TEL AVIV: Israelis want peace but don’t believe it’s possible. That is the cumulative finding of a host of opinion polls, and it is critical to any effort by President Barack Obama to create a new momentum toward peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
For many Israelis, the peace with Egypt and Jordan has not appeared sufficiently beneficial, despite the added security it has brought, to pursue peace with the Palestinians or Syrians.
After all, many people note that the Golan frontier with Syria is Israel’s quietest border even though there is no peace agreement with Damascus. And the two existing peace pacts have not brought anything approximating “normalization – large and important sectors of the Jordanian and Egyptian publics continue to hold strong anti-Israeli views.
If a tour of the pyramids or Petra no longer entices most Israelis, why continue striving for that mythical quick drive to Damascus to sample the humus in the old souk?
An alternative version of “regularizing Israel’s relations with its neighbors, unilateral withdrawal, has been even more disappointing from the standpoint of attitudes toward peace.
True, the Egyptians and Jordanians have a case when they argue that they expected Israel to demonstrate progress on the Palestinian front as a condition for warming up the peace they reached. But when Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, its neighbors got all their territory back and repaid Israelis with rockets.
Some of this has to do with the rise of militant Islam in the form of Hamas, Hezbollah and their patrons in Iran. But Israelis also perceive in the response a deep-seated Arab and Muslim rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
That was not an obstacle to a “cold peace with Israel’s neighbors, with whom the borders were clear. But when the Palestinians’ quarrel with Israel touches on fundamental issues of ownership, whether in the claims of 1948 refugees or in the competing claims to the Temple Mount, the question of legitimacy comes to the fore.
This is how even moderate Israelis view the public rejection by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s peace offer in 2008 – a set of proposals that Israelis deemed extraordinarily generous.
That rejection followed on the disappointments of Oslo, Camp David II and the unilateral withdrawals. And it dovetailed, in Israeli eyes, with the growing radicalization of the intellectual and political leadership of the Israeli Arab community in its calls for Israel to become a binational state-a formula Israelis view as the effective end of the Jewish state.
Israelis, then, feel that the peace agreements they do have, as well as those they may achieve, are premised at best on an Arab readiness to accept them at a superficial and conditional level, one that is little different from tactical non-belligerency.
This in turn reinforces the sense that Israel’s security depends far more on its military might than on any peace agreement. It strengthens the arguments of those who would seek only “separation from Israel’s Arab neighbors.
The “north-south aspect of Israel-Arab relations also reinforces the separation approach. In the early days of the Oslo agreement in the mid-1990s, Israelis were alarmed to discover that thousands of Palestinians and even Egyptians and Jordanians used the opening to migrate illegally to Israel. That raised fears that a peace would further contribute to diluting Israel’s Jewish identity.
Beyond its immediate neighbors, most Israelis have a similar skepticism about the capacity of Arab states to sustain a real peace. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt failing to pull their traditional leadership weight and many other Arab states in a state of collapse or disarray and threatened or ruled by militant Islamists, some Israelis wonder if even some sort of Israel-Arab alliance against Iran and its proxies – one of the hoped-for payoffs of peace – would really represent an appreciable advantage.
Of course, there is much to be said about Israel’s own contribution to Arab frigidity by invading Lebanon in 1982 when the ink on the peace treaty with Egypt was barely dry; by not making a sustained effort to solve the Palestinian issue; by the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and, until 2005, in Gaza; and by alienating Israel’s internal Palestinian Arab community. When the history of the Israel-Arab conflict is finally written, both sides will undoubtedly be found heavily at fault.
One moment will stand out. In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to Jerusalem, he told the Knesset “we were wrong to reject you and stated that 70 percent of the problem was psychological, Israelis responded by abandoning their skepticism and embracing a peace that included giving up the entire Sinai peninsula. Mr. Sadat figured us out: Israel will pay a huge price for acceptance and security. Yet no one has followed in his footsteps. Imagine if Bashar Al-Assad of Syria were to do so?
In other words, with the right “marketing , Israelis can be turned on by the prospect of peace even if this means heavy sacrifices. Peace – even cold peace – is so important that, in the absence of Arab initiatives, marketing should begin at home.
Unfortunately, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not seem to realize that the demographic thrust of his settlement policies contradicts his insistence that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state. Yet the real problem is not a hypocritical prime minister, but the support he draws from a skeptical Israeli public.
That leaves Barack Obama. To enlist Israelis he has to address us directly. And he has to deliver not only justified demands about settlements but reassurances regarding Israel’s security and integrity in a less than welcoming neighborhood.
Yossi Alpher,former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, co-edits bitterlemons.org. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the International Herald Tribune.
