By: Professor Howard Lupovitch

Twenty-nine years ago, Yamit, a beautiful coastal town that the Israelis had built from scratch at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, was dismantled and handed over to Egypt as part of the Camp David Accord.  The ceding of Yamit to Egypt did not proceed without incident.  Indeed, the group of residents who refused to leave Yamit were literally dragged out by Israeli soldiers under the command of none other than future prime minister Ariel Sharon.  One rarely hears about Yamit these days.  For those who peddle their wares as purveyors of mass media, Yamit is not a story that sells or engages a popular audience.  The sad fact is that the nobility of compromise and conciliation is not as marketable as the politics of anger and vengeance.  The story of Yamit, moreover, belies a seemingly never-ending campaign by the European left and parts of the media to blame Israel for the current plight of the Palestinians and for the failures of peace initiatives between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.  In this sense, recalling Yamit underscores the indispensability of historical perspective and a sense of proportion when sorting out the complexities of the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  To this end, I offer the following reflections on three central aspects of this conflict:

(1) There are extremists and moderates on both sides of this conflict.  In fact, the current conflict is as much between extremists and moderates on either side as it is a conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  Many if not most Israelis and Palestinians prefer peace to misery and the lingering threat of death, and thus face the daunting task of reigning in their extremist compatriots in order to make peace possible.  To date, Israelis have had more success than Palestinians in containing extremists. The Israeli government and its military have managed for the past sixty years to marginalize Israeli extremists either by condemning and outright rejecting them, or by absorbing and thereby diffusing them.  When the extremist Meir Kahane advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, he was ejected from the Knesset and deported from Israel; and his political successors remain a fringe albeit annoyingly vocal faction.  In those cases when Israeli extremists have attained positions of real power and influence, they have almost immediately moderated their position and gravitated toward the political center.  Menachem Begin was hardly a moderate, yet when he and his cohorts joined the newly created Israeli Government after the War of Independence, they set aside their earlier militancy.  Once elected Prime Minister, he gravitated further toward the political center, trading the Sinai for peace with Egypt.  Ariel Sharon, too, once prime minister gravitated in a more centrist direction.  The recent surge of Settler violence is a significant and disturbing exception that most Israelis reject and that the State of Israel and its military must address and contain.

On the Palestinian side it was difficult until recently to locate parallel moderate tendencies.  Yet the increasingly divergent behavior and mentality of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza point to the emergence of real differences within Palestinian society.  Palestinians on the West Bank have made real inroads towards peace and non-violent protest. They are setting up government institutions that will work once they gain statehood. They quickly and unequivocally condemn acts of violence by Palestinian militants  and they should be recognized for doing so.  The real possibility for peace between Israelis and Palestinians rests in no small part on the ability of Israelis to control the settlers and the ability of West Bank Palestinians to declaw and subdue Hamas extremists.  More than anyone else, Hamas with its nihilist outlook threatens to deprive Israelis and Palestinians alike of a chance for a normal life.

In no small sense, the lesser influence of extremists on the Israeli side is the result of the limited influence of religious extremism in Jewish life.  Despite the growing politicization of the Haredim, the State of Israel and Israeli society are still predominantly secular and are guided by secular notions of democracy and civil rights, and not by any religious doctrine.  Even within the Haredi world, moreover, religious fundamentalism has been curbed by doctrinal decisions that the rabbis made centuries ago.  This is poignantly evident with the respect to the Jewish notion of holy war.  While there is a notion of Milhemet Mitzvah, [Obligatory War] in Judaism, the rabbis banished this notion more than fifteen hundred years ago to the distant periphery of Jewish life.  To put it another way: even though the ancient Israelites were commanded to destroy the Amalekites, any present-day attack by a Jew on an alleged Amalekite would be condemned as an act of murder.  It is noteworthy in this regard that Baruch Goldstein’s unconscionable and unforgivable attack on Palestinians was never justified as some sort of act of holy war.  More important, Baruch Goldstein was a deranged aberration that all but a handful of crazed extremists condemned as un-Jewish, un-Israeli, and totally unacceptable.   In sharp contrast, Hamas’ charter not only embraces Jihad as a mandated act of violent aggression against its adversaries – rather than the conventional Muslim notion of Jihad as a diverging, personal battle against the one’s impurities and imperfections –  but also openly calls for a violent Jihad against Israel.  In short, religious fundamentalists neither run the State of Israel nor dominate Israeli society.  Can the same be said of a Hamas-dominated Palestinian State and society?

(2) Israelis and Palestinians have both suffered the deaths of innocent civilians.  There is no point in trying to weigh the suffering of one people against the suffering of another people.  The death of innocent loved ones is tragic and painful, regardless of who the victims and their families are.  Yet there is a subtle but crucial difference between the circumstances that led to the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.  Palestinian civilians who were killed by the Israeli military had the misfortune of being too close to the target; Israeli civilians and other victims of Palestinian attacks were killed because they were the target.   Does this mean that the death of one is more less tragic than the other?  No. Death is death, loss is loss, sorrow is sorrow.  But it does require us to distinguish between the tactics and intent of those responsible on either side.  The Israeli military goes to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and, whenever possible, to avoid them entirely.  No other military in the world follows so deeply and intensely the guiding principles Tohar ha-Neshek [the purity of arms] and Haganah ve-Havlagah [Self-Defense and Restraint], even when it means complicating an operation and placing its own soldiers in greater danger.  Even the recent disillusionment among Israelis regarding the prospects for peace, coupled with the growing influence of Haredi leaders in the Israeli military, have only eroded this guiding principle somewhat, but have by no means dislodged it from its preeminent position.   On the other hand, can one honestly say that a Hamas militant who straps explosives to his or her body and walks into a public place crowded with un-armed Israeli civilians with the intent of killing as many innocent people as possible is acting in self-defense or exercising any form of restraint?

Furthermore, Palestinian militants have consistently and conveniently disregarded the importance of separating the military from civilian society.  Consider the contrast: Israeli soldiers live on separate military bases, apart from the civilian population, and, when amidst the civilian population, are easily identifiable by their military uniforms.   Hamas militants could avoid harming Israeli civilians almost entirely simply by targeting military installations rather than pizza parlors and bus stations.  On the other hand, the very reason that Israeli soldiers cannot avoid shooting in the direction of Palestinians in the first place is because Hamas militants – the militia that claims to be the champion of Palestinians’ best interests –  is an army living among a civilian population.  Though tactically effective, this is cowardly and morally reprehensible(and death is in no one’s best interest), and thus begs the questions: why do the members of a militia, knowing full well that their foe may have to use military force, deliberately and knowingly draw fire in the direction of their fellow Palestinians?  Who is putting innocent Palestinians in greater danger: the Israeli soldiers who fire at Hamas militants, or the Hamas militants who live among the civilian population, often using innocent Palestinians as shields?  And why then do Palestinian civilians not object to being put in harm’s way?  Perhaps because they have been convinced, compelled, or coerced to believe that failure to cooperate constitutes disloyalty, a lack a patriotism, high treason, and, for some, nothing short of heresy.   Palestinian civilians have been backed into this predicament not only by the Israeli army but, more immediately, by the tactics of Hamas militants.

(3) Israeli and Palestinian leaders face incessant criticism of their policies and actions.  Yet there is one crucial form of criticism that Israelis leaders endure which Palestinian leaders rarely face: self-criticism from within their own ranks.  Israeli society is intensely self-critical, calling its political and military leaders to task almost daily and, from time to time, voting individual politicians and even entire administrations out of office.  Critics of Israel and its policies speak freely and without fear of consequence.  The varied attitudes of Israelis toward the current situation are equally well-known because people in Israel have the right to voice their opinion unabashedly, whether supportive or critical of the government, the military, or any other aspect of Israeli society.  This is possible in no small part due to the unbridled freedom of expression in Israel.  There is no comparable free expression within Palestinian society, especially not in Hamas-controlled Gaza, and thus no comparable self-criticism.  Can a Palestinian individual living in a territory governed or dominated by Hamas openly criticize the leadership, aims, or tactics of Hamas without fear of reprisal?   If not, can we be sure how rank and file Palestinians in Gaza regard Hamas or, for that matter, peace with Israel?

For over a hundred years, first Zionists and then Israelis have recognized the importance of co-existing peacefully with their Arab neighbors, and have tried unceasingly to realize this aim.  The harsh realities of death and war have complicated this task immeasurably, but Israelis remain committed to achieving peace.  In the tradition of Golda Meir, who lamented the deaths of Israel’s foes as much as the deaths of Israelis, Israelis continue to search for peace.  They regard the rising price of peace – ceding territory, accepting a Palestinian state that may or may not be friendly – as preferable to the costs of war.  More than once, Israel has offered the Palestinians some and even most of what they want, in exchange for peace – but to no avail.  Palestinians have allowed militants to subordinate the possibility of peace and normalcy to the realities of military conflict and to the fantasies of ultimate military victory.  Palestinians, too, want peace, and many have begun to demonstrate a willing to compromise.  Others, though, are they still determined to settle for nothing less than the unrealistic demands of a militant minority.  As the entire region contemplates democracy and free expression, perhaps the Palestinian people, too, will use this historic moment as an opportunity to choose peace through moderation and compromise over  suffering and hardship.