The framework agreement between Israel and the P.L.O. on future Palestinian autonomy — the so-called “Gaza-Jericho first” agreement, signed in September 1993 in Washington — has profoundly altered the political horizon in the Near East, opening for the first time a breach in the wall of mutual hatred and fear that has been sustained for a hundred years. This agreement, which at last sketches the horizon of a possible peace between Israelis and Palestinians, is the result of a slow evolution of ideas and representations on both sides. On a more general level, it also marks a lifting of the blockages between Jews and Arabs. After so many years of hatred, one can well understand the mistrust and incredulity of the skeptics, for the reality of peace will take a long time to become visible.
The Palestinians have understood that Israel is now a permanent part of the geography of the region’s states, and that they would have everything to lose by continuing to deny its existence. For to refuse its existence and any prospect of peace would only reinforce, within Israel itself, the camp of refusal, thereby risking an even greater expansion of settlement in the Occupied Territories. By waiting a few more years, there would be nothing left to negotiate.
As for Israel, it has understood, after five years of Intifada, that there is no military solution to the Palestinian question — that the only possible path for the violence between the two peoples to cease is to offer the Palestinians a political solution, one that takes account of their dignity, won through five years of Intifada, since the status quo cannot last forever without risking setting the entire Near East ablaze. Israel has understood that, failing to sign agreements with the P.L.O. today, it risked having to confront in the future a tougher and far more extremist adversary — namely Hamas, or other fundamentalist movements — with the war then threatening to become a hundred years’ war. Yitzhak Rabin had the courage to recognize this truth and to draw its consequences.
Here as elsewhere — as in Bosnia-Herzegovina — only peace holds a future for peoples.
This agreement, in itself, helps to change both ideas and reality, in Israel as much as among the Palestinians. A recent indication illustrates this process: whereas until last year only 10 to 15% of Israelis declared themselves in favor of a Palestinian state, today (a January ’94 poll) nearly 50% declare themselves in favor of one, against roughly 30% who declare themselves opposed. On this score, one should also welcome the first appointment of an Israeli Arab as ambassador: a former judge has just been named Israel’s ambassador to Finland. Israel has understood that symbolic gestures toward Israeli Arabs were also needed, so that they would not feel the poor relations of the peace process that has just been set in motion.
In this regard, one can only regret that the French Jewish community shows itself so timid in supporting the peace process undertaken between Israel and the Palestinians. Let us welcome the success of the initiative of the Comité de liaison des associations juives laïques, which organized last December 5th, in the Amphithéâtre Richelieu at the Sorbonne, a meeting in support of these agreements. Before six hundred participants, and in a warm atmosphere not felt in a long time, Palestinians — Leïla Shahid, the P.L.O. representative, and Elias Sanbar, editor-in-chief of the review Études Palestiniennes — Israelis — Claude Klein, professor at the University of Jerusalem, and Avraham Rozenkler, the Mapam representative in Europe — together with numerous French Jewish figures, debated, under the chairmanship of Maître Théo Klein, former President of the CRIF, the prospects for peace but also the obstacles that still stand in its path.
The climate of this new Judeo-Arab dialogue, to which we devote our central dossier, is spreading little by little to all the Arab countries, in the Maghreb as in the Mashreq: economic and cultural relations between Israel and certain Arab countries are developing, despite the anachronistic Arab boycott that officially continues to exist. Israeli ministers are being invited, while scientific cooperation programs are being established; meetings are taking place, such as the symbolic one organized by UNESCO in Granada. The relations between Arab countries — such as Tunisia or Morocco — and the Jews originally from those countries are being reexamined in a spirit of openness and truth that is new. It is to the whole of these questions that we devote our dossier; we hope that this new climate of dialogue will continue to develop, so as to build the peace of tomorrow: the peace between the Jewish people, in all its components, and the Arab peoples, in all their diversity.