Haaretz
Shvat 1, 5765
In the mid-1980s, when the government considered
allowing elections in the territories, Henry Kissinger warned an Israeli
friend that the territory in which the Palestinian people will elect its
leaders will not remain in Israel's hands. Sooner or later, said the
professor-statesman, the combination of a people, elections and territory
will push Israel back to the 1967 borders. Twenty years and thousands of
Israeli and Palestinian victims later, Kissinger's prophecy seems more
realistic than ever: The people that dwells in Palestine (and not in the
diaspora) elected its leader yesterday. And not only that: Israel is
completing the preparations for a departure from all of the Gaza Strip and
a small part of the West Bank.
These lines were written a few
hours before the results of the elections in the territories became known.
However, one can hazard a guess that the Palestinians (including those in
East Jerusalem) elected Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as chairman of the
Palestinian Authority. Television networks from dozens of countries have
broadcast to the world pictures of the lines at the polling stations in
Nablus and Hebron, and have reported on the attempts by Hamas to disrupt
the democratic process. In between, the correspondents reported on the
letters of refusal to serve by reserve officers and on the threats by the
Jewish settlers in the territories to revolt when the government of Israel
orders - legally - their evacuation from the Gaza Strip and northern West
Bank.
The elections in the territories and the disengagement plan
have created a certain symmetry between the mainstream on the Israeli side
and the mainstream on the Palestinian side. Both here and there,
pragmatism is challenging fanaticism and democracy is defending itself
from theocracy. Abu Mazen, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, will be
judged by his ability to realize the will of the majority - the life
breath of democracy - giving maximum consideration to a majority that will
express its opposition in peaceful ways. The Palestinians' challenge is
many times greater: to institute law and order under occupation, in
conditions of poverty and despair.
If Abu Mazen succeeds where his
predecessor Yasser Arafat failed and lowers the heat, Israel will have to
divest itself of the respectable title "the only democracy in the Middle
East." Then the occupation will be exposed in its full nakedness. The word
"occupation" is not common only in the mouths of "leftists." It was the
most right-wing government that Israel has ever had that formally adopted
the vision of United States President George W. Bush and the road map -
two documents that call for putting an end to the occupation that began in
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967. In this Israel relinquished the
main legal argument with which for years it defended the policy of Jewish
settlements in the territories.
The moral-historical argument is
becoming completely eroded as opponents of the disengagement plan are
edging toward the lunatic fringe. Anyone who argues today that the land of
Israel from the Jordan River to the sea belongs only to the Jewish people
is considered a Jewish fundamentalist. Terror remains the last weapon in
Israel's foreign policy. Just barely, if we ignore the impotence of the
authorities in face of the expansion of the outposts in the territories
and the acts of harassment of their Palestinian neighbors by people of the
extreme right, it is possible to add to terror the problem of the
incitement against Israel. The control by Abu Mazen's government of the
street in Gaza and a switch to nonviolent struggle against the occupation
in the West Bank will leave Israel stripped of excuses to hold onto the
Jewish settlements in the territories, never mind their expansion. The
separation fence, another unilateral initiative on Israel's part - like
the disengagement plan - could bring it even closer to the June 4, 1967
borders.
If there is a need for proof that Palestinian democracy
bodes well for Israeli democracy (the end of the occupation), it can be
found in a major article that Henry Kissinger published recently in one of
the most important newspapers in the United States. That same Kissinger,
who was once partner to the belief that the 1967 borders are "Auschwitz
borders," is suggesting to Israel that it build the fence more or less
along those same lines and content itself with border revisions and
exchanges of territories. The settlers, according to Kissinger, will be
able to choose between Palestinian citizenship and returning home, to the
State of Israel.