PRINCETON, NJ: “It is as if two insane people, crazed with wrath, had decided to turn into a fatal embrace the forced marriage from which they cannot free themselves. Forced to live together and incapable of uniting, they decide at least to die together, wrote Albert Camus in his Letter to an Algerian Militant (October 1955).
Fear pervades. Do these words apply to the Arab-Jewish conflict? Are the two peoples destined to dwell in the valley of the shadow of death, or will they find a true path to peace? Arab-Jewish relations often seem like yet another, modern, chapter in the myth of Sisyphus, pushing the rock of reconciliation up to the next peace summit, only to see it rolling back downhill to yet another violent escalation. But the determinist tragedy of Sisyphus could and should be substituted with the free-will drama of Prometheus. His many gifts to humankind notwithstanding, Prometheus, the god of “forethought , deprived men of premonition, lest mortals know their own death-date and lose hope.
Indeed, this primordial, human fear of death is the driving force, not the outcome, of the conflict. Awareness of our mortality engenders our need for existential certainty, which in turn finds expression in striving to belong – a desire to find a valid identity as well as defend a viable polity. Undermining this coveted certainty is at the heart of the Arab-Jewish blood-battle, and our ability to cope with it shall shape our fate.
“The world has many images of Israel, wrote Jewish thinker Simon Rawidowicz in 1948, “but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be… there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up. More than 60 years later, in the Jewish State, as in the Diaspora, existential uncertainty still haunts the Ever-Dying People.
This doubt, however, is not all embracing. We should discern its two faces: one turns to the past to find a collective identity; the other faces the future to seek the collective’s survival. The uncertainty that Rawidowicz describes pertains to the future survival of the group, not its identity. Although each generation might indeed “consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain, it does not doubt its present role in continuing the past-based Jewish identity.
Not fear of losing identity, but doubt about sustaining the polity, about the possible death of the Jewish State, has reached an apex in recent years. “What most frightens me, said author David Grossman in 2003, “is that I am no longer confident of Israel’s existence. suddenly the possibility that Israel will no longer exist has become concrete. It’s no longer a mere nightmare. The possibility exists that the great, heroic experiment that took place here will cease to be.
Grossman is not alone. There is nothing more terrifying than the belief that your fear is your enemy’s hope – that ending the Jewish State is the Arabs’ goal.
On the face of it, there is nothing new under the sun. For about a century Jews have lived in Palestine/Israel not only on the edge of an abyss, but in the shadow of the Iron Wall. Already in 1923, the right wing Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, proclaimed “there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to ‘Palestine’ becoming a country with a Jewish majority. He rejected efforts to reach peace now, for “a living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall.
But breaches in the iron wall remain visible to all. The Zionist wish to burn Arab consciousness towards a realization that the Jewish State is not another fleeting Crusader entity seems increasingly as wishful thinking. The collapse of the peace process, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Israeli Arabs’ demands to transform Israel into a bi-national state – have all deepened fears and generated a great normative transformation. This is the cradle for the emerging new Zionist demand: not merely recognizing Israel as a fait accompli, but subscribing to its raison d’être: the Jewish people’s right of self-determination. This is a dual right: for an identity, regarding Jews as a people, not just a religious congregation; and for a polity, anchoring the people’s existence in a sovereign state. The “two-state formula has thus become almost meaningless without its concluding condition – “for two peoples.
Proponents of this process have regarded this transformation as a means to expose the Palestinians’ true intentions; while opponents of it – as an obstacle to pragmatic negotiation. Both are right, but so what? This paradigmatic shift is here to stay. The conflict is now, more than ever before, not only about states and borders, but about peoples and beliefs; not just polities and policies, but identities as well. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is increasingly a misnomer; it is, much more accurately, a Jewish-Palestinian conflict, an inter-communal, rather than an inter-state, clash. Furthermore, both camps pay little attention to the flipside: Palestinian existential uncertainty, which, in contrast to Israeli Jews, is still very much about the validity of the collective identity.
For Jews, with their age-old ethnic identity, territorial concessions may be justified as a means to secure the collective Self. Conversely, for the Palestinians, whose identity is fresh, fragile and primarily land-based, losing ground risks losing face, compromising the Palestinian Self. The new Israeli demand from the Palestinians to accept the Jewish people’s right for self determination will neither plaster the Iron Wall, nor lead Arabs to accept its ethics.
A moral agreement is not the product of political give and take. Peace may only emerge out of a normative dialogue, one that complements the journey to a utilitarian middle ground by framing and farming an ethical common ground, based not on who is right and who is wrong, but about what makes right and wrong.
Uriel Abulof is a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His current work focuses on the role of political ethics in intercommunal conflicts. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
