Death as a Way of Life Read online

  There are so many things to say, but I feel that in another moment I might fall into the insult trap that I mentioned before, so I must be careful. Fifty years is too short a period for the wound to heal. It’s too early to sum up, and there’s no urgent need to speak about reconciliation. After all, there is no feud between Israelis and Germans today. On the contrary, there are widespread ties in almost every area, a growing closeness and mutual curiosity. But at the tragic points of contact, the wound is still gaping. No person has the moral authority to cover it with a false bandage of ceremonies and declarations. No person has a right to decide on the date on which the scab begins to form, when the responsibility reaches its expiration date. We still have a long way to go.

  Yes, Prime Minister

  April 1995

  After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians moved on two separate tracks, one toward interim Palestinian self-government and another toward a permanent settlement. The interim track culminated with the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II, which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat signed on September 28, 1995. This agreement divided the West Bank and Gaza into three zones, each with distinctive borders and rules for administrative and security controls. Area A, including nearly all of the Gaza strip and six West Bank cities, was to be under exclusive Palestinian control; Area B was to include 450 Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, where the Palestinians would have civilian control and Israel would retain responsibility for security; Area C was to include mostly unpopulated areas of the West Bank and would be controlled exclusively by Israel.

  During a meeting last week with Palestinian intellectuals, an Israeli asked, “You, our Palestinian colleagues, know just as well as we do that the current difficult spot in the peace process is only a passing moment, and that in the end, after extended negotiations, you will receive what you want—a sovereign Palestinian state and separation of the two nations from each other. Why, then, don’t we hear more of your voices within your society? Why don’t you say this to your compatriots? It’s precisely you who are supposed to be the farsighted vanguard, which can point out the advantages and hopes that the process offers. Why are you, of all people, silent?”

  “Because we ourselves no longer believe very much in the process, as we once did” was the reply. “Because we look around us each day and see that large-scale land expropriations still continue, that roads are being paved around each city and village, that the settlements are being enlarged through massive construction projects. We are beginning to feel that, once again, just as in every contact we’ve had with the Israelis, you will defeat us, that you will mislead us; only this time it will happen in such a devious and oppressive way that we will have no chance at all of recovering from it.”

  This dialogue will not reveal anything new to people who are in contact with the Palestinians. But it may well be that most of the Israeli public, especially that part of it which supports the peace process, is not sufficiently aware of these sentiments. This response from our Palestinian colleagues, all of whom support peace with Israel and have paid a heavy personal price as a result, requires the members of the Israeli peace camp to make an honest assessment of the (horrific) possibility that we are deluding ourselves.

  It is astonishing that this question is not being asked in the moderate, liberal left, how it is repressed and avoided. For decades the left has been exerting a huge effort—acting, thinking, framing ideas, organizing on a large scale. It has succeeded in creating a public atmosphere that, at a fortuitous moment—thanks to the Palestinian uprising—seeped into the reluctant minds of our politicians and propelled them into negotiations.

  But ever since the Oslo agreement, this same left has been afflicted with almost complete paralysis. The usual excuse is, of course, that now the government is carrying out what the left predicted and desired and fought for. But is this statement still valid? Is the plan, as it looks today, really what the left had in mind? Have the negotiations with the Palestinians really been conducted in a way that we think will bring about normal neighborly relations, or are they turning (perhaps intentionally?) into one more stage of humiliation for the Palestinians, into an imposition of surrender on them? Is the peace process in fact ensuring that war will continue?

  How can it be that in recent months almost no clear voices have been raised on the left asking these questions? Can it be that we on the left are censoring ourselves, preventing this question from even being asked (with all good intention, so that we do not interfere with the process)? Perhaps, in our silence, we are collaborating with a historic debacle whose bitter fruits Israel will have to digest for generations. How can it be that the Peace Now movement isn’t sending out thousands of volunteers to intersections each day to make this other voice heard? Why isn’t it organizing mass demonstrations, precisely now, to exert pressure in the direction where it has always tried to lead? What has happened to the movement? What has happened to the government ministers from the pro-peace Meretz Party?

  After all, huge pressure is being exerted on Yitzhak Rabin from the other direction, and its results can be seen in the street, in the public opinion surveys, and soon at the polls (its effect on Mr Rabin’s political and personal behavior is especially notable). Yet on the left—silence. True, the far-left Gush Shalom movement is asking such questions, but they are getting no response and no attention from the more moderate, and larger, part of the left. “How suddenly feeble you are, how have you ceased to give aid,” the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik chided the Zionist leadership in his 1931 poem “You Have Seen the Shortness of Your Reach.” Those lines are now addressed to us: as if we, the people of the word, of the book, of thought, become ineffectual when ideas turn to reality. As if we thought that from here on out, peace is the job of the doers rather than the thinkers. A kind of supernatural sense of security has overtaken us since Oslo, a dubious certainty that may well be based on nothing more than a naïve wishful hope that we have placed our pledge in the hands of a trustworthy emissary who will bring it to its destination, and that from that point forward, peace will prevail.

  It is today, of all times, that a voice must come from the left, a voice with great force to pressure the government. The left has a unique talent for blazing a trail out of entrapment and immobility, away from petty squabbles with the Palestinians. There is no good reason to leave the field to the politicians. Especially not at this time. If we abandon it to them now, we will truly be worthy of the dismissive term “bleeding hearts.”

  The bitter truth is that most of those who are today “leading” the process were not willing to enter into it until it was more or less forced upon them. Most of them did not read the map properly, did not discern the subterranean flow, the pressure building up with explosive force. After all, it was the long hesitation of the politicians of the right and the left, their denseness, their mental paralysis, their pandering to their voting public, that got us stuck in the disheartening situation we find ourselves in today. Why should we believe that all of a sudden, and in a much more delicate and complex situation, they would be able to reinvent themselves as more flexible and farsighted leaders? To what extent are they really able to change? Imagine a child who plays constantly with a puzzle made from a picture of a wolf. Suddenly the child is told to build, out of the same pieces, a picture of a dove. That, more or less, is the present dilemma of Prime Minister Rabin.

  The question we need to ask is: When Rabin speaks (sincerely!) about wanting peace with the Palestinians, is he speaking of the most desirable, true peace for Israel in the long run, the peace for which the left has struggled all these years? The impression is growing stronger that Mr Rabin really means an expanded security arrangement that will fence the Palestinians into autonomous areas of confinement, surrounded and separated one from the other by a dense network of Israeli roads, roadblocks, and settlements.

  The
distance that Prime Minister Rabin has traveled up until now is worthy of admiration. Few leaders in the world or in Israel have the ability to do what he has done. Still, it is difficult to avoid the impression that belief in the use of force and the fighting instinct that are inherent in his character (an instinct that was most vital in other situations and times) are now preventing him from going the full distance. And this road has to be walked to its end. There’s no stopping before the destination is reached. If we don’t walk to the end, we will find ourselves walking back the way we came.

  When it comes down to it, the peace process is, despite reports to the contrary, reversible. Many situations and procedures that were much more solid than this limping peace process were considered “irreversible,” their disappearance “impossible,” until they suddenly came to an end, and from then on the situation arranged itself in a different way around them. If Arafat becomes inactive, naturally or through a violent act; if Rabin continues to hesitate and to contend with Arafat instead of understanding that their fates are intertwined; if the Likud wins the elections; if the peace process is suspended for a few weeks after each major terrorist attack—if only one of these events happens (or any one of a myriad of others), there will be no peace. Not with the Palestinians, or as a result with the Syrians. The entire regional movement toward peace, problematic as it may be, will be frozen. But it won’t be cold here—within a short time Syria will begin to give us hell in Lebanon. The Intifada will renew itself in the strangled, despairing “territories,” this time with violence we have not yet seen.

  In order to change this scenario fundamentally, we need to make a much more daring move. We need to shake off the repudiating, ungenerous, derisory attitude our representatives have taken toward the Palestinians during the negotiations. There’s no question that our position in the negotiations is much more comfortable—we have the “merchandise” and they need it; we are strong and they are weak. Error: it’s not so clear that we are only giving and they are only taking. Neither is it obvious that they need this peace more than we do. If that were really the case, Israel would not have been so quick to enter the process.

  Isn’t it too late? When will we begin to hear voices that are at least as determined and aggressive as those on the right, demanding of Rabin that he not “defeat them” all that much? That we be much more generous, that we rise above our instinct to wrangle with them, that we remain committed to our original intentions? Or might it be that, deep in their hearts, those on the liberal left also want, even just a bit, to defeat the Palestinians and so “prove”—what?—the left’s loyalty? To whom?

  After Rabin’s Assassination

  November 1995

  Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by a Jewish law student who acted alone. Yigal Amir succeeded in penetrating the security around Rabin—who was leaving a large peace rally in Tel Aviv-—and fatally shot the prime minister at close range. The news of the assassination sent shock waves throughout Israel and around the world. The murder was strongly condemned by most parts of Israeli society, despite an already widespread opposition to the Rabin government’s policies. The traumatic event became a significant turning point in Israeli politics and the peace process.

  I

  Three bullets ended Yitzhak Rabin’s life, and all that his life symbolized. It’s as if the image of an entire generation shattered into tiny pieces and the era of the Sabra came to an end.

  In all that he did, Rabin was a product of the forge of the elemental experiences that produced the Sabra, the new native Israeli. The biography of this man, who was so often called a traitor, passed through all the archetypical formative stations of the Israeli character—a prominent agricultural boarding school; training on a kibbutz combined with military service in the Palmach, the elite strike force of the nascent Jewish state; the Palmach’s first commander’s course; the army convoys that supplied besieged Jerusalem during the War of Independence of 1948; the battle for the Negev, Israel’s southern region, in that same war; command of the army in the Six-Day War; and more, throughout Israel’s history. This is the DNA of the Israeli identity.

  But he wasn’t a Sabra only in his peak moments. He was no less a Sabra in his weaknesses and mistakes. An entire generation could look at him as its reflection. They could see what happened to the mythological, idealist, ideal Sabra when his life became entangled in the trivial matters of daily life, in political intrigue, in the temptations of money.

  Even his physical appearance could teach us something that we didn’t know. This youthful Sabra with the handsome face and the uncombed, wavy hair turned into an adult, and then into an old man. Rabin’s very real face allowed us to sense how our ideals and hopes slowly became flesh, became real life, became real time. We walked with him, watching him, as if walking alongside ourselves, each according to his age, and we saw our own image in him.

  Then, just when he was at the lowest point of his political career, he began to soar again. To my mind, in accomplishing this astounding turnaround, Rabin returned to the most profound essence of the Sabra character. He displayed an amazing capacity for renewal, and loyalty to the deepest, most manifest interest of Israel and the Jewish people. Most of all, he displayed exceptional courage. Rabin not only changed his political positions. He showed all of us, even the dubious, that we never have to be the victims of our fears, of our preconceptions, of the education we received, or of the circumstances of our lives.

  Rabin prevailed over all these, and first and foremost over himself. He overcame a certain tough and unnuanced view of the world. He surmounted the exclusively military reflexes that were so vital to him—and to us—in times of war. In a relatively brief process, he almost re-created himself as a statesman, as a military man, as a man. Even if at times he was not striding with the proper determination and speed toward peace, I wonder how many of us could, at a much younger age, and with a less charged and imposing biography, identify at the right moment the opportunity, the birth of a new reality, and act with such resolve in a field of action that was both unfamiliar and not completely comprehensible.

  How many of us could have been so victorious over ourselves, over the fears imprinted within us, within our natures.

  II

  I was driving yesterday through the Jerusalem Forest, and at one of the turns in the road, on the side, hidden behind a small clump of trees, I saw a man get out of his car and quickly peel off a black-and-red bumper sticker inscribed RABIN IS A MURDERER. What will this man say to his children today? How will he explain to them why he put the bumper sticker on his car and why he tore it off today?

  As has happened so many times in history, the gunshots came at the end of a long string of violent words, of provocations and curses, and of incendiary bumper stickers. How did the speakers and cursers and street inciters not understand that at the end of every such chain of events stands a man with a gun, who will add the deadly exclamation point to all those words echoing in his ears?

  Our lives in Israel are lives of ongoing violence. The country was born in war, and it has lived with war and terror and occupation. Violence was also part of the Sabra experience, but the Sabra never seems to have been able to assimilate that part of his identity. Perhaps, had more of them managed to resolve this internal contradiction, to comprehend in a profound way the internal toxification that our massive use of force brings upon us, then we might long ago have been living in a different political and social reality. Perhaps yesterday, at the climax of the magnificent and heartwarming Act III, the pistol concealed within us since Act I might not have gone off.

  Yitzhak Rabin tried to introduce a profound change here, even though he had, for years, participated in that same use of violence and force. To our detriment, the violence seeped into the entire tissue of our social and private lives. The murderer is a metastasis of the violence, the hatred, the loathing, and the cruelty that we have become accustomed over the years to direct, not only against our enemies, b
ut also against ourselves.

  Sometimes it seems that nowhere else in the world are Israelis hated as much as they are here, in our own country, on our own roads, on the beach, in the city streets.

  The action that Yitzhak Rabin led was meant, at its most fundamental level, to bring about the end of the violence between us and our enemies, and also our own healing. We have what I would cautiously call the Israeli disease, a constant and deadly nervous condition of hatred within.

  It is now clearer than it ever was that peace is necessary for us primarily for this purpose. Peace is our only chance to live full lives here. Surely, in a harsh reality, without illusions, and with full and painful awareness of all our faces and all our scars. But to live, finally—not only to survive from disaster to disaster. The assassination on Saturday night warns us, in the most shocking way, that from now on the war for peace is a war for our chance to continue to exist, and to develop normally as a nation, as a society, and as human beings.

  When Fear Overcomes Everything

  March 1996

  Israel experienced a particularly horrendous wave of terrorism during February and March 1996 during Shimon Peres’s brief tenure as prime minister and defense minister after Rabin’s assassination. The killing of children in costumes, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim in Tel Aviv was the cause of much Israeli rage. Hamas claimed the attacks were in retaliation for Israel’s liquidation of their master bomb maker, Yehia Ayache. These were the first of the suicide bombings, which were to become the archetypical terrorist attack of the years to come.