A Durable Peace (31 page)

It seems that the cradle of world civilization is all around us, everything dating back thousands and thousands of years.
A few Saturdays ago I visited the Biblical Gibeon and saw the remarkable ancient pool there. It’s this pool that’s mentioned
in Second Samuel in connection with Avner ben Ner and Joab ben Zeruya [Saul and David’s generals] who “met together by the
pool at Gibeon” and let “the young men arise and play [i.e., do battle] before them.” The entire country is like that.
⁷⁰

I myself remember the experience less from weekend leaves than from the training that I underwent in a reconnaissance unit.
We would criss-cross the hills and mountains in exhausting marches and hikes aimed at honing our navigating skills. Inevitably,
if there was a craggy peak along the route, we would climb it; a steep gorge, and we would descend into it. As the shirt on
your back stiffens into a mixture of sweat and dust and the soles of your feet burn as if on fire, it is difficult to feel
deeply for a country. But not impossible. I remember nights when we would come to a sudden halt at the foothills of Shiloh,
the first capital of the Israelites after the exodus from Egypt; or stop midway up the steep pass of Beth Horon, where the
Maccabees triumphed over the Greeks in their desperate struggle for Jewish independence; or gaze up at the fortress of Betar,
where Bar Kochba’s revolt met its tragic end at the hands of the Roman legions. We would stand there, a handful of youngsters
barely nineteen, taking in the night air and gulping water from our canteens, saying nothing. Because what we felt did not
need saying. We had come back—for all the
generations of Jews who had suffered oppression, degradation, and humiliation while they dreamed and prayed that we would
return to this land.

Moshe Dayan captured this sentiment a few weeks after the Six Day War in a ceremony on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem,
marking the reinterment of the soldiers who had fallen in Jerusalem in the battle for the city in 1948:

Our brothers who fell in the War of Independence: we have not abandoned your dream nor forgotten the lesson you taught us.
We have returned to the [Temple] Mount, to the cradle of our nation’s history, to the land of our forefathers, to the land
of the Judges, and to the fortress of David’s dynasty [the Old City]. We have returned to Hebron, to Sh’chem, to Bethlehem
and Anatoth, to Jericho and the fords over the Jordan.
⁷¹

For the normally uneffusive Dayan this was an uncharacteristic outpouring of feeling. Israeli culture does not encourage outward
displays of profound emotion, and in the years following the Six Day War many Israelis kept their deepest sentiments about
this, the heart of their land, to themselves. The ones who expressed it more openly were the religious members of the settlement
movement, who spearheaded the drive to rebuild the ancient (and modern) Jewish cities in the largely barren land. Even though
many Israelis who did not go to live there supported their activities, the result was that the world came to believe that
the claim to the land was espoused only by a “radical fringe” of the Israeli public. This erroneous view was heightened by
the emergence of a vocal movement on the left that for a variety of reasons argued that Israel should leave “the territories.”

Successive Israeli governments did not bother to articulate the emotional connection that so many Israelis, including a significant
number on the left, felt toward the land, choosing rather to stress the more readily explainable security arguments against
relinquishing the land outright. That—and the fact that, unlike most Israelis,
the Arabs had no compunction in expressing their attachment and their claims, almost always embellished with a false history
that few in the international media had the knowledge to debunk—soon combined to produce a commonly accepted view that the
Jews had taken an Arab patrimony to which they had no moral rights and no enduring ties. Quickly forgotten was not only the
fact that it was the Arabs who had driven the Jews out in 1948 and attacked them again from these territories in 1967, but
also the entire course of Jewish history, the focus of which was the great Return. Return to what? Certainly not the quaint
cafés of Tel Aviv or the lush villas of its wealthy suburb Savion, both of which had been sand and swamp until a few decades
earlier and which had never before existed in Jewish history or Jewish memory. When the Jewish people yearned to return to
their land, when they actually did so in the course of this century, their souls were enthralled by the idea of returning
to all the places that Moshe Dayan enumerated, and to many more that he did not, in the mountains of Samaria and Judea.

Yet the endless parade before the television cameras of Palestinians castigating Israeli “occupiers” was able to erase all
of this from the public mind. It was asserted that Israel had taken “foreign land,” and that Israel must return it to its
“rightful owners”; if it did not, it would suffer the risk of war.

This was not the first time in Jewish history that the Jews reclaimed these very lands from which they had been barred. More
than twenty-one hundred years ago the Maccabees had done the same after a thirty-year war of liberation. It is instructive
to read today the exchange of letters between the Seleucid king Antiochus and the Jewish leader Simon, the only survivor of
the five Mac-cabee brothers who fell leading their people in the long struggle for freedom. Antiochus, just as convinced that
the land was an inextricable part of his Seleucid Greek empire as the Arabs today are convinced that it is an inextricable
part of their realm, demanded:

You hold control of Joppa and Gazara and the citadel of Jerusalem; they are cities of my kingdom. You have devastated
their territory, you have done great damage in the land, and you have taken possession of many places in my kingdom. Now then,
hand over the cities which you have seized…. Otherwise we will come and conquer you.

Simon’s reply could have been written today:

We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time
had been unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity, we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers.
⁷²

This land, where every swing of a spade unearths remnants of the Jewish past and where every village carries the barely altered
Hebrew names of old; this land, in which the Jews became a nation and over which they shed more tears than have been shed
by any other people in history; this land, the loss of which resulted in an exile of the Jews such as has been suffered by
no other people and the spilling of a sea of blood such as has been spilled by no other nation; this land, which never ceased
to live as a distant but tangible home in the minds of Jewish children from Toledo in medieval Spain to the Warsaw ghetto
in our own century; this land, for which the Jews fought with unsurpassed courage and tenacity in ancient as well as in modern
times—this is the “foreign land” that world leaders now demand be barred to Jews and that Israel unilaterally forsake. This
is an unjust demand. The Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank now live under Palestinian rule. The remaining territories are
almost entirely uninhabited by Palestinians, but are replete with historical significance for Israel.

The Arab campaign to keep all the West Bank free of Jews, like the campaign of the 1930s to keep Palestine free of Jews, may
have garnered international support, but it is based, now as then, not on justice but on injustice. Thus the Jewish state,
which was squeezed by violations of international promises and by Arab conquest to an indefensible coast, that saw Jews forcibly
expelled
from the ancient Jewish cities they had come to rebuild, that was attacked by Arab forces from the surrounding mountains,
is now being told by virtually the entire world that it must accept a confined and stifling existence on the narrow shoreline
dominated by a hostile,
Judenrein
Palestinian state on these same mountains, the very heart of the Jewish home. If Lord Cecil had proclaimed “Judea for the
Jews, Arabia for the Arabs,” the world was now saying, ’Arabia for the Arabs—and Judea too.” The Reversal of Causality was
now complete.

5

F
alse reductionism is the central technique of the Arab campaign against Israel. Reduce all the Middle East conflicts to the
Arab-Israeli one, reduce the Arab-Israeli conflict to a Palestinian-Israeli one, and you are then ready to take the next logical
step: Reduce all the various Palestinian communal groupings and points of view to a single, anti-Israel “liberation movement,”
the Palestine Liberation Organization. This completes the role reversal whereby Israel is transformed into the heartless villain,
challenged by a united band of dedicated, popular, even romantic revolutionaries, Arafat’s PLO—if not George Washington and
the Minutemen, then at least the Hollywood version of Emiliano Zapata and his freedom fighters.

In no time, the PLO became the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” No matter that until the Oslo Accords
its officials weren’t actually elected by anyone and then, too, by dubious methods. No matter that its only claim to unchallenged
support lay in the fact that it slaughtered any Palestinian opponent who dared dissent. Throughout the Arab world, it was
accepted that the PLO had to be pushed front and forward when discussing Israel—so that the attention of Western public opinion
would remain focused on the purported sins of Zionism against the Palestinians, rather than on, for example, the Arab states’
feverish arms buildup aimed against Israel and against each other. So obvious was the utility of this strategy that even the
PLO’s fiercest Arab antagonists supported its claim to being the “sole” spokesman for the “sole” (or at least principal) aggrieved
party of the entire Arab-Israeli dispute.

Where did this organization come from, and what was its purpose? Was its espousal of terror a result of current political
frustrations, or did it have deeper roots? And was its campaign of “armed struggle” against Israel developed in response to
the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands” after the Six Day War of 1967, as the PLO repeatedly claims, or did it have
an earlier genesis?

The PLO was founded in Cairo in 1964, three full years before the outbreak of the Six Day War. It was established by Egypt’s
Nasser as a means of continuing his unsuccessful war against Israel, and of destabilizing Jordan.
¹
Since these two states together constituted the territory of Mandatory Palestine, they both readily fell under the PLO Charter’s
goal of liberating “all Palestinian lands.” Notice that at that time Israel, the prime target, did not have an inch of what
are now termed the “occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza. When the PLO was set up to liberate “Palestinian lands
occupied by Israel,” this unambiguously meant the State of Israel, especially the coastal plain between Tel Aviv and Haifa,
where three-quarters of all Israelis live. It was the coastal plain from which most of the PLO leadership had originated,
and it was the coastal plain to which they intended to return.

Thus, in its founding meeting, the Palestine National Council (PNC), the “legislature” of the PLO, adopted its infamous “constitution,”
the PLO Charter,
^*
which laid out the PLO’s most fundamental purpose:

ARTICLE 19: The partitioning of Palestine [by the UN] in 1947 and the establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void,
[and remains so] whatever time has elapsed….

ARTICLE 20: The claim of a historical or spiritual tie between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities
nor with the constituents of statehood in their true sense….

ARTICLE 21: The Palestinian Arab people, in expressing itself through the armed Palestinian revolution, rejects every solution
that is a substitute for a complete liberation of Palestine….

ARTICLE 22: [T]he liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence….