with its multiple parties and interest groups. They don’t like the culture that derided Dana Olmert’s gay pride and resisted a planned march of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and multicult singularities down by the Western Wall. They believe that both the gays and the Palestinians are essentially moral and right in their claims. If the Arabs take over Jerusalem, it may become less gay in the Old City, but the Olmerts will be long gone, and Avishai will be tending his garden in Wilmot, New Hampshire. All these Israeli dissidents can justify their multiple- passport lives by echoing the angst of the novelist protestors such as Amos Oz, who puts it as bluntly as any anti- Semite: “We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.”
Is there something about novelists and intellectuals that makes them incapable of grasping the reality of enemies that want to destroy your country and you, enemies contemptuous of all your legal nuances, literary apercus, civil-liberties refinements, Booker Prizes, and generous globalist poses? Oz, Grossman, and A. B. (“Bulli”) Yehoshua, all proud advocates of Peace Now, all want to give up the land of others — settlers — for what is called “peace.”
It has long appeared to be a plausible strategy, upheld by each successive Israeli and U.S. administration and by many sophisticated observers and activist experts blind to the obduracy of Israel’s opponents. Israel took land from the Palestinian Arabs in the wars of 1948 and 1967. “Now it is time to relinquish it for peace.”
It makes sense. Why not Peace Now?
In the end, Shaul and Dana won their debate with their father. Once assertive about Israel’s right to settle in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, Ehud Olmert concluded that because of the demographic trends, Arabs would come to dominate any Israeli state that included the territories. He became the single Israeli prime minister most avidly committed to achieving peace with the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon. He supported the withdrawal from Gaza and the removal of some 25,000 Jewish settlers from there. In secret negotiations in 2008 with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, he offered to withdraw from the territories, divide Jerusalem, and give scores of thousands of Palestinians the “right to return” to Israel. He declared the West Bank settlements illegal, attempted to uproot several of them, and was willing to remove all of them, a quarter-million people.
In this pursuit, he gained the support of the Bush administration, which could hardly be more pro-Israel than the Israeli government was. Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region sixteen times in 21 months to bring about peace and to arrange peace talks at Annapolis.
The conventional wisdom is that Olmert, Rice, and Bush were unlucky or maladroit in their negotiating tactics. Experts declared it “ironic” that Olmert, this ardent pursuer of Peace Now, found himself fighting two wars, one in 2006 with Hezbollah, and one in 2008 and 2009 with Hamas in Gaza. Following the withdrawal from Gaza, Israel won no plaudits or support from the international community and no respite from attacks. Since 2001, Hamas and its allies have targeted towns in southern Israel with more than four thousand rockets and thousands of mortar shells. After Israel withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, rocket attacks increased fivefold.
Following the Hamas rockets came an Israel incursion into Gaza in the last month of 2008 and first month of 2009. Entitled crudely “Operation Cast Lead,” it destroyed scores of arms-smuggling tunnels, dozens of ministry buildings and offices, police stations, military targets associated with Hamas, and several Hamas officials.
The result was a huge uproar from the United Nations and other bodies, widespread demands for a cease- fire, and pervasive denunciations of the “disproportionality” of the Israeli response.
When Israel withdrew after twenty-two days amid Hamas’ claims of victory, the United States promised some $900 million for Gaza, to be channeled through the United Nations. Since Hamas continues to control Gaza and to intimidate UN officials, who persisted in taking the Hamas side in the conflict, the chances of keeping the money out of Hamas’ clutches seemed dim.
In exchange for expending a few million dollars on missiles, the jihadist group (or its Iranian sponsors) would eventually gain three times as much money from the United States ($900 million) as it has reportedly received from Iran. A week later some seventy countries and international organizations convened in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and pledged an additional $4.48 billion, over $1.5 billion more than the Gazans had requested. Their cup runneth over. Again, the donors stressed that the money would all go to the Palestinian Authority, to Fatah rather than Hamas. But Hamas controls the territory, so it will extort a large proportion of the funds, regardless of contrary intentions. The clear lesson is that terrorism pays and pays. The donors will predictably get what they pay for. So what else is new?
Certainly this sequence of “Peace Now and Then War” was nothing new. It followed the previous even more avid pursuit of the Peace Now agenda by the Clinton administration, when Israel agreed to abandon 95 percent of the territories, financed a new PLO militia to keep order, and committed to a new Palestinian state and a divided Jerusalem. The world was euphoric again, in time with the Nobel Prizes awarded both to Arafat and to Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 for allegedly achieving peace. The result was four years of intifada — suicide bombs and deadly attacks. But this, too, was nothing new.
Similarly, after the 1967 war, in which Israel won a sweeping six-day victory, the country sought peace by proposing to give up its gain of territory. The result was repeated attacks by Nasser’s Egyptian army at Suez and then the Arab — Israeli War of 1973, desecrating Israel’s holiest day, Yom Kippur. With U.S. support, the Israelis managed to avoid defeat, consolidated their control of Sinai, and established thriving new settlements there. This, too, was nothing new.
Then in 1977, the supposedly bellicose Menachem Begin and the right-wing Likud Party displaced Ben- Gurion’s Labor Party in Israel for the first time. The world was appalled. Around the globe and in Israel itself opinion leaders condemned the Israeli voters who, by electing a “former terrorist” to confront the urbane and civilized Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat, had effaced every moral distinction between the Arabs and Israelis. With Begin in power, war was believed to be inevitable.
The result, however, was again “ironic” and “baffling.” Peace broke out. Not only did Sadat agree to talks, but he actually traveled to Israel, addressed the Knesset, and aroused the wild acclaim of Israeli crowds. As the wise and courageous Harvard professor Ruth Wisse observed in her authoritative book,
In the Camp David negotiations that followed, the reputedly pugnacious Begin succumbed to the Peace Now spirit. Under pressure from Sadat and then U.S. president and peace paladin Jimmy Carter, Begin gave up the Sinai and expelled the Jewish settlers. Israel might permit 15 percent of its population to be Arab, but the newly friendly Egyptians stopped well short of allowing a small but prosperous Jewish presence on their territory.
In conversation with Sadat, the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir epitomized the Jewish stance, subordinating the pain of loss of Israeli soldiers to the pain of inflicting military losses: “We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” It’s nice rhetoric, but in the usual liberal stance, she was elevating her own moral feelings above the practical effects of her actions.
As Wisse writes, “This point had been made long before by the foremost exegete Rashi… in his commentary on the passage of Genesis 32:4… ‘Jacob was very afraid and he was greatly distressed… lest he be killed by his brother Esau, but he was even more ‘distressed’ that in self-defense, he might have to kill Esau…’ Whereas Rashi was expounding this high moral principle for his Jewish audience, Golda Meir was admitting it to an antagonist whose political traditions interpreted her confession as weakness….
“Four years earlier, when Golda Meir had been prime minister, [Sadat] had coordinated with Syria the attack on Yom Kippur…. If he now came to Jerusalem to regain the territories lost by Egypt, it was not out of regret for having killed too many Jews but with the realization that he could not kill enough to defeat them.”
Even so, his treaty with Israel, however favorable to his country, outraged the Arab League, which maintains a genocidal posture against Israel as its raison d’etre. The league moved its headquarters out of Cairo to Tunis. Its hostility to Sadat continued until his assassination two years later by Hamas precursors from the Muslim Brotherhood.
