TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/062689/06268900.030

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.7 KB | 68 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 42

Trying to Bridge the Gap



    And then there are the "good Jews," as they are known to their
Arab counterparts, a hundred or so Israelis who meet regularly with
an equally small number of Palestinians for round-table discussions
that have all the naive earnestness of 1960s-style encounter-group
sessions. Their meetings are arranged secretly with code words;
they debate over coffee and cake in one another's homes; they talk
about mistrust and victimization. The Jews recall the Holocaust,
the Palestinians the humiliation of Israel's occupation. In common,
they all deplore the intransigence of Israel's political
leadership.

    "We are one of the confidence-building measures the Shamir
government claims to favor," says Hillel Bardin, 53, a veteran of
the American civil rights movement. He was jailed for two weeks
last year after trying to arrange a dialogue with Palestinians
while on reserve army duty in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
"You'd think the authorities would be delighted."

    They are not. Publicly, Israeli officials are noncommittal.
"Privately," concedes a senior Israeli army commander, "we are
apoplectic. Acknowledging that moderate Palestinians actually exist
in the middle of the intifadeh and that they are unafraid to meet
Israelis when they know we can jail them on the flimsiest of
pretexts means it might really be possible to achieve a peaceful
solution -- which is exactly what Shamir is against. To him, calm
talk can lead only to the thing he fears most, a Palestinian state
in the West Bank."

    Given their meager influence on Israeli public opinion, which
is moving furiously rightward, these interlocutors are strengthened
by such criticism. At one meeting in Bardin's Jerusalem home, Jad
Isaac, a Palestinian biology professor imprisoned after urging West
Bank Arabs to plant vegetable gardens to achieve agricultural
self-sufficiency, put it simply: "Even if all we do is talk, it is
good."

    Whatever the venue or composition of the groups, there are
invariably two agendas at work, one psychological, the other
political. "We Jews see the dialogues as a way of dashing
stereotypes," says Leora Frucht, an Israeli writer. "The
Palestinians want more. They say to us, `We know you're here to
assuage your guilt, and that's fine as far as it goes. Now what we
need is to organize some joint actions.' They want us to refuse
army service and lie down with them in front of the bulldozers when
an Arab house is ordered destroyed. Because we won't do things like
that, the Palestinians leave with unfulfilled expectations. We
could be doing more harm than good."

    Beyond the differing expectations lies a more fundamental
disagreement. Although all the dialogue participants favor a
two-state solution, the Israelis insist that a Palestinian nation
be demilitarized. Suggestions that Israel also disarm are greeted
with incredulity. "Creating alternative images of each other --
dedemonizing each other -- is worthwhile in itself," says Paul
Mendes-Flohr, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. "But while
many of us accept the right of the Palestinians to exist alongside
us in their own state, even the moderate Palestinians with whom we
meet only seem willing to accept Israel because of the fact of our
strength." To which Israel's West Bank commander nods sadly.
"Unless and until the right-vs.-fact problem is bridged," says
Major General Amram Mitzna, "it won't ever matter what Arafat says,
and the settlers' mentality will be closer to the feelings of most
Israelis, even if most Israelis deplore the settlers' tactics."