Peac Activists in Israel?

Haaretz Op-Ed
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Wednesday, June 6, 2001


The basic assumptions have not collapsed

By Baruch Kimmerling


The feeling that the basic assumptions of those who advocate peace with the
Palestinians have collapsed and that Israel has no partners for any process
of conciliation with the Palestinians is groundless.Israel's peace camp is
disappointed in the Palestinians because they have rejected proposals that
"have been unprecedented in their generosity" and because they have instead
launched an armed struggle and a guerrilla war (that is inherently a dirty
business) against a foreign occupier. This situation, on the one hand,
provokes emotions of rage, disillusionment and profound frustration among
the majority of the advocates of peace in Israel, and, on the other, makes
Israel's colonialists (of every possible stripe) unabashedly gloat.

What is even worse, however, is that some of the members of this peace camp
were actually collaborators - through acts of commission and omission,
through explicit words and in a tacit manner - with rabid chauvinism,
whether secular or religious, without understanding that, in fact, the very
concepts of that chauvinism had shattered into thousands of fragments.

What are the principles of the still-valid basic assumptions of the peace
camp? Naturally, one must exclude the axioms of those who supported the
idea of "peace" when all they really hoped for was to continue to control
and settle the occupied territories in an indirect manner, while turning
the Palestinian police into a subcontractor in charge of protecting Israeli
interests.

First of all, peace - namely, the recognition by the Arab nations of
Israel's legitimate right to sovereign existence - is the ultimate goal,
and the ideological triumph, of Zionism. All those who seek to sabotage the
attainment of that goal or who today define the goals of Zionism in a
different fashion are clearly anti-Zionists.

The Jewish national movement - even if the state it established has been
partially built atop the ruins of the local Arab society - cannot continue
to act as an occupier and to rule another nation while denying the basic
rights of that nation. By behaving in this manner, Israel is undermining
both its own right to exist and, in long-range terms, its very capacity to
survive. The subjugation of another nation and continued expansionism are
corrupting Israeli society from within. The perpetuation of the existing
situation is leading to an intolerable increase in the brutality,
militarism and anti-democratic tendencies of Israeli society.

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt contains a formula for all future
agreements. That formula can be summed up in a nutshell as the recognition
of, and the establishment of peaceful relations with, Israel in return for
the surrendering of all the territories captured by Israel in 1967, with
the proviso that all the territories to be evacuated will not have even one
remnant or sign of foreign occupation.

Deviations from this formula and its adaptation to prevailing circumstances
are possible, of course; however, the deviations and adaptations can be
made only if there is full agreement on both sides.

None of the declarations of principles and none of the agreements and
understandings that have been obtained up to now with the Palestinians (and
which have all been only interim agreements) openly and explicitly mention
this basic principle - primarily because Israel's leaders lacked the
courage to publicly make the principle known to their citizens.

Nevertheless, that principle has come to be perceived as a tacit agreement
between the parties and as one of the ultimate goals in the conciliation
between the Palestinians and the Israelis. When the Palestinians were
confronted with the demand that they declare an end to the
Palestinian-Israeli dispute under conditions that do not even come close to
the fulfillment of that principle, they naturally refused.

As of July 1974, a revolution has taken place in the political thinking of
the mainstream component of the Palestinian national movement. After
vociferous internal debates, the Palestinian National Council adopted a
formula that basically signified, on the one hand, the abandonment of the
traditional strategy of "all or nothing" and, on the other, recognition of
the principle of the partition of historical Palestine. That recognition
was made under conditions that were less favorable than those of the UN
General Assembly resolution on the partitioning of historical Palestine in
November 1947 (the UN resolution would have granted the Palestinians 22
percent). The Israeli response was that the council's decision was nothing
but a tactical move intended to destroy Israel in stages.

The Palestinian right of return was not presented as a condition from the
time of the declaration of principles until the collapse of the peace talks
at Camp David. Nonetheless, the entire world realized that it was essential
to deal with the Palestinian refugee problem on two levels. On the symbolic
level, Israel must assume at least some of the responsibility for the
Palestinian disaster in general and for the situation of the Palestinian
refugees in particular.

On the practical level, Israel must express a sincere willingness for - and
must begin (as soon as possible, even in stages) - the repatriation of an
agreed-upon number of Palestinian refugees, primarily in the context of
family reunification efforts. In this process of repatriation, Israel must
provide substantive compensation for property loss to Palestinian refugees
- including "internal" refugees who are Israeli citizens - in the framework
of an international project aimed at rehabilitating Palestinian refugees
either in the Palestinian state or in the countries where they currently
live.

A concrete political item that recently entered the agenda of the
Palestinian-Israeli dispute is the right of Palestinians to return to their
original homes after the formal establishment of Israel's borders on the
basis of the armistice lines that were in existence on June 4, 1967, the
day before the

outbreak of the Six Day War. Responsibility for the emergence of this item
on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute must be assigned to those who first
began to talk about the issue of "our historical right" and who turned that
issue into a political platform. Those who seek to impose "our historical
right" with the creation of a Jewish settlement in Hebron have reopened the
issue of Jaffa and Haifa. When Palestinian negotiators whipped out an
absolute demand for the fulfillment of the "right of return" to homes and
villages that they knew very well no longer existed, they were merely
responding to the impossible proposals and maps that they were receiving
from the Israeli side.

After some 35 years of occupation, exploitation, uprooting and degradation,
the Palestinian people have the right to use force to oppose the Israeli
occupation, which, in itself, is the brutal exercise of force. Millions of
people cannot be forced today to remain under the subjugation of a foreign
occupier. Anyone who thinks otherwise is merely indulging in pipe-dreams.

It is quite possible that the gravest error committed by Israel's peace
camp was that it did not declare those basic assumptions over and over
again, day in and day out - because of a lack of courage and because of
political and social convenience. If there really is a peace coalition in
this country, those assumptions must be the prime items on its agenda


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