Last evening our President was sensitive to the fact that he, a secular Jew, was obliged to speak before a Cardinal. As for me, I am more sensitive to the motto inscribed behind us, “Pacem summa tenent” (“the heights hold the peace”), and all I can say is “so be it.”
When I drafted this paper, the tunnel that was about to provoke the well-known tumults had not yet made itself talked about. The “rock of our existence,” as our poet of a Prime Minister so prettily defined the Temple Mount, was still getting along quite well without it, just like the merchants of the Arab souk who were still unaware of its beneficial fallout for their trade. We knew, of course, that blood would soon flow; for as the famous proverb has it: “you can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people for a brief moment, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
What we did not know was that they would believe so fast and so strongly, and over so trivial a pretext. What we did not know was the extent to which stupidity, incompetence, contempt, self-satisfaction, and arrogance had blinded a whole team in power in Jerusalem, to the point of rendering it insensible — not to the sufferings of others (let us not exaggerate), but to its own interests.
That said, it is not about this grotesque tunnel affair that I have come to speak to you here. I have come to speak to you about peace between Jews and Arabs; that is the subject I was asked to treat, the true “rock of our existence.”
Just as well, for on the long road that fatefully leads somewhere, this wretched interlude will one day appear only for what it is: one more rut. A snag. A useless and uselessly bloody delay. Or if you like, a small footnote in the great book of the Zionism of the State of Israel and of its place among the nations.
Indeed, if I had to choose a definition — a single one — of political Zionism, I would take this one: “Zionism is first and foremost a radical attempt to normalize the relations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world.” Think about it. The national solution to the eternal Jewish question came to be massively resolved only when all the other collective solutions (the Bundist economy, territorialism in its various forms, or again social revolution) proved inoperative. I insist on the adjective “collective,” for what is at stake here is the fate of the Jewish people, and not of Jewish individuals.
Zionism is first and foremost a radical attempt to normalize the relations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world.
Zionism can be reduced to a simple syllogism: The contemporary world belongs to nation-states; Without a nation-state, the Jews will forever be strangers to this contemporary world; They therefore need, in order to carve out a decent place for themselves in it, a nation-state. Such is the essence of Zionism; all the rest is secondary.
Why, then, did it take so much blood and so many tears to translate into fact an idea so luminous? And why is the normalization of the Jewish condition among the nations still kept waiting? Well, because peoples and states understand nothing of formal logic, and because history does not advance by syllogisms. At the moment when Pinsker was advocating auto-emancipation and taking the lead of the Lovers of Zion, perhaps one could have created a Jewish state in Palestine without immediately opening a hundred years’ war with the Arabs. But at that moment, more than a hundred years ago, the national solution to the Jewish problem seemed a chimera, both in the chancelleries and in the eyes of the immense majority of the Jewish people. Later, when the hour of this Jewish state finally strikes, it will not be, it could not be, the hour of normalization. Over the cradle of the newborn state, there will come into being together the specter of the Nazi genocide and an Arab national movement in full ferment. For the founding members of the United Nations, the State of Israel will be the consolation prize of a people massacred amid general indifference. For the Arabs, one more dirty trick by a West reluctant to decolonize. What normalization could be built on such paltry foundations?
This is to say that I do not share the ideas of my Israeli friends of the so-called “new historians” school, according to whom the intransigence of the Zionist leaders constituted the major obstacle to a peaceful settlement in Palestine; any more than I ever believed the official mythology that painted the Israeli-Arab conflict in black and white. Black for them, white for us, of course. I maintain that this conflict has a logic; here it is: Zionist settlement bore war as the cloud bears the storm. It was natural, as we have seen, that the Jews should aspire to a nation-state; and it was natural that they should choose to build this state on the only patch of ground where the realization of this aspiration promised any meaning. But this patch of ground was not empty of men, and it was just as natural that the Arabs, in the name of the same principles, should oppose it with all their might. I say it every time I have the chance, at the risk of wearying those who have already heard it, but it seems to me important: There is no example in history of a people moving aside of its own accord to make room for another, whatever the excellence of the reasons the latter may advance. There is no example of a people making the founding myths of another people its own, especially when they contradict its own and cancel out their effects. Moreover, a consistent Zionist ought to rejoice in this unnuanced opposition.
Zionism is first and foremost a radical attempt to normalize the relations between the Jewish people and the nations of the world.
Everything that the Zionist governments reproached the Arabs for — the blindness of their leaders, the obstinacy of their refusal, their determination to drown the Zionist enterprise in blood — all of it favored the said enterprise and allowed it to be realized.
Had the Arabs accepted so much as the beginning of a negotiated solution, so much as a single partition plan, the State of Israel would probably never have seen the light of day.
I have always been struck by the fated character of this conflict. Jews and Arabs were drawn into a confrontation with the look of a Greek tragedy, where the will of men weighs less than the inexorable logic of the plot.
Thus the Judeo-Arab conflict takes on from the outset the character of a confrontation between two national movements, all the more bitter, this confrontation, in that it has for its object the same patch of soil and in that it is doubled by an ethnic and cultural confrontation. But — important point — it refuses to display itself as such. Each side strives to deny the other its national dignity. Indeed, to recognize in the other a legitimate adversary, whose objectives are no more contemptible than one’s own, would amount to calling one’s own history into question.
To demonize the adversary thus becomes the very condition of one’s own legitimacy. The conditions are thereby met, for a long time to come, for a veritable war of religion. What I mean by war of religion, in the broad sense of the term, is a total conflict whose only conceivable outcome is the elimination of the adversary. Such a conflict excludes by definition the solutions of compromise. It draws on origins and aims at salvation; it is therefore inexpiable.
To demonize the adversary thus becomes the very condition of one’s own legitimacy. Thereby are met, for a long time to come, the conditions for a veritable war of religion.
This is not the place to weigh the responsibilities in the various phases of the conflict. Nor is it a matter of dismissing both belligerents equally in an Olympian attitude of cold historical objectivity. No, these wars were ours, they wove the warp of our life, we all took part in them in one way or another. It is more modestly a matter of making the indispensable effort to step outside oneself, to put one’s reason to work rather than one’s guts, and to understand. For one does not build a true peace on the occultation of history.
It is a matter of transforming the war of religion into a classic conflict — that is, one that can be settled by the weapons of reason.
How does one emerge from a war of religion? Through the liquidation of the adversary, as we have seen. That is the Amalek model, and it works sometimes; we all have examples in mind. Or, more often, through weariness: when it becomes evident that it does not work — that is, that the adversary is too tough. It is then a matter of transforming the war of religion into a classic conflict, most often territorial, but not always. That is, into a conflict that can be settled by the weapons of reason — namely, negotiation and compromise. In short, it is a matter of stepping out of religion in order to enter politics. And that is indeed what happened in the Near East; the revolution that made it possible was the Six-Day War. And I am astonished that Israeli friends persist in presenting the Six-Day War as a national catastrophe. The Six-Day War will have been a good thing… Israel, while showing its adversary that it was decidedly ineradicable, seized territories that were going to transform total war into a classic territorial conflict.
Arab discourse — and this is no accident — imperceptibly began to evolve. The liquidation of the Zionist entity gave way to the recovery of the territories lost during the 1965 campaign. In fact, without yet realizing it, the Israelis had just won the recognition of their neighbors. From this perspective, the Yom Kippur War is merely an episode, largely attributable to the political myopia of the Golda-Dayan tandem. But an episode with the look of an earthquake, since, among other consequences, it made possible the conclusion, in time, of peace with Egypt. Israel lost the Sinai and won the recognition, duly and properly, of the most powerful of its neighbors. But alas, if history has no use for formal logic, it likewise mocks the straight line. Its ways are doubtless less impenetrable than those of the Lord, but just as winding. For in the exact measure that the Arab countries abandoned the total approach to their war with Israel, a growing number of Israelis made it their own. The spearhead of this tendency was the Bloc of the Faithful (Gush Emunim), born in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. Its message, we all know it, is political messianism, which at that moment was a new creature in the Zionist landscape; its natural ally, the revisionist right, which was to come to power at the first reversal of May 1970. What do these neo-Zionists say? That we are living a transcendental political reality; that the messianic times are being fulfilled before our eyes, here and now; that the land of Israel is holy not solely because it allows the fulfillment of the mitzvot (the religious commandments), but that it is holy in itself: the stones are holy, and the clods of earth, and the trees…; that the State of Israel is nothing other than the resurrection of the kingdom of Israel, the fulfillment of the heavenly kingdom here below, the very condition of the imminent advent of the Messiah…
In this view, the normalization of which the founding fathers dreamed is a madness, indeed a crime of lèse-majesté, divine and human. In this view, again, the stranger who dwells among us, the Arab, will have at most limited rights; according to some, no rights at all; according to others still — such as, for example, Rabbi Heiss, the aptly named, the chaplain of Bar-Ilan University — this stranger will be destroyed outright, the Arabs turning out to be the modern avatar of Amalek. In any case, the granting of equal rights is an absurdity, for equality of rights is a democratic and liberal principle, therefore foreign to Judaism and alienating by definition.
Few in number at the time, these men have remained a small minority today. According to a recent poll, nearly 60% of Israelis declare themselves hilonim, secular, for want of a more adequate translation. Whereas only a little more than 14% call themselves religious, all shades combined; and these latter are not all zealots, far from it. But it is a hard core whose influence reaches well beyond its militants. It feeds on the active sympathy of the secular right, less and less secular moreover; on the alliance of all, or very nearly all, of the national-religious sector, which it has ended up engulfing; on the growing political fanaticization of the ultra-Orthodox — witness the Chabad phenomenon; above all on the doctrinal timidity of the left, paralyzed as it is, this Labor left, by the dwindling of the pioneer ideal and by its own incapacity to imagine a credible alternative to this hard-and-fast Judaism. To this hard-and-fast Judaism, sure of its good right and of its interpretation of the texts, speaking loud, strong, and clear a language that the left has long since forgotten — the ideological language. It is the story of the iron pot and the clay pot, except that in its Israeli version, the iron pot is a creation, at least by default, of the clay pot.
The first settlements in the Territories — that is Shimon Peres; Kiryat Arba — that is Yigal Allon; the Hesder Yeshivot, from which there issued a veritable armed militia in the service of the ideology of Greater Israel, which is in the process of infiltrating the army — that too is the Labor party… I could multiply the examples. But to what end? The assassination of Rabin was a surprise only to those who had no eyes to see nor ears to hear.
One did not know how to explain properly to Israeli, and Jewish, opinion the immense scope of the framework agreements with the P.L.O.
Simplifying somewhat, I would say that the whole chronicle of Israel over these last twenty years sums itself up in the confrontation between these two major conceptions of “the Israeli-Arab conflict: the political conception of integration through compromise, and the religious conception of the ideological blockhouse; or, if you like, between two conceptions of Zionism: the classic one, which seeks the normalization of the Jewish condition among the nations, and the one we may call neo-Zionist, which sees in the State the perpetuation of the principle of Balaam, of ‘a people that dwells alone.’”
Yet in this confrontation, fateful for the future of the Jewish people and of its center, the Eretz-Israeli one, our conception of Zionism remains confusedly in the majority — the proof: it won at Oslo a decisive victory. Oslo is a recognition by the Palestinians of the Jewish national fact, and therefore the ultimate triumph of normalizing Zionism. The divine surprise of Oslo is no accident of History; it is a stage inscribed since the beginning of the Zionist adventure, in the long march of the Jewish people toward the conquest of a decent place among the nations. But here again, errors were committed: one did not know how to explain properly to Israeli, and Jewish, opinion the immense scope of the framework agreements with the P.L.O., nor, for that matter, the immediate perils with which these agreements were fraught… For one did not need to be very clear-sighted to understand that it is when compromise is at last within reach that the die-hards band together to make it miscarry. One had only to consult the history of others, that of the French in Algeria, for example. But who cares about history, especially that of others…
For want of vision and courage, we got bogged down, as always, in the palaver of experts; we lost time and, worse still, momentum. There are moments when diplomacy must be like war according to Bonaparte: a simple art, and all in the execution. There are moments when one must know how to act fast, to cut into the quick, to lean on the living forces of the nation, resolutely outflanking one’s adversary.
More serious still: one did not concern oneself with the social and communal dimension of the peace process. For want of a vigorous campaign on the ground, in the development towns, in the poor neighborhoods of the big cities, one let the mad idea take hold that peace with the Palestinians is an affair of the rich, a whim of the sated Ashkenazi establishment. Such is, moreover, the deep reason for the Labor party’s defeat at the elections: one need only consult a map of the results of those elections. And it is thus that one allowed the extremists to sabotage the work begun at Oslo. Astonished by our own audacity, intimidated by the noisy opposition of a minority of irreconcilables, the leaders of Israel applied the soft pedal. Of course, it is not Israel’s fault alone; Arafat shares it equitably — he who thought he was doing well by flattering these God-crazed fanatics. The bloody attacks of Hamas and Jihad killed Rabin a second time, by paving the way for the third reversal, that of May 1996. The objective alliance of the die-hards of both sides functioned well: the peace process, as they say, is certainly not dead, but it is in a bad way. Indeed, the new coalition in power in Jerusalem does what it can to plunge us back into the war of religion. In less than three months, with a talent and a doggedness worthy of better causes, it has managed to remake a semblance of Arab unity against Israel, to humiliate and to drive to despair the Palestinian partner, to fill the air of peace we breathed in the region with the sinister rattle of jackboots, and — since it is normalization we are talking about here — to put the Jewish state back into its old role of international pariah. A fine record for one quarter; peace, in the security of candidate Netanyahu, is doing well, thank you.
I would like to conclude on a more optimistic note. History is not deterministic, certainly, but neither is it that tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, as Macbeth sees it. It has, I have tried to show it here, a logic. And this logic wills that the long process of Israel’s integration into the region continue to its end. One can kill the logic, of course; what has been done can be undone. But, as this government itself is discovering through bitter and daily experience, that is no small affair… Once people have tasted the promises of peace, it is extremely difficult to make them renounce it. Messianism is in power, of course; but this coalition presents a curious peculiarity in a democracy: that of being more radical than its electorate. It is no accident that Benjamin Netanyahu presented himself before the voters with his adversary’s program; with that of his own party, he well knew, he had no chance. Just as well, most Israelis support the peace process. When Netanyahu finally consented to meet Arafat, that belated handshake received the approval of 85% of Israelis — 85%… And, despite the blockade, the misery, and the disappointments, the situation is not very different among the Palestinians. Despite a hundred years of bellicose, contemptuous, and hate-filled rhetoric, I never believed in the myth of the chasm of hatred supposed to divide the two peoples for another hundred years. Years of demonization of the P.L.O. and of its chief — “the hairy-faced beast,” you remember, that is how Menachem Begin, among other niceties, depicted Arafat from the rostrum of the Knesset… Years of demonization, then, did not prevent the Israelis from endorsing the Oslo accords with an ease that astonished their authors themselves. One generation of Palestinians was born under the occupation, a second matured during the Intifada, but foreigners passing through remain open-mouthed before the ease of human contact between Israelis and Palestinians of good will. Friendships have been formed, common interests have been created, habits of working together have been established… The occupation will have been hard on the occupied, but not completely sterile; it happens that the occupied himself acknowledges it.
This must be affirmed forcefully, for it is not a pious wish, it is the truth: peace in mutual respect, good neighborliness, and cooperation is possible — it is even within reach. It is the necessary and sufficient condition for the integration of the Jewish state into the region, and therefore into the community of nations. It is imperative to mobilize the living forces of the Jewish people to achieve it. For those who lay claim to a secular and humanist Judaism, I see no more urgent task.
Allow me to leave the last word to a young Palestinian whom I met at the Ketziot camp, in the Negev, well before the Oslo revolution, in the blackest of the night of the Intifada… a most instructive visit, moreover, about which I could speak to you at length.
I asked this boy: “what do you want, in the end?” He answered me simply: “a state like yours.” I wanted to know what he meant by that, and he explained to me: “a democratic state.” “But what else?” “A state where I can vote (I quote from memory, but it is truly word for word), a state where I can vote, say what I want, read the newspapers I want, and criticize the government without going to prison.” “What’s this,” I cried out, in feigned scandal, “you want to criticize Abu Ammar?” “Of course,” he said to me, “just as you criticize Shamir.”
I learned more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ten minutes of conversation with this boy than in a year of reading newspapers. Ali — such was his name — represented the cutting edge of the militancy of the children of the stones; he was barely sixteen years old (sixteen!), but he had already been languishing for two years in this desert camp for having thrown, not stones, but a Molotov cocktail at a patrol. An older brother had been shot dead, another was locked up elsewhere. And yet, I assure you, there was no hatred in him, but envy, and a kind of smiling assurance that one day he will have it, this state like mine.
At this hour, Ali must be a member of one of the numerous police forces of the Palestinian Authority. This state, he does not yet have, but he will doubtless have it. What he has for the moment is not great, it must be said, and he will probably have understood by himself that the republic is more beautiful without the empire, but that is another story. •