The Israel-Arab Reader (89 page)

A child is born in an utterly undemocratic way. He cannot choose his father and mother. He cannot pick his sex or color, his religion, nationality or homeland. Whether he is born in a manor or a manger, whether he lives under a despotic or democratic regime is not his choice. From the moment he comes, close-fisted, into the world, his fate—to a large extent—is decided by his nation's leaders. It is they who will decide whether he lives in comfort or in despair, in security or in fear. His fate is given to us to resolve—to the governments of countries, democratic or otherwise.

Just as no two fingerprints are identical, so no two people are alike, and every country has its own laws and culture, traditions and leaders. But there is one universal message which can embrace the entire world, one precept which can be common to different regimes, to races which bear no resemblance, to cultures that are alien to each other.

It is a message which the Jewish people has carried for thousands of years, the message found in the Book of Books: “Therefore take good heed of yourselves”—or, in contemporary terms, the message of the sanctity of life.

The leaders of nations must provide their peoples with the conditions— the infrastructure, if you will—which enables them to enjoy life: freedom of speech and movement; food and shelter; and most important of all: life itself. A man cannot enjoy his rights if he is not alive. And so every country must protect and preserve the key element in its national ethos: the lives of its citizens.

Only to defend those lives, we can call upon our citizens to enlist in the army. And to defend the lives of our citizens serving in the army, we invest huge sums in planes and tanks, and other means. Yet despite it all, we fail to protect the lives of our citizens and soldiers. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.

There is only one radical means for sanctifying human life. The one radical solution is a real peace.

The profession of soldiering embraces a certain paradox. We take the best and the bravest of our young men into the army. We supply them with equipment which costs a virtual fortune. We rigorously train them for the day when they must do their duty—and we expect them to do it well. Yet we fervently pray that that day will never come—that the planes will never take off, the tanks will never move forward, the soldiers will never mount the attacks for which they have been trained so well.

We pray that it will never happen, because of the sanctity of life.

History as a whole, and modern history in particular, has known harrowing times when national leaders turned their citizens into cannon fodder in the name of wicked doctrines: vicious Fascism, terrible Nazism. Pictures of children marching to slaughter, photos of terrified women at the gates of the crematoria must loom before the eyes of every leader in our generation, and the generations to come. They must serve as a warning to all who wield power.

Almost all regimes which did not place the sanctity of life at the heart of their worldview, all those regimes have collapsed and are no more. You can see it for yourselves in our own time.

Yet this is not the whole picture. To preserve the sanctity of life, we must sometimes risk it. Sometimes there is no other way to defend our citizens than to fight for their lives, for their safety and freedom. This is the creed of every democratic state.

In the State of Israel, from which I come today; in the Israel Defense Forces, which I have had the privilege to serve, we have always viewed the sanctity of life as a supreme value. We have never gone to war unless a war was forced on us.

The history of the State of Israel, the annals of the Israel Defense Forces, are filled with thousands of stories of soldiers who sacrificed themselves—who died while trying to save wounded comrades; who gave their lives to avoid causing harm to innocent people on their enemy's side.

In the coming days, a special commission of the Israel Defense Forces will finish drafting a Code of Conduct for our soldiers. The formulation regarding human life will read as follows, and I quote:

“In recognition of its supreme importance, the soldier will preserve human life in every way possible and endanger himself, or others, only to the extent deemed necessary to fulfill this mission.

“The sanctity of life, in the point of view of the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, will find expression in all their actions.”

For many years ahead—even if wars come to an end, after peace comes to our land—these words will remain a pillar of fire which goes before our camp, a guiding light for our people. And we take pride in that.

We are in the midst of building the peace. The architects and the engineers of this enterprise are engaged in their work even as we gather here tonight, building the peace, layer by layer, brick by brick. The job is difficult, complex, trying. Mistakes could topple the whole structure and bring disaster down upon us.

And so we are determined to do the job well—despite the toll of murderous terrorism, despite the fanatic and cruel enemies of peace.

We will pursue the course of peace with determination and fortitude. We will not let up. We will not give in. Peace will triumph over all its enemies, because the alternative is grimmer for us all. And we will prevail.

We will prevail because we regard the building of peace as a great blessing for us, for our children after us. We regard it as a blessing for our neighbors on all sides, and for our partners in this enterprise—the United States, Russia, Norway—which did so much to bring the agreement that was signed here, later on in Washington, later on in Cairo, that wrote a beginning of the solution to the longest and most difficult part of the Arab-Israeli conflict: the Palestinian-Israeli one. We thank others who have contributed to it, too.

We wake up every morning, now, as different people. Peace is possible. We see the hope in our children's eyes. We see the light in our soldiers' faces, in the streets, in the buses, in the fields. We must not let them down. We will not let them down.

I stand here not alone today, on this small rostrum in Oslo. I am here to speak in the name of generations of Israelis and Jews, of the shepherds of Israel—and you know that King David was a shepherd; he started to build Jerusalem about 3,000 years ago—the herdsmen and dressers of sycamore trees, and as the Prophet Amos was; of the rebels against the establishment, as the Prophet Jeremiah was; and of men who went down to the sea, like the Prophet Jonah.

I am here to speak in the name of the poets and of those who dreamed of an end to war, like the Prophet Isaiah.

I am also here to speak in the names of sons of the Jewish people like Albert Einstein and Baruch Spinoza, like Maimonides, Sigmund Freud and Franz Kafka.

And I am the emissary of millions who perished in the Holocaust, among whom were surely many Einsteins and Freuds who were lost to us, and to humanity, in the flames of the crematoria.

I am here as the emissary of Jerusalem, at whose gates I fought in the days of siege; Jerusalem which has always been, and is today, the eternal capital of the State of Israel and the heart of the Jewish people, who pray toward Jerusalem three times a day.

And I am also the emissary of the children who drew their visions of peace; and of the immigrants from St. Petersburg and Addis Ababa.

I stand here mainly for the generations to come, so that we may all be deemed worthy of the medal which you have bestowed on me and my colleagues today.

I stand here as the emissary today—if they will allow me—of our neighbors who were our enemies. I stand here as the emissary of the soaring hopes of a people which has endured the worst that history has to offer and nevertheless made its mark—not just on the chronicles of the Jewish people but on all mankind.

With me here are five million citizens of Israel—Jews, Arabs, Druze and Circassians—five million hearts beating for peace, and five million pairs of eyes which look at us with such great expectations for peace.

I wish to thank, first and foremost, those citizens of the State of Israel, of all the generations, of all the political persuasions, whose sacrifices and relentless struggle for peace bring us steadier closer to our goal.

I wish to thank our partners—the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Palestinians, that are led by the Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Mr. Yasir Arafat, with whom we share this Nobel Prize—who have chosen the path of peace and are writing a new page in the annals of the Middle East.

I wish to thank the members of the Israeli government, but above all my partner the Foreign Minister, Mr. Shimon Peres, whose energy and devotion to the cause of peace are an example to us all. . . .

Allow me to close by sharing with you a traditional Jewish blessing which has been recited by my people, in good times and bad ones, as a token of their deepest longing:

“The Lord will give strength to his people; the Lord will bless his people—and all of us—in peace.”

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate. “But if the enemy incline toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace, and trust in God.” [Koranic quotation]

Since my people entrusted me with the hard task of searching for our lost home, I have been filled with warm faith that those who carried their keys in the diaspora as they carry their own limbs, and that those who endured their wounds in the homeland and maintained their identity will be rewarded by return and freedom for their sacrifices. I have also been filled with faith that the arduous trek on the long path of pain will end in our home's yard.

As we celebrate together the first sight of the crescent of peace, I, at this podium stare into the open eyes of the martyrs within my conscience. They ask me about the national soil and their vacant seats there. I conceal my tears from them and tell them: How true you were; your generous blood has enabled us to see the holy land and to take our first steps in a difficult battle, the battle of peace, the peace of the brave.

As we celebrate together, we invoke the powers of creativity within us to reconstruct a home destroyed by war, a home overlooking our neighbor's, where our children will play with their children and will compete in picking flowers. Now, I have a sense of national and human pride in my Palestinian Arab people's patience and sacrifice, through which they have established an uninterrupted link between the homeland, history and the people, adding to the old legends of the homeland an epic of hope. For them, for the children of those good-natured and tough people, who are made of oaks and dews, of fire and sweat, I present this Nobel Prize, which I will carry to our children, who have a promise of freedom, security and safety in a homeland not threatened by an invader from outside or an exploiter from inside.

I know that this highly indicative prize has not been granted to me and my partners, Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, to crown a mission that we have fulfilled, but to encourage us to complete a path which we have started with larger strides, deeper awareness, and more honest intentions. This is so we can transfer the option of peace, the peace of the brave, from words on paper to practices on the ground, and so we will be worthy of carrying the message that both our peoples and the world and human conscience have asked us to carry. Like their Arab brethren, the Palestinians, whose cause is the guardian of the gate of the Arab-Israeli peace, are looking forward to a comprehensive, just, and durable peace on the basis of land for peace and compliance with international legitimacy and its resolutions.

Peace, to us, is a value and an interest. Peace is an absolute human value which will help man develop his humanity with freedom that cannot be limited by regional, religious, or national restrictions. It restores to the Arab-Jewish relationship its innocent nature and gives the Arab conscience the opportunity to express—through absolute human terms—its understanding of the European tragedy of the Jews. It also gives the Jewish conscience the opportunity to express the suffering of the Palestinian peoples which resulted from this historical intersection and to find an echo for this suffering in the pained Jewish soul. The pained people are more capable than others of understanding the suffering of other people.

Peace is an interest because, in an atmosphere of just peace, the Palestinian people will be able to achieve their ambitions for independence and sovereignty, to develop their national and cultural existence through relations of good neighborliness, mutual respect, and cooperation with the Israeli people. Peace will enable the Israeli people to define their Middle East identity and to enjoy economic and cultural openness toward their Arab neighbors, who are eager to develop their region, which was kept by the long war from finding its real position in today's world in an atmosphere of democracy, pluralism, and prosperity.

As war is an adventure, peace is also a challenge and a gamble. If we do not fortify peace to stand against storms and wind, and if we do not support it and strengthen it, the gamble will then be exposed to blackmail, perhaps to fall. Therefore, I call on my partners in peace on this high platform to expedite the peace process, achieve early withdrawal, pave the road for elections, and to move to the second stage in record time, so that peace will grow and become a firm reality.

We have started the peace process based on land for peace, on UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and on the other international resolutions calling for achieving the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. While the peace process has not yet reached its target, the new atmosphere of confidence and the modest achievements of the first and second year of the peace process are promising. Therefore, the parties are urged to abandon their reservations, facilitate measures, and achieve the remaining goals, foremost of which are transferring powers and taking steps toward an Israeli withdrawal in the West Bank and the settlements. This will finally lead to a comprehensive withdrawal and will enable our society to build its infrastructure and utilize its status, heritage, knowledge, and awareness to formulate our new world.