It has been said that with the second anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we are now almost two years into World War IV. If World War I was a conflagration over imperialistic and economic stresses that had been brewing since the late 19th century, and World War II was the battle against Nazism, the third was the containment of Communism and the fourth, now underway, is the global conflict with fundamentalist terrorism.
This war had, in some ways, beginnings similar to those of WW II. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of Pearl Harbor, America and Americans were attacked, seemingly out of the blue, and shocked into the realization that a conflict already underway in many parts of the world was no longer one that they could simply watch from the sidelines.
Yet while “World War” imagery may be apt, and even instrumental in communicating to dubious Americans the importance of the battles in which they are now engaged, it also has its drawbacks. It portrays the battle in absolute terms, good versus evil, civilized forces of light in opposition to dangerous forces of darkness that would seek to destroy the best of what Western culture has to offer. And the goal is also singularly clear. Nothing short of absolute victory will do. Nazism had to be eradicated, Communism’s stranglehold over Europe had to be demolished, and now, it is said, Islamic fundamentalism must be dismembered.
But, while in the major conflicts that America has chosen to join (the war on Afghanistan, the war against Iraq, a looming conflict of some sort, perhaps, with North Korea and/or Iran and Syria) the absolutist language of victory and destruction of the enemy may well serve a purpose, such language will prove enormously counterproductive in the other conflict that George W. Bush has decided to try to end, namely, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In this conflict, decisive “victory” is not possible, and seeking it could well undermine any hopes for a more nuanced resolution, the only chance we have for escaping the cycle of violence and destruction that has gripped the region for nearly the past three years.
As of the moment of this writing, in late July 2003, Israel and the Palestinians find themselves in a tentative cease-fire, a “hudna” that many do not trust and that many more are certain will ultimately fail. The pessimists (among whom I do not count myself) may well be right. There are almost always more reasons for pessimism than for optimism in the Middle East. But pessimism now is perilous, for its prophecy can become self-fulfilling.
Both sides in this conflict are battered and bloodied — both desperately need the beginning of something new. And while we learned from bitter experience that Oslo was a naïve arrangement (even most leftists in Israel acknowledge that one would have to be rather Pollyan-naish not to have dramatically shifted one’s assessment of the Palestinians’ intentions and their code of ethics over the past three years), it is still clear that some version of “land for peace” and the creation of an autonomous Palestinian entity are both inevitable (given the agendas of Bush, Blair, and other world leaders) and the only reasonable chance for something different to emerge.
The urgency of finding some resolution cannot be overstated. It is not simply a matter of the economy, which is in tatters, or the specter of even more deaths in the months and years to come. What is at stake is the entire enterprise that we call the State of Israel. Ariel Sharon has made the dramatic shift that he appears to have made, I suspect, not because his instincts have changed, but because he can see, feel, and hear the sense of desperation in his country. An Israeli population (at least those with a modicum of mobility) without hope of some version of peace for their children will not stay in Israel. An Israel locked in today’s stranglehold affords its citizens little hope. Such a country, Sharon apparently has come to understand, may well not survive.
Thus, the success of this “hudna,” or of the next one, or the one after that, is not just a matter of peace, but of survival. For that reason, both Israelis and American Jews must shed the language of absolutism that the World War metaphor fosters, and that many passionate observers of the conflict on both sides of the ocean have seen fit to use. Rather than persist in the language of victory and destruction of the enemy, we would do well to pay particular attention to the nuances and compromises that an exit from this morass will require. In the pages that follow, I will point to five of these areas.

I. A reassessment of our basic expectations

We shall first have to recalibrate the very goals to which we aspire, and to become more realistic about what the Middle East can actually come to be. Here, it is the Left, both in Israel and in the United States, that will have to do the most adjusting. For, sadly, a universalistic image of virtually idyllic relations between Jews and Arabs in their shared ancestral home — the dream on which many of us were raised — is so unrealistic that pursuing it can lead only to further disappointment and then to disaster.
Shimon Peres is the leader of the Labor party only by default, only because the party is so inept that it cannot even begin to chart its way out of its suicidal ossification. But Peres, by continuing to speak about a “new Middle East,” consigns the Left to a delusional dream. The blood lust of much too high a percentage of the Palestinian population is so profoundly ingrained that few middle-of-the-road Israelis continue to share Peres’s vision of an altered Middle East in which Israelis and Palestinians co-exist in harmony. There will no singing of Kumbaya at the end of this conflict, no squatting on the sands of the Judean hills smoking peace pipes together. The best we can hope for is the border fence that is now rising, too slowly. Separa-tion of the two peoples is our only chance. In social terms, the appropriate analogy is divorce, and not necessarily a terribly amicable one. Israelis and Palestinians must simply live apart and stop ruining each others’ lives.
Whatever solution we arrive at has to result in a cessation of the killing, or at least to reduce it dramatically. Our policies, therefore, ought to be geared towards that attainable goal, but not beyond. Only with a realistic sense of the future we seek will we avoid another round of profound disappointments, disappointments that would result, in turn, in exasperation with our Palestinian counterparts, which would be disastrous for the maintenance of whatever progress we actually do achieve.

II. Trading land for peace — balancing hope with pain

Sadly, public discourse in Israel (and in much of the American Jewish Community) today is built upon a non-conversation between two positions that are rather absolute in their assessments. One might metaphorically characterize these two positions in terms of what they “see” as they travel the West Bank.
There are those who drive through the West Bank, and gazing out upon a landscape virtually identical to how it must have appeared in Biblical times, see, quite rightly, Eretz Yisrael. The idyllic images of the rocky rolling hills, olive and acacia trees that dot the landscape, and even flocks of sheep grazing without any human in sight are a moving visage of what our ancestors might well have seen in those very places. The pastoral beauty of this image, and its obvious Biblical resonance, make it difficult for these people to imagine relinquishing this land to anyone, much less to those who for decades have dedicated themselves to our destruction. For these people, who see and feel the land, its beauty, and our (understandable) attachment to it, the trading of land for peace is so painful as to be either unthinkable, or something that must come only after the Palestinians meet a series of expectations that are made so demanding as to render them impossible.
Other Israelis, however, drive the same roads, look out the same windows, and see not land, but people. They focus on the small villages and larger towns that dot the landscape. They see small children, often living in fairly obvious poverty, and even adults who, if they are less than 37-years-old, have never lived a day without our army’s occupying them. Then, these Israelis often decide that this reality is untenable. We must separate from this population — we must not occupy them, for the “occupation” (as even Ariel Sharon refers to it today) is terrible for both them and for us. Then these people, who see not Eretz Yisrael but an occupied indigenous Palestinian population, lower the bar of expectations, sometimes to the point of making no demands on the Palestinians at all. We must get out, they say — that is all that matters.
But the future of the State of Israel, at least the future of a state that I would want to live in and in which I would want my children to grow and to raise their own children, depends on something more nuanced than either of these monocular views. Yechiel Tchlenov, who, at the Sixth Zionist Congress, led the battle against Herzl’s foolish Uganda Plan, understood that a revived Jewish sovereign entity had to be where it is today. Our yearning for a state was more than a dream of national sovereignty. It was a dream of national sovereignty in the only place on earth where Jews feel, or at least ought to feel, a connection to every hill, to every rock, to each tel, and to all the wadis. If we have gotten to a place where many Israelis no longer feel that attachment, then we have failed ourselves and our children. If we have reached a stage at which these people can look out the car window and see only an indigenous population that they do not wish to rule, but not a land that they wished with every fiber of their beings that they could keep, then the Zionist educational agenda in Israel has failed.
But by the same token, when I imagine the state that I hope and pray my children will live in, and the people with whom they will build their society, I am equally distressed by the notion that they, or their peers, might drive those roads and see only the land, and remain blind to the people who are undeniably there. The fact that there are, al-ready, many such people, is equally devastating testimony about the failure of Israeli education. If the first failure was the inability to teach a love of the land, this second failure is a moral one — our apparent inability to raise generations of children who can win wars and protect themselves, but who, at the same time, can remain sensitive to the human costs of even battles and wars that were forced upon us.
At this critical juncture, after three years of exhausting and devastating conflict, we can no longer do with such Cyclops-like visions. We shall have to learn, and we shall have to teach our children, to see with our two eyes. We need Israelis who will drive those hills and see both the land that they love as well as the people they do not wish to rule, and who, with nuance, and with hope balanced by pain, will make the accommodations necessary to keep as much of the land as we can, while making it possible for there to arise a new generation of Palestinians who will experience Jews as something other than occupiers.
This, too, will require a recalibration of our hopes, our demands, and our policy. This, too, will require of both Left and Right nuance where there has been little. But this, too, is critical if we are to survive in a form of which our children and theirs will ultimately be proud.
III. Balancing pride in victory with
pain at the price we have paid

If this “hudna,” or some other subsequent arrangement proves viable, and the hostilities commonly known as the “Second Intifada,” but more reasonably called a war (since whatever this was/is, it was not the popular uprising that the Arabic word “intifada” connotes), Israelis will say, quite rightly, that we won this war, too. We will have earned the right to make that claim, even with pride. For despite the mistakes we have made (and there have been too many), on the whole, Israel’s armed forces have conducted themselves admirably, and no less importantly, successfully, in a drawn-out battle that was clearly designed to bring Israel to its knees, or to its destruction. As exhausted and anguish-ed as Israeli society now is, it should be buoyed at least slightly by the knowledge that, though at a heavy price, this war, too, was won.
However, this pride and satisfaction must be offset by an acknowledgment of the very heavy price that we have paid, and the nature of that price. The key loss of this war, of course, has been those who have lost their lives, both those in the armed forces as well as the hundreds of innocent civilians who have been killed by a barbaric, years-long wave of suicide bombings that the entire Western world is now desperately trying to learn to counter. Also horrific has been the price we have paid in the wounded, forgotten all too quickly both at home and abroad as they spend months, and often years, struggling to recover from attacks that have left them without limb or physical capacity, seared by constant pain, riddled forever with nails and nuts and bolts that cannot be safely removed.
Yet the price that we have paid in this painful war extends even further, beyond the shattered and broken bodies, beyond even the lives so brutally ended. A heavy price has also been paid by those who have watched what it is that we have had to do to win this war. I have watched my children, and their peers, react as we have placed entire populations under curfew, often for days at a time. I have watched as my children have heard the stories, often from Israeli Arabs who are friends of ours, of sitting at roadblocks for hours on end, making it impossible for them to go teach, or to visit a sibling on the other side of the line, or to get medical care that they need. And I have watched my children ask themselves, and ask us, whether that sort of behavior on our part is really necessary.
When my children have asked such questions, I have told them the truth. I have told them that people like us do not have the information provided by the intelligence services that is necessary to decide what must be done, but that I assume that the army mostly does what is critical to keep them and us safe. That may be a somewhat oversimplified approach, but I’ve found nothing better to say.
But in these moments, I have seen how even children who have not been wounded and who, thankfully, do not personally know anyone who has been hurt or killed, are paying a heavy price in this war. When Ha’aretz, in the summer of 2002, showed a photo of Israeli soldiers searching the bedroom of a frightened Palestinian family in Shechem, the soldiers in full battle gear and the mother and her child cowering in the corner, my son Avi was appalled. “Do we really have to do that?” he wanted to know. “I don’t know,” I told him. “People like us just don’t have all the facts.”
He thought about that for a moment, and didn’t say anything. But then he said, “I would hate it if anyone came in our house and searched us like that. Whoever did that to us, I would hate them forever.”
He would, probably, hate them forever, just as I assume that the child in that picture and many thousands more like him, will hate us forever because of what we have been forced to do. That is not to say that we must apologize for these searches or roadblocks, or that we have necessarily done wrong. But it is to say that fighting this war successfully has perforce brutalized us, military and civilian alike, and that it will take us a long time to recover some of the qualities that had formerly made this society unique, more introspective, more humane than many others.
This loss is all the more reason to hope that the pessimism that now grips much of the country might, somehow, prove to be unfounded, all the more reason to hope that we just may be extricating ourselves from this morass. The dream of the society which lies at the core of this country, and which is even discussed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, will survive only if we can end this war and what it is forcing us to become.

IV. Recognizing our fallibility, while defying
the world’s double standard

Those of us who now have, or will have, children in the Israeli army, have every reason to want them to be part of something of which they will be proud, an enterprise that is disciplined, moral, and highly principled. That will happen only if we are open to the critiques that we Israelis are leveling at our own mistakes, a form of nuance in short supply among Israel’s most ardent supporters.
At the same time, though, we must be very careful not to internalize the unwarranted and baseless critiques leveled at Israel primarily by a Europe consumed with a politically correct form of antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. There is no distinction between the two, and the double standard that Europe applies to the Middle East must not be tolerated. This will require intellectual discipline, discerning balance.
When the child, Muhammad Jamal al Dura, the now world-famous Palestinian casualty of the first days of the war, was killed, it was commonly assumed (even by many Israelis) that he had been felled by Israeli fire. That accusation, along with France 2’s footage of his tragic death, was broadcast far and wide on virtually every channel one watched and in every newspaper and magazine one read.
That was distressing, but hardly indictable. But months later, when the German channel ARD analyzed the footage and concluded that the child had actually been shot not by Israeli troops but by Palestinian gunmen, the revelation went virtually unmentioned. The same broadcasts that had seen fit to repeat again and again the “news” that Israeli soldiers had shot this child did not feel that the news that they had been wrong was news at all. It is this standard against which we shall have to battle, even as we maintain our own self-criticism.
In the aftermath of Operation Defensive Shield, the entire world was convinced that a “massacre” of innocent Palestinians had taken place. Israel denied the claim vociferously, but to no avail. French and German newspapers reported the massacre as fact with screaming headlines, while Kofi Annan asked, “Can the whole world be wrong?” No, he implied. Such a scenario was not possible, and Israel was convicted before the investigation, which Annan subsequently tried to cancel, even began.
But it was Annan’s very own United Nations, hardly known as a bastion of Zionist passion, that produced a report on August 1, 2002, stating that the number of Palestinians killed was 52 — around half of whom may have been civilians. The dead did not number in the thousands, not even in the hundreds. No massacre had taken place.
Yet did the French newspapers that had condemned the massacre now report that it had never happened? Did the German papers retract their headlines? Did Kofi Annan admit that he was wrong? No.
In today’s political marketplace, European protection of the underdog at virtually all costs, a response in no small measure to an abiding and justifiable guilt over what transpired in the Shoah, now stands ready to vilify the very state that the world created as meager compensation for that guilt. It is, though in sophisticated form, simply a reversion to the European antisemitism of old.
More recently, Professor Andrew Wilke of Oxford University wrote to Amit Duvshani, an Israeli applicant:
Thank you for contacting me, but I don’t think this would work. I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because [Palestinians] wish to live in their own country.
In no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the only UK scientist with these views, but I’m sure you will find another suitable lab if you look around.
Wilke tried, thankfully unsuccessfully, to hide behind the cloak of academic freedom, just as European news sources hide behind the veil of journalistic independence. But that cannot be allowed. The nuance required of us is that we shall have to let the Israeli press investigate the IDF and have Israeli citizens hold our armed forces to the highest possible standards, even when that entails profound self-criticism. And all the while we must defend ourselves against criticism from the outside that is motivated not by a desire to see Israel live according to the standards articulated in its own Declaration of Indepen-dence, but motivated instead by a wish that Israel had no independence in the first place.
A potentially fine distinction? Clearly. But not an inconsistent one, I would insist, and it will require our vigilance, coupled with intellectual acuity, and moral nuance.
V. Israel’s Arab population is a serious problem

Finally, we turn to an issue that deserves infinitely more attention than we can allot it here but that we will, nonetheless, mention briefly. Israel’s Arab population, approximately 20 percent of its total population, represents a serious threat to Israel’s ability to maintain itself as both Jewish and democratic, and the next phase of Israel’s strategic thinking will have to take this into account honestly and forthrightly, but also morally.
The late Meir Kahane’s suggestion of “transfer,” a rallying-cry that some MKs (including Effi Eitam of the NRP*) have tacitly endorsed, must be rejected out of hand. Since Israeli Arabs would not leave willingly, even if offered money, “transfer” actually means ethnic cleansing, or worse. It is out of the question.
Yet we should not delude ourselves. Even if Israel had treated Israeli Arabs much better than it has, these people would be in an impossible situation. Their insistence that they be called “Israeli Palestinians” is only one indication of an obvious fact — who became an “Israeli” Arab and who remains a “Palestinian” Arab was largely an accident of history, a product of who was on what side of what line on what day when fighting ceased. When Israel goes into Jenin, even if no massacre takes place, life in Jenin is miserable. But Palestinians in Jenin can have siblings inside Israel, siblings who are Israeli citizens. The bind in which these Israeli Arabs find themselves is untenable.
For that reason, it is understandable that Israeli Arabs have seized on the Israeli left’s suggestion that Israel become a medinat kol ezrakheha, a “nation of all her citizens.” But that phrase is a euphemism for Israel’s abandoning the Jewish core of the state, a step that would in the minds of many (including me) eviscerate the purpose of the state in the first place. Something else will have to give.
What that something is, is not clear. But at the risk of raising a very complex issue with insufficient space to explore it, suffice it to say that once the peace that some of us hope may one day emerge requires us to rewrite Israel’s borders, we should recall that there is nothing sacred about the 1967 Green Line. And thus, if Israel is going to return land as the Palestinians suggest, there may be no reason to assume that the only lands that Israel should return are those captured in June 1967. Perhaps the “triangle,” that area of the Galilee that is home to a large percentage of Israel’s Arab citizens, and which includes cities like Uhm el Fahm, must also go back. The hostility of these people to the very country of which they are citizens is palpable, perhaps even understandable. Giving up the “meshulash,” or even other sections (in return for areas with significant Jewish population that Israel understandably has no intention of returning, such as the Gush Etzion bloc with Efrat, or Ma’aleh Adumim, or Ariel further to the north) would not solve the problem of Israel’s Arabs and Israel’s simultaneous democratic and Jewish commitments, but it would buy the country a great deal of time.
Can such a move be defended in liberal democratic terms? What are the implications not of capturing territory and of making a foreign people citizens of Israel, but of giving up territory and of (gradually?) stripping a population of citizenship as they become citizens of a new state, one created to offer their people a homeland? These issues deserve careful analysis by Israel’s most insightful legal and moral theorists. But Israel’s population statistics are a time bomb, no less threatening to the ultimate survival of the state than the war that may now be winding down, and any strategic engagement with Israel’s future dare not ignore them.
This, too, would require a reorientation on the part of both sides of the political spectrum. Those most committed to Israel’s Jewish core must acknowledge that we have failed our Arab population in profound ways and must ameliorate the situation of those Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens. But those more concerned about social justice and civil liberties, who have been (rightly) calling for such steps for decades, will have to acknowledge that even such steps will not resolve the problem, and that in the long run, this population represents a grave danger to Israel’s democratic Jewishness, a danger that must be faced forthrightly, boldly, and strategically.


It may well be that by the time this article appears in print, today’s “hudna” will be long dead. I hope that this will not be the case. But either way, it seems virtually certain that at some point, some solution to the current conflict will either be chosen by or forced upon Israel, and that solution will look more like Oslo, Taba, or even the “hudna” than many of Israel’s right wing and even centrist supporters (both in Israel and abroad) would like.
Given that eventuality, the challenge that the Israeli electorate and Zionists abroad face is to re-orient their expectations, their policies, and their strategic goals to a new and emerging reality. The five areas explored here by no means exhaust those arenas that will demand our attention, and their policy implications are obviously much more complex than space here allows. But re-orientation, recalibration, and a newfound commitment to nuance are in order. The failure to recalibrate our hopes and our policies, and a continued absence of nuance, despite the misgivings that many of us have about any particular scenario, will be no less destructive to Israel’s future than the war from which we just might be emerging.•
About the author
Daniel Gordis, (www.danielgordis.org), is Vice President of the Mandel Foundation — Israel, and director of its Jerusalem Fellows program. His latest book, Home to Stay: One American Family’s Chronicle of Miracles and Struggles in Contemporary Israel, will appear in October (Random House / Three Rivers Press). Prior to making aliyah in 1998, Dr. Gordis served as Vice President of Public Affairs and Founding Dean of the Ziegler Rabbinical School at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, California.