The terrorist attack against America has paradoxically reopened the door a crack towards peace, but the legacy of the second Intifada makes negotiations much more difficult: peace with a capital P remains far off.

In the history of humanity it is difficult to find a conflict comparable in intensity and duration to that which has pitted Arabs and Israelis against each other for more than half a century. The Punic Wars? The Hundred Years’ War? The Napoleonic campaigns? While they caused more death and destruction, none of these events was characterized by such intense hatred between the peoples involved or by such intense involvement of the civilian population on both sides. The periods of open conflict between countries — in 1947-48, 1956, 1967 and 1973 — were relatively brief. But these were never separated by periods of genuine peace, even though the conflict, which originally was between the Jewish state and a block of Arab states that wanted to liquidate the “Zionist entity,” gradually turned into a merciless struggle between Israelis and Palestinians for possession of a land that both believe they are entitled to claim: the former because it is at once their land of origin, their chosen homeland and their refuge against persecution, the latter because they have lived there for 1200 years and believe they have unjustly paid the bill for reparations that the West owed to the Jews for the Holocaust. The only period when a majority of the population, at least on the Israeli side, believed in the possibility of a peaceful solution was after the Oslo accords in 1993, which won Rabin, Peres and Arafat a premature — to say the least — Nobel Peace Prize. On the Israeli side, the accords produced acceptance of the principle of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and a green light for the return of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to the territories; on the Arab side, a formal renunciation of the destruction of the Jewish state, which up until then had been called for by the PLO’s charter, and a peace treaty with Jordan. Then it seemed that the “miracle” of coexistence of the two enemy nations was within reach, and that it was possible to envision full political and economic inclusion of Israeli democracy in a Middle East context still consisting of authoritarian states. But soon we realized that the understanding, signed with the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House steps, contained too many mental reservations, left open too many vital issues to definitively halt the spiral of violence: the fate of the Jewish settlements in the territories under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinians who fled Israel when the Jewish state was formed and of their descendents. As these thorny issues gradually came to the fore, and as delays occurred in the schedule agreed upon in Oslo, tension grew once again until the new Intifada broke out in September 2000. To the outside world, the struggle between a country equipped with one of the most war-hardened armies in the world and a Palestinian Authority that has a few thousand policemen may appear unequal, leading some parts of public opinion to side with the weaker of the two (forgetting that the Israelis belong to our civilization and that we have an ideal bond with them that can not exist with the Palestinians). Here, however, we are not dealing with a conventional war in which the superiority of weapons is decisive, with the side that wipes out the enemy army or occupies the other’s territory being the winner; rather, we have a country — Israel — that is trying to fight with conventional weapons a revolt that uses any means, from rocks to suicide bombers, to force the other side to come to terms. Last year, when Labor Party leader Ehud Barak was in power in Jerusalem, the Palestinians were a heartbeat away from getting what they wanted, but they committed a tragic mistake: they refused a solution that satisfied 95% of their territorial demands, including a form of control over East Jerusalem, but that did not include the right to return for the 1948 refugees and their descendents, which would have undermined the foundations of the Jewish state and was thus unacceptable for any government. Arafat’s “no” to the compromise sponsored by the United States meant not just the failure of negotiations that had by then come within one step of their conclusion but also the success at the polls of the “hawk” Ariel Sharon, and the consequent, unavoidable return to the starting point for the negotiations. Since then, the conflict, flaring up again especially after a push from the Palestinian extremist movements that had never accepted Oslo, has only intensified, with many civilian victims on both sides. The new Israeli government, which came to power on the basis of a promise to guarantee greater security for the population, has intensified its repressive actions, not hesitating to resort to armed incursions into the territory controlled by the Authority and to physically eliminate the heads of Palestinian terrorist organizations. These organizations have responded by multiplying their indiscriminate attacks against the Israeli population, which Israeli security forces are only rarely able to prevent. Both parties have applied the law of retaliation: Israel has responded to each human bomb with missiles, and the Palestinians have responded to each eliminated leader with more kamikaze operations in an escalation that no one seems capable of halting. But, what is worse, on neither side did there seem to be a plan for the future that is even remotely acceptable for the adversary. With the parties’ positions further apart than ever, even the various diplomatic attempts to start up the negotiating engine again can not have much success. The only thing it was possible to hope for was a truce, a distancing of the tension, a lowering of the level of the conflict that at least would exclude involvement of the Arab countries and allow the parties to resume talking to each other. On September 11, the horrible attack by Islamic fundamentalists on America suddenly overturned the cart. Explicitly or implicitly, many governments noted that the situation in Palestine was undoubtedly one of the factors unleashing Islamic terrorism, and that therefore any initiative aimed at eradicating it had to include a new, more resolute attempt by the international community to promote new peace negotiations. At the same time, the White House’s call to arms for an all-out war on the murderers, to include the Arab countries and even Iran, presupposes a truce period in the territories. “With us or against us” was the meaning of Washington’s appeal right from the start, and Arafat, who in 1991 committed the serious mistake of siding with Saddam Hussein, got the hint. If he wanted to bind up his relationship with the United States, if he didn’t want to be forever included among the bad guys, he had to condemn the attacks, denounce terrorism, and make himself available to fight it. Consider the background of this figure, who built his fortune on terrorism, and his current position as leader of a Palestinian autonomy that for the last year has returned to the way of violence, and it is legitimate to doubt the sincerity of his statements and even his ability to control the extremist organizations which he has given free reign. Both Hamas and Jihad immediately dissociated themselves from his decision to declare the truce demanded by Israel for the resumption of contacts, and they followed up their words with bloody attacks. But Arafat’s move had the two-fold effect of putting him back on track as a credible negotiator with the Americans and of forcing Sharon, who was cultivating the idea of getting rid of him for good, to withdraw Tsahal from the occupied territories, ordering a cease-fire, and giving the go-ahead to resumption of contacts. Paradoxically, therefore, the fundamentalist attack on America, instead of further exacerbating the conflict, has dampened it. But whatever the developments of the war on terrorism worldwide, for peace with a capital P — even assuming that it might be possible — we will have to wait a long time yet. This does not keep us from carefully analyzing the causes of the violence, the states of mind of the two peoples, and even possible solutions. The media tend to attribute the new Intifada to the Palestinian people’s exasperation over delays in the peace process, the harsh economic conditions in which they are forced to live, the vexations caused by the Israeli occupiers, and hence the media assign the greater responsibility to the Jewish state. In Europe, millions of people, under the influence of Arab propaganda and as part of a widespread “ethic of surrender,” have even assigned serious responsibility to Israel for the genesis of Islamic terrorism, without understanding that this terrorism is directed towards all of Western civilization. In reality, Arafat and his men have never done anything — not even when it seemed the negotiations might be successful — to prepare their people for peaceful coexistence with the Israelis. On the contrary, the Palestinian Authority has over the years continued to feed their hatred for the “Zionist enemy.” Palestinian children who, at least initially, were on the front line in the clashes with the Israeli army and paid a high price in blood for their stunts, have learned since the cradle, from shamefully inaccurate school books, that any coexistence with the Jews is impossible. The words “Jew” and “Zionist” are often used (in dictionaries and school books) as insults; on geographic atlases distributed by the Authority, Israel (which even the PLO has recognized) never appears, and in its place there is a large Palestine; there is never a nod to the possibility of reconciliation. It has been proven that the second Intifada did not start spontaneously on September 26, 2000, following Sharon’s famous stroll (he was then head of the opposition) on the esplanade of the mosque, as was stated and written for months, but was carefully planned by Arafat himself and his collaborators as a tool to exert pressure to get past the negotiating impasse. This is proved by the fact that, far from lowering the tension, the Rais proceeded quickly to free the leaders of the terrorist organization Hamas, only recently captured with great difficulty through fruitful cooperation between the Israeli, Palestinian and American secret services, and thus threw gasoline on the fire of the revolt. These adventuristic moves ended up costing him dearly, because they have contributed to undermining his authority, to pushing the extremists to the fore, and consequently to making any attempt on his part to meet Sharon’s conditions to return to the negotiating table much more difficult. In fact, any time it looked like there would be a rapprochement, Hamas, Jihad and the other organizations opposed to any compromise have tried to disrupt everything. The climate in the territories was revealed unequivocally when, after the attack, thousands of Palestinians went into the streets to celebrate the deaths of so many Americans and to sing the praises of Bin Laden. Up until September 11, behind the Palestinian extremists there moved agents of many Islamic countries, from Syria to Iraq, Iran to Sudan, which are interested in moving on to a face-to-face confrontation. Whether this remains so after the attacks, the United States’ commitment to punish not just the terrorists but also those states that harbor them, arm them and supply them, only the coming months will tell. On the Israeli side, the failure of Camp David and the realization that not even concessions that were unthinkable a short time ago were adequate to satisfy the Palestinians have set in motion a process of radicalization that mirrors that of the Palestinians: even many of those who sincerely believed in the peace process today think, if there has to be a war, let there be war. Opposed to a compromise that does not guarantee absolute security are not just the followers of the Likud, who voted heavily for Sharon, but also the Laborites, who have just chosen as their new leader the defense minister of the national unity government, Ben Eliezer, considered the hawk of hawks. The only real remaining difference between right and left has to do with the settlements of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and Gaza, which the former intends to maintain without exception and the second would still be prepared to reduce as part of a hypothetical overall accord. Both suspect that the current Palestinian political class does not want peace at all, because it would exhaust their revolutionary task and would force it to submit for the first time to the will of the electorate. The indiscriminate attacks carried out by Palestinians have naturally revived the population’s fear of entering public places, of getting on buses, of strolling down the street, and consequently have stifled even what little sympathy there was for the adversary’s positions. While there was a certain openness to territorial concessions up until Camp David, today such concessions are viewed as a threat for the future, because every village ceded to the Palestinians risks becoming a forward base for future terrorists. This is why Sharon continues to repeat that “Oslo is dead,” i.e., that the maps drawn up during the peace negotiations will have to be revised in any case. What is to be done, then? Lacking plausible responses, international diplomacy repeats to the disputants that they must start over from the Mitchell report, a careful, substantially impartial analysis of the situation by three foreign scholars, that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have — albeit with significant reservations — accepted. And on this basis, in fact, dialog resumed after the attacks of September 11. But it is one thing to point to what solution are to be adopted on a map and quite another to put them into practice in the current white-hot climate. First of all we need tools, whether the carrot or the stick, to induce the parties to withdraw from their more bellicose positions. At the last G8, a proposal was approved in principle to send into the region a corps of international observers who, while unable to divide the disputants (obviously an impossible task), would function as neutral witnesses or arbiters. Israel, however, aware — as was demonstrated at length at the Durban conference against racism — of not having many friends in the world, opposed this creeping “internationalization” of the conflict. It was then thought to resort to the economic-financial weapon: in an act agreed upon between Washington and Brussels, the United States might threaten to freeze part of the almost three billion dollars in aid it supplies to Israel, and the European Union would do the same with the major monthly payments that allow the Palestinian Authority to keep going. But even if it wanted to (and everything leads one to think that it does not want to), the Bush administration would be hard pressed to get an OK from Congress to an act of that kind, which in any case wouldn’t back Israel into a corner. The Union, for its part, would probably see its efforts nullified by the Arab countries, which have the resources to replace the Europeans as official payers. However, it is historically proven that economic sanctions, especially if partial, almost never bend the will of a nation. Meanwhile, a revolutionary proposal is now circulating in Jewish government circles: designate new, defendable boundaries, withdraw unilaterally from the territories, and build around the Palestinian state a sort of Berlin Wall that would prevent its inhabitants (and hence any potential terrorists) from entering Israel. In short, total separation. But aside from the catastrophic consequences to its economy and image, such a solution would lead to Israel’s losing control over the new nation, which could arm itself to the teeth, form alliances with the outlaw countries, and become a genuine time bomb. We should not delude ourselves that the new scenarios arising out of September 11 exclude a development of the sort. An imaginative American commentator has suggested making use of NATO, which would have to establish a form of protectorate over the Palestinian territory similar to that created in Kosovo, which guarantees against a return to hostilities. But who could ever convert the Arabs to this sort of colonial revival and the Western powers to place fifty to a hundred thousand men in Palestine for an indefinite period of time under extremely high risk? Beyond the justified exhortations to negotiate a solution, we are thus back at square one. However the all-out war on terrorism launched by the United States turns out, the Middle East tinderbox is still there and the wick continues to burn. Unless there are other unpleasant surprises, defusing it will be the top problem for the next decade.