Pride and humiliation
(Differently on Palestinian knot)
The history of the State of Israel is for the most part a record of never-ending war struggles. Rafael Eytan, former army chief of staff, wrote in his memoirs: “our war for independence is not over.” In a sense, he was right. In the mind of the average citizen, Israel is a state doomed to war. The public views reality and what it brings with it through a thick veil of never-falling smoke that perpetually hovers over dozens of battlefields. People have learned over the years to live under the barrels of rifles, and life goes on in two separate planes, which sometimes overlap.
The Jewish state is not fighting a war in the literal sense of the term at the moment, and everyone is feeling the brunt of it anyway. Today, perhaps even more than ten or fifteen years ago, this burden pinches people to the ground — it interferes, as it were, with some unnecessary hump.
The last decade of the 20th century left Israelis with what Amos Oz called a sense of peaceful defeat. In the normal world, where everything is predictable and people jump up and down at the sound of exploding firecrackers and look around in surprise, the word peace means little nowadays and is more associated with sleep or rest. But in the Middle East, the word is hardly associated with a blessing of fate. There, the idea of peace is something that should not happen, or at best, something that ends quickly. Peace is only a passing phase, a breathing space between one war and another. A man who fights either gain or loses something, no matter what the final score is. In any case, with a rifle, in both instances he has a greater influence on the emerging reality than if he were sitting comfortably in his armchair at home, holding the television remote control. This identification of peace with defeat, with the feeling of being defeated, has often driven the inhabitants of the Holy Land to violence, and sometimes being even stronger than the fear of the cruelty of war.
For those less informed — especially under the influence of television coverage of the ‘Middle East Games’ — it may have seemed that even someone like Ariel Sharon did not escape the snare of this all-encompassing consciousness. It was believed that this very sentiment brought him to the top of the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem in 2000. He was blamed by many for provoking the riots and ultimately for directly contributing to the outbreak of the Intifada. It was only later that earlier reports by Israeli intelligence confirmed that “Arafat and co.” had planned the outbreak of the uprising long before the visit. So when the chaos reached its apex and the Holy Land was bleeding like a big, open, yawning wound, the same unwanted Sharon exile won the elections. And the unexpected happened; over time, under his leadership, the pervasive sense of failure dissolved and the conscious need to find a path to peace grew.
Yet war — its horror rather than the romantic vision of brilliance — never vanished in his imagination. He made clear in almost every interview he gave that he wanted peace, precisely because he had been a warrior for almost thirty years, and warriors know things that the ordinary politician will never learn. He believed that he was the one who could break the vicious circle of violence. In the first interview he gave after becoming prime minister in 2001, he said: “I have seen the nightmare of war. I took part in all the wars that swept through Israel. I was in every battle at its most difficult moments. […] I lost many close friends and was wounded twice myself. I felt first-hand the suffering experienced by soldiers immobilized in hospital beds. I have had to make the decision to live and die for others as well as for myself. That is why I believe I understand the importance of peace better than politicians who talk about it but have not experienced what I did[…]”. And in 2004 he warned: “We will not be able to govern millions of Palestinians. Their numbers are doubling from generation to generation”. It seems, though, that the fears of a dire future for the “People of Izzak and Abraham”, for soon times will come when the Jews become a minority in their land, as the Palestinian majority wants to get rid of the trouble and at best deport them all to Europe or the USA, has not been confirmed by demographic data. The 2019 statistics show that Israel’s population is just over 9 million (9,053 to be precise) and Palestine’s just over 4 and a half million (4,685 respectively). However, even based on wrong assumptions, the idea of withdrawal has met great resistance since the settlers (who traditionally come from the religious right-wing) did not want to leave the country on which they considered theirs, which is why today for many of them Sharon still remains a traitor.
Palestinians also voiced their fears loudly, for them the prime minister’s idea was just another link in a long chain of Jewish subterfuge. They feared that this time Israel, rather than offering them independence, might be opening the door to a new prison from which they would never be able to break free.
Arafat thinking differed from the street. The hawk-general’s ideas took him completely by surprise, and his worst premonitions were coming true: Sharon’s defeat, a split in the Likud, and premature elections — “for him, the best Prime Minister of Israel was always someone with whom he could wage war, not negotiate peace. Sharon’s predecessor Ehud Barak made great concessions, even on the division of Jerusalem. For the political right, he was almost a traitor. But he was also a threat to Arafat and the Palestinian fundamentalists. And here the Israeli right and the Palestinians involuntarily began to pursue the same goal — the defeat of Ehud Barak. It worked. The Israelis elected Ariel Sharon once they understood that Barak would not solve the Palestinian problem. Sharon — as understood by the Palestinians — the personification of all that is worst, a monster in human flesh, as he was repeatedly referred to — suddenly, before the eyes of the whole world, turned from a menacing hawk into a dove carrying an olive branch of peace. It was a shock for everyone, Israel was stunned, the Arabs were bewildered… Meanwhile, the Prime Minister calmly referred to demographics and Arafat’s words that the war against Israel would be won not by guns but by Palestinian women. “Gaza is the area most heavily populated by Arabs, so this rotten branch must be cut off before it poisons the whole tree — the cure is Palestinian independence”. or, as the Palestinians understand it, isolation.
The Palestinians feared a prime minister wrapped in lambskin, they would have preferred to see him as he once was — an intransigent military man. It would have been preferable to have him as an enemy and to present as such to the world, but Sharon had stretched out his hand to them and they could not refuse it, they knew that the moment they did so public opinion would clothe them in the skin of the wolf that he had so ably abandoned.
Indeed, the old general knew what peace was worth and what price would have to be paid for it. He proved it when he ordered the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza. It is said that one of the qualities of great leaders — and this is rare — is the ability to abandon the path once taken. Sharon has always been able to do this like no one else. He dared to become the first prime minister to order the dismantling of something that had previously been created on his initiative and with his considerable support. He was repeatedly asked in this connection why he took the risk of turning against the settlers and insisted on withdrawing even when bombs were exploding in his homeland — an action that could not only end his political career but also put his life in danger. “The Arabs have always wished me dead”, he replied, “and now the Jews are doing so. For me this is an incomprehensible situation. As a man who has defended the Jews all his life, I must now be protected from them. Despite everything, I still remain true to my principles — I am not afraid.”
The interview I am quoting here was published in November 2004. Already then a shadow hovered over the Prime Minister’s figure, who after all was no young man. He was already in his seventies and his tired body was slowly refusing to cooperate, yet he still managed to withdraw from Gaza and leave the Likud Party, of which he was a co-founder, and that he saw as no longer being able to govern. Against all common sense, he set up a new political entity — the Kadima party — and opened the way for it to win the elections announced for March. In December, after his first stroke — later described as mild — 91 percent of Israelis believed that his health would not affect their electoral decisions. The Israeli people trusted him and were ready to support him. Suddenly — at a critical time for the state — he was taken to hospital…
On the following day, the NYT commentators wrote in columns that his sudden departure off the political stage calls into question any peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Chaos in the PA is so great today that the Palestinian side hardly has the capacity to negotiate on the terms set by any Israeli leader. The Israelis have indeed left Gaza according to Sharon’s plan, but this does not solve anything. After they left, the Palestinian administration abandoned the people to their fate. Gaza today is a “ no-go zone”, and that can only mean one thing — violence and impunity. How is it possible to talk about the future of a Palestinian state under such circumstances?
The disease caught up with Sharon at the least opportune time. The Palestinians will never admit it outright, but they were well aware that Hawk Ariel was their last hope. Whom will they now blame for their fate and who will have the courage and self-denial to continue, something many have spoken of bluntly — madness? Nothing and no one has been able to help them since it happened.
Today the Middle East is nothing like it was in the days of Sharon and Arafat. Looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the standpoint of the internal politics of either side of the barricades, looking for correlations or pointing out contradictions as a result of reactions to the actions of the other side, or in a broader perspective, applying what is happening there to the global game is a founding error in the search for an answer to the most difficult question in the history of humanity: what next?
This conflict has been brewing since the 1930s when the first Jews began to flee from Europe to Palestine. Then came the tragic year 1948, the war with the Arabs, and the establishment of the State of Israel. A state that supposedly was born peacefully but grew up on the blood of the generation of both. In this context, pointing the finger of blame is simply short-sighted, if not hypocritical. After 70 years of bloody peace, the Jews and the Palestinians have reached a point where time has stopped, where they are locked in an impenetrable dome of violence and fear — politics can no longer make amends, nor can any gesture or effort on the world stage. Protests, Facebook posts such as those comparing Jews to Nazis and Palestinians to Jews of the Holocaust. The efforts and publications of Zionist organizations are all the sound of peas being thrown against a wall. The struggle continues and will continue until the last stone, the last bullet kills the last representatives of both nations. For it has long been about pride and humiliation, understood in the same way on both sides of the rampart, rather than about land or even life. The only difference is the perspective from which they are viewed. Today, the best tools for understanding what is happening in Gaza and the occupied territories are not in the hands of politicians or historians, but in the minds of sociologists, philosophers, and even psychologists or psychiatrists. Resolutions and laws, speeches and signatures on paper will not reverse the vicious circle of violence and cruelty. As usual, the world will shout in indignation for a while, and then we will mind our own little business and forget about the Jews and Palestinians who shed blood on an almost daily basis, just as we forgot about the Kurds, Syrians, Belarusians under Lukashenko’s shackle, Ukrainians in Lugansk and the Crimea. Everywhere, the same forces of pride and humiliation are at work — the flywheels of history that, it is about time, should be dealt with by clinical specialists for the crippled mind.
