By Arie
M. Kacowicz
In our neighborhood of Gilo, we were literally sitting at the
borderline between the city of Jerusalem and Palestinian territory.
Like in a surreal movie, my family and I could watch from our
living room the exchange of fire and artillery between the Palestinian
snipers and our Israeli armed forces. We learned to identify the
sources and caliber of the different weapons that caused more
noise than damage but had a tremendous psychological impact upon
all of us, especially our children.
In the mid-'90s my family and I moved to Gilo from French Hill.
These are both Jewish neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem after
the Six-Day War in 1967. I was still convinced, like the majority
of the Israelis who supported the 1993 Oslo peace process, that
the nearby Palestinian town of Beit-Lehem eventually would be
part of an independent and peaceful State of Palestine. The unofficial
"green line" border that separates Israeli and Palestinian territory
is about half a mile from our new apartment in East Jerusalem,
and I always teased my friends that we had a view from our apartment
of hutz laaretz, of a foreign country, Palestine.
One of the reasons we came to Gilo was the captivating view
of the beautiful town of Beit-Lehem (or Bethlehem, as many know
it), with the bucolic and almost mystic ambiance of its white
houses and its hills. I always dreamt of the fabulous tourist
potential and benefits from the economic cooperation between Israelis
and Palestinians in this small piece of land we all share.
Those were the optimistic days of the mid-1990s, when exchange
students from Notre Dame arrived regularly to Tantur, a Notre
Dame institute "between Jerusalem and Beit-Lehem," a few yards
from Gilo. At Tantur, where I was teaching a course on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, we analyzed together the question of whether the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict had reached a "point of no return" in the direction of
peace. About the same time my family moved to Gilo, the nearby
Beit-Lehem and Beit-Gala became part of the Palestinian Authority
semi-sovereign territory, the embryonic core of a future Palestinian
state.
Jordan controlled what is called the West Bank (or Judea and
Samaria) and East Jerusalem between 1949 and 1967, as result of
its invasion of Israel/Palestine in the first Arab-Israeli War
(1948-1949). In 1950 Jordan (formerly Transjordan) unilaterally
annexed those territories, which, according to the 1947 U.N. Partition
Plan, were supposed to be an integral part of a Palestinian (Arab)
state. The 1967 Six-Day War, involving Israel, Jordan, Syria and
Egypt, brought about the Israeli military occupation of the West
Bank (from Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (from Egypt). Following
the war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, making it part of its
national territory. Nowadays, there are about 200,000 Jews and
200,000 Arabs living in East Jerusalem in disparate neighborhoods.
Despite my dovish convictions about the need for a Palestinian
state in the West Bank and Gaza, I never found an ideological
contradiction in moving to Gilo, a large neighborhood of about
40,000 Israeli Jews in Southeast Jerusalem. Unlike the Israeli
settlements in the West Bank that crisscross the Palestinian villages
and towns and impede their economic and future development, the
200,000 Israeli Jews who live in East Jerusalem are a vibrant
and integral part of the city and of the State of Israel. That
fact had been tacitly recognized by the Palestinian negotiators
at Camp David and Taba in 2000-01, as well as by then-President
Clinton in his December 2000 blueprint of possible Israel/Palestine
borders. Thus, Israel's interlocutors were ready to recognize
the complex demographics of the city, according to which the Jewish
neighborhoods should be part of Israel and the Arab neighborhoods
part of the new Arab state of Palestine.
The violence in Gilo started about a week after the eruption
of the second Palestinian intifada in late September 2000. Violence
had always followed the peace process in its convoluted trajectory,
but during the first few months we still did not have a sense
of a full war. We were hoping that the Israeli and Palestinian
leaders, prompted by Clinton, would come to their senses and reach
a fair and feasible compromise following the significant (but
perhaps not as far-reaching as the Palestinians expected) Israeli
offers at Camp David in July 2000.
The parameters of that compromise have been clear for mainstream
Israelis ever since U.N. Resolution 242 of November 1967 heralded
them: a two-state solution more or less along the former 1967
borders; some form of territorial swaps to accommodate most of
the settlers in Israel (but not the settlements); Jerusalem as
an open and shared city, the Western Wall in Jewish hands and
the mosques in the Temple Mount under Moslem control; and a return
of the Palestinian refugees to their new state, but not to ours.
Today, after more than two years, 2,000 Palestinians and 700
Israelis have died, the majority of them innocent civilians who
were victims of Palestinian terrorism and of Israeli counterinsurgency
and harsh military reactions. We now face a full, though very
lopsided war -- a sophisticated regular army vs. militias, terrorist
and guerrilla groups -- which epitomizes the end of any meaningful
peace process for the time being. Negotiating with the Palestinian
Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat, is nowadays considered
as anathema by the majority of Israelis. Tragically, the parameters
of a solution in the future will probably be similar to those
outlined by Clinton in December 2000. For now, peace seems far
away.
In 2000, the first year of the intifada, there was
sporadic shooting at Gilo from Beit-Gala, but the Palestinian
snipers had not reached our street yet. In the second year, around
October of 2001, Palestinians "discovered" the close proximity
between our street and Beit-Lehem and started aiming directly
at it, including our apartment building. The bullets eventually
reached the garden of one neighbor, the windows of two others
and the building's entrance. The Municipality of Jerusalem provided
us with bullet-proof windows, free of charge, courtesy of the
State of Israel. Nobody was hurt, at least physically. We tried
to keep our daily routine to some extent, forbidding the children
from playing outside or on the balcony, asking them to fold themselves
under the seats in the car when we left or reached the garage.
Otherwise, in Tel-Aviv, or even at Hebrew University in Mount
Scopus, 10 miles from home, or in other neighborhoods in Jerusalem,
life went on.
The "front" of Gilo continued to grasp some attention for the
next two years but eventually became only a minor item in the
news, because of a much more widespread and tragic phenomenon:
the Palestinians' increasing resort to suicide bombers, their
most lethal weapon in this asymmetrical war. Suicide bombings
have become part of the landscape, especially since February 2001,
with the failure of the Taba talks of January 2001 and the inability
(and lack of will, if not active encouragement) of the "official"
Palestinian leadership to control these terrorist attacks. This
happened long before they lost their territorial control of their
cities with the Israeli re-occupation of most of the West Bank
in April 2002. These heinous attacks have targeted buses, nightclubs,
restaurants, malls and bus stations, and have affected the daily
life and the deep psyche of the Israelis, not only in the occupied
territories but mainly within the pre-1967 borders ("the green
line") of Israel itself.
Even if the Palestinians have been involved in a just war against
the Israeli occupation, there is no justification whatsoever for
these Palestinian terrorist attacks on civilians, which are considered
crimes against humanity (see for instance the Human Rights Watch
Report of November 2002). As a result, many Israelis have returned
to their preconceptions of the Palestinians, formed before the
peace process, as a bunch of terrorists aiming at destroying Israel
and committing genocide against Jews as Jews.
Once these attacks aimed at Israel proper, rather than against
the occupation of the territories, it has become more and more
difficult to understand the rationale for this so-called Palestinian
war of national liberation (supposedly, of the territories), and
to differentiate between it and the criminal and irrational war
of Palestinian Islamic extremists against Jews in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv
and Haifa. Hence, many Israelis feel that the use of the military
option for the time being was necessary to defend themselves and
stop the Palestinian violence.
One can imagine how reality could have changed if the Palestinians
had chosen to turn to nonviolent resistance, probably leading
to a peaceful Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories.
To the contrary, the terrorist attacks inside Israel only hardened
the Israeli public opinion against any conciliatory move or return
to negotiations.
It was in the summer 2001, when we were away from the country,
that we learned about the suicide bombing attack ("another one")
in a pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem, with its nefarious toll.
Tragically, I understood the real meaning of that "event" when
I was back in Israel in September 2001 and learned that one of
my students at Hebrew University, Tzvika Golombek, had been killed
in that pizzeria. Tzvika was 26 years old, bright and handsome.
He used to come to class with his motorcycle helmet in one hand,
and a smiling and charming excuse for being chronically late at
the beginning of our seminar. A passionate student of international
relations and of Latin American politics and history, he had just
finished his bachelor's degree and planned to continue with his
graduate studies. Captivated by the Latin American magic, he wanted
to explore and understand the civil war of Colombia, not being
aware that la violencia could reach him in Jerusalem
and that he would become one of the numerous statistics in this
ongoing Middle Eastern tragedy.
The second time I felt the reach of the "Russian roulette" of
Palestinian terrorism was in December 2001, when my 19-year-old
neighbor from the apartment below us in Gilo, Moshe Yedid-Levy,
was killed in a gruesome "double" suicide bombing in downtown
Jerusalem, together with another nine youngsters. I will never
forget the screams of his mother that night, when the tragic news
reached her. Moshe was a diligent and sensible young man, with
fervent religious beliefs and a great love for his fellow human
beings. I do not know what his political views were, but the fact
remains that the only reason Moshe was killed was because he was
an Israeli Jew.
The third time a suicide bombing attack directly affected me
was when it struck my workplace, Hebrew University at Mount Scopus
on July 31, 2002. I still wonder who can justify the targeting
of Hebrew University, an enclave of peaceful co-existence across
religions, ethnicities and nationalities. That morning, before
heading to a sabbatical in the United States, I had greeted my
friends at the university. Only that afternoon, a couple of hours
before leaving for the airport, I learned from a cell-phone call
from a friend that the cafeteria where I used to eat had been
destroyed. Seven people were killed, including some American students.
The violence has continued since, and we have followed it from
the (relative) quiet of Maryland and of Washington, D.C. In October
2002, when a deranged sniper (or two) terrorized our new neighborhood
for three weeks, friends were telling us that we "brought bad
luck," or that our fate followed us from the shootings in Gilo
to the shootings in Maryland. The difference is that the snipers
on the East Coast were eventually caught, while the violence between
Israelis and Palestinians continues. The result of this vicious
cycle of violence has been a growing pessimism, anger, desperation
and disillusionment with the peace process, as reflected in the
results of the Israeli general elections of January 28, 2003.
At least in the short term, many Israelis have moved to the
political right and have given up any hope or expectation of finding
a political solution. The more I learned about the failure of
the peace process of 1993-2000, the more I realized that what
we are facing here is a clash of two narratives about "what went
wrong," a tragic sequel of missed opportunities, misperceptions
and miscalculations, and a deep failure of leadership on both
sides. All contributed to this catastrophic movement back from
peace to war.
Beyond these anecdotes and personal stories, three paradoxes
remain in this cacophony of different interpretations. First,
many Israelis today are hawkish in their short-term views, agreeing
to "crush" the Palestinian resistance by military means, while
they remain dovish in their long-term views, aware of the inevitability
of a Palestinian state. Second, the only way for Israel to remain
a Jewish and democratic state and for the Palestinians to have
their own state is by accepting the two-state solution. Third,
the most painful and tragic paradox of all is that the majority
of Israelis and Palestinians agree more or less about the "parameters"
of a political solution, but not about the process itself.
The tragedy of the current situation is how to get out of the
cycle of violence and mutual escalation without waiting too long
for the inexorable logic of ripeness that will lead us eventually
to the same results. Those will come, I fear, only after a few
more thousand innocent people on both sides are killed. After
all, neither Israelis nor Palestinians will be driven from the
region. The question that remains is not what the outcome will
be, but how and when we will return to meaningful political negotiations
between Israelis and Palestinians.
* * *
Arie Kacowicz, currently a visiting professor in the department
of government at Georgetown University, is a professor in the
Department of International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A visiting professor at Notre Dame and a fellow in the Kroc and
Kellogg institutes in 1997-98, he has taught in the University's
international study program in Jerusalem.
July 2003
