Tribal Warfare

These terms represented the application of utilitarian principle to
demographic facts; indeed, they are essentially what Beilin and a high PLO
official agreed to in October 1995, days before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin was assassinated. But in the current atmosphere of terror, the practical
details of such a compromise seem almost to mock Israel’s condition. Arafat has
never publicly accepted these terms, and his refusal to hunt down and jail Hamas
radicals seems implicitly to condone terrorism. What, in the absence of a
Palestinian peace partner, is Israel to do? Is its policy reduced to exacting
vengeance?

The question cannot be divorced from how Israel conceives of itself, its
purpose, and its relation to its neighbors. Consider Rehavam Ze’evi, the tourism
minister, a leather-faced former Israeli general who has notoriously proposed
mass transfers of Palestinians from “Judea and Samaria” to Jordan. His political
party, Moledet, is marginal, but he’s the voice of Israeli defiance when terror
strikes. “Sharon knows the Arabs–they care most about their homes,” Ze’evi told
a TV interviewer. “One more shot from Ramallah and we’ll take down the first row
of houses.” Israelis, Ze’evi insists, should not be friarim (“chumps”). The
Intifada–the ongoing uprising against Israeli occupation of the territories–has
become the most meaningful experience in the lives of destitute Palestinian
youths; of 319 Palestinians killed by December 19 of last year, 121 were 18 years
old or younger. In the absence of a signed agreement, the demand for the “right
of return” could still mean three million Palestinians (refugees of the 1948 war,
plus their children and grandchildren) exercising the right to inundate Israel
with Arabs, a demand that gives pause even to peace advocates like Amos Oz. Would
this not mean an end to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority?

Barak and others have advocated complete “separation” from the Palestinians,
though how this would be possible around Jerusalem without the forced transfer of
populations Ze’evi envisions, no one could say: The Wailing Wall abuts the Arab
Quarter; the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus is on an exposed salient
between two Arab towns. According to Jane’s Foreign Report, Sharon has
authorized the Israeli military to draw up a contingency plan for a month-long
offensive to disarm the Palestinian Authority and expel (or kill) Arafat’s circle
of leaders–and is waiting for a terrorist bomb to supply the pretext. He argued
through the 1980s that the Palestinians should topple the monarchy in neighboring
Jordan and set up a Palestinian state there. His government, which includes
Shimon Peres, would not dare pursue such a plan today. But if Sharon commands the
Israeli Defense Force to start “taking down” rows of Arab houses in Ramallah,
refugees will stream across the Jordan and the fat will be dangerously close to
the fire.

But there are other voices, too. On the day of Sharon’s election in February,
the novelist David Grossman wrote a column imagining what Israelis would say 50
years from now about a leadership that had believed it could impose by force what
it could not expect to win by negotiation. What he was really doing, of course,
was thinking back 30 years and envisioning how much better off Israel would be
today if, in 1967, it had occupied the West Bank without settling it, held Arab
Jerusalem and its mosques without annexing them, invited international investment
and international forces into the West Bank and Gaza instead of turning these
places into sites on an ancient map, and even conditionally recognized the PLO
after the Rabat summit in 1974. Grossman was asking whether Israel, in laying the
groundwork for the next generation, would conduct the occupation with
liberal-democratic values or would revert to the previous state of affairs
personified by Sharon. Democracy is not just majority rule, after all: It
requires a commitment to the more or less permanent negotiation that aims to
derive sovereignty from “the consent of the governed” (as former U.S. Secretary
of State Cyrus Vance observed). A democratic Israel would promote peace, a
framework for tolerance, not as a reward for Palestinian cooperation but as an
acknowledgment of the inevitability of conflict, which must always be managed and
subdued. What is a democracy if not a peace process without an end?

The Five Tribes

These voices underline that Israel, in spite of the terror,
remains a site of contesting political cultures, habits of mind, and circles of
loyalty in which different groups of citizens have experienced the peace process
in quite different ways. Indeed, the people of Israel can be divided into five
distinct “tribes” or demographic groups, each made up of about a million people,
or 20 percent of the Israeli population. While each group has its
contrarians–and while high rates of intermarriage among the tribes make bright
lines difficult to draw–these blocs of Israelis nevertheless have distinct
political profiles. And they have been talking past one another for at least a
decade.

Tribe 1: The Pretty Souls This tribe consists of the more highly
educated descendants of the old European Labor-Zionist establishment now living
in northern Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem’s Baka’a. These yefei nefesh, or
“pretty souls,” held firm for the peace process. Seventy-five percent of the
affluent northern suburb of Kfar Shmaryahu, for example, voted for Ehud Barak.
Contrast this with the 88 percent who voted for Sharon in Beit Shemesh, whose
residents are mainly descendants of the less well educated, more Orthodox,
working-class and petit bourgeois mizrahim–Eastern Jews who arrived from North
African Arab states during the 1950s and 1960s. The yefei nefesh see the state as
a facilitator of their cultural life rather than as its embodiment. In this way,
they are far closer to professional circles in the United States and Europe than
to the Jewish settlers of the West Bank or residents of Jerusalem’s pietistic
quarters. Their children expect to be citizens of the world. They travel
extensively–after serving in the army, during their university years, and
throughout their careers. Today there are 200,000 highly skilled Israelis
employed in Israel’s 50 largest high-tech businesses. These firms contribute more
than a quarter of Israel’s total gross domestic product (GDP). This far outstrips
the settlers in numbers and economic power. Over the past decade, Israelis have
launched thousands of knowledge-based companies, which (until the recent
downturn) have been thriving in Har Hahotzvim in Jerusalem, Herzliah, and the
southern part of Haifa. Israeli entrepreneurs see tourism–which presupposes
Palestinian cooperation–to be a necessary 15 percent of Israel’s GDP and the
sector most likely to provide good jobs for working mizrahim laid off from their
jobs in Israel’s rust belt.

Many Israelis who join the high-tech economy find themselves living in
Amsterdam, Boston, or Santa Clara, whether they work for an Israeli company like
Check Point or a global one like Intel. The real question is not whether the most
talented young Israelis will leave; it is whether they will come back to raise
their children and in the process become custodians of Israel’s democratic
culture. As the dean of a new business school told me, “The 20 percent of Israel
that would be isolated by the collapse of the peace process cannot be expected to
continue to provide the intellectual capital that translates into 80 percent of
the country’s wealth.” The Israeli army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General
Shaul Mofaz, recently warned that the brain drain from the research arms of the
army and the defense ministry was Israel’s greatest strategic vulnerability.
Unlike the old Zionists who preached self-sufficiency, such people expect to be
an integral part of a global culture.

Tribe 2: The Second Israel The mizrahim, or “the second
Israel,” arrived in the country from hostile North African countries a generation
after Israel was founded. These new immigrants discovered a strangely socialist
society that was widely committed to the Zionist labor union Histadrut’s owning
the means of production, to sexual freedom, and to a Labor-Zionist aristocracy,
which tried to steer the mizrahim into agricultural collectives. In reaction,
the mizrahim embraced the populist Likud Party in the 1970s. In the 1990s, as
integration and intermarriage accelerated, many migrated to the Shas Party, a
hybrid movement of increasingly xenophobic Orthodoxy and proletarian resentment.

Tribe 2 does not oppose peace–only the social changes that would make
it possible. Its members live on the edge of poverty, and their political tempers
are easily triggered. They see themselves as having been no less dispossessed by
the conflict than do the Palestinians. They envision an Israel as Jewish as the
Arab states are Muslim–and as paternalistic. For as they once regarded
themselves the chief victims of Labor-Zionist control over the economy, they now
regard themselves as the chief victims of a post-Oslo global economy that favors
the high-tech world of Labor-Zionism’s children. They fear competition for jobs
and housing from Israel’s Arabs and want an Israel that resembles their large,
warm families–observant, loyal, and gritty.

Tribe 3: The Orthodox Members of tribe 3, whose birth rates
are twice the national average, fall along a spectrum ranging from Jerusalem’s
ultra-Orthodox haredim (“the awestruck”) to followers of the messianic
Zionism advocated by the ethnically European Mafdal–the National Religious
Party–whose spiritual center is Bar Ilan University (where Yigal Amir, Rabin’s
assassin, was educated) and whose heroes are the West Bank settlers of Gush
Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”).

Both the haredim and the Mafdal have become champions–and
wards–of the state. If a young man declares himself committed to a life of Torah
study, he may be exempted from military service while his wife and children live
on the dole. There are about 150,000 haredi men pursuing rabbinical studies
in yeshivas. The state also supports Shas-sponsored schools attended by Israel’s
poorest children; Shas pleases their parents with rigid training in Orthodox
observances, a hot lunch, and a longer school day. At the same time, defense and
infrastructure investments subsidize as many as 100,000 people in the
settlements. The haredim do not serve in the army (though the Gush Emunim
serve with a vengeance).

On the whole, the institutional Orthodox see the state apparatus as a crucial
force in protecting the Sabbath and other Jewish ritual law–and also the
thousands of state jobs that go along with Rabbinic vigilance over marriage,
burial, and kashruth. They want a Jewish state; equality for Israeli Arabs is
anathema. Their leaders speak of liberal Jews as purveyors of an indecent
materialism. They see the Jewish state as a chance to escape the theological
challenges and physical threats of goyim. Though they joined Barak’s government
because it was victorious, they abandoned him, faction by faction, as soon as
peace negotiations involved rethinking sovereignty in Jerusalem.

It is important to understand that the roughly 40 percent of
Israel’s electorate who have persistently opposed territorial compromise are
skeptical not only of Palestinian claims but of the cosmopolitan makeover any
peace process would bring and the secular democratic coalition that it has
engendered. Though Ehud Barak–a military man–got a marginally higher vote than
previous peace candidates from tribes 2 and 3 in 1999, the peace camp has always
assumed that these tribes are hard-liners. Indeed, after Barak failed at Camp
David, losing the Shas Party’s support in the process, he tried to rally peace
forces with the promise of a “secular revolution” that would have banned the
ministry of religion and mandated that all citizens, including yeshiva students
and Arabs, serve in the army. These reforms were an attempt to fuse all the
forces in the country who grasped, however dimly, that secular democracy and
peace were two sides of the same coin and that Israel would emerge from the
peace talks a different country from the one that entered them.

Tribe 4: Israeli Palestinians Israel’s Arab citizens were
intent on making a strong statement in the last election–and they did. In 1999,
75 percent voted, 95 percent of them for Barak; only 13 percent voted in
2001–and of those, 20 percent cast a blank ballot. It is cold comfort for the
Labor Party that most of the small remainder voted for Barak. In Nazareth and Um
el-Fahm, where 13 protesters were shot dead by Israeli police at the start of the
new Intifada, the rate of voting was only 10 percent and 3 percent respectively.

The Palestinian Authority, in a last-ditch effort to get the peace
process back on track, encouraged Israeli Arabs to vote for Barak, but the Arab
members of Knesset who led the vote boycott told Palestinian Authority leaders to
mind their own business. Aved Mar’am, an Arab Knesset member, said it was “the
Israeli Arabs’ declaration of electoral independence.” Israeli Arabs have come to
understand that they are not just 20 percent of the population but 40 percent of
any conceivably triumphant peace coalition. Their electoral revolt was
predictable, not least because the Barak government handled the tragic deaths
with callousness.

Actually, the surprise is not the show of resistance but that it took so long.
Per capita income of Israeli Arabs is roughly half that of Jews. Arabs are
underrepresented in the civil service and in professional life and are still not
permitted any effective program of national service that would enable them
security clearances. Barak refused even to meet with Arab members of Knesset to
discuss their possible participation in his coalition.

The growing political consciousness of Israeli Arabs portends the kind of
political revolution that tribes 2 and 3 fear the most. If, as seems likely, the
peace wing of the Labor Party (led by Beilin) joins informally with the left-wing
Meretz Party to form a democratic peace coalition in the Knesset, the Arab
parties will almost certainly cooperate with them. And this cooperation might
well prepare the ground for social reform, including the retirement of
anachronistic Israeli laws left over from the Zionist colonial period: the Law of
Return (which bestows citizenship on all legally defined “Jews”); regulations
regarding ownership of land that make it very hard to sell property to non-Jews;
a prohibition of civil marriage, which makes intermarriage difficult; and others.

Tribe 5: The Russians Russian immigrants are the wild card
of Israeli politics. Some 825,000 can now vote, and 70 percent did so in 2001 (90
percent cast ballots in 1999). Though 58 percent went for Barak in 1999, 63
percent went for Sharon this year. Its hybrid background makes the Russian voting
bloc volatile. For one thing, Russians have come to Israel with higher levels of
education than any other wave of immigrants. According to one estimate, a third
of the software engineers and materials scientists who power Israeli start-ups
are Russians; these professionals have raised standards in Israeli music,
science, and the arts. For another, most Russians came to Israel not for Zionist
reasons but to enjoy a style of life that they associate with the West.
Ha’aretz‘s Lili Galili, who has covered the Russians extensively, says that a
very small number practice Judaism and perhaps only half were (or considered
themselves) Jews before they came. They dislike the Orthodox, whom they regard as
a threat to the sophisticated and pluralist atmosphere of Tel Aviv, where the
Russians are concentrated.

One would think that all this would make Russians staunch allies of the
peace coalition, but that’s not the case. Though most of them are cultural
liberals, these veterans of the Soviet regime have generally retained both the
refuseniks’ suspicion of immanent world anti-Semitism and a Russian taste for the
strongman. Barak was their ideal at first: Stanford-educated, sensitive to
Israeli honor. His alleged capitulation to Palestinian demands over Jerusalem–at
which point Russian leaders Natan Sharansky and Avigdor Leiberman left his
government–and his decision to call off the secular revolution that the Russians
supported left him looking like a paper tiger. “They are for the most part
immigrants without a Jewish or deeply Zionist identity,” writes Galili, “so
national symbols, such as Jerusalem, have become an important component of their
identity.” But the émigrés from Russia are still getting used to
their new country–the opportunities as well as the frustrations of freedom–and
they may well change the political landscape again, especially when the economic
impact of curtailing the peace process is fully felt.

Global support for Hebrew Democracy

There is a pattern here. In a time of relative stability,
tribe 1, the professional and economic elite, leads tribes 4 and 5, the Arabs and
the Russians–and eventually also leads tribe 2, the mizrahim, while
marginalizing 3, the Orthodox. This is the Israel Rabin was shaping until his
murder. In a time of growing tension, however, tribes 2 and 3 will lead 5,
alienate 4, and put 1 into a kind of internal exile–while presenting tribe 1’s
children with a choice between serving in the army to fight a war they believe
could have been prevented or opting for exile in the global knowledge-economy.
For the peace coalition to regain power and implement the deal, Israelis and
Palestinians have to regain the stability that marked Oslo’s early days. Can
they?

Sharon says he will accept a demilitarized Palestine on 43 percent of
the West Bank and sign a nonbelligerency agreement with its leaders–if the
violence stops. His unity coalition promises to prohibit new settlements, limit
existing ones to “natural” rates of growth, and negotiate partial agreements that
defer decisions on refugees and Jerusalem. Saeb Erakat, one of the Palestinian
Authority’s most conciliatory negotiators, said that if these were the terms, he
would meet his interlocutor “in the next life.” So if Israel expects a cessation
of violence, it will have to freeze all settlement activity–because to the
Palestinians, settlements amount to aggression. Besides, why should Arafat’s
fragile Palestinian Authority risk a confrontation with radical Hamas activists
if Israel’s fragile coalition will not risk a confrontation with the settlers?

In retrospect, what was missing from Oslo all along was a stronger
international presence to help contain outbreaks of violence and manage their
aftermath in the context of continuing negotiations. If a cease-fire can be
restored, Israel and the Palestinians need to achieve some kind of “separation of
forces” like the agreement with Egypt that ended the post-1973 exchanges of fire.
Each side desperately needs a strong third party to trust without having to trust
each other. Sharon says he wants an “interim” arrangement. Secretary Powell could
make the presence of international forces–billeted in a recognized, if
temporarily small, Palestinian state–a condition of implementing the
confidence-building measures outlined in the report of the Mitchell
“fact-finding” commission, which was set up after October’s Sharm el-Sheikh
conference to ascertain the roots of the recent violence. As a quid pro quo to
Israel, he could offer, say, to set up an American naval base in Haifa.

This is not to underestimate the diplomatic and logistical
difficulties of deploying NATO forces, especially in and around Jerusalem, or the
challenges to Israeli sovereignty such intervention might pose. Powell is famous
for disliking American troops in a policing role and has endorsed only “outside
observers” in the region. Israeli officials have a deeply ambiguous attitude
toward the “blue helmets”: They have bitter memories of UN forces evacuating the
Sinai at Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s insistence in 1967–the umbrella that
folded just when the rain began to fall, in Israeli diplomat Abba Eban’s view.
More recently, UN forces denied Israelis an unedited video they possessed of
Hezbollah fighters kidnapping Israeli soldiers. One young officer told me he
fears that UN forces, especially if they were European, would seriously undermine
the Israeli Defense Force’s freedom of action in the occupied territories and
become a kind of shield behind which terrorists might operate, as in Lebanon.
What’s more, in the absence of a final-status agreement, would international
forces have a clear mandate?

But on balance, these objections are unimpressive. NATO forces are
going into Macedonia under equally chaotic conditions. And without international
forces mediating cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the
two sides will always be hostages to terrorism. As for the young officer’s wish
to preserve Israel’s freedom of action, well, the Israeli military has had
freedom of action in the occupied territories since 1967. Besides, effective
sovereignty does not mean military control, even if this were possible. What will
happen to the stewardship of important utilities, public works, and
transportation infrastructure without the cooperation of Palestine, other
neighbors, and international partners? The water shortage has become a virtual
emergency. If a Palestinian state is formed, neither side will be able to pump
from the West Bank water table without affecting the other. Israel and a
Palestinian state will have to work together on transportation links between the
West Bank and Gaza, as well as on other matters of common jurisdiction, labor
law, monetary policy (the Israeli shekel is still the major Palestinian
currency), telecommunications policy, and more.

In this context, the fear of the Palestinians’ “right of return” seems to be a
failure of imagination. After all, the political and demographic forces unleashed
by any negotiated settlement underwritten by the global powers will lead to
pretty much the same result. Let’s say 250,000 Palestinians are repatriated to
Israel proper. What problems does a 25 percent Arab minority pose to Israel that
a 20 percent minority does not? There would in any case be a dramatic expansion
of Palestinian population in the triangle between Jerusalem, Ramallah, and
Nablus–an increase of up to a million people that would eventually create a city
the size of Amman. Israelis and Palestinians will consequently struggle with
problems much like those of Singapore and Malaysia, or San Diego and northern
Mexico. The Tel Aviv-Haifa corridor, and the roads to it, will swell with
Palestinians working in industries like construction, light manufacturing, and
tourism. At the same time, the promise of greater Israel will give way to that of
greater Tel Aviv, a city that will remain materially and culturally hegemonic.
The language of work for tens of thousands of Palestinians already is Hebrew. Tel
Aviv will expand along the road and rail link that joins Herzliah, Netanya, and
southern Haifa; it will become an international Hebrew-English megalopolis
anchoring the technological development of the region up to Turkey.

True, this is not exactly the Israel envisioned by classical Zionist
theorists. But if the fundamental purpose of their Zionist revolution was, as the
movement’s first great mentor Achad Ha’am argued, to have a place in the world
where Jews could express the “Jewish spirit,” compete in the world without
self-effacement, and ask scientific and literary questions in Hebrew (free from
the hold of Orthodoxy), then the prospect could be worse. Achad Ha’am had hoped
that a Jewish national home would be heir to what he took to be Rabbinic
Judaism’s real achievement: a sense of divine intention that was endlessly
debatable–an anticipation of the fractious, liberal values that he loved and
believed had “overturned Judaism from within.” If that hope is still worth
cherishing, it will be realized, ironically, not by Israelis who consider their
country a not-quite-finished Zionist revolution but by citizens of an
internationally supported Hebrew democracy.