of, but it is also due to the fascination the elites have had for this reincarnation of the pioneer. I believe that this situation also underscores the ambivalence, not to say the deficit, of that fundamental recognition whose necessity Buber already underscored, perhaps too early. But whose lessons were not retained afterward.
How many years it took us to think that there exists a Palestinian people! There is also a whole culture inside the mainstream that prevents this coming-to-awareness. Of course, this was also nourished by the PLO’s refusal of the existence of Israel. I see clearly today that the impossibility of arriving at this reconciliation is nourished by Palestinian Islamism, by Hamas, by Islamic Jihad… So at the next stage we will negotiate with Hamas and we will have to be nourished by the refusal of something that will be even more fanatical than Hamas. There is also the absence of recognition of an authentic claim. There is this feeling that one can always navigate by sight, and that at each decisive moment one will be able to get out of it. What might perhaps change things? If I take Yitzhak Rabin, it is incontestably the moral crisis that followed the first Intifada.
Ilan Greilsammer — Leadership.
Denis Charbit — Yes, leadership. But also the feeling that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, something is rotten in the kingdom of Israel. I am not sure that the state of opinion today is steering us toward such a type of coming-to-awareness.
Ilan Greilsammer — I would just like to add that, as you said very rightly, Élie, we all thought at the time of the Gaza disengagement in 2005 that it was a formidable precedent because it was the first time that Israel dismantled settlements in a territory considered as Israel, and not the north of Sinai given back to the Egyptians. We said that it was a precedent, and that one saw that it was possible to do it.
But this precedent turned out catastrophically. It is the fault of the Israelis who, instead of having carried out this disengagement by mutual consent, threw the keys in the air and did not even look at who picked them up. And today Israeli public opinion draws from the disengagement and the dismantling of the settlements of the Gaza Strip conclusions that go contrary to the peace solutions. We left Lebanon, and it is Hezbollah that moved in there. We left Gaza and it is Hamas that moved in there. I would say that most Israelis, the average Israeli, thinks today that it is the last thing to do. And if one evacuates in the West Bank, it is even more dangerous because it is very close to Lod, to Ben-Gurion airport. One can imagine the missiles. So it is true that there is this experience, but it is not conclusive for saying that it will be possible and the way in which it will be possible. For my part, I am above all worried and anxious to see how an Israeli government, even if Obama summons it very harshly, will be able to act in this direction in the current context.
Élie Barnavi — I think that the correct conclusion of what happened with the evacuation of the Gaza Strip is the failure of the unilateral method. It is true that the public does not necessarily perceive it that way. But a determined government is capable of speaking to the people, of telling them the truth. And it is unfortunate that Ehud Olmert resolved to do so only at the very end of his term. Even if better late than never. I think there would be a way of saying it to the Israelis. And that if one brought to this people a convincing peace treaty, the Israelis would not say no. On the other hand, what seems certain to me is that it would not happen without violence; I think we risk there, in the West Bank, a nucleus of civil war.
I think as you do, Denis. I do not exonerate the various governments of Israel. The problem is that they were extraordinarily blind and irresponsible. But the situation is there now; we are dealing with a mass of people, with fanaticized radical fringes, armed by Tsahal, let us not forget it, so we risk confrontation in this territory. But I think it is a risk to be taken because we have no choice. And my experience as a citizen teaches me that each time the Americans wanted to obtain something and it was important to them, they obtained it. There is what one calls, by antiphrasis, the international community. I do not see any Israeli government refuse to comply. I say it with pain because it is hard for a patriot to beg the great powers to vassalize us. To beg them to put pressure on us. And to say that we must do what they tell us to do. But it is the price of the survival of this country. I do not see a government of Israel refuse to comply with a strong, determined injunction from the American government. That is the gamble. We have exhausted the discussion. We shall see. But the gamble is there. I, for one, hope that this is what they will do. If they do not do it, I do not know what will have to be done.
Izio Rosenman — One more question. We have evoked the extremist groups. These extremist groups are in large part religious, and in the same way there has been among the Palestinians a change of balance between Fatah and Hamas. That is my worry, for this evolution tends to shift the balance of a conflict between two nationalisms, represented for at least a hundred years, toward a religious conflict. This transformation of the conflict between two nationalisms into a conflict between two religions — does it have something irreversible about it, in which case we are heading straight into the wall, or is there a means of thwarting this evolution?
Élie Barnavi — Denis said earlier that one of Ben-Gurion’s great gambles was to imagine that the Palestinian problem was going to evaporate. And it is true. The other gamble was that religion as a political force in Israel was going to evaporate. Do not forget that he had a far-left youth. And even though he had a biblical culture, even though he was very sensitive to the poetry of the Bible as national consciousness, he had no patience with religion. He told himself that all these people were waging a rearguard battle, constituted a remnant. That is how he exempted them from military service, that is how he admitted that there be religious school currents, one of which does not obey the Ministry of National Education at all, the independent current of the ultra-orthodox. And that gamble too he lost.
What is most serious, and here I think your definition is perfectly correct, is that after the Six-Day War, it is these elements, issuing from the Yeshivot, and particularly from the Yeshiva of Mercaz HaRav, who invested Zionism with a content apparently close to classical Zionism, but in fact completely different, completely perverted. A Zionism that was no longer the salvation of the people but a Zionism of the salvation of the land, where the stress was laid on the integrity of the land of Israel. And in the face of this Zionism, the successive governments were completely paralyzed. As, moreover, were most Israelis. So there was a Judaization, in the sense of a confessionalization, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And what is true on the Israeli side is even more so on the Palestinian side, where Islamization is more and more massive, and obvious. In part because of our sins, if I dare say, and in part because of the deep currents independent of our will in the Arab world. We must not forget that Hamas is not a nationalist movement stricto sensu. Hamas is an internationalist movement, it is a jihadist movement. Hamas does not want an independent Palestinian State. That is not its war aim. I recall that when King Hussein abandoned the West Bank, when he disengaged from the West Bank, the only movement opposed to this gesture was that of the Muslim Brotherhood, that is to say the matrix of Hamas. There is the essential danger. The national conflict can be settled by negotiation. A conflict of religious essence cannot be.
Ilan Greilsammer — Two remarks. The first concerning Israel: it is true, there are these religious people. But one must not exonerate the secular Israeli public, which unfortunately has today lost all Jewish reference, this Tel-Avivian public, which is not like the secular Jews, as I see them here, in Paris, who cultivate a Jewish heritage and who, without being religious, know the sources of Judaism and take an interest in them as well as in Jewish literature. The advance of the religious nationalist forces in Israel is parallel to the loss of reference of a large part of the secular Israeli youth, whom this does not interest, not even the Bible of Ben-Gurion. What interests them is to do like in Europe, like in the United States, like elsewhere, to grab all the latest novelties. So one cannot deny this advance of the religious, but what about the secular part? For example, why did we have in Jerusalem an ultra-orthodox mayor? In the secular neighborhoods, they did not even go to vote.
Denis Charbit — One more word, Ilan, to say that I do not completely share your point of view on the manner in which you described Israeli youth. When one sees the cinematographic, musical production, the return to the Jewish library, one realizes that there are currents, perhaps subterranean, that do not concern everyone, but that show something more complex, precisely with regard to classical Zionism.
The second thing I would like to reflect on with you is this religious dimension. There are today two schools: the first, classical, consists in saying that, if the conflict becomes religious, all is lost. And so there is only a rational vision, a secular vision, that can prevail. I am sensitive to this position, it is the one I generally espouse, except that I recognize being also sensitive to a second school, which has appeared in recent years and which says that one must not desert the religious. One must not leave the religious to the fanatics of one camp or the other. And one must try to multiply the interreligious dialogues between Islam and Judaism. I know well the limits, the very slow progress of this approach. But it is an aspect not to be neglected, precisely in a region like ours where people define themselves on the basis of religious entities. The Weberian vision we had, according to which the religions were going to disappear, is not accurate. That may be true for Western Europe, but not for the Middle East. I recognize that it would be interesting today to explore this vein and to try to draw inside the religions these fringes, even if they are marginal, inside Islam and Judaism.
As for the evacuation of the Territories, I think that today one must proceed by stages. The army still maintaining itself in the West Bank, one can on the other hand begin to evacuate the settlements, beginning with the outposts. But one must give a strong sign to the moderate Palestinians. That is the way through.
(This round table took place at the Hôtel Lutetia, Sunday 25 January 2009)
Élie Barnavi, historian, was Ambassador of Israel to France; he is professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv and president of the scientific council of the Museum of Europe. He is the author of numerous books, including: L’Europe frigide : réflexions sur un projet inachevé (Frigid Europe: Reflections on an Unfinished Project), A. Versaille, 2008; Les religions meurtrières (Murderous Religions), Flammarion, 2006; Israël-Palestine : une guerre de religion ? (Israel-Palestine: A War of Religion?), Bayard: BnF, 2006; Une Histoire moderne d’Israël (A Modern History of Israel), Flammarion, 1988.
Denis Charbit is professor of political science at the Open University of Israel. He recently coordinated the issue on La sexagénaire jeunesse d’Israël (Israel’s Sexagenarian Youth), January-April 2009 (No. 652-653) of the review Les Temps Modernes. He has published in particular: Qu’est-ce que le sionisme ? (What Is Zionism?), Albin Michel, 2007. He edited a reference work, Sionismes : textes fondamentaux (Zionisms: Foundational Texts), Albin Michel, 1998 (texts gathered and presented by Denis Charbit).
Ilan Greilsammer is a political scientist, professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, author of numerous books, including Repenser Israël (Rethinking Israel), Autrement, 2008; Le sionisme (Zionism), PUF, 2005; La nouvelle histoire d’Israël. Essai sur une identité nationale (The New History of Israel: An Essay on a National Identity), Gallimard, 1998.
Izio Rosenman is president of the Executive Committee of the “Livres des mondes juifs” Encounters, and a member of the editorial committee of Plurielles.