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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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1990-09-17
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ESSAY, Page 68Why Israel Needs a Gentle Intifadeh VictoryBy Michael Kramer
As diplomatic theory, its charm remains irresistible: the
intifadeh is a blessing in disguise. A rising spiral of violence
and economic dislocation will propel Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization to concessions deemed impossible before the
Palestinian uprising began in December 1988. Get a peace process
going, reason the U.S.'s Middle East savants. Any process. Get the
parties a little bit pregnant, and there will be no turning back.
They are right about the pain, but they forget about the fear.
In politics -- and especially political negotiations -- abortion
is never illegal.
Israel's intercommunal war is steadily escalating. As in
Lebanon, vigilante violence strikes innocents engaged in the most
prosaic activities. As a result, people on both sides of the
conflict have come to feel that even their individual survival
hangs in the balance. Those who contend that the recent Palestinian
attack on a bus full of civilians could be something other than a
foretaste of future horrors are urged to recall that after 18
months of sticks and stones, the intifadeh command last month
instructed its followers to "kill a settler or a soldier for every
martyr of our people." And those who dismiss the settlers'
increasing resort to acts of revenge as the scattered expressions
of madmen are similarly out of touch.
On the ground, the rhetoric of peace counts for nothing. Few
Israelis believe that the vast distance traveled by Yasser Arafat
toward a credible negotiating position is anything but a ruse. The
P.L.O.'s apparent readiness to bless a peace initiative whose
salient points are at best ambiguous is dismissed as derisively as
its earlier recognition of Israel's right to exist. The majority
of Israeli Jews scorn as naive the possibility that the
Palestinians may finally have decided to "settle" for something
short of everything. How could they?, asks Yitzhak Shamir; the
central problem has never changed: "We think the land is ours, and
they think it is theirs."
From this, the Prime Minister's bottom line, a dangerous notion
transcends Israel's current internal political crisis. It is the
idea that the intifadeh must be defeated rather than merely calmed.
Surprisingly, the insistence on victory comes from both
ideological poles, but for very different reasons. On the right,
the unstated premise is simply put: no more intifadeh, no more need
for peace. Even the downside is welcomed. Given the undisputed
hardening of opinion -- especially among those Israelis and
Palestinians who have reached their majority since Israel took the
West Bank and Gaza in 1967 -- failing to resolve the matter
peacefully now will almost inevitably lead to another region-wide
Arab-Israeli war. "Which we would win," says an aide to Ariel
Sharon confidently. "And then we will be that much closer to the
transfer" -- Israeli-speak for kicking the Palestinians out of the
territories once and for all.
On the left, a number of liberal-oriented senior army
commanders -- Israel's so-called dovish generals -- justify an
identical desire to win. Only by crushing the Palestinians, they
say, can Israel assure that half a loaf will suffice. Says one:
"From a military standpoint, with only a slight rectification of
the present boundaries, we can certainly live with a demilitarized
Palestinian state. But if they think they've won it from us rather
than having had it granted to them out of our magnanimity, they
will only be emboldened to strike for more later. Restraint would
be fine if it weren't always seen as weakness."
This is another nice theory that misses the mark in practice.
Winning produces a psychological high, all right, but it is often
injurious to long-term stability. "This isn't like Viet Nam, where
you resolve a situation and walk away," says the Israeli
philosopher David Hartman. "Neither side is going anywhere. Give
them peace after trampling them, and all you'll breed is
resentment, even among Israelis. A sense of misplaced paternalism
antithetical to a healthy day after will creep in. Like fathers and
sons, we'll always be saying, `Look what we've made of you, you
ungrateful scum.'"
What is needed, then, is exactly what the dovish generals
abhor, a Palestinian victory, but a mini one: a "victory" that
accommodates the need to feel that an individual's accomplishments
are earned through self-sacrifice, an affirmation of the Judaic
notion of justice. Christianity is about grace; man is a sinner
whom God loves in spite of his sins. Judaism invites a covenant in
which God asks man to be responsible. At the same time, of course,
a Palestinian victory must somehow quell the Arab sense of
grandiosity that invariably distorts real power relationships. (He
is mighty who controls himself, teaches the Talmud, a text with
which most Arabs -- and an increasing number of Israelis -- are
unfamiliar.)
Tactically, the intifadeh might be closer to victory if it
muted its self-indulgent rhetoric, reined in its paramilitary
operations and opted for civil disobedience: sit-ins, traffic
obstruction, hunger strikes, marches in which the only words
spoken, "We want peace," are chanted repeatedly. "Right now," says
Hartman, "our nerves are rubbed raw because when we walk about in
our own land, we are constantly afraid that rats are going to
attack us out of the shadows. Gandhi-like moves would drive Israel
nuts and productively appeal to the guilt feelings that inhabit the
core of Jewish existence."
Some statesmen would help too, leaders who recognize what
Maimonides and Plato understood, that the greatest rulers are
therapists because the highest statesmanship crafts solutions in
which everyone wins. Unless and until Israelis realize that a
Palestinian victory is theirs too, peace will never be at hand.