Inshallah
17 March 2007
NOT ONLY the Palestinians must be breathing a deep sigh of relief after the swearing in of the Palestinian National
Unity Government. We Israelis have good reason to do the same.
This event is a great blessing, not only for them, but also for us - if indeed we are interested in a peace that will
put an end to the historic conflict.
**********
FOR THE Palestinians, the immediate blessing is the elimination of the threat of civil war.
That was a nightmare. It was also absurd. Palestinian fighters were shooting at each other in the streets of Gaza,
gladdening the hearts of the occupation authorities. As in the arena of ancient Rome, gladiators killed each other for
the amusement of the spectators. People who had spent years together in Israeli prisons suddenly acted like mortal
enemies.
That was not yet a civil war. But the bloody incidents could have led there. Many Palestinians were worried that if the
clashes were not stopped immediately, a fully-fledged fratricidal war would indeed break out. That was, of course, also
the great hope of the Israeli government - that Hamas and Fatah would annihilate each other without Israel having to
lift a finger. The Israeli intelligence services did indeed predict this.
I was not worried on that account. In my view, a Palestinian civil war was never in the cards.
First of all, because the basic conditions for a civil war are absent. The Palestinian people are unified in their
ethnic, cultural and historical composition. Palestine does not resemble Iraq, with its three peoples who are distinct
ethnically (Arabs and Kurds), religiously (Shiites and Sunnites) and geographically (North, Center and South). It does
not resemble Ireland, where the Protestants, the descendents of settlers, were fighting the Catholic descendents of the
indigenous population. It does not resemble African countries, whose borders were fixed by colonial masters without any
consideration of tribal boundaries. It certainly had no revolutionary upheaval like those that brought on the civil wars
in England, France and Russia, nor an issue that split the population like slavery in the USA.
The bloody incidents that broke out in the Gaza Strip were struggles between party militias, aggravated by feuds between
Hamulahs (extended families). History has seen such struggles in almost all liberation movements. For example: after
World War I, when the British were compelled to grant Home Rule to the Irish, a bloody struggle among the freedom
fighters broke out at once. Irish Catholics killed Irish Catholics.
In the days of the struggle of the Jewish community in Palestine against the British colonial regime ("the Mandate"), a
civil war was averted only thanks to one person: Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun. He was determined to
prevent a fratricidal war at all costs. David Ben-Gurion wanted to eliminate the Irgun, which rejected his leadership
and undermined his policies. In the so-called "season", he ordered his loyal Haganah organization to kidnap Irgun
members and turn them over to the British police, which tortured them and put them in prison abroad. But Begin
prohibited his men from using their weapons to defend themselves against Jews.
Such a struggle among the Palestinians will not turn into a civil war, because the entire Palestinian people oppose this
strenuously. Everybody remembers that during the Arab Rebellion of 1936, the Palestinian leader at that time, the Grand
Mufti Hadj Amin al-Husseini, butchered his Palestinian rivals. During the three years of the rebellion (called "the
Events" in Zionist terminology) Palestinians killed more of each other than they killed of their British and Jewish
opponents.
The result: when the Palestinian people came face to face with their supreme existential test, in the war of 1948, they
were split and splintered, lacking unified leadership and dependent on the mercies of the bickering Arab governments,
who were intriguing against each other. They were unable to stand up to the much smaller organized Jewish community,
which rapidly set up a unified and efficient army. The result was the "Naqba", the terrible historic tragedy of the
Palestinian people. What happened in 1936 still touches the life of every single Palestinian to this very day.
It is difficult to start a civil war if the people are against it. Even provocations from outside - and I assume that
there has been no lack of these - cannot ignite it.
Therefore I did not doubt for a moment that in the end a Unity Government would indeed come about, and I am glad that
this has now happened.
**********
WHY IS this good for Israel? I am going to say something that will shock many Israelis and their friends in the world:
If Hamas did not exist, it would have to be invented.
If a Palestinian government had been set up without Hamas, we should have to boycott it until Hamas was included.
And if negotiations do lead to a historical settlement with the Palestinian leadership, we should make it a condition
that Hamas, too, must sign it.
Sounds crazy? Of course. But that is the lesson history teaches us from the experience of other wars of liberation.
The Palestinian population in the occupied territories is almost evenly divided between Fatah and Hamas. It makes no
sense at all to sign an agreement with half a people and continue the war against the other half. After all, we shall
make serious concessions for peace - such as withdrawing to much narrower borders and giving East Jerusalem back to its
owners. Shall we do so in return for an agreement that half the Palestinian people will not accept and will not be
committed to? To me this sounds like the height of folly.
I shall go further: Hamas and Fatah together represent only the part of the Palestinian people that lives in the West
Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. But millions of Palestinian refugees (no one knows for sure how many) live
outside of the territory of Palestine and Israel.
If we strive indeed for a complete end to the historic conflict, we must reach out for a solution that includes them,
too. Therefore I strongly question the wisdom of TzipI Livni and her colleagues, who demand that the Saudis drop from
their peace plan any mention of the refugee problem. Simply put: that is stupid.
Common sense would advise the exact opposite: to demand that the Saudi peace initiative, which has become an official
pan-Arab peace plan, include the matter of the refugees, so that the final agreement will also constitute a solution of
the refugee problem.
That will not be easy, for sure. The refugee problem has psychological roots that touch the very heart of the
Palestinian-Zionist conflict, and it concerns the fate of millions of living human beings. But when the Arab peace plan
says that there must be an "agreed upon" solution - meaning agreed upon with Israel - it transfers it from the realm of
irreconcilable ideologies to the real world, the world of negotiations and compromise. I have discussed this many times
with Arab personalities, and I am convinced that an agreement is possible.
**********
THE NEW Palestinian government is based on the "Mecca agreement". It seems that it would not have been possible without
the energetic intervention of King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia.
The international background has to be considered. The President of the United States is now busy with desperate efforts
to bring his Iraqi adventure to a conclusion that will not go down in history as a total disaster. For this purpose he
is trying to bring together a Sunni Front that would block Iran and help to put an end to the Sunni violence in Iraq.
That is, of course, a simplistic idea. It disregards the enormous complexity of the realities of our region. Bush has
presided over the setting up in Iraq of a government dominated by the Shiites. He has tried to isolate Sunni Syria. And
Hamas is, of course, a pious Sunni organization.
But the American ship of state is beginning to turn around. Being a giant ship, it can do this only very slowly. Under
American pressure, the Saudi king has agreed (perhaps unwillingly) to take upon himself the leadership of the Arab
world, after Egypt has failed in this task. The king has persuaded Bush that he has to speak with Syria. Now he is
trying to persuade him to accept Hamas.
In this picture, Israel is a hindrance. A few days ago Ehud Olmert flew to America and told the conference of the Jewish
lobby, AIPAC, that a withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster (contrary, by the way, to the opinion of more than 80% of
American Jews - who support early withdrawal.) This week, the US ambassador in Tel-Aviv hinted that from now on the
Government of Israel is allowed to conduct negotiations with Syria - and it may be assumed that this hint will turn into
an order before long. In the meantime, no change in the position of the Israeli government is noticeable.
**********
UNFORTUNATELY, JUST at this moment, with a newly formed Palestinian government that has a good chance of being strong
and stable, the government of Israel is becoming more and more destabilized.
Olmert's support rating in the polls is approaching zero. The percentage points can be counted on the fingers of one
hand. Practically everybody speaks about his political demise within weeks, perhaps after the publication of the interim
report of the Vinograd commission on the Second Lebanon War. But even if Olmert manages to survive, his will be a lame
duck government, unable to start anything new, and certainly no bold initiative vis-Ã -vis the new Palestinian
government.
But if Bush supports us on one side, and the Saudi king on the other, perhaps we shall after all take a few steps
forward. As people in this region say: in sha Allah, if God wills.
*************
GUSH SHALOM p.o.b. 3322 Tel Aviv 61033
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