In killing Thabet, the Israelis were apparently retaliating for a terrorist attack in the coastal town of Netanya just hours earlier, though nobody has established a connection between Thabet and the fatal explosion. A profile in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz later revealed that Thabet and his wife had been open advocates of peaceful negotiation with Israel; moreover, she credited their ability to have children to an Israeli friend who had pleaded with her to be treated by a Tel Aviv gynecologist. ("The Israelis gave me my life," Mrs. Thabet said, "and then the Israelis took it 19 years later.") In a state of depression following Thabet's assassination, one of his relatives shot and killed Israeli restaurateurs Motti Dayan and Etgar Zeituni, themselves peace advocates, as they shopped for supplies. At Danny Yehuda's funeral--scarcely a week into the cease-fire declared after 21 Israeli youths were blown up at the Dolphinarium dance club--grief-stricken settlers denounced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for failing to declare war against the Palestinian Authority. "We need another Goldstein," shouted some of the mourners. They were referring to Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Arabs at prayer in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, before he himself was beaten to death.
So Close, and Yet So Far
The Oslo peace process--which dates back to secret negotiations in 1992 between Palestinians and Israelis in Norway, and which many hoped would move forward definitively in talks at Camp David a year ago--promised an era of confidence building, followed by a final agreement that would have resolved the status of Jerusalem and the territories. But what Secretary of State Colin Powell confronted when he arrived in the Middle East to begin a new round of diplomacy on June 26 was a grotesque reversal. Although the terms of what would have constituted a final deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians are clear, the violence that made reaching final terms impossible has now swept away the peace-seeking Labor Party coalition of Prime Minister Ehud Barak--who was unseated by Sharon in the February election--together with any accumulated good faith between Arab and Jew. Indeed, while the framework for a peaceful settlement is conceivable (in fact, such a framework exists), implementing it is not.
What would the deal have been? according to Yossi Beilin, the justice minister in Barak's government who served as a lead negotiator at the January talks in Taba, Egypt, Bill Clinton's "bridging proposals"--which were offered in the waning days of his administration, and went beyond Barak's offers to Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat at Camp David in July 2000--put the parties just a few weeks from an accord. Here are the terms of the deal:
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.