Ongoing quest for peace

Editorial

IIsrael's Supreme Court has approved Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The 9,000 Jewish residents in the occupied area were behind petitions to the court, asking that the plan be recognized as an infringement of their rights. The court's decision means that any legal barriers to the plan's progress have been dismissed.

While this is a hearty endorsement of Sharon's policy, it is hardly reason to rejoice.

There remain plenty of reasons to fear the effort will not end well. There was a perception in the non-Jewish Middle East after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon that the real reasons for the action were not a result of Israeli strategic policy, but rather due to the success of anti-Israel terrorism. There is every reason to believe that the Gaza pullout will be treated in Arab media in a similar fashion; that nearly six decades of varying degrees of insurrection have resulted in a partial victory. And there would be a certain amount of logic to this position.
In some ways, terrorism has won. It is the incessant demand of the international community that, along with the requisite lip-service to terrorism's unwelcome role in the conflict, Israel must accede to the demands that accompany the violence or never expect a moment's peace. While Israel has done a remarkable job at resisting any capitulation to those who murder civilians, the world community has spoken, almost as one, accepting as a matter of course that Israel has both a pragmatic interest and a moral obligation to do what the terrorists demand.

There is a body of opinion among Israelis, too, that sees the pullout as giving in to terrorism. As one woman described the pullout, it would be like U.S. President George W. Bush declaring after Sept. 11, 2001, that he was giving New York City to Al-Qaeda.

Religious views play a central role, of course. There are those, proportionately large among the settlers themselves, who see the pullout not as a political issue at all, but as a rejection of a divinely ordained covenant between klal Yisrael and Hashem. There is no arguing with such a position; of all the sentiments involved in the current conflict, those of a religious nature are, by far, the hardest to change and, often, the hardest to accommodate.

In spite of this, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has done it his way, managing to advance a proposal that could protect Israeli civilians, soldiers and security while leaving to its own devises the tyranny that, more than a decade after Oslo, still typifies Palestinian "democracy." Sharon believes that only an enforced separation of Israel from its neighbors can result in a lasting peace. Like it or not, this is the most logical philosophy currently ascendant in Israel.

Every other effort at peace, including the grand, generous offerings of the Oslo process, has failed. The Palestinian leadership, backed by much of the Arab world, has repeatedly rejected peace for a variety of reasons ranging from complete rejectionism of Israel's existence to the more modest hope that a little more violence will win a few more concessions. By withdrawing from its daily interface with Palestinians, Israel seeks to reduce the potential for further Israeli injuries and death. Though this may or may not work, it remains just about the only possibility as yet untried.

But the pullout plan could hold seeds of failure in other respects, as well. One Canadian magazine seemed especially high on the possibility of a fratricidal fight over the pullout. The May issue of The Walrus extolled "Israel's looming civil war" as a featured story. While a cataclysmic policy decision like the pullout plan could indeed be expected to cause huge internal turmoil, predictions of civil war are as unseemly as they are unlikely. Israel is a democracy, the vast majority of Israelis are democrats and democrats do not resolve even the most conflicted public policy issues with violence.

Israeli support for the plan, meanwhile, is falling, according to polls, for a variety of reasons. Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors has always been premised on the concept of land-for-peace. Sharon is proposing a swap of land for a guarantee of nothing, which can logically be seen as a dramatic shift away from traditional policy and a giving-away of the only bartering chip the state has for future negotiations.

After the catastrophe of the failed Oslo process, in which Israel gave and gave while receiving nothing but murder and mayhem in return, a Zionist could be forgiven for seeing no hope of mutual agreement with the Palestinian leadership now or ever. Are we fools for being optimistic that this plan can succeed where all others have failed? Perhaps. But in the climate of Palestinian and Arab rejectionism, perhaps only Israeli rejectionism has a hope.

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