No one can appreciate the adrenaline rush Americans felt on Monday when they
heard of the successful elimination of Osama bin Laden better than we Israelis.
The Holocaust experience led us to vow “never again,” and to a philosophy that
says we must strive to be the ones who call the shots. Doing away – by legal
means or otherwise – with individuals who we consider indefatigable enemies has
been part of this policy, which over the years the world – the same world we
claim is always against us – has accepted with surprising equanimity. As a
Syrian-American acquaintance recently wrote to me: “You guys really get away
with murder.”
The problem is that the situation does not always warrant
our calling the shots, and when this happens we are inclined to panic. This is
precisely the situation we are in today. Four recent developments emphasize this
reality: the possible recognition by the UN General Assembly of a Palestinian
state in September, the popular uprising in numerous Arab states in North Africa
and the Middle East, the Egyptian intention to enable free passage between the
Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip, and the declared preparedness of Hamas to
sign an agreement with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, establishing a joint
interim government.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak referred to the first of
these events as an approaching tsunami. It is a poor simile. Usually the warning
time for a tsunami is a few minutes.
That a Palestinian state would be
established some day is a fact that should have been part of Israel’s strategic
thinking at least since 1988, when the PLO declared the formal establishment of
such a state. It should have been clear that as time went by, more and more
states would grant this state at least de facto recognition. Israel’s reaction
to the 1988 declaration was a total refusal to deal with the PLO leadership, and
assistance to the newly formed Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a counterbalance to
the PLO.
INSTEAD OF seriously preparing for the eventuality of a
Palestinian state, successive Israeli governments kept finding excuses for why
such a state should not be established, or conditioning its establishment on a
liberal-democratic leadership gaining control of the Palestinian national
movement – “when apples grow on a lilac tree.”
Furthermore, instead of
taking the Egyptian position seriously following the signing of the
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979 – that further progress in the Middle East
peace process would depend on progress on the Palestinian front – we chose to
ignore it.
There is little, of course, that Israel can do about
developments in the Arab world today, other than trying to minimize the damage
to Israeli interests.
Israel can’t really be blamed for having dealt with
autocratic Arab regimes – there isn’t any other sort. Despite the democratic
motivation of those who initiated the uprisings, the final outcome is more
likely to be a new set of autocratic regimes; all Israel can do is pray that
they will not be of an Islamic fundamentalist nature. There is also little
Israel can do to prevent the de facto lifting of the stringent blockade on the
Gaza Strip, or attempts to achieve a Palestinian Authority-Hamas rapprochement,
even though the chances that this rapprochement will actually materialize seem
slim.
However, at this twelfth hour, despite the fact that Israel cannot
call all the shots, it can try to regain some influence with regards to the
approaching UN recognition of a Palestinian state. It will not be able to do so
with a totally negative approach. In practical terms, Israel simply does not
have the option of saying no to a Palestinian state. This has nothing to do with
“the world being against us,” but rather with the world’s feeling that the
Palestinians deserve a break, and that Israel is not doing anything tangible to
enable them to get a real break, beyond occasionally giving in to world pressure
and softening its hold (for example, by reducing the number of checkpoints in
the West Bank, or enabling more products to enter the Gaza Strip). Past policy
speeches by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were not regarded as tangible
steps, but rather as the mincing of words.
Netanyahu now has an
opportunity to change course, and prove in the speech he is to deliver in the
American capital toward the end of the month that he is capable of salvaging
Israel’s ability to call at least some of the shots.
The writer is a
former Knesset employee.