My new favorite journalist
Is Martin Peretz of The New Republic. (See I, II)
Today, for the September 5th issue of the magazine, he published another article about Israel, the Gaza disengagement, the Palestinians etc. It's a long piece (well worth the read-I'll post it as a comment for those interested) that doesn't seem to connect all of its different ideas as well as the author usually does, but here are some of the better portions:
Today, for the September 5th issue of the magazine, he published another article about Israel, the Gaza disengagement, the Palestinians etc. It's a long piece (well worth the read-I'll post it as a comment for those interested) that doesn't seem to connect all of its different ideas as well as the author usually does, but here are some of the better portions:
Words, not blows; and, in most cases, the arguments between soldiers and settlers ended with a hug, revealing the deeper truth that the Jewish polis may be divided between messianism and realism but is very much one. The civil war that had been widely feared turned out to be a lot of civil and very little war.[That's the contrapositive of what Alon Pinkas wrote just last week in Ynet.]
...
And what of the politics in the days and months ahead? Condoleezza Rice is impatient. Even before the evacuation has been completed--it is not just the people who have to be removed, but all the houses torn down (at the insistence of the Palestinians!) and the entire military infrastructure disassembled--she hardly lets a day go by without insisting that Israel give more, including weapons that she cannot assure won't be used against its soldiers and citizens. If she doesn't give Sharon a breather, the secretary of state will soon have Bibi Netanyahu to deal with.
The wrenching experience of the dissolution of Jewish Gaza should be a caution to those Israelis who anticipate a similar and overall fate for the settlements in the West Bank. This will not be repeated; the Israeli body politic simply will not permit it. The fact is that the Israeli settlements of Gaza were different: They were Israel's stepchildren. It was almost as if they were in a foreign land.[I'm not so sure about that; the 'typical' TNR readers I know well would definitely consider the settlers 'weirdos.')]
...
There are several towns with quite sizeable populations deep in the West Bank. (Remember: In any of these characterizations a word like "deep" may mean as little as five miles.) They pose a larger problem than the obstinate and isolated little pockets that the Israeli army and police are extricating from Samaria in these very days. These real communities cannot simply be picked up and moved. As difficult a problem as they may pose, they are living organisms with three generations of inhabitants having their souls and bodies entwined with their immediate environment. You cannot simply expel 10,000 individuals here and 10,000 there and 10,000 elsewhere and say this is being done in the interest of making peace.
The remainder of the Israeli settlements and settlers are not at all stepchildren. These constitute what Sharon calls the settlement blocs. The contours of the fence include these, and the fence expresses the logic of the two-state solution. Nothing else does.
...
Psychologically and geographically, these small cities and towns are as much Israel as Beersheba and Tiberias. You do not cross checkpoints to get to them. They are suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in some cases adjoining suburbs. They are vibrant, pulsating, and growing by natural birth rate and internal migration. (They are not inhabited by people whom a typical New Republic reader might consider weirdos.)
They are not up for grabs. Any negotiating team with goodwill and good sense could find ways to compensate the Palestinians with the kind of hardscrabble land the Israelis encountered when they first came there three and four decades ago (with the support of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, incidentally, who also saw them as no obstacle to peace if the Palestinians really wanted peace). The Palestinians claim to adore this land, but one wonders why they never did anything more with it.
...
lose observers of the Palestinians will tell you to put your money on Hamas in the elections scheduled for January 25. And Hamas has been making its point of view abundantly clear. Do you recall the name Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas official whom an Israeli agent tried to kill in Amman in January 1997, to the outrage of nearly everyone?...Mashaal told reporters in Beirut and major Arab TV stations, according to the Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, that the Israeli withdrawals marked the beginning of the end of the Zionist dream in Palestine. One of Mashaal's lieutenants, Mahmoud Zahar, impressed upon the pan-Arab daily Arshaq Al Awsat that "neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don't recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold on to one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims." After a meeting with Qurei, Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders informed reporters that they were assured that "there would be no attempt" by the PA "to collect weapons from the resistance groups." No PA officials denied this. Well, Prime Minister Sharon, can't you find some more generous common ground with these folks? Secretary Rice, have you heard about this in your morning briefings? [emphasis added]
...Saul Singer astutely observed that the Greater Israel movement may have been broken by--of all people--Ariel Sharon, but what almost nobody has noticed is that Greater Palestine is still alive. Its irredentist and jihadist idea suffuses each and every Palestinian crowd. "Palestinians," Singer wrote, "including Abbas, do not even have to call their goal 'Greater Palestine' because to them that is what the word 'Palestine' means. The Palestine of Palestinian maps, poetry, dreams, and legal claims includes all of Israel." There is no reason for great optimism. Gaza will be a relief to Israel. But partial relief: It does not change the stakes or even the odds.
posted by Michael at 12:12 PM
1 Comments:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050905&s=peretz090505
Gaza Dispatch
Polis
by Martin Peretz
Post date 08.25.05 / Issue date 09.05.05
Israel may be the last polis on earth. Not that its parliamentary debates or party conventions are exactly Athenian. But it is a small country in which almost everyone is alert to the high stakes of its politics, and many are historically knowledgeable and intellectually sophisticated about them. Politics here is, after all, a matter of life and death. Walking around the Gaza settlements last week, I was also struck by the consistent intimacy of the population, even across bitter ideological lines. Even across police lines, talk was the great medium of the conflict that split friends, families, co-workers. Words, not blows; and, in most cases, the arguments between soldiers and settlers ended with a hug, revealing the deeper truth that the Jewish polis may be divided between messianism and realism but is very much one. The civil war that had been widely feared turned out to be a lot of civil and very little war.
I was accompanied in Gaza by my friend Moshe Halbertal, a scholar at the Hebrew University and one of Israel's most distinguished public intellectuals. He encountered students and former students, colleagues and former colleagues, also on both sides of the ideological divide. The physical and philosophical lines in this confrontation were remarkably porous. Some of the songs the resisters sang--and some of the prayers they chanted--also came naturally to the lips of those who had come to uproot them from their homes. This was hardly a meeting of real enemies, although harsh words were said and harsher words shouted. There were more than a few tragicomic scenes, such as impertinent young punks shouting at real combat heroes that they were cowards; but, mostly, it was an encounter between articulate young people and the determined but joyless authorities.
Much of the high brass of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was present throughout the entire maneuver and certainly during the three days I spent in Gaza, including the two commanders of this sensitive operation, Dan Harel--who will soon be military attaché in Washington--and Gershon HaCohen, a very independent intellectual, indeed. Both of them--and all of their other comrades, generals and colonels--walked through the hostile crowds without weapons and without bodyguards, a fact that no journalist seems to have noticed. I marveled at this evidence of a resiliently open and unafraid society in a moment of terrible stress. (The ones who needed the bodyguards were the preening politicians, who had come to be seen and not, as they claimed, to see.)
Halbertal was immediately engaged by his interlocutors over matters of democratic theory and Jewish ethics. Hadn't the government of Israel put the residents in Gaza? How could it simply pull them out, uprooting their lives and destroying their work? The citizenry's right to resist, the requirement of a plebiscite in historically decisive matters, the correctness of a unilateral withdrawal, the sacredness of tilled land: These became the topics of ad hoc disputations and tutorials, along with appeals to the men and women of the IDF and the police to refuse their orders. This last issue had already been settled in the weeks and months before. The Greater Israel movement had launched an intense campaign to get soldiers not to participate in the removal of settlers and settlements, but I'm happy to report that, among Israel's young, there is not a big "I'm Not Marching Anymore" culture. Less than a handful refused.
These issues were on almost everyone's tongue during the days of my Gaza stay. Suddenly, almost everyone--the settlers, their outside supporters, the young and old, policemen and women, soldiers, officers, and, yes, generals--was a political philosopher of one sort or another. Everywhere, there were deeply felt opinions and intensely argued ideas. In its fervor of popular argument, this polis was more Jewish in tone than Greek. HaCohen had gone into a yeshiva whose rabbi had reneged on a deal about when he and his acolytes would vacate the school. The students were already in a cosmic trance of liturgy and dance, awaiting an act of God or, even less probably, some stay of the verdict the government had rendered about settlement evacuation. When HaCohen, who was known not to be a particular enthusiast of this unreciprocated disengagement over which he presided so masterfully, came out, he said to me, "I know why I am, in the end, a Litvak." He was referring to the old stereotype of the Lithuanian Jew who lives only for reason and rules and despises enthusiasm and its undermining of personal and social discipline.
One member of the Knesset I met there, neither preening nor shadowed by bodyguards, was Yuli Tamir, a protégé of Isaiah Berlin, author of a fine book on liberal nationalism, professor of political philosophy at Tel Aviv University, minister of immigration and absorption in Ehud Barak's government, and among the declining numbers of the serious Israeli left. She has been reduced (I don't mean this disdainfully) by the behavior of the Palestinians since 2000 to being a de facto supporter of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But she is a woman of parts. We encountered her outside a house where a young man, his first name being her second, a student of architecture at the prestigious Bezalel school in Jerusalem, was pleading to explain his family's circumstances. Hailing from the swath of Arab North Africa, Tamir's parents had settled in Ofakim, a dreary development town plucked down in the Negev desert, an intrinsic part of Israel, though some "moderate" Palestinian officials have recently laid claim to it. (I note this just in case you want an inkling of the political psychodrama of ever more preposterous demands from the Palestinian camp that we are about to witness.)
The family had moved to Neve Dekalim, the Gaza community whose destruction we were witnessing, some 20 years ago. Encouraged by the government, they had planted themselves in Gaza to raise their quality of living. Their house was handsome, with textured white plaster studded with beautiful stone and a red tile roof. Tamir's family worked hard in its greenhouse and had helped its neighbors with theirs. This was private property, but with a communal tinge. (A group of American Jews, mostly good Zionists, have themselves put up $14 million to buy these greenhouses and hand them over to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority had rejected a proposal that the U.S. government buy them from the Israelis and transfer them to the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas refused to be a party to a transaction in which official U.S. aid would make the greenhouse purchase from the Israelis, even though the greenhouses would eventually go to the Palestinians. Will the greenhouses be functional in two years? I bet not.)
Back to Yuli, and to Tamir. He took us around the house that his father built and around to the garden where his father had planted grapevines two decades ago and where he had uprooted them in the last days to replant them in the next place the family would live. The government's planning for the resettlement of these families and communities within Israel has been sloppy, inchoate, indifferent. They will be living in caravans and in shabby hotels for only God knows how long. I think that Yuli, who had some responsibility for the immigration of Jews from Ethiopia, sensed this young man's agony. And we had to respect the agony. It has a basis in reality. The settlement of Gaza may have been a momentous strategic, political, and even moral mistake, but it did not have to end so shabbily, with so much disdain for the people, some admittedly very difficult and with God on their side, whom the government of Israel had put out in scorching sands. So Yuli and Moshe and I wept a little along with Tamir, whose tears will not dry as quickly as ours. Still, do not doubt the solidarity of this people: The members of a formerly communist and still left-wing kibbutz have invited the evicted members of Homesh, a small right-wing settlement in Samaria, to join them, and at least the nonreligious ones will go. Other kibbutzim sent their members to help the Gaza settlers with the pullout.
And what of the politics in the days and months ahead? Condoleezza Rice is impatient. Even before the evacuation has been completed--it is not just the people who have to be removed, but all the houses torn down (at the insistence of the Palestinians!) and the entire military infrastructure disassembled--she hardly lets a day go by without insisting that Israel give more, including weapons that she cannot assure won't be used against its soldiers and citizens. If she doesn't give Sharon a breather, the secretary of state will soon have Bibi Netanyahu to deal with.
Israel has long ago accepted the proposition of a Palestinian state, and Sharon bonded with President Bush over that agreement. Perhaps this agreement was facilitated by the fact that the boundaries of the state were left a trifle ambiguous. But Bush clearly understood that the big new towns cleaving for 35 years to the precarious 1949 cease-fire lines (and dropping the fragility of those lines a notch or two) were not to be dismantled. The same was understood about the post-'67 Jewish neighborhoods and towns around Jerusalem. More than half a century of the Palestinians refusing to consider a real give-and-take with Israel entails some costs to them. (Bush never quite addressed Sharon's intentions about the Jordan Valley settlements, which set up a barrier to invading Arab armies. These intentions have deep roots in Israeli defense strategy, having been detailed in the Alon Plan 38 years ago.) Nor is this a case of the Israelis taking and taking without recompense: The defense establishment has developed designs for territorial swaps and other reciprocal exchanges that would leave a Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors in far more advantageous positions than they would be if they simply made the happenstance truce lines permanent. And, here, let us raise a no-no. The Gaza dispossession of Israelis has put into the air the idea of "transfer"--not certainly of Israeli Arabs without their towns and villages but Israeli Arabs with their towns and villages--to Palestine; not the forced movement of people, but the demographically expedient and diplomatically validated redrawing of the map. This is appropriate only for those municipalities that would, in fact, abut neighboring Palestine. It is true: Some of these Israeli Arabs would want to remain in Israel. But the Gaza Israelis wanted to remain in Gaza. The Israeli Arabs could take their ample Israeli social benefits with them to Palestine, along with their houses and their fig trees and their true loyalties. The other Israeli Arabs would remain resident Israeli citizens as you cannot for a moment imagine Jews being allowed to remain citizens resident in Palestine.
The wrenching experience of the dissolution of Jewish Gaza should be a caution to those Israelis who anticipate a similar and overall fate for the settlements in the West Bank. This will not be repeated; the Israeli body politic simply will not permit it. The fact is that the Israeli settlements of Gaza were different: They were Israel's stepchildren. It was almost as if they were in a foreign land. Virtually no one wanted to serve there to protect 8,500 farmers; but they served. There are some dozens of similar tiny settlements, again with relatively few settlers in them, spread thinly throughout the West Bank and surrounded by or abutting old Arab villages and towns. Many Israelis feel strongly that these settlements are also not an intrinsic part of Israel. They are not contiguous with Israel. They do not command necessary defensive positions. These Jewish enclaves, their ill-wishers believe, are an indulgence to their inhabitants. Some of these will also be vacated, with all the pain and sorrow this entails to the people who live in them. "Not everything will remain," said Sharon, and he was echoed--and actually preceded--by his most trusted minister, Ehud Olmert. Altogether, these may constitute something approaching 25 percent of the Israelis in the West Bank proper. There are several towns with quite sizeable populations deep in the West Bank. (Remember: In any of these characterizations a word like "deep" may mean as little as five miles.) They pose a larger problem than the obstinate and isolated little pockets that the Israeli army and police are extricating from Samaria in these very days. These real communities cannot simply be picked up and moved. As difficult a problem as they may pose, they are living organisms with three generations of inhabitants having their souls and bodies entwined with their immediate environment. You cannot simply expel 10,000 individuals here and 10,000 there and 10,000 elsewhere and say this is being done in the interest of making peace.
The remainder of the Israeli settlements and settlers are not at all stepchildren. These constitute what Sharon calls the settlement blocs. The contours of the fence include these, and the fence expresses the logic of the two-state solution. Nothing else does. (It is also the inevitable corollary of the Palestinians having turned down the unreasonably generous proposals made to them by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David and Taba in 2000.) Psychologically and geographically, these small cities and towns are as much Israel as Beersheba and Tiberias. You do not cross checkpoints to get to them. They are suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in some cases adjoining suburbs. They are vibrant, pulsating, and growing by natural birth rate and internal migration. (They are not inhabited by people whom a typical New Republic reader might consider weirdos.) The fact is that these will not be given up to a Palestine, real or imagined. And they do not constitute much territory. They are not up for grabs. Any negotiating team with goodwill and good sense could find ways to compensate the Palestinians with the kind of hardscrabble land the Israelis encountered when they first came there three and four decades ago (with the support of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, incidentally, who also saw them as no obstacle to peace if the Palestinians really wanted peace). The Palestinians claim to adore this land, but one wonders why they never did anything more with it.
In any case, the real question is whether the Palestinians are willing to contemplate compromise. Not since American and European innocents swallowed the line that Josef Stalin really didn't want all of Eastern Europe has there been such widespread gullibility about a political movement's intentions. It's not as if the Palestinian revolution goes to any particular lengths to disguise its objectives. Ah, but, you may say, there are two wings to the Palestinian crusade, a moderate one and an extremist one. The so-called moderate one is led by Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose party includes Fatah and its offshoot, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which have been at least as involved in ongoing terrorism as those who wave the green flag of Hamas. He has not mobilized whatever force he has to put an end to terrorism, in Gaza or in the West Bank. No terrorist has been arrested, tried, or sent to prison. The truth may be that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority do not have the capacity to control their compatriots who specialize in murder. He may have some months to prove this wrong. In the meantime, his prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, a loyal acolyte of Yasir Arafat, has been consorting with Muslim militants, and Abbas himself will be forced to compete for their loyalties.
Close observers of the Palestinians will tell you to put your money on Hamas in the elections scheduled for January 25. And Hamas has been making its point of view abundantly clear. Do you recall the name Khaled Mashaal, the Hamas official whom an Israeli agent tried to kill in Amman in January 1997, to the outrage of nearly everyone? Imagine the Israelis killing a terrorist chieftain on the street--just imagine. Well, of course, Mashaal has been heard from again and again since: He is now the effective head of Hamas. Ted Koppel said on "Nightline" earlier this year that he imagined Mashaal coming to tea at the White House. (I doubt it would be Bush's White House.) Mashaal told reporters in Beirut and major Arab TV stations, according to the Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, that the Israeli withdrawals marked the beginning of the end of the Zionist dream in Palestine. One of Mashaal's lieutenants, Mahmoud Zahar, impressed upon the pan-Arab daily Arshaq Al Awsat that "neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don't recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold on to one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims." After a meeting with Qurei, Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders informed reporters that they were assured that "there would be no attempt" by the PA "to collect weapons from the resistance groups." No PA officials denied this. Well, Prime Minister Sharon, can't you find some more generous common ground with these folks? Secretary Rice, have you heard about this in your morning briefings?
In The Jerusalem Post last Thursday, the political commentator Saul Singer astutely observed that the Greater Israel movement may have been broken by--of all people--Ariel Sharon, but what almost nobody has noticed is that Greater Palestine is still alive. Its irredentist and jihadist idea suffuses each and every Palestinian crowd. "Palestinians," Singer wrote, "including Abbas, do not even have to call their goal 'Greater Palestine' because to them that is what the word 'Palestine' means. The Palestine of Palestinian maps, poetry, dreams, and legal claims includes all of Israel." There is no reason for great optimism. Gaza will be a relief to Israel. But partial relief: It does not change the stakes or even the odds.
Post a Comment
<< Home