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Marek Halter | I Confess; Today, I Fear for Israel    [

    Has Israel Learned Anything?
    By Amos Oz
    Libération

    Wednesday 20 December 2006

Sadat in 1973, Syria in 2006: Proffered hands each time rejected.

    Syrian president Bashar al-Assad recently - and on several occasions - proposed peace negotiations with Israel. Not long ago, he specifically noted that there were no preliminary conditions for these negotiations - and didn't even demand that Israel promise in advance to return the Golan Heights. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's response was astonishing. According to him, we cannot act against our friend, President George W. Bush, who has no interest in any accommodation whatsoever between Israel and Syria. That's why Israel refuses to seize the hand Syria offers....

    Once upon a time, when Israel still behaved like an independent country, rather than a United States client, the demand for direct and unconditional negotiations with the Arab countries was at the heart of its Near Eastern policy. Prime ministers such as David Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin all required that Arab leaders sit down at the negotiating table without any preliminary conditions on one side or the other. Each party's demands had to be examined during the course of the negotiations - that's the position Israel defended for decades.

    That's no longer the case.

    Now, in response to the Syrian overture, Israel presents a list of conditions: Syria must expel Hamas's leadership. Syria must cut its links with Hezbollah. Syria must stop harassing our American allies in Iraq. Syria must put an end to its alliance with Iran. Syria must abandon any military build-up along the Golan front. And it must complete all of that before any negotiation can start.

    If Syria met all these demands, Israel all of a sudden would no longer have any reason to negotiate with Syria over the future of the Golan. In fact, if Syria accepted all Israel's conditions, peace would become superfluous.

    In 1967, in response to a Syrian attack, Israel occupied the Golan plateau. Since then, Syria has demanded the return of its territory, while, at the same time, Israel has demanded that the Syrian regime recognize Israel, put an end to the hostilities, and live in peace with the Jewish state. Now, Israel demands as a prerequisite that Syria abandon everything it has to offer before even sitting down at the same table with us. That's an unreasonable demand. And, even more unreasonable, is the justification Israel gives for this disdain of Syria's proffered hand: We cannot negotiate with Syria because that would put President Bush in a bad position in America over his Middle East policy.

    Why does Israel involve itself in a controversy between hawks and doves in the United States? Why must Israel sacrifice its supreme national interest - peace with all its neighbors - for the benefit of pleasantness in its relations with a foreign government? And in particular, this: It's the first time that an Israeli prime minister has acknowledged, and even takes pride in the fact, that a national Israeli decision of enormous importance has been handed over to foreigners.

    We've already had a taste of that sort of thing: Right before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had proposed peace to Israel in exchange for restitution of the Sinai. Golda Meir's incompetent government ignored that offer for reasons very similar to those advanced by the Olmert government today. After that war, Israel received the same offer as had been made just before the fighting: peace in exchange for territory. Have we learned anything since?

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     Amos Oz is an Israeli writer. His last work to appear in French is Soudain, dans la forêt profonde, translated from the Hebrew by Sylvie Cohen, Gallimard, 2006.

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    I Confess; Today, I Fear for Israel
    By Marek Halter
    Le Figaro

    Wednesday 20 December 2006

    I fear for Israel. For many people, the Middle East is just a political poker chip - a hostage to domestic politics; a subject for electoral argument, quickly forgotten once the elections are over. For me, Israel is part of my memory; it is incised in my flesh and in what I consider to be justice. For years, confronted by Israelis, confronted by Palestinians, I cry out the words of Isaiah - our predecessor, the predecessor of all activists, of all whose sole weapon is the Word: "And the fruit of justice shall be peace; and justice will deliver tranquility and security for all." (32:17)

    I confess; I am attached to Israel, to its existence: an existence that Israel owes above all to its uninterrupted presence on this land since Abraham purchased land near Hebron from the Hittite Ephron, son of Zohar, four thousand years ago. Sometimes in the minority, often in the majority, always in revolt against the invaders - Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Mameluks, Ottomans, and, most recently, the British - whom they, weapons in hand, drove out of the land of their ancestors - the Jews have nourished the hills and valleys of Judea with their blood over the centuries.

    It is certain that the memory of the Shoah, the destruction of a third of the Jewish people during the Second World War, influenced the UN vote in 1947 that decided to divide the land into two states: Israeli and Palestinian. A guilty conscience was partly responsible, but not determinant, as some suppose, in the creation of the State of Israel. People often forget that its government structures antedated the declaration of Independence and existed from the 1930s. Yasser Arafat, with whom I began to associate in 1969, would often talk to me about his admiration for this state-before-the-state, which included, apart from a leadership - a parliament, a real administration, a (clandestine) army, a budget, political parties, unions, and a mutual aid society. It was an organization that he found exemplary, and which he tried to reproduce exactly for the Palestinians.

    The Palestinians, then. I confess; I am attached to a Palestinian state. Not for the same reasons as I am to the Israel state. The Palestinians' history is not exactly mine, but their future depends on the degree of Israel's sense of justice. Every time Israel neglects the appeal of Deuteronomy, "Justice, Justice, you shall pursue," it puts itself in danger.

    Now, today, external danger exists. The Israeli army's secret services deem that a war could break out between the spring and the summer of 2007. Major General Aharon Zevi Farkash, former director of those services, even foresees Syria's involvement this time. That's pretty convincing when you see how Hezbollah, Iran's armed branch, has been taking over Lebanon by assassinating Christian leaders, encouraging the non-Muslim population to leave the country, and pushing Prime Minister Siniora to resign.

    Iran has just added itself to the long list of those who harass the Jewish people out of their hatred, beginning with the Biblical Amalek and including Torquemada and the Inquisition, up to Hitler in the 20th century. The famous Persia that long ago, under Cyrus the Great around 530 BCE, helped the Jews regain their independence. I don't doubt President Ahmadinejad's desire to destroy Israel. He says it, and he repeats it. I have learned the hard way to take the speeches of political leaders seriously, especially when they announce the worst and equip themselves with the means to realize their threats.

    Consequently, the fear that I feel for Israel and for Jews like myself, attached to Israel's existence, is justified. In the face of this danger, I found on my last trip to Israel a country in crisis: a government torn apart, angry media, and an embittered population. The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is no longer even speaking with his defense minister, Amir Perez. In spite of urgent appeals from the media and public opinion, the Israeli government has not resigned after so many political and military blunders in Lebanon and Gaza. Worse still: In order to construct a more comfortable majority in Parliament and to keep himself in power, he has co-opted Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of a Russophile party, who maintains that Israel must "act in Gaza like Russia in Chechnya."

    "Oh, my people, those who guide you lead you astray and confuse the direction of your paths," says Isaiah. (3:12). At that time, he was addressing King Manasseh, who did not hesitate to have the tree into which the Prophet had taken refuge sawn in two. That occurred around 735 BCE. If the Israeli press were to reproduce Isaiah's cry on its front pages, the whole country would think it was about today's leaders.

    Hezbollah's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in the north and the kidnapping by Hamas of a soldier in the south reminded Israelis of this obvious fact. It was necessary to save three human lives. Was it therefore necessary to go to war? Certainly not at that moment and not like that. They could have been freed through negotiation. Didn't Israel do that two years ago for businessman Elkhanan Teitelbaum, who was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Qatar? Moreover, had Israel freed the very popular Marwan Bargouti, convicted for several attacks, but who created an Israeli-Palestinian friendship commission during the Clinton administration, they could have strengthened the moderate camp of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and Gaza.