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The God veto |
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By Khaled Diab Belief in the sacredness of the holy land has long bedevilled the
quest for peace. It’s time to challenge the ‘God veto’. |
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November
2008 The possibility that Tzipi
Livni will become Why is it
that, since the 1990s, efforts to reach a two-state resolution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been going round and round in vicious
circles, while the situation on the ground has been deteriorating
constantly? There are
no shortage of thorny practical issues – from the question of Palestinian
refugees to final borders – standing in the way of a deal, not to mention the
power disparity between the two sides, but what role does rigid religious or
pseudo-religious ideology play in perpetuating the struggle?
The
message was apparently all too clear to the hawks that had been circling
around the then prime minister ever since he had decided to talk directly to
his one-time archenemy Yasser Arafat and the PLO. On that
autumn night, 4 November 1995, Rabin paid
for his “betrayal” with his life. The assassination sent shockwaves across
the country, the region and the world, with that rare spectacle of Arabs
expressing grief for a slain Israeli politician. The
killer was Yigal Amir, a university student who was a far-right religious
Zionist. After his arrest, he told police that he had acted on “the orders of
God”. Reflecting the distrust and hate elicited among the settler movement,
Amir confessed to a later Commission of Inquiry: “I felt as if I was shooting
a terrorist.” Although religious
and revisionist Zionists quickly distanced themselves from the murder, many
Israelis are convinced that, even if Amir pulled the trigger, the extremists
provided him with the ideological ammo. The settler movement had accused
Rabin of planning to withdraw to “Auschwitz borders” and Orthodox rabbis had
called on soldiers to disobey any orders to evacuate any part of the Rabin’s
grieving widow, Leah, refused to shake hands with the Likud’s Binyamin
Netanyahu, one of the staunchest and most vitriolic opponents of Rabin’s
peace overtures, but shook Arafat’s. “I feel that we can find a common
language with the Arabs more easily than we can with the Jewish extremists,”
she said. The Likud
and other revisionist Zionists, the right-wing religious parties and the
settler movement oppose the peace process because they advocate the
annexation and settlement of the whole of Eretz Even the
ostensibly more pragmatic religious party Shas, which is vaguely in favour
of making some concessions to the Palestinians, advocates the ‘Greater
Israel’ enterprise. Despite his ‘fatwa’ that the sanctity of human lives is
more important than that of the land, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Sha’s spiritual
leader, instructed his men to leave Rabin’s government in protest against the
Oslo accords and, again in July 2000, the rabbi withdrew Shas from Ehud
Barak’s government to undermine the Camp David summit. But it is
not just extremist Israelis who believe they own a divine deed to the land,
Palestinian Islamists, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad possess the inverse
view. According to Hamas’s 1988
charter, “ Unsurprisingly
then, Hamas – created during the first intifada as a reaction to the
increasingly oppressive Israeli occupation and the increasing willingness of
Palestinian secularists to reach an accommodation with Israel – was incensed
by Oslo and started a suicide bombing campaign to undermine the process. This,
coupled with the death toll and humiliation inflicted by the Israeli military
on the Palestinian population, sought to chip away at public confidence in
the peace process on both sides and to restore mutual distrust. An Arabic
proverb talks of people who kill and then lead the funeral procession. And
that is what the extremists seem to be on the verge of doing with the
two-state solution. On the Israeli side, Rabin’s murder marked the beginning
of the end for the moderates and pragmatists. A shaken Shimon Peres was
unable to regain momentum and shot himself in the foot with his Grapes of
Wrath invasion of On the
Palestinian side, the continued failure of the Palestinian Authority to
deliver an independent state, as well as its endemic corruption, strengthened
the hand of the extremists, propelling Hamas to a series of local election
victories, crowned by their success in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Israeli
and Palestinian extremists achieved this by having the unshakable drive and
conviction – one could say ‘delusion’ – to take advantage of the fractured
political landscape, by preying on the fear and distrust of the enemy, and by
hoodwinking the electorate. For instance, Hamas dropped the
call for the destruction of What the
extremists have been unable to answer is what to do with the elephant in the
room: the millions from the ‘enemy camp’? How do they achieve their fantasies
of territorial maximalism without having to oppress an entire people
permanently, which is impossible? Neither
Jewish nor Palestinian extremists are likely to abandon their ultimate dreams
easily, but there are signs that they can be pushed to become more practical
and pragmatic. Ariel Sharon, the die-hard warhorse, broke away from the Likud
he founded to take a somewhat more pragmatic path with his new Kadima party.
The responsibilities of office have shown that Hamas can be more
accommodating than its past suggests, with the Islamist party indicating its
willingness to end its armed struggle with Despite
the best efforts of the extremists, the Israeli and Palestinian public still
crave peace, as poll after poll confirms, but agreeing a fair price for it is
the challenge. The Had Rabin
lived, the final status talks which were due to start on 4 May 1996 may have
led somewhere, rather than the empty shell they proved to be. After all, six
months earlier, with Rabin and Arafat’s blessing, a blueprint for a
mutually acceptable deal was hammered out in secret talks under the auspices
of Yossi Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas. The
two-state solution is on life-support and if it is to be saved, the passive
majority needs to mobilise in opposition of those who continuously veto the
quest for peace by invoking the wrath of God. As any just deity would now, it
is the sanctity of people, not land, which matters. This
column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section
on 18 September 2008. Read the related
discussion. ã2008 – Khaled Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this
website is the copyright of Khaled Diab. |
