The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (9 page)

Answer: “The villas of the contractors who built it.”

In response to a comment made by Israel Galili, who was a cabinet member and a major policymaker under Golda Meir’s premiership, my father wrote yet another article, calling to allow the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to conduct democratic elections
³
. Galili’s claim, often heard since, was that had there been democratically elected Palestinian representatives, Israel might have considered negotiations, but in the absence of such representatives Israel had no choice but to maintain the status quo. My father thought Galili’s claim disingenuous—after all, it was Galili’s Israeli government that was preventing the Palestinians from conducting elections in the West Bank and Gaza.

In another article my father wrote in his column on the third anniversary of the Six-Day War, my father compared the government’s inaction and lack of courage to act to achieve peace, a peace that he said was made possible thanks to the tremendous victory that the army delivered, to the lack of courage and inaction that characterized the same government in the weeks leading up to the war. He wrote of the great sacrifice he along with everyone else felt in having to return portions of the Land of Israel in return for peace. “I would be less than
honest had I denied that I too have deep regard for these lands that for the sake of peace must be left outside the boundaries of our State.” And he continued to speak with great emotion of the experiences of his youth: “It was not out of obligation, but rather love for this country that in my youth I traversed its length and breadth.”
⁴

In 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir gave a speech in the southern Israeli city of Eilat, in front of an audience of high school students. It was during this speech that she claimed that, before 1967, she had never heard of the Palestinian people and that they were somehow invented and had no real national identity—and therefore could have no national claims to the land of Palestine. In his column, my father immediately wrote a scathing reply to Golda’s speech where he asked:

“How do people in the world refer to the population that resides in the West Bank? What were the refugees of 1948 called prior to their exile? Has she really not heard of the Palestinian people prior to 1967? In discussions she must have had over the years in her capacity as ambassador and then as foreign minister, how did she refer to these people? Yet she says she had not heard of the Palestinian people prior to 1967? Truly amazing!”
⁵

Still, it came as a shock when in the mid-1970s my father called on the Israeli government to negotiate with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. He agreed that the PLO was the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and as such must be Israel’s partner to the negotiating table. He claimed that Israel needed to talk with whoever represented the Palestinian people, the people with whom we shared this land. He constantly wanted to remind everyone that only peace with the Palestinians could ensure our continued existence as a state that was both Jewish and democratic.

In those years, I occasionally traveled with my father when he gave lectures around the country. He was often invited as an expert to speak about the major political and military issues of the day. It was a great way to see places I had never seen and to spend time with him. I recall once we visited the Kibbutz Bar’am in the northern region of Galilee. Bar’am sits on the lands of the former Palestinian village Bir’am. The lecture was at the Kibbutz in the evening, and the next day we went to see the ruins of the village. At the time, I was not fully aware of the state’s role in the displacement of Palestinians.

Sometimes my mother would come on these trips as well. The lectures were typically on Friday night, so we would drive Friday afternoon, and then eat dinner and spend the night at the Kibbutz. Then on Saturday we’d see whatever the area had to offer.

The lectures were quite often very tough and people were not at all polite when they heard my father’s opinions. I will never forget the anger and venom directed
at him when he spoke of
Ashaf
, the actual Hebrew acronym for the PLO. “How can you talk to terrorists who want our destruction?” some would ask. “They want Yaffa and Haifa and Ramle, and they want to slaughter all of us.”

“Terrorism,” he would reply, “is a terrible thing. But the fact remains that when a small nation is ruled by a larger power, terror is the only means at their disposal. This has always been true, and I fear this will always be the case. If we want to end terrorism, we must end the occupation and make peace.” He insisted that the Palestinians could become our natural allies, our bridge to the entire Middle East, where we Israelis had decided to build our home.

A military general was suggesting that we negotiate instead of fight; this was hard for Israelis to swallow. I think it angered people that he did not go along with the established thinking, which always placed Israel on the right side and the Arabs on the wrong side. Moreover, he was suggesting we turn away from what had become basic Zionist principles: to never give up land and to never accept the claims of the Arabs regarding Israel and the Palestinians.

He was suggesting that we talk with the people we had been taught to hate and fear the most. Unlike Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, or Lebanese, who had their own states, “these so-called Palestinians,” people would say to him, and to me when I opened my big mouth, “wanted
our
homes and
our
land.” I, like most Israelis, learned the terms
fedayeen
⁶
, infiltrators
, and
terrorists
long before I knew they were actually called Palestinians. People would voice their fears in ways that were aggressive and even belligerent: “You want to make peace with these terrorists who blatantly claim they want to take back the cities of Jaffa and Ramle and Lod and to push us into the sea.” People thought General Peled had lost his mind, or at the very least, lost his direction.

I am often asked how it was that he had developed such clear and far-sighted opinions on this issue, and the only answer I can think of is that he was a principled man through and through. He did not accept the double standard that we, the Jewish people, deserve to live on the same land as the Palestinians and yet deprive them of their rights. He also had grave concerns for the nature of the Jewish democracy, and he knew that the occupation of another people would destroy the moral fiber of society and of the IDF. He did not want to see the IDF turn into a brutal force charged with oppressing a nation that would surely rise to resist the occupation. There were other Zionists, like the revered professor Yesha’yahu Leibovitch and journalist Uri Avnery to name but two, who thought and spoke as he did. But when he said these things, it was particularly troubling to people because he was a military general of the Palmach generation.

It wasn’t long before friends stopped inviting him and my mother to social events. He became a political and social pariah. For my father this meant more
time to work, so he didn’t mind. But I remember many occasions during that period when my mother would tell me, sadly, about old friends who were gathering without her: “They invited everyone but us.” My mother agreed with his political views, but she would always insist that the harsh and impatient manner with which he expressed them was counter-productive because it isolated him, and her. “People don’t hear the message when you are so harsh. It is only hurting you,” she’d say.

Somehow I, my sister Nurit, and my brother Yoav, all reached the same political conclusions as our father did. His rationale was always clear and convincing. There was a time for war, and now it is time for peace. His generation fought so that ours could live in a democracy, and the occupation and oppression of Palestinians was getting in the way. Ossi has never been, and still is not, as engaged politically as the three of us. And while we all criticized and disagreed with my father plenty, albeit not in front of him, on this issue we were all aligned—even though it sometimes came at a heavy price.

Being the youngest son of a public figure with such unpopular opinions was difficult. I was as patriotic as one could be, and I knew my father was a patriot. So I could not understand how people doubted him. While I felt myself being pushed out of the mainstream, at first I was not sure why.

Over the years, his views became more and more at odds with mainstream Israel, even though in theory everyone claimed to espouse the principles he preached: democracy, free speech, and above all, peace. With time I too established firm views that were aligned with his, and so I too found myself at odds with my environment. But to my surprise, no one wanted to hear the rationale behind our views. On occasion, I would voice my opinions in school and get in over my head, arguing with teachers and other students. These arguments did hone my debate skills, but I was mostly yelled at for being an Arab-lover. I remember once in fifth grade, a parent of a classmate who was a well-known journalist came to speak to us. The first thing he said was: “I understand that one of you is Matti Peled’s son. Which one of you is it?” I felt my face burning as all eyes turned to me, and I raised my hand and identified myself. I had to constantly negotiate my patriotism and my love and admiration for my country and its army with the fact that I, along with my father, was going against popular opinion.

In the early 1970s Israel still held military parades during Independence Day. My father believed whole-heartedly that they ought to be part of the Independence Day festivities—that without the IDF there wouldn’t have been an independence day at all. It was a huge affair and I loved it: there were tanks and missile launchers and infantry brigades displaying their colors. They would enter the stadium at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where a stage was set up for the VIPs. The stadium was packed with people who looked up at the IDF air force flyovers by U.S.-made F-5 Fantoms and French-made Mirage fighter
jets. We got to sit in the VIP section, and I thought it was the best thing in the world. In those days, it was quite common to see the retired generals show up in their uniform for the Independence Day parade, but my father refused to follow the tradition.

“Come on dad, why not?” I was dying to see him wear his uniform again.

“This is not a masquerade and the uniform is not some costume,” he said sharply. I would look at the one clean and pressed uniform he had sitting in the closet with admiration, and wonder when if ever he might wear it again. He never did. I would play with his older ones, wearing the hat and the medals and pretending to be a general myself, but he never encouraged this. He saw no particular pride in the military; he thought of it as a tool, not an identity.

In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which we named the Yom Kippur War because it began on that holiest of Jewish holidays, my father shifted even further from the mainstream and aligned himself with Israel’s Zionist socialist left. His association with Uri Avnery for example, a veteran journalist who was a leftist, anti-establishment political activist his whole life, was a major shift. It was a relationship that lasted many years.

Then, along with Avnery, Yaakov Arnon, and several other dissident members of the Zionist establishment, he founded the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.

The council sought to promote private and unofficial dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, which they hoped would lead to official negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Its charter called for Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967 and for an independent Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza, with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. At the time, the idea was unthinkably radical.

I remember that I and everyone else were surprised at the amount of attention the council received, particularly from the foreign press. Soon word came through back channels and intermediaries that key members of the PLO, Yasser Arafat’s people, wanted to meet. It was a big step for both sides. Until that point, the PLO had a policy of talking only to non-Zionist Israelis who were open to the idea of a “secular democracy” in all of Israel/Palestine, where Jews and Arabs would live in one state. This notion was totally unacceptable to my father: He was a Zionist—he believed in a state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. For him, any other solution would lead to endless bloodshed. Still, I wonder if his devotion to Zionism would have waned at all had he been alive today.

Great precautions were taken and a great deal of mistrust had to be overcome before the first meeting took place. It was in Paris where my father was first
introduced
⁷
to Dr. Issam Sartawi, a close confidant of Yasser Arafat and the PLO’s representative to Paris. To borrow from the classic movie
Casablanca
, this was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” as Dr. Issam and my father became peace partners.