Contents
 back to Features |
 previous story
|
next story 
|
One land, two claimants, no peace in sight
Israelis are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of their state. But problems with their Arab neighbours are still intractable, says Gerald Butt
 Founding fathers: above: David Ben Gurion, first Prime Minister of Israel, reads the declaration of independence in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948 |
|
JEWS and Christians have for centuries recited Psalm 122 and prayed for the peace of Jerusalem. The psalm needs to be on their lips in 2008, as much as it has at any time in the past. Israel is celebrating its 60th anniversary, confident that its survival is assured, but still lacking a relationship with its Arab neighbours that would allow it to relax, and that would grant the sacred city of Jerusalem some peace. In the foreseeable future, self-defence and security will continue to be the dominant concerns. They are hardly conducive to relaxation. The strain of surviving as a tiny state (a total population of 7.2 million, of whom 25 per cent are Arabs) in a region dominated by close to 300 million inherently hostile Arabs and Muslims takes its toll.Thinking back to a three-year reporting assignment in Israel in the late 1980s, I find that security issues of one kind or another dominated the news and influenced the character of daily life. |
 A boy runs on a section of the world's largest flag, the size of two football fields, constructed near Latrun, in central Israel at the start of last month |
|
The constant tension often translated into barely disguised aggression — on the bus, in the supermarket queue, in the push to be served at the post office. All the time, eyes were alert to an abandoned package or bag, or to the apparently nervous or shifty behaviour of an Arab who had just walked into the shop. The greatest security concern, of course, is along Israel’s borders. Israelis have — and must have if they are to enjoy any kind of peace of mind — total faith in their security services. I recall clearly how the country was left in a state of profound shock by the events during one particular night in November 1987. The morning news bulletins reported that a Palestinian gunman had successfully penetrated Israel’s highly sophisticated air-defence system by flying across the border from Lebanon in a motorised hang-glider. But this was not all. The gunman landed at an Israeli army base and killed six soldiers before being shot dead. The hang-glider incident was one of a number of events around that time that caused Israelis to come to terms with the fact that their country was not necessarily invincible or inviolable. After three or four decades of statehood, when the imperative of survival glued society together, Israel was at that time starting to experience self-doubt, together with some of the difficulties that are common to countries all over the world: ethnic tension, rising crime, drug abuse, and so on.THE SIEGE of Beirut in 1982, followed by the massacres of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, sparked huge anti-war protests in Israel, and troubled the consciences of liberal Israelis. |
 Then: An Israeli Defence Force convoy prepares for action |
|
For those who had fought for the creation of Israel, and shared in the vision of a Zionist state built on religious foundations, but espousing the secular ideals of socialism, some of the changes were hard to accept, especially the rise in influence of the ultra-orthodox community and the growth of the nationalist religious groups.
The late Michael Elkins was for many years the BBC correspondent in Jerusalem. By the time I was posted to Israel, he was in retirement. But I learnt much from him about the early years of the Jewish state.
Michael had been involved in smuggling arms into Palestine for the Jewish underground groups, and in hunting down former Nazis in Europe. He was a passionate Zionist. But, like other older members of the Israeli Labour movement, he was profoundly disillusioned by the state of society in the 1980s and ’90s.
He lived on the edge of the ultra-orthodox Jewish neigbourhood of Me’a Sharim. The ultra-orthodox, in their black coats and hats, believed that driving a car on a Saturday represented a desecration of the sabbath. As a result, they had taken to throwing stones at cars passing through their neighbourhood on the sabbath, including Michael’s.
One Saturday afternoon when I visited him, a jazz record was playing loudly. Michael was pacing the floor, fury written all over his face.
“Those ‘blacks’”, he said, “smashed my windscreen. I fought to give them a state, and this is how they behave towards me, a Jew and an Israeli. I will not accept my lifestyle being dictated to by them.”
Michael Elkins enjoyed a number of reporting triumphs for the BBC; but he also had to shoulder one disastrous failure.
From 1948 to 1977, the Labour Party governed Israel. For its lifelong supporters — people like Michael — it was, quite simply, the only party that could possibly be elected. Right up until polling day, Michael confidently predicted another easy Labour victory. Perhaps his homework was faulty, or perhaps he could not bring himself to imagine that the right-wing Likud bloc, led by Menachem Begin, could possibly win an election. But it did, and a new era in Israel’s political life began.
BY 1977, Israel looked, in many respects, a different place from the one that the mainly European pioneers had been part of. Large-scale immigration from many parts of the world, not least the North African states, Iraq, Ethiopia, and the Soviet Union, had changed the demographic mix. A large underclass of Sephardi (oriental) Israelis was looking for a platform and a voice. Likud gave them both. |
 Then: Palestinians flee from their village in Galilee |
| The newly empowered right wing, supported by religious parties, also derided the angst expressed by prominent figures on the Left who had come to believe that the overwhelming victory over the Arabs in the Six Day War of June 1967, and the occupation of Arab land, was a mixed blessing for the Jewish state. Continuing the occupation, the Left argued, was eroding some of the fundamental values of Israeli society. So began the polarisation that characterises Israel today. The parties on the right of the political spectrum demand and witness tough — often disproportionately brutal — punitive retaliation for acts of violence perpetrated by Palestinian groups, while urging military action to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power. Voices on the Left call for dialogue and compromise in the search for a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Assisting the cause of the Israeli Right, and frustrating the efforts of the Left, has been the stunning ineptitude of Arab governments and institutions in formulating a co-ordinated policy to deal with the issue of Israel, from 1948 to the present day. Most of the wars against Israel have ended in disastrous defeats for the Arabs. The few regimes, beginning with Egypt, which have opted for peace have found themselves isolated and despised by their own people. The practical result of this patchwork approach to recognising Israel can be odd. If, for example, you travel from London to Amman in a Royal Jordanian aircraft, you will fly from west to east across Israel (the two countries signed a peace agreement in 1994). But if a plane from Jordan’s northerly neighbour Syria were to come anywhere close to Israel’s airspace (or the airspace of the “Zionist entity”, as the official media continues to call Israel), it would be shot down. In the same way, while President Mahmoud Abbas is committed to a finding a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel, the Hamas movement that controls the Gaza Strip is adamantly opposed to this policy. So, with the Palestinians split, and in the absence of a unified position towards Israel, the hopes for an end to the killing of Hamas militants and Israeli and Palestinian civilians continue to be slim. Even to imagine a peace deal that would satisfy those Israelis and Arabs who seek one is not easy. More alarming is the volume of invective in both communities, and not just from militant groups. For example, one still hears educated Israelis saying that, since there are 22 Arab states with plenty of empty space, why do the Palestinians not go and live in them? Conversely, educated Arabs continue to call for the destruction of the Jewish state — the cancer, as they put it, in the body of the Middle East. Continuous live satellite-television coverage of events in the Middle East has, if anything, increased support for Arab and Israeli rejectionists. The pictures of women and children killed in an Israeli rocket strike on the Gaza Strip are beamed live into the homes of Arabs across the Middle East and around the world. And the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hamas, and President Ahmadinejad of Iran, is listened to in Jewish homes in Israel and in every part of the globe. Meanwhile, the United States and the West in general are depicted in the Arab media as either openly supportive of Israel, or callously indifferent to the rights of the Palestinian people. “When President Bush appears on television, I almost have to physically restrain my wife,” I was told by a secular, middle-class Iraqi businessman, British- and American-educated. “If she could, she’d join the suicide bombers: she’s so angry with Bush’s blind support for Israel.” AGAINST THIS background, Israel will be celebrating its 60th birthday with mixed feelings: satisfaction and pride at having beaten off the challenges facing it over the past decades, and continuing anxiety about the future. The latter factor means that Israelis who support the idea of maintaining a fortress state seem likely to remain the key players on the political stage in the immediate future. For Israeli doves, the winning of popular support in the face of Hamas-related violence, and in the face of increasingly tough rhetoric from many quarters of the Arab and Islamic world, will not be easy. Nevertheless, Israelis are weary. Living with remorseless tension is not easy. The hang-glider incident all those years ago, and the more recent fiasco of the war against the Iranian-backed Hizbollah organisation, in Lebanon, in 2006, demonstrate that Israel cannot survive on the slogans of the founding fathers, any more than the Arab world can rely on empty rhetoric to work out a collective policy to cope with the existence of the Jewish state. The inexorable logic, therefore, should be that the two sides will eventually realise that it would be to everyone’s advantage to work out an accommodation that allows Israel to become an accepted state in the Middle East. The problem is that, while the logic is sound, the factors working against it appear, 60 years after the creation of Israel, to be as intractable as they were in 1948: two communities lay claim, by divine right, to the same small piece of territory. Having lived in Israel for three years, and in Arab countries for many more, I am not optimistic that a solution will be found before Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary. So, relaxation for Israel is an unlikely option in the near future — as is the creation of a Palestinian state that will satisfy the demands of most Arabs, who continue to view Israel’s creation as a usurpation of the rights of the Palestinians. The status of Jerusalem, the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the demand of Palestinians to return to their homeland are issues that will stand in the way of a political deal. At the same time, acts of violence and cycles of ruthless retaliation will create television images to fuel hardline sentiments within the Israeli and Arab populations. In their heart of hearts, I fear, most Israelis do not trust Arabs, while most Arabs despise Israelis — even though, or perhaps because, few have met each other, or have chosen to scratch beneath the crude racial stereotypes. Israel’s 60th birthday is, perhaps, an appropriate occasion for a renewed attempt to achieve better mutual understanding. Reciting and taking to heart the words of Psalm 122 would be a good start. |
%231%23.jpg) Now: Ultra-orthodox Jews walk through an Arab market in Jerusalem's Old City |
|
All photos: AP |
.gif "Caris Magazine for girls aged 11 to 16 © site")
