The Middle East conflict is not a battle between good and evil but between right and right

By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian,

Wednesday 18 October 2000

The verdict came swiftly and with characteristic eloquence. The
leaders had spent 28 hours arguing, shouting and finally negotiating
in Sharm el-Sheikh - but the people they represent took just minutes
to deliver their response. As the summit ended, Palestinian militiamen
aimed their guns at a Jewish neighbourhood of Jerusalem and Israel
responded with tank-mounted machine gun fire. So much for the paper
truce, painstakingly pieced together by Bill Clinton and his unique
brand of insomnia diplomacy.

Not that you can blame the American president. Nor can you point the
finger at Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak: they are merely reflecting the
mood on the Palestinian and Israeli streets. For both sides in this
conflict have returned to the hardest of hard lines. The past two
weeks have put them back on a war footing, and they are digging into
their trenches.

Ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, and their defenders outside the
region, are returning to the old, cold positions. The email that has
reached me this last week is revealing enough. Advocates for Israel
are singing once more the 1970s refrain that the Palestinians already
have a home (It's called Jordan) or that the Arabs have 22
other countries to go to, so why must they have poor little Israel
too? These are arguments that Israel and Zionism were meant to have
abandoned two decades ago. Yet here they go again.

The same regression has occurred on the Palestinian side. The email
inbox speaks not only of the evils of Israel's post-1967 occupation,
or the grotesque record of discrimination inside Israel proper, but of
the country's fundamental crime: its mere existence. Longtime
rejectionists such as Edward Said are back in business, appearing on
Start the Week to call implicitly for the dissolution of the Jewish
state - and facing only the slightest challenge. The clear undertow of
the phone-in shows and letters pages is the same: not opposed to this
border or that settlement, but to the very idea of Israel. As one
veteran peace activist told the Guardian this week: It's not that
they don't want us here as occupiers. They don't want us here at
all.

For those who thought the 1993 handshake between Arafat and Yitzhak
Rabin heralded a new dawn, this return to core hostilities is
profoundly depressing. The breakthrough of the Oslo accords was to
move beyond the absolutist demands of the past - in which each side
claimed exclusive right to the land - to a new place, where the two
nations finally saw each other. It was that new premise, that both
sides had a claim on the same, disputed territory, that underpinned
the so-called two-state solution: one for Palestinians, one for
Israelis.

The trouble, it seems now, is that that logic was never fully accepted
by both sides. Palestinians say that Israel never understood it: hence
the paltry, pocket Palestine Barak was offering at Camp David.
Israelis say Arafat never understood it: hence his regular rhetorical
flourishes, in Arabic, hinting at the eventual liquidation of Israel.

We are in the realm of retro nationalism, with both Israelis and
Palestinians sinking their noses back into history rather than lifting
their eyes to the future. But the paradox may be that this could be
just what the Israel/Palestine battle needs. Perhaps, if they are ever
to have a chance of making peace, both sides need to get to the bottom
of their argument once and for all.

For Palestinians that means a recognition from Israel that they are a
people with national rights. Rabin and Barak both dipped a toe in this
water, and Israel's liberal intelligentsia have gone much further. But
now Israelis themselves may have to dive in. Yesterday's Ha'aretz
newspaper contained an extraordinary essay, all the more remarkable
for being published in the current climate. In it sociologist Danny
Rabinowitz adds to the current back-to- basics mood by suggesting
Israel needs to reflect on its own birth in 1948 - and make amends. He
urges his fellow countrymen to acknowledge at last that their state
was created at the cost of tragedy and dispossession to another
people. He suggests government memorials for the 400 Palestinian
villages destroyed in 1948, proper care for ruined mosques and
churches, an official memorial day for the Palestinian tragedy - even
perhaps a change to Israel's national anthem and flag. What
Rabinowitz, in common with Israel's new historians, wants is
for the Jewish state finally to see the other side: to recognise the
Palestinians' history and understand their claim.

I sraelis, of course, want the same thing. Among the ironies of the
peace process is that, while one of the great sticking points was
always Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state, it is Israel which
desperately wants Palestinian recognition - of the Jewish state. It is
a constant neurosis of the Israelis that their presence in the Middle
East is not accepted as legitimate by their neighbours. They need to
hear the Palestinian intelligentsia, if not Arafat himself, at least
acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist - yes within smaller
borders, yes with an end to occupation and brutality, yes with a
policy of internal equality - but a right to exist.

Yet such acceptance never comes. Until now, the best Israelis could
hope for was a pragmatic recognition by Palestinians that there are 5m
Jews in the region and they cannot be wished away. But that grudging,
de facto acceptance has not been enough to make Israelis feel secure -
and ready to forge a genuine peace with their neighbours.

What Israelis, and indeed Jews around the world, need to hear is that
Palestinians, and their supporters, recognise that Jews have a right
to self-determination like every other people: the Scots, the
Catalans, even the Palestinians themselves. Of course the tragic
difference is that the territory designated by Jews as the stage for
their self-determination already had another people living there. In
an ideal world, the Jews would have gone somewhere else. But where?
There was no land without a people for the people without a
land.

Besides, much as the anti-Zionist absolutists refuse to see it, the
Jews do have a millennia-old connection to that terrain. No matter
what Hanan Ashrawi may say, Jews did not fabricate Joseph's
Tomb. Nor is Haram al-Sharif important only to Muslims: it is also the
site of the Jews' Second Temple. It would be easier if the claim was
all on one side, as the Palestinian hardliners and Zionist right
insist it is. But the truth is not so absolute.

So maybe there's hope to be had in this current return to first
principles. Maybe, through this argument, those outside the region
will see that this is not a Wild West battle of cowboys and Indians,
Zionist villains against Palestinian heroes, but a tragedy - pitting
against each other two needy peoples, whose causes are both just. When
both sides see each other that way, then maybe they will decide to
share the land, not only because they have to - but because it is
right.