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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Since Camp David failed, most Israelis have accepted the slogan "We have no one to talk to." A bold peace initiative has changed that -- and given rise to that rarest of commodities, hope.
Oct 24, 2003 | Yossi Beilin has been the most daring and influential political entrepreneur in Israel for more than a decade. The soft-spoken, bespectacled political scientist has managed to set the national agenda time and again, typically setting off with little or no support from his political peers and national leaders, and then steering them in his direction. In a governing culture built on hesitation and the avoidance of tough choices, Beilin has played the role of the daring scout, charting unpaved roads toward peace and reconciliation with Israel's Arab neighbors.
Beilin's modus operandi works like this: He builds a "model" for a solution and then presents it to the decision makers at critical moments, when their policies are going nowhere and need a shakeup. Lacking a credible alternative, they have little choice but to follow Beilin's lead. That is how Beilin laid the basis for the Oslo process with Yasser Arafat's PLO in the early 1990s. Later, he conceived the formula for a final-status deal with the Palestinians, which was eventually discussed at Camp David in 2000. He also created the momentum for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon.
The failure of Camp David and the following negotiations at Taba have plunged the Israelis and Palestinians into the terrible violence that has raged without interruption for the past three years, causing thousands of deaths and injuries. Domestically, the breakdown of negotiations led to the rise of the right wing, bringing Ariel Sharon back from the political wilderness to the national helm. When Ehud Barak, Labor's last prime minister, declared, "We have no partner" on the Palestinian side, the majority of Israelis agreed with him and the political left was devastated. Beilin himself was kicked out of active political life and later abandoned the Labor Party, having lost his bid for a parliamentary seat.
But Beilin never gave up. Along with his small group of peace-seeking devotees, he went on trying to reach a model agreement with a similar group of interested Palestinian politicians. A couple of weeks ago, he scored his latest coup and once again succeeded in turning the national agenda upside down. The "Geneva accord" is a peace agreement reached by a team of left-leaning Israelis -- including several prominent Labor politicians as well as two of Israel's most acclaimed writers, Amos Oz and David Grossman -- and moderate Palestinians, including veteran Camp David negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo. Lacking any official status, it's a mere theoretical exercise. Despite this, its authors have managed to take the political initiative and put Ariel Sharon's government on the defensive with the public. Beilin's goal was to prove to the skeptical Israelis, devastated by the endless bloodshed, that there is a "who" to talk with" and a "what" to talk about on the other side: to disprove the government's line that as long as Arafat lives and holds power, any diplomatic opening is useless and dangerous.
The Geneva accord (the name honors its Swiss sponsors) takes up where the Taba talks ended inconclusively in January 2001. Consequently, it aims to resolve the three most contentious issues of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, the pillars of the conflict -- namely, borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. It seeks to break the deadlock by moving directly to the final status, without complicated interim steps. Its conflict-resolution formula demands an Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank and all of Gaza to the pre-1967 lines, to create a demilitarized Palestinian state; land swaps to fully compensate the new state for those West Bank settlements not dismantled (about half), which will be annexed to Israel proper; a division of Jerusalem, including its holy sites, along ethnic and religious lines; and a "recipe" of choices for refugees, assuming that most will remain in their "hosting" Arab countries or will settle in the new Palestinian state.
For both Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, the refugee issue is the hottest potato. The Palestinian claim that the 1948 refugees and their descendants have "the right of return" to their homes in what is now Israel is viewed by most Israelis as tantamount to the destruction of the Jewish state. For their part, Palestinians regard the right of return as symbolically sacrosanct -- but have also sent out signals at various times that they understand Israeli fears and would be willing to adopt a realistic position. Beilin, who negotiated the refugee clauses at Taba, has since tried in vain to convince his fellow Israelis that this is a bogus issue, used as a scarecrow by right-wingers who oppose any compromise anyway. Nevertheless, the Geneva architects assert that their Palestinian interlocutors have in fact (though not formally) waived the right of return and agreed to a deal in which Israel would eventually accept only a small number of refugees, up to 40,000. Such a number would not cause Jews to become a minority in Israel.
The Geneva plan is not perfect. Like previous Beilin endeavors, it may be overoptimistic in its ambitious effort to bridge generations-old problems with mere words. Some of its solutions appear impractical: for instance, its approach to the divided, but intertwined, Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. Compared with the Camp David, Taba and Clinton formulas, it walks an extra mile toward the Palestinian demands on borders, Jerusalem and security issues, while giving more to the Israelis on the right of return. All in all, however, it is an intriguing effort to break the stalemate and find a way out of the current morass of mutual violence.
The first person to acknowledge the political importance of the plan was none other than Sharon himself, who attacked its authors even before the plan became public knowledge. On Oct. 8, speaking at a political rally ahead of Israel's municipal elections, Sharon launched a fierce attack on the left. He accused it of subversion, of assisting the Palestinians and aiming to topple Israel's elected government during its war against terrorism. These were indeed harsh charges, especially coming from Sharon, who has tried to portray himself as a fatherly, almost nonpartisan figure. Thus, unwittingly, he turned himself into Beilin's best P.R. agent.
Sharon's attack reflected the fact that the political winds had begun to blow against him. Since taking office in March 2001, Sharon enjoyed virtual freedom from opposition. His failure during the 1982 Lebanon war, which he engineered, taught him a lesson in the importance of public consensus. His first Cabinet included the Labor Party, but after winning reelection early this year, Sharon formed a right-wing coalition. Even then, the opposition was slow to emerge. First came the war in Iraq, and then the American attempt to revive the peace process through the "road map." Sharon accepted the road map (albeit with reservations), and welcomed the new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas ("Abu Mazen"), depicting him -- wrongly, as it turned out -- as the successor to Arafat. But violence erupted again after a seven-week ceasefire, Abbas resigned, and the road map all but collapsed. Sharon was left with no political alternative besides using more force and threatening to expel or kill Arafat, whom he called "the main obstacle to reconciliation."
The resumed stalemate prompted the resurrection of the Israeli left from the ashes, where it had resided since the Camp David debacle. The turning point was a "refusal letter" signed by 27 reservist pilots in the Israeli Air Force, who pledged not to participate in combat missions in Palestinian areas, saying they were immoral. "We, who were taught to love Israel and contribute to the Zionist enterprise, refuse to take part in attacks on civilian population centers," the pilots wrote. Their credibility was somewhat problematic -- most have long been retired from active flying -- but given the reverence for airmen in Israeli society, their protest made a considerable impact, especially compared with the failed efforts of former, ground-based "refuseniks" to catch the public attention. The military responded by kicking the "refusenik pilots" out of the cockpits but failed to silence them. Led by former Gen. Yiftah Spector, who participated in the 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor, they became the bon ton speakers of the newly emerged opposition.
But protest alone cannot serve as a political agenda. Geneva gave the left an even more important commodity, namely a platform, which it desperately needed during the last three bloody years. Beilin managed to recruit some of his former Labor colleagues to the initiative, in order to give it more respectability. These latecomers included Amram Mitzna, the former party chairman who lost the election, and Avraham Burg, the previous Knesset chairman. Both belong to the moderate Labor camp. But other party seniors, like Barak, attacked the initiative, or simply turned away.
