Encountering Peace: Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur

The demise of partition as an option brings us back into an existential conflict.

By GERSHON BASKIN
olmert worried 248.88 ap (photo credit: AP [file])
olmert worried 248.88 ap
(photo credit: AP [file])
Why did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert suddenly now realize that the price of peace with the Palestinians is giving back almost all of the West Bank, dividing Jerusalem and even acknowledging Israel's part in the suffering caused to Palestinians as a result of the establishment of Israel? Why do Israeli leaders and Israeli generals come to these same political insights only when they no longer have any real power to do anything about it? At the time of coming to the decision to disengage from Gaza, prime minister Ariel Sharon said that the weight of responsibility changes your vantage point. Perhaps that is true when you are a leader with a strong coalition government behind you, or when there is no real opposition working against you, as Sharon had during those days. Olmert had a strong coalition, but only on paper and only if he didn't make any controversial decisions. After muddling the war in Lebanon, he lost his "moral majority" in the Knesset and even within his own party, and along with all of the corruption investigations, he was not given a free day to really focus on his main and most important mission - peace with the Palestinians. Domestic politics have always clouded the vision of Israeli leaders and have always prevented them from fulfilling their political agenda. Olmert has been liberated from domestic politics - he doesn't care about his coalition or his popularity rating any more. He can now say what he really believes. It is, on the one hand, refreshing to hear such honesty from a political leader, but; on the other, extremely frustrating to hear it when it is too late to impact any political change. Olmert has faced the reality that we may have missed the opportunity to create the Palestinian state next to Israel. Ironically, for most of his political life he was opposed to this idea and now he has come to realize that the survival of the State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise is based on it. I HAVE spent a lot of time recently traveling around the West Bank and seeing the reality of the settlement entrenchment that makes it almost impossible to separate Israel from Palestine. Larry Derfner, a Jerusalem Post columnist, wrote last week that we must come to realization that as much as Tel Aviv is Israel, so is Nablus. More and more Palestinians are coming to this conclusion as well. Palestinian newspapers as well as debates in the Palestinian universities and among political activists throughout Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora are coming out in support of the one-state solution. Objectively speaking, in light of the continued settlement building and the failure of the negotiators to produce an acceptable agreement, it seems like a logical conclusion. The main problem is that there is no such thing as a "one-state solution." The Palestinian national movement has traveled long distances since its institutionalization with the founding of the PLO in 1964. For 24 years it held steadfast to the idea of a "secular democratic state" in all of Palestine, from the river to the sea. According to the PLO Charter, Jews that came to Palestine after the beginning of the Zionist movement's "colonialization" would have to go back to where they came from. We correctly understood the PLO Charter as a call for the destruction of the State of Israel. In 1988, after the outbreak of the first intifada, the local Palestinian leadership in the refugee camps and in east Jerusalem, living under Israeli occupation for 20 years, succeeded in imposing a different agenda on the Palestinian leadership in exile. In November 1988 the PLO adopted the two-state solution which implicitly recognized the State of Israel. That recognition became explicit in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Agreement. Now after 20 years of failing to convince Israeli governments to accept the two-state solution, the Palestinian national movement is in the process of reviewing and renewing its political agenda. A significant number of Palestinian intellectuals and political thinkers, some of the very same people who helped to shape the position in support of the two-state solution, are now saying it's too late. There is currently a new search for ideas and political concepts aimed at reshaping the vision of the Palestinian national movement. The more simplistic version or "sound bite" of the new vision is "the one-state solution." The more sophisticated renditions reflect an enhanced and keen political awareness of international politics and national liberation struggles and call for democracy - one person, one vote. They are not presenting their position as "anti-Israeli," in fact they are saying: Give me Israeli citizenship and Israeli freedom. They are aware that using the term "bi-national state" would not be popular because they also cannot find examples of successful and peaceful bi-national states. But democracy is a different ball game. Who can oppose democracy? The people who support this program have already adopted and promulgated the term "apartheid wall." They are very well aware of the connotation that it is meant to arouse in the minds of the listeners. Israel, they say, is the new apartheid South Africa and it must be brought to accept democracy in the same way that the apartheid regime of South Africa was brought down. WHAT THE supporters of this plan fail to understand is that the only hope for peace in this land has always been based on the concept of partition. This is the only way to move beyond an existential conflict of either "us or them." Partition allows for the conflict to be focused on issues: borders, sovereignty, Jerusalem, economics, water, etc. The demise of partition as an option brings us back into an existential conflict - a zero sum game where the focus of the conflict is "identity" and not borders. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict moves back into existential terms, then Israel/Palestine turns into Bosnia of the 1990s. In that Balkan conflict about 150,000 people were killed in 10 years. That is what will happen here if the conflict is about identity, because then it is a conflict of everyone against everyone. There is no escaping the conflict - it becomes all encompassing and completely intractable. Israelis and Palestinians are not ready now or at any time in the foreseeable future to share the same national home. We both need a physical territory in which we can claim sovereignty and express our own national identity. Olmert's soul searching of the new year should be a collective soul searching in which we all reach the same conclusions. If we will not find the way to allow the Palestinians to gain their freedom and to end our occupation over them, in the not too distant future, we will be atoning for our loss of our own freedom in our own state and wondering how we missed the opportunity for peace. The writer is the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. www.ipcri.org