Crawling from the Wreckage (45 page)

Now the Palestinians are within sight of becoming a majority in the whole of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea, and some of them are starting to abandon that compromise goal. Let us have a single democratic state in all of these lands, they say, and we don’t mind if Israel never returns to its 1967 borders. We will just demand our equal democratic rights within this larger country that includes all the land now controlled by Israel, and our votes will change Israel from a “Jewish democracy” to a multi-ethnic, post-Zionist democratic state. (Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, has already adopted this strategy.)

This is the spectre that haunts Ehud Olmert and every other thinking Israeli. If you cannot make the two-state solution work, then you get the one-state solution, and Palestinians will soon be a majority within the borders of that single state.

Israel has the military power to deny the vote to Palestinians in the occupied territories indefinitely, but, in that case, it will look more and more like apartheid-era South Africa, with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as its Bantustans. Even its American supporters will turn away in the end, and Israel will be, as Olmert put it, “finished.”

That would not happen next year, or even in five or ten years, but the possibility is now permanently on the table. Even on the right, many Israelis have concluded that a Palestinian state is essential to the long-term survival of a Jewish state—but many others still think that a
two-state deal is either undesirable or impossible, and hope that the current round of peace talks fails.

They will probably not be disappointed, for Olmert’s cabinet would collapse if he made any major concessions on Jerusalem or Palestinian refugees in the talks. His negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas, only controls half of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories. Eighty-three percent of Israelis think that there will be no peace deal in the next year, and expectations among Palestinians are even lower. Still the question is as valid as ever: “if not now, when?”

What kept Ehud Olmert in office right down to the middle of 2008, despite the disastrous miscalculation of his 2006 war against Lebanon, was the fear on the centre and left of Israeli politics that the only alternative was a return to power by Binyamin Netanyahu, who had recaptured the leadership of the right-wing Likud Party. However, Olmert was dogged by corruption charges for his whole time in office, and eventually he was forced to resign and face them
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By the time he left office, he finally understood the strategic realities of Israel’s situation fully, but there was nothing he could have done about them. Israeli politics is still paralyzed by the great division between those who think the “demographic danger” requires major compromises on territory, and those who do not
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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was well aware that he resembled the generals who join a peace movement as soon as they retire. “I have not come here to justify my actions over the past 35 years,” he said. “For a large portion of that period, I was unwilling to look reality in the eye.”

Olmert, who has resigned but will stay in office until a new government is formed or an election is called, gave a valedictory interview to the newspaper
Yedioth Ahronoth
on September 29, and said something that no previous Israeli prime minister has ever said. He declared that if Israel wants peace, it must withdraw from almost all the lands it occupied in 1967. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late.

Not only is it a bit late for Olmert to tell the Israeli public this harsh truth, since he is leaving power now. It’s also too late for Israelis to act on his advice even if they accepted it, because the situation has changed.

That isn’t Olmert’s own view. What he says is: “We have an opportunity that is limited in time, in which we can perhaps reach a historic deal in our relations with the Palestinians and another historic step in our relations with Syria. In both cases, the decision we must reach is a decision that we have been refusing to accept for the past four decades.”

If Israel wants peace with Syria, he says, it must give back all of the Golan Heights. If it wants peace with the Palestinians, “we must … withdraw from almost all of the [occupied] territories, if not all of them. We will maintain control of a certain percentage of the territories [where the big Jewish settlements are], but we will have to give the Palestinians a commensurate percentage of our land, because without this, there will be no peace.”

Not only that, but Olmert now says that Israel must let go of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinian Authority wants as the capital of its future state. A “special creative solution” would get around the question of sovereignty over the disputed sacred sites in the Old City.

If Israel had been willing to make such a peace deal in the 1990s, it could have worked, but the only Israeli leader of that era who might eventually have offered such terms to the Arabs was Yitzhak Rabin. Since Rabin was murdered by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995, no other Israeli prime minister has been willing to go so far—including Olmert during his two and a half years in power.

But the new reality, which Olmert does not acknowledge, is that no Israeli leader will be free to make that deal in the next five or ten years. It is the right deal to make in Israel’s own long-term interests, but only if the Arab partners can guarantee that Israel will get permanent peace in return for giving back the land, and the Arab leaders with whom Israel might make this deal cannot really guarantee that anymore because they don’t even know if they will survive.

Consider Syria. The old dictator died in 2000 after a mere thirty years in power and his son still rules there eight years later, but the country is much less stable than it used to be. Many elements in Syrian society have been sharply radicalized by the American invasion of Iraq and the
flood of refugees from that country. Nobody knows if Syria is heading for a revolution, but the possibility certainly exists.

If there were a revolution in Syria the winners would almost certainly be Islamists who reject any peace with Israel. So what Israeli leader in the next five or ten years could sell the public on a peace that returned the Golan Heights to Syrian control? A few days of violence in Damascus could turn that peace into a nightmare that sees a hostile Syrian army back on the heights that overlook northern Israel.

In the case of the Palestinians, the Islamists of Hamas are already in control of the Gaza Strip, and there is no single Palestinian authority for Israel to make a peace deal with. The notion of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement in the current circumstances is purely a fantasy that is maintained to indulge the Bush administration.

Even Egypt, whose peace treaty with Israel is almost thirty years old, is not a reliable partner anymore. If there were to be a truly free Egyptian election in the next five years, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably form the next government—and they have already said that their first act would be to hold a referendum on the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. It would probably be rejected by the voters.

So, even if Israeli voters were willing to listen to Ehud Olmert in principle, they would not dare to act on his advice now. Perhaps, in time, the likelihood of Islamist regimes coming to power in Israel’s neighbours will shrink. Perhaps there will then be a majority of Israeli voters willing to back the kind of deal that Ehud Olmert has just outlined. But not this year, not this decade, and probably not this generation.

Three months after his “valedictory” interview, Ehud Olmert was still in office, hanging on in order to hold his coalition together until the next election, scheduled for February 2009. And in order to improve the chances of his own Kadima Party in that election, he was fighting another war: an extremely one-sided one, in which Israel was hammering the Gaza Strip with heavy weapons in retaliation for homemade rockets being fired from there at southern Israeli cities
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Everybody knew that it was completely pointless, but it was nevertheless an emotional and political necessity in Israel
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Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, was understandably distraught at the funeral of Irit Shetreet, one of four Israelis to be killed by Palestinian rockets since Israel launched its bombing campaign against the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Sunday. However, he was wrong to say that her death was “the latest manifestation of 3,000 years of anti-Jewish hatred.” The hatred is real but its sources are a good deal closer both in time and in space.

Western media coverage of current affairs rarely goes into the origins of those events: even what happened last year or ten years ago is treated as ancient history. So the fury and despair of the million and a half residents of the Gaza Strip can easily seem incomprehensible—the “bottomless hatred of wild beasts,” as Sheinin so delicately put it. Why do these Palestinians fire murderous rockets at innocent civilians in Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, even Beersheva?

Because that’s where they come from. Only about one-fifth of the Gaza Strip’s population is descended from people who lived in that barren stretch of land before 1948. The rest are people, or the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of people, who were driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war, or simply fled in fear and were not allowed to go home again afterwards. Their former homes were mostly in the south of former Palestine, in places like Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod and Beersheva.

This does not give them the right to launch rockets at the people who now live in those towns, of course, any more than Israel has the right to use its massive air power to pound the crowded Gaza Strip. But it does provide some context for what is happening now—and indeed, happens every year or so. This struggle is still about what it has always been about: the land. And the fact that Israel is killing a hundred Palestinians for every dead Israeli does not mean that the Israelis are winning.

Israel cannot actually lose this fight since Hamas, the Islamist organization that now controls the Gaza Strip, is distinctly short of F-16s, tanks and unmanned aerial vehicles carrying Hellfire missiles. And Israel will not lose a lot of soldiers—more than a couple of dozen—even if it invades
the Gaza Strip on the ground for a while, because Hamas is not like Hezbollah, the Shia militia in southern Lebanon that fought the Israelis to a standstill in the 2006 war.

Hamas does not have the discipline or the weapons that Hezbollah had. It cannot even prevent Israeli infiltration of its own ranks, which is why its leaders die like flies in Israeli air strikes and “targeted killings,” whereas Hezbollah successfully purged its ranks of informers and has not lost a single senior leader to Israeli assassination for more than a decade. The Israelis can do pretty much what they want to the Gaza Strip—but they cannot win.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s interim prime minister, and Tzipi Livni, his successor as head of the Kadima Party, and Binyamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud Party and Livni’s principal rival for the prime ministership in next month’s Israeli election, all know that. They are all old enough to have watched Israel try to bash the Palestinians into submission half a dozen times before, and they know it does not work. But that is strategy, and this is politics.

For Israel’s political leaders, this is mainly about looking tough in front of an electorate that just wants someone to “do something” about the Palestinians and their rockets. Nothing much can be done, short of a peace settlement generous enough to reconcile them to the loss of their land, but Israeli politicians have to look like they are trying. Hundreds of people are dying in the Gaza Strip to provide that show.

The Hamas leaders are equally cynical, since they know that every civilian death, and even every militant’s death, helps to build popular support for their organization. The dead are pawns, and the game is politics. No wonder there is such a lack of enthusiasm elsewhere for spending much effort on trying to persuade the two sides to agree to a ceasefire. They will stop only when they have achieved their (purely tactical and short-term) political goals.

There is a more profound issue behind all this, which is Israel’s right to exist versus the right of the Palestinians to their homeland, but we shouldn’t get carried away with the unique moral dimension of all that. It’s just one more conquerors-versus-previous-inhabitants conflict, like the European settlers versus the Indians in the Americas in the eighteenth century—or, for that matter, the Israelites versus the Canaanites three thousand years ago.

Those earlier conflicts were all settled by force, but the world has changed and force doesn’t work so well anymore. Israel has the power to hammer the Palestinians endlessly, but they don’t give up and go away. They cannot, and neither can the Israelis. Neither side can eliminate the other, as has been amply and repeatedly demonstrated.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that this conflict will ultimately be settled by peaceful negotiation and compromise. It may mean that there will be no solution of any sort for the foreseeable future, just an endless series of bloody, indecisive clashes like the present one. Happy New Year.

Israel’s three-week war against Hamas in Gaza in 2008–09 ended up looking a lot like its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, which could hardly be called a success. It lasted about as long, killed about as many Arabs, and ended with Hamas, like Hezbollah, still able to fire rockets at Israel
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That pretty well guaranteed that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader and the ultimate rejectionist, the man who successfully sabotaged the Oslo Accords and effectively killed the “peace process” during his last term as prime minister in 1996–99, would form the next Israeli government. But Ehud Olmert had one more service to do us before he left the scene
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