The following was written by David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC.org):
Almost every responsible political leader today expresses a desire to contribute to peace in the Middle East.
Easier said than done. A real effort to promote peace requires an understanding of what motivates the parties to the conflict.
I can’t say I quite get what makes the Palestinians tick. Like the late statesman Abba Eban, I haven’t grasped why Palestinian leaders never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
But I do believe that anyone who genuinely seeks peace, or who aspires to be a friend of the Israeli people, should consider four key factors that inform the Israeli worldview.
First, geography.
The throwaway line these days is that geography no longer matters in an era of long-range missiles. Not so fast.
As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin famously quipped, “The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography.”
Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey or Wales, and barely two-thirds the size of Belgium. To put it into context, Egypt is approximately fifty times larger than Israel, Saudi Arabia a hundred times.
And there’s more. Until its 1967 war for survival, Israel’s borders, which were nothing more than the armistice lines from the 1948 War of Independence, were nine miles at their narrowest point, near the country’s midsection and most populous area.
When President George W. Bush first saw that narrow width from the vantage point of a helicopter, he was reported to have said, “There are some driveways in Texas longer than Israel is wide.”
Topography matters too.
When the towering Golan Heights were in the hands of Syria before the Six-Day War, for example, Jewish villages and farms below were regularly targeted by Syrian shelling. Ask my wife. She was a volunteer in a kibbutz there. With the Golan Heights in Israel’s hands, those villages and farms no longer have to rush their children into underground shelters.
Second, history.
Notwithstanding Arab claims to the contrary, the Jewish people have been linked to this region for over three thousand years. The bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is central to the historical narrative. The Jewish people were born here, their sacred texts emerged here, their temples were built here, and, even when forcibly exiled, they never stopped dreaming of their return. It is a story, quite frankly, unlike any other in the annals of mankind.
To read the Hebrew Bible, especially the Psalms, is to come across Jerusalem and Zion literally hundreds of times.
The metaphysical and physical link between the Jewish people and its wellsprings of history and holiness must be acknowledged - in the same way as the tie between Islam and Mecca and Medina.
Third, psychology.
Some dismiss Israel’s preoccupation with security as obsessive. How can it be, they ask, that the country with the strongest armed forces in the region feels so beleaguered, so under the gun?
For example, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote, “Closure (on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation) is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victim-hood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.”
The “inflation of threats”? The “perpetuation of fears”? Is that all there is to Israel’s current situation? Hardly.
While Cohen has sought to recast Iran as a misunderstood country, Israelis hardly share his optimism about Teheran’s intentions.
What is any nation to make of calls for its destruction from another nation that is hell-bent on acquiring the tools to achieve its goal?
And when the threatened nation is Israel, surely, the alarm bells go off - and with good reason.
After all, Israel has a history. So do the Jewish people. And it teaches that there are those who wish to do harm and mean what they say. They are not to be neglected or minimized.
That history also teaches that, all too often, Israel and the Jewish people have stood largely alone in facing the danger. Promises and pledges of help are more often made than kept. Relying on the good will of others has proved a risky proposition.
So yes, Israel has every right, indeed obligation, to take Iran’s nuclear ambitions seriously - just as it has every right, indeed, obligation, to take seriously the 40,000 missiles in Hizbullah’s arsenal in Lebanon and the desire of Hamas in Gaza to emulate Hizbullah’s example.
Are the words of Hamas and Hizbullah, which cry out for Israel’s annihilation, simply to be ignored? Filed away in the drawer of rhetorical excess?
Are those who have themselves been targeted for destruction more than once simply to assume it cannot be tried again and instead get a good night’s sleep?
Moreover, is Syria such a gentle neighbor, with such a sterling record of respect for human rights and the rule of law, that Israel can afford to let its guard down?
Is the Palestinian Authority on Israel’s side simply because it is at odds with Hamas - even as this week’s Fatah congress again revealed that this group, seen as Israel’s best negotiating bet, is unwilling to recognize Israel’s rightful place in the region?
And fourth, yearning.
The survivors of the exiles, the pogroms, the inquisitions, the blood libels, the ghettos and the death camps don’t need lectures about why they should seek “normality”. After all, wasn’t Israel established in such large part precisely to create, at long last, that new condition for the Jews? Normality - nothing more, nothing less.
And yet, it hasn’t entirely come to be, at least not yet.
The fears are there not because they can’t be forgotten, but because the threats endure. And the threats can’t be ignored because the Jewish people’s genetic code includes an early warning system, which tells them that the Iranian regime and its friends just might mean what they say. And that the spinning centrifuges and those liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets just might be meant for seven million Israelis.
Israel doesn’t need newspaper columns about the imperatives of peace. It needs credible, committed partners in the search for peace. When it has such partners, as history has amply shown, Israel will go to great territorial lengths, even at risk to its own security, to achieve a solution.
At the end of the day, Israel’s partners don’t have to buy its narrative any more than Israel has to buy theirs.
Yet Israel is asked to recognize their needs - the needs of dignity, justice and respect. And that is indeed a legitimate request for the process of conflict resolution.
So they, in turn, need to take into account the place of geography, history, psychology and yearning in the Israeli worldview, as Anwar Sadat and King Hussein, peacemakers both, did to their everlasting credit.
Then, perhaps, in the words of the Jewish prophet Isaiah, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war anymore.”
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Robert Efroymson’s Introduction to “How Will It End?”
Categories: General Commentary
On Thursday, August 20, Robert Efroymson, President of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico and Mark Rudd, the legendary 60’s activist and member of Another Jewish Voice, debated the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at an Albuquerque event titled “How will it End.” The following is Mr. Efroymson’s introduction to this landmark conversation:
The title of the event is “How will it End,” but before we get to the end, we should talk a little about where we are now, and how we got here. It has been noted that there is only one place on Earth where the same people are speaking the same language, practicing the same religion and governing themselves in the same place as they did 3000 years ago. That place is Israel. The story of how that came about is the history of Zionism. Zionists built the state of Israel, and that is why it exists.
I do not want to minimize the historical impact of the holocaust, except to correct a common misconception, common enough to have crept into President Obama’s speech in Cairo, that Israel was born of the ashes of the Holocaust. Perhaps you heard this growing up, I know I did. It is not so. In the 1920s there were already very active Palestinian civic organizations, from Newspapers to Symphony Orchestras, Labor Unions, to schools. In those days Palestinian did not mean what it does now, the institutions were all Jewish, and in the particular case of the Labor Union, functioned as the Jewish government. It is no accident that the Labor party ruled Israel continuously from 1948 to 1977.
In the years before WWII, my great grandfather received a number of letters from European Jews who wanted his assistance in getting to America. In those days, there was no such concept in our Immigration Law as “reasonable fear of persecution”. Immigrations was severely limited, and immigrants needed someone to vouch for them, to assure the government that the new American would not become a drain on the public purse.
My great-grandfather answered many of these letters, and filed the appropriate forms with the State Department to get some people into the US. Unfortunately there were delays in getting paperwork to people, and some of the letters that he responded to are heartbreaking. The ones that most affected me were some of the last in the series, when my great-grandfather had to tell his correspondents that he was too old, and the American government would not allow him to sponsor any more immigrants. My grandfather was able in some cases to step in as sponsor, but there are several people we were not able to save.
Some day I plan to check the Holocaust records to see what happened to them, but I have not had the heart to do so yet.
While the Holocaust did not result in the creation of the Jewish State, it perhaps hurried it along, and in relation to today’s discussion, it brings me to an imperative, and that is that a bi-national state is not a possible end-game. There must always be a place of refuge for Jews, and therefore there must always be a Jewish homeland, with a right of Return. As you all should know, the state of Israel uses the same criteria to evaluate Jewishness under the Law of the Return that the Nazis did. In other words if you are Jewish enough for the Nazi’s to have murdered you, you are Jewish enough for Israel to save you.
Perhaps this is a good place to note that Israel is not a perfect place, and I am not going to stand here and defend everything that Israel does. While anyone who is Jewish under the Nuremberg laws is eligible for Israeli citizenship, they are not necessarily considered Halachikally Jewish, and thus may not be able to marry in Israel. The “who is a Jew” question is just one of the many unresolved issues in Israel. There are others.
The question of settlements for example. It is vitally important to understand that the term “settlements” covers a lot of territory. There are suburbs of Jerusalem and of Tel Aviv, that because they are built in areas to the West of the 1949 cease fire line are considered by some to be settlements. There are also small caravans (mobile homes) parked on hilltops in remote areas that get the same name, but that are not in the same category.
There is a consensus that the largest suburbs, closest to the rest of Israel, are legitimate Jewish neighborhoods, and should be part of a Jewish state. Consider Gush Etzion, which was settled prior to 1949, but was captured by Jordan in the War of Independence. The Jordanians massacred the residents who were unable to flee. By what right should Gush Etzion today be evacuated? If the conquest by Israel in 1967 was illegitimate, even more illegitimate was the conquest and massacre in 1949 by Jordan. This proves the absurdity of demanding that Israel withdraw to the Green Line.
Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim, and the other bedroom communities of established cities in Israel should stay, and indeed it is not difficult to see how they will. Of the Jews living West of the Green Line, 80% are in communities that together make up no more than 5% of the total area of the West Bank. That 5% cannot logically be called an insuperable obstacle to peace, so when you hear someone say “the settlements are the problem” you need to know that they are not.
I spoke earlier about Zionism, and how Zionists built the state of Israel. This process did not end in 1948 or 1967 or 2001. It is going on to this day. The main difference I see is that instead of developing new agricultural land by draining swamps and watering deserts, the modern Israeli is developing new agricultural techniques, such as drip irrigation, and salt tolerant tomatoes. The technological innovation of course extends well beyond farming, to solar energy, water treatment, chip design, and medical technology, all of which impact the daily lives of all Americans, and in particular New Mexicans.
It is an exciting time to live and work in these areas, because like Israel New Mexico is blessed by abundant sunshine, but not by abundant water. Right now Israeli labs and entrepreneurs are inventing solutions to the problems facing their country and our state, and we can all take pride in that.
There are of course those who are not participating in the tech revolution that has changed life in Israel dramatically over the course of the last few decades. Far too many there still live in poverty. And I would be remiss to not mention that the Palestinians have not seen the kind of economic growth and development that Israelis have.
Without being flip, I consider myself to be strongly pro-Palestinian in the sense that they deserve better lives. Every Palestinian mother deserves to send her child to school without worrying, to see that child grow and be productive, just as every Jewish Israeli mother deserves the same. One group over the last decades has played the most malign role in depriving Palestinians of their rights. That group is the Palestinian leadership. The Palestinians have been cursed with leadership that has picked the wrong side in every conflict from choosing the Nazis in WWII (see Icon of Evil for more about the Mufti and Hitler), to siding with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, to recently siding with Saddam’s Iraq, (which led to the expulsion of numerous Palestinians from Kuwait, an event little commented upon). Hamas continues to misrule Gaza and pursue a confrontational policy toward Israel, a policy of rocket fire that forced Israel into Gaza late last year, the “Cast Lead” operation.
However there are signs of hope in the West Bank, where Abu Mazen continues to give signs that he truly is a voice of Moderation. The recent elections to the Palestinian Authority’s central committee brought in many younger leaders, who are not tied to the rejectionist legacy of Yasser Arafat. The easing security situation has led to a reduction in the number of road blocks, which has dramatically improved the economic conditions on the ground there. There is once again a real reason to hope, for the Palestinians who live there, and for us.
So to answer the question, How will it end? I believe that we can see the outlines of a future two state solution on the ground right now. The Security fence that Israel has built over the past several years has already served one purpose, it has dramatically reduced the number of suicide bombings in Israel. In 2000 to ride an Egged Bus was to play Russian roulette. By contrast, on my last trip to Israel, a year ago, the Bus was a safe and convenient way to get my family from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The fence will also be the boundary line between Israel and a new Palestinian state. To account for the 5% of the West Bank that will become part of Israel, other territory may be traded. There are numerous other issues that must be solved, for example a connection between the West Bank and Gaza. A secure road? A tunnel? A railway? I don’t know. There will also be new roads for the new Palestinian state. They may pass underneath or around the Jewish suburbs I mentioned before.
It is not just the Palestinians who will need to make accomodations. While 80% of the Jews in the West Bank live on 5% of the land, land which will be incorporated into Israel, the other 20% will have to be resettled, or accept that they live in a Palestinian ruled state.
Finally of course there is the question of Jerusalem. Speaking only for myself, it seems clear that there are Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem that properly should be part of the new Palestinian state. Perhaps they will even host its capital. The details of this are beyond my ken, and in any event must be worked out on the negotiating table between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As Americans we should recognize that Israel is a Democracy, in fact the only Democracy in the Middle East, and we should allow its citizens to determine its fate. They are the ones who must live with those decisions, they are the ones who send their sons and daughters off to defend those decisions.