Under This Blazing Light (9 page)

Current talk about pushing the Palestinian masses back to oil-rich Kuwait or fertile Iraq makes no more sense than would talking about our own mass emigration to ‘Jewish’ Brooklyn. Knaves and fools in both camps might add: ‘After all, they’ll be among their brothers there.’ But just as I am entitled to see myself as an Israeli Jew, not a Brooklyner or a Golders Greener, so a Palestinian Arab is entitled to regard himself as a Palestinian, not an Iraqi or Kuwaiti. The fact that only an enlightened minority of Palestinians seem to see it that way at the moment cannot prejudice the national right to self-determination when the time comes. Let us remember -with all the reservations the comparison requires - that it was only a Zionist-minded minority of Jews that - justly! - claimed the right to establish a Hebrew State here in the name of the entire Jewish people for the benefit of the Jews who would one day come to a national consciousness.

This land is our land. It is also their land. Right conflicts with right. ‘To be a free people in our own land’ is a right that is valid either universally or not at all.

As for the war between Israel and the neighbouring Arab States, it is an indirect outcome of the confrontation between us and the Palestinians. Of course I am not going to explain everything away in terms of ‘devotion’ or ‘brotherliness’ on the part of the neighbouring states. I only want to emphasise that the strife which has developed in the Land of Israel must be resolved here, between us and the Palestinian people. There is nothing tragic in our relations with Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus. The war they are waging against us is basically a war of aggressors against victims of aggression, even though our neighbours are armed, as usual, with self-righteous rhetoric. The Arab-Jewish tragedy does not extend, therefore, to the whole Middle East, as the Arab States claim, but is confined to this land, between the sea and the desert.

Against consistency and against justice

From its inception, Zionism has contained currents of thought that played over-ambitious fantasy games over the whole map of the Middle East, and entertained colossal geopolitical speculations. This motif is apparent from the start, in the thought and actions of Herzl, and the Revisionist movement in its different guises has still not been weaned off it. Its global strategists have more than once tried to square the circle, to stand Columbus’s eggs on their end and to cut Gordian knots with one stroke of a geopolitical formula. The Labour movement, on the other hand, has generally treated all these geopolitical manifestations with ironical reserve and wry suspicion.

It is easy enough to represent this contrast as one between giants with wide vision, on the one hand, and narrow-minded dwarfs on the other. Actually, it was a conflict of temperaments and mentalities, a contrast between childishly simplistic romanticism and restrained romanticism.

The Six Day War and its aftermath have revitalised, right across the political spectrum, a craving for ‘mighty’ geopolitical formulas: you read in the press elated calls for a Palestinian protectorate under the Israeli aegis, an Ottoman-style Hebrew empire with a Kurdistan and Druzistan created by the might of the Israeli Defence Force, and similar far-fetched speculations on the theme of a ‘pax Israeliana’. What all these formulas have in common is the desire to raise our sights beyond the fact of the existence, under our military rule, of a one-million-strong Arab population with a burgeoning national consciousness.

All the thinkers who have sprung up on every side since the Six Day War spouting brilliant geopolitical ideas, all, even those who promise to do wonderful favours to the Palestinian Arabs and give them all sorts of benefits, try to bypass the need sooner or later to ‘consult the bride’.

I do not undertake to determine whether the Arabs in this country regard themselves as Palestinians, Hashemite Jordanians, part of greater Syria or descendants of the ancient Hebrews whose ancestors were forcibly Islamised and who have been redeemed at last. I do not know. But I am almost certain that they are not overjoyed to entrust their future to even the most enlightened and benevolent Jews. They doubtless regard themselves as the despoiled owners of the whole country, some of whom reluctantly accept the loss of part of it while others do not accept it at all. In any case, this population has never been given an opportunity to define itself and express its wishes democratically, whether as a Palestinian people or as a branch of the greater Arab nation. Its demand for self-determination is legitimate. One can postpone its realisation, for no less a reason than Israel’s existence, but the day that our existence is recognised this demand will have to be met.

Where right clashes with right, the issue can either be decided by force, or some unsatisfactory, inconsistent compromise develops that does not seem right to either of the sides.

If might prevails, I am not sure whose might it will be. We know that conflicts that last for generations are not fought out between armies, but between systems of national potential. They may eventually manage to drive us out of the Land. We may manage to push them into the desert. We may both succeed: then the land will be a desolate ruin without Jews or Arabs, with only justice hovering over the debris.

If a compromise is reached, it will be between an inconsistent Zionist and an inconsistent Palestinian. Justice, total, brutal justice, is of course on the side of those who argue that in principle there is no difference between Ramallah and Ramleh, between Gaza and Beersheba, between Jerusalem and Jerusalem. This, of course is precisely what the Palestinian and Zionist fanatics claim with a single voice: ‘It’s all mine!’

In the life of nations, as in the life of individuals, existence, albeit a complicated and painful existence, can sometimes only be made possible by inconsistency. Tragic heroes, consumed by the desire for justice and purity, destroy and annihilate each other because of the consistency that bums like a fire in their bones. Whoever sets his sights on total justice is seeking not life but death.

Confronting the Arab States

It would be well to clear the path of this discussion of certain stumbling-blocks. One of them is the inane phrase ‘return of territories’. The areas occupied by the Israeli forces during the Six Day War may be divided into two categories: those populated by Palestinian Arabs and those that were unpopulated and served as a springboard for a war of attrition and annihilation. East Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria and the Gaza Plain are one thing, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights another. In the case of the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, the question is comparatively simple. Egypt and Syria have not been deprived of their independence by the Israeli conquest of those territories.

We crashed their armies and deprived them of a springboard for renewed aggression. When those countries deign to enter into peace negotiations with us, one of the subjects we will discuss with them is the drawing of permanent borders, and we shall not commit ourselves in advance to the straight line between Rafah and Eilat, and certainly not to the stupid line in the north drawn by the clumsy hands of Messrs Sykes and Picot. For the present, as long as Syria and Egypt refuse to sign proper peace treaties with us there is nothing hard or objectionable in keeping these territories under military occupation. Meanwhile, they may as well serve to warn and deter Cairo and Damascus, instead of being a violent threat to the heart of the State of Israel.

Where Judaea and Samaria and the Gaza Plain are concerned, the expression ‘return of territories’ is meaningless. The future of those districts is a matter between us and the Palestinian Arabs who inhabit them. As I have said, this is a problem quite unlike the Gordian knot or Columbus’s egg, that cannot be settled with a single clever formula, such as the simplistic formula of those who see peace as a matter of generosity and goodwill, or the foolish formula of those who calculate that military strength times determination equals peace plus territories.

From the viewpoint of the Arab States one of the roots of the conflict is their mortal fear of the momentum of the Zionist effort and the legendary potential they attribute to the Jewish people. For all that moderate Israel leaders declare that all we want is ‘a piece of land for refuge and shelter’, the Arabs have seen Zionism in its eighty years of development going from strength to strength, from a ragged, starving handful of nondescript settlers encamped among the marshes to a minor world power.

From the viewpoint of anxious or frightened Arabs, the inner rhythm of the achievement of Zionism seems to consist in a recurrent cycle of consolidation and expansion. Hence the widespread feeling in the neighbouring countries that there are many more areas in the Middle East that could become the object of Zionist ‘redemption’ and ‘liberation’. In this respect the Arabs’ belief in the secret power of Zionism is, paradoxically, even greater than that of our own most fanatical extremists. And while there is no denying the helpful and perhaps decisive contribution the stupidity of the Arab leaders has made to the increasing strength of Zionism, that does not diminish the widespread fear of the Satanic power of Zionism, and fear, as usual, increases stupidity.

For the national movements in the Arab countries, with the demonic superhuman powers they ascribe to the ‘Zionist monster’ (verging on classical antisemitism and the mythology of the secret power of‘international Jewry’), the fate of Arab Palestine is a fearsome vision of their own future. It is their view of us as a ‘bridgehead’ that threatens to overwhelm the entire Middle East if it is not smothered in its infancy that drives them to launch against us one desperate war of destruction after another.

And so we return to our starting-point. If in Israel after the Six Day War those trends in Zionism for which the ‘redemption of the Land’ is the most important thing, if the nationalistic and Canaanite ambitions to become a Jewish power as great as the kingdom ofDavid and Jeroboam prevail, then the darkest fears of the Arabs about the ‘true meaning’ of Zionism will be confirmed and reinforced, as will their sense that their war against us is a life-and-death struggle.

On the other hand, if a victorious Israel, from a position of strength, allows Palestine to develop gradually in the direction of the realisation of its national right to part of the land, the Arab world will be exposed to a mental shock which may perhaps, in the course of time, force it to reassess the nature of Zionism. Such a reinterpretation, accompanied by a shrewd awareness of Israel’s determination and ability to defend itself, may bring the Arab States to a gradual if grudging acceptance of the fact that we exist. Not, of course, to an enthusiastic brotherly reconciliation.

Between two possibilities of Zionism

I am not one of those who hold the fatalistic view that there is no other way out of the Jewish-Arab war than the ultimate defeat of one side in blood and fire. On the other hand, I do not share the melodramatic vision of the two reconciled sides embracing each other as soon as the magic geopolitical formula is found. The best we can expect, in the usual way of tragic conflicts between individuals or between peoples, is a process of adaptation and psychological acceptance accompanied by a slow, painful awakening to reality, burdened with bitterness and deprivation, with shattered dreams and endless suspicions and reservations which, in the way of human wounds, heal slowly and leave permanent scars.

Some people say that ‘reality dictates’ this and ‘the situation demands’ that, or that ‘there is no choice at this moment because there is no one to talk to’. There is truth and its opposite in such talk. The fact is that the immediate conclusion of my reasoning puts me in a position that is not far from the declared policy of the government of Israel.
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Yet one would have to be blind to fail to realise that the results of the recent war have placed Zionist ideology before an urgent and fateful choice: if from now on the current which has flowed within Zionism almost from the beginning, the current of nationalistic romanticism and mythological delusions of greatness and renewal, the current of longing for a kingdom and blowing rams’ horns and conquering Canaan by storm, the national superiority complex based on military enthusiasm in the guise of crude biblical nostalgia, the conception of the entire State of Israel as one giant act of retaliation for the ‘historical humiliation’ of the diaspora - if that trend prevails among us, then the Middle East is fated to be the battleground of two peoples, both fighting a fundamentally just war, both fighting essentially for their life and liberty, and both fighting to the death.

I believe in a Zionism that faces facts, that exercises power with restraint, that sees the Jewish past as a lesson, but neither as a mystical imperative nor as an insidious nightmare; that sees the Palestinian Arabs as Palestinian Arabs, and neither as the camouflaged reincarnation of the ancient tribes of Canaan nor as a shapeless mass of humanity waiting for us to form it as we see fit: a Zionism also capable of seeing itself as others may see it; and finally, a Zionism that recognises both the spiritual implications and the political consequences of the fact that this small tract of land is the homeland of two peoples fated to live facing each other, willy-nilly, because no God and no angel will come to judge between right and right. The lives of both, the lives of all of us, depend on the hard, tortuous and essential process of learning to know each other in the curious landscape of the beloved country.

(First published in 1967)

(Based on a radio interview)

Yes, there is a growing despondency, and lately people have stopped feeling ashamed of it and hiding it behind the usual mask of cheerful complacency. I myself share this despondency. I even felt it in the years between 1967 and 1973, when most people seemed to be living in a state of uninterrupted euphoria. But recently, specifically since the Yom Kippur War, I have had an intuitive feeling that deep down at least some of the pain is a symptom of recovery. I am less frightened now than I was, let us say, in 1969 or 1970.