Hopeless peace cycle?

Editorial

As we remember especially at this season, time in the human imagination is cyclical. The comings and goings of the days, weeks, months, years and decades have a familiar feel, even though each is new. A mere extension of time, history is also cyclical, a fact of which we should not lose sight.

The Obama administration is expressing the audacious hope that a peace agreement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders will be inked within a year. Such hopeful but arbitrary deadlines miss the most important reality. We may indeed have a peace agreement in a year. But will we have peace?

On the very day that he participated in the signing ceremony with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Bill Clinton, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat appeared on Jordanian television, assuring the Arab world he had not lost sight of the ultimate objective.

“Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages,” Arafat said, reiterating the “phased strategy” he had advanced since first coming on the scene in the 1960s. “We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.”

Arafat may have believed, prematurely, that the day had come, on Sept. 29, 2000. That was the moment, almost exactly a decade ago, when he figuratively upended the negotiating table and reverted to mass murder as a strategy. With an unprecedentedly generous offer on the table, Arafat returned to the warm blanket of violence so familiar to him.

This month, 10 years after Fatah abandoned good faith negotiations, Arafat’s successor may be continuing his mentor’s strategy. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is warning that negotiations will cease if the settlement freeze is not extended. He is uttering demands for a return to pre-1967 borders, evidently without compromise or deviation. He is effectively demanding that Jerusalem be divided. He expects, as a starting point, apparently, that Israel will capitulate to Palestinian demands on water rights and settlements. Then, he said this week: “This will leave us with the issue of refugees, which will be dealt with during the second phase [of the talks].”

It is a curious phenomenon that the abject losers of the 1967 war that led to the current situation feel confident to make out-of-hand demands of the victors. This is possible only because of another curious phenomenon: the victors of the war have lost the battle that, in some ways, matters more – that for world opinion. Because of the almost universal enmity for Israel, Palestinian leaders can make ludicrous demands and be taken seriously on the world stage. Yet, even Abbas and his colleagues understand that Israel will never concede to extremist demands that would amount to abrogating Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

So, what could Abbas gain from a sham negotiation and crazy, unreasonable demands? Given that the world, as measured, at least, by the United Nations, has come, despite all evidence, to the irrational conclusion that Israel is the barrier to peace, the inevitable failure of such negotiations would be blamed on the party to which blame inexorably falls. Call that party Israel or call it the Jews. Since the Fatah leadership has never stopped viewing this conflict as a trans-generational battle with eradication as the end-goal, such a stalemate would be merely one more bump in the road. For Israel, it would be one more shattering experience of seeing the olive branch, so tantalizingly near, snatched away for another generation or more.

While the Palestinian negotiators and the world community believe it is fair to demand that Israel demonstrate its good faith at the beginning and all through the peace negotiations, almost no one is suggesting the Palestinians have a corresponding obligation. This despite history – writ large a decade ago this month – that indicates the Palestinians may wait until after the peace negotiations, perhaps for the few years of implementation, before continuing with their phased strategy and turning again to another generation or two of violence, hoping this, at last, will rid the region of Jews.

For Israelis and Jews, every day of war is a world of lost peace. For our enemies, the same lost day may merely be 24 hours spent patiently awaiting an idealized, far-away victory more important than life, peace, or time itself: a final victory that will be savored only in the generations to come.

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