The most transparent of all are the Arabs. Arafat has said
clearly all along that he wants nothing less than a single
Arab state from the Jordan to the sea. He has not wavered in
the slightest in his declarations. He has betrayed no
weakness or lack of focus. This is what he wants and things
have been moving in his direction for the past seven
years.
Is there a red line short of Arafat's goal beyond which no
Israeli will venture? So far even the apparently strongest
consensus items like an undivided Jerusalem have proven
negotiable. Arafat does not have to plan in advance to be
flexible. The Israeli side, at least so far, has enough
flexibility for the two of them.
What does the Israeli Left want? Peace? Sometimes it appears
that they are blind and dumb. They forge ahead no matter
what. If your "partner" calls for a holy war and then
proceeds to shoot at you, it is hard to call that a peace
process.
In a recent article in The New Republic, Douglas
Feith, who was a senior official in the Reagan
administration, points out that Arafat never even pretended
to fulfill all of the promises he made to make peace. He
never changed his rhetoric, never renounced anti-Israel
propaganda, never disarmed the terrorists and so on. Yet he
purports to want to continue the process.
The truth is, according to Feith, neither Arafat nor the
Israeli Left is so excited about peace. "The Israeli leaders
who launched and sustained Oslo understood that peace would
be, at best, a by-product of the negotiations. For them,
Oslo's paramount purpose was `ending the occupation'--
allowing Israel to relinquish control of the populated areas
of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They hoped for peace, but
they didn't require it. They wanted out, whether or not the
Palestine Liberation Organization transformed itself into a
neighborly government that upheld its commitments. Israeli
officials had political reasons for calling their policy of
unilateral withdrawal a `peace process,' but maintaining
that fiction has been costly, and now, after the failure at
Camp David, its abandonment would be a sensible stride into
a post-Oslo world."
This explains the Left's insistence on progress no matter
what the other side does. For them, the main point is to
redraw the boundaries of the State of Israel so as to
exclude the Palestinian population. Any peace that might
result is purely a bonus.
Yet in order to garner public support, the leaders
consistently portrayed the process as leading to peace and
not just to unilateral withdrawal. Now that Barak has at
Camp David offered about as much as even the Left was ever
prepared to offer and Arafat rejected it, following with the
worst violence since the last war, the next step is not
clear.
And what do we want in all of this? We hope that the events
will finally show our people that the IDF will not save
them, nor will either a Leftist nor a Rightist secular
government bring any real salvation. There is no solution of
power and force to our dilemma, and no apparent diplomatic
or political solution either.
We must make peace with ourselves and with Heaven -- by
fulfilling the Torah -- and only then and only thus will we
merit peace with our neighbors.
