Israel must stop blaming the Palestinian side

By Martin Woollacott

LONDON: Those who plead there is nothing to be gained from raking over the past are often those who have most to gain from obliterating the claims and grievances of the other side. In Israel today, people who want a rigorous examination of the mistakes which led to the collapse of negotiations and the recourse to violence face an uphill struggle.

It seems that too many Israelis, including some in the peace camp, want to hug their version of events close to their chests and avoid exposing it to reassessment. Since no return to the peace path can be envisaged without a fundamental shift in Israeli understanding of how their society and state have behaved over the years, this is a bad sign.

The essence of the Israeli position is that they bear the lesser share of the blame -- by far the lesser share, many would say -- for the breakdown and the violence. The reverse argument, that they bear most of the blame, gets little credence and little investigation.

At a conference on Palestine organized by the United Nations information department in Paris this week, it was disappointing to hear people like Yuli Tamir, a former Labor minister with a good peace record, and Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, one of Ehud Barak's negotiators, reiterate the standard Israeli arguments without much nuance.

Tamir was particularly disposed to regard attempts by Israelis and Palestinians to arrive at something approaching a common account of events as doomed to failure. Look to the future, was her message. Yet, as one Israeli Arab intellectual recently put it: "It is not possible to build a future by merely looking forward; the future begins by looking back."

At least three different pairs of Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals and journalists are in fact contemplating trying to produce joint accounts of recent events. Such efforts could at least establish where Israeli and Palestinian accounts agree and where they diverge. At best they would open Israelis to the idea that the last government pursued profoundly foolish policies in the occupied territories and then gravely mismanaged the attempt at final settlement negotiations.

Ron Pundak, a Tel Aviv academic, has lucidly demonstrated in a recent paper how the two different tracks reached a disastrous convergence. Had negotiations been successful while Israel still had a government which could deliver there would have been no intifada, his account implies. Equally, if Barak had not been perversely set against meeting even minimum obligations in the territories, there would not have been the anger and mistrust which formed the tinder waiting for a spark.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN's special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the Paris conference: "The situation was so bad that any incident could have triggered the violence. It was a crisis in waiting."

Other sharp Israeli minds have been at work on various aspects of the failure, especially in examining Barak's secretive and lonely political style. But when the questioning touches on some of the largely hidden assumptions that condition Israeli political life it becomes less keen.

Gen. Lipkin-Shahak reiterated in Paris the Israeli mantra that peace would only ever be available after "very painful compromises by both sides." Yet this formulation wailfully ignores the Palestinian position. That is not one of no compromise, but rather of no compromise on compromise.

The fundamental concession made by the Palestinians, certain political and religious groupings excepted, was to agree to be satisfied with a state on only 22 percent of the territory of historic Palestine, including East Jerusalem, and with a meaningful solution to the problem of the refugees of 1948 and 1967. Thus Palestinians resist the idea, for so long entertained by Israel, that the Oslo process could legitimately be about persuading the Palestinians to accept significantly less than this.

Just as most Israelis do not see the final promising discussions at Taba as involving a dreadfully belated and still only partial recognition of the Palestinian compromise, they still do not grasp the other compromise involved. This is the compromise the international community made with Israel to allow restitution of illegally occupied territory, which ought in theory to be immediate, total, and automatic, to proceed in parallel with peace negotiations.

Helped by the Oslo agreement's many vague provisions -- nowhere does it mention occupation, for instance -- the Israelis abused the leverage this compromise gave them. That leverage was supposed to be used to ensure they got a genuine peace, not to repartition what had already been partitioned. Oslo allowed the Israelis to do something to which they were already very prone, which was to avoid confronting their own severe internal contradictions. That people in Israel do not agree on what kind of society Israel should be is not a new thought. But the habitual impulse of Israeli politics, which is to propel these differences into the future and meanwhile appease all constituencies, has worse consequences for their neighbors than it does for them.

This in a way is the Israeli compromise, a compromise with themselves. The settler and the Tel Aviv commuter, the varieties of the religious and the secular -- all could live under governments which brokered what they wanted into bundles of disparate policies. Hence the madness of expanding settlements even as Israel was supposedly negotiating an end to occupation. Hence the demand that the unfortunate Palestinians accommodate themselves to Israeli political "realities" rather than an understanding that Israel had to deal with its own political, schisms.

Tom Segev has argued in a new book, soon to be published in English, that Israel is well on its way to becoming both a "normal" and a "Jewish" society, as dedicated to individual satisfaction and consumption as other successful capitalist countries, and relaxed and unheroic in its Jewishness.

If so, the change has been out of phase, so far, with what is necessary for a fair peace with the Palestinians. The ultimate Israeli blind spot, it seems to some outsiders, lies in not understanding the unavoidably hybrid Israeli- Palestinian nature of their political situation.

Were it not for "Palestinian" votes, those of Israeli Arabs, Labour would arguably have been out of power for 35 years. Such votes, reinforced by returning refugees, could not but play an even more critical role after a settlement. Whatever separatists in Israel think, there would be an unavoidably intimate relationship with a Palestinian state, in part because of the wishes of Israeli Arabs.

Finally, if there is no settlement and armed conflict continues, it will be equally the case that Palestinians shape the Israeli future. There is no getting away from Palestine for Israel -- only a choice about the way it faces up to the Palestinian reality.

-- Guardian News Service