Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 5

Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on March 5, 2001:

Her Excellency Colette Avital
Member of the Israeli Knesset

"After the Israeli Elections: Prospects for Peace"

Good evening to all of you. I believe that your Chairman has made my job very easy, having said almost half of what I was going to say with one exception. I am not a member of the government. I belong to the Labor Party and we lost the election. As your new administration in Washington now starts to design its foreign policy, the crisis in the Middle East looms as one of the most daunting challenges it will have to face. In just a few months, as you have mentioned, we have gone from negotiations which we thought would make a final settlement, a final agreement, with the Palestinians into an intifada and then into a stalemate and finally into a collapse of the peace process. I will try to say or to analyze what went wrong and try to see what options, if any, are left for us. Obviously, I would have preferred to come to you at a time of greater hope. I will try to look at the situation soberly; I will try to learn some of the lessons that we have learned. I have many more question marks than many of you. We have to try to analyze the situation and to start from two realities that produced the peace process as you said ten years ago in Madrid. And these realities, I think, have not changed.

The first reality is that neither side can defeat the other. The Palestinians are too weak to war against Israel militarily. The Israelis are too weak to launch an attack on a defenseless people. So basically none of us can win, really, a war on the battlefield. This is some of the logic which we had to accept in the Middle East. This is what brought us first to Madrid. This is what we had hoped was really the beginning of reconciliation between the Palestinians and ourselves. It started in Oslo. Two agreements were signed on the lawn of the White House. The Oslo agreements not only gave us hope, started the process of reconciliation, but the Oslo agreements were a road map, a road map that we were supposed to follow almost step by step, agreement after agreement, the idea being that as time would pass we would gain confidence in each other which would foster relations, we would manage to understand each other’s needs and that peace was not supposed to be a zero-sum game. The peace was supposed to be at, the end of the day, a process in which both would come half way, would give each other what the other side needs the most, would have along the line made sacrifices, but each side would gain from a peace agreement. That was the logic of Oslo. The logic of Oslo was also that we would go through interim agreements and that at the end we would have to settle the most difficult problems, the ones that we had not touched for over fifty years at the conference table for the final settlement or the final discussions for a final settlement. We actually went to the Camp David summit invited by President Clinton after having negotiated for over a year and a half with the Palestinians. All the elements were there, but I believe that Mr. Barak very courageously for the first time put on the table all the issues that had to be discussed and without which we could not, in fact, solve the problem. He actually went far beyond what many of us in what we call the peace camp believed and hoped for. He made very generous proposals to the Palestinians; however, we were turned down, and when Mr. Arafat came back to Palestine, to the Palestinian autonomous region, he told his people that he would continue to fight until he would liberate the last inch of territory. The rest, as you probably all know, is history.

The second reality is that both sides will continue to share the same land, breathe the same air, and therefore we have to learn to be courteous to each other. So even if right now we are in a situational stalemate and perhaps even hopeless, at the end of the day if there is no military solution and if we are condemned to continue to live with each other we will have to find the solutions around the conference table. I’d like perhaps to try to analyze what happened and to say that as you all know after we lost the Israeli election a West Bank settler who was interviewed on the radio said that he would have voted for anyone against Barak, even if that would have been a broom. And that, in fact, was not only the opinion of settlers, of people in the right wing of politics in Israel, of the religious establishment, in many ways that seemed to become the prevalent mood also between or among left-wingers in Israel.

Why was that so? For the first time, actually, during these elections what happened in Israel was that only 60 percent of the population came to the polls. [They] voted overwhelmingly for General Sharon, did not vote for Mr. Barak, and 40 percent of the public remained at home. This is rather unusual if you think that Israel is a very intense country, people are extremely involved in politics, people listen to the radio every hour on the hour and choosing the Prime Minister in Israel is probably as important, if not more important, as choosing a wife. So everyone wants to participate. Actually, Israelis living abroad usually use their life savings to come and vote. This time, many of the Israelis living in Israel chose to stay at home or to go to the movies or to go to the beach. And why was that? I think that if you look at this it’s not because Mr. Barak was considered a failure personally by most Israelis but I think it was a sign of despair. If you look very deeply, if you analyze the situation, it was a sign of despair in many ways, including among those who had voted for Mr. Barak before and who had voted for peace. It was a sign of despair with the peace process. It was even worse than that and I think that this is something that we have to address seriously. For the first time in over fifty years it was a sign of loss of hope and it is with that sign of loss of hope that we have to live. So what happened during the election is that the right dug its heels in, the center moved right, and the left simply disappeared.

So it is basically the events of the past few months and not the peace process itself. It is not the fact that Mr. Barak went and suggested and gave a proposal which was more generous than most Israelis would have been ready to accept. I believe that even in the middle of the month of October, just a week after the intifada had started--and nobody thought that this was going to last long--69 percent of the Israelis were ready to accept the Barak plan. Sixty-nine percent of Israelis were ready, not only to accept the Barak plan, they were ready to do it knowing full well that this entailed great sacrifice. I’d like for the benefit of those of you who don’t know what sacrifice means to say just a few words.

At the conference table at Camp David we discussed a number of issues. In fact, everything was put on the table, but the most difficult and existential issues for us were borders, security, the problem of the Arab refugees and the question of Jerusalem. On the issue of drawing borders, I believe that Mr. Barak was generous. He offered 92 percent of the territory back to the Palestinians. He, however, asked to leave a few in place where 80 percent of the settlers are. That would have been an issue that could have been settled. On the issue of security, I believe that also could have been settled. However, the two stickiest issues were refugees and Jerusalem. And I will start perhaps with the issue of refugees.

There have been 600,000 refugees who left Palestine in 1948; there are today 4 million refugees. What the Palestinians demanded was the right of return of the refugees to Israel. If we had accepted the right of return of 4 million refugees to Israel, that would have meant for us the end of the state of Israel as it is, as a Jewish state. Let me remind you that there are twenty-two Arab states; there’s only one Jewish state and there was no reason for us to decide either to become a bi-national state or to simply open our doors to 4 million people who haven’t necessarily been friends of Israel. The whole population of Israel, by the way, is 6 million people. So imagine the balance or the kind of equilibrium that we would have reached. Now that was something impossible. We refused. The Palestinians said, “Why don’t you just accept the principle of the right of return as a symbol?” We could not accept that because, as those among you who are lawyers know, if you accept somebody’s right to return, it means that you open yourself indefinitely for years to come to any claim of anyone in the next fifty or one hundred years. So we got attacked on that issue. We suggested, together with President Clinton, many plans—the possibility to compensate all those 4 million people, the possibility to resettle many of them in what would become a Palestinian country. Obviously, what was on the table was that as we would leave Camp David, there would be an independent Palestinian state.

The other issue was Jerusalem. Jerusalem is for all of us a symbol. It certainly is the most profound part of any Jew’s sense of identity. It embodies not only our culture and our prayers, it embodies part of our spiritual heritage, or most of our spiritual heritage. We do understand that we’re not the only ones to have very strong ties to Jerusalem and so we were ready to reach a very difficult compromise to accept two capitals in Jerusalem. However, what happened in Camp David was that President Arafat, or Chairman Arafat, decided to turn the issue into a religious issue and started a fight over the holy places. He decided that he’s the keeper of the Islamic places in the world. And this is where the negotiations got stuck. Now, according to our books when you negotiate and fail in negotiations you either ask your partner to bring a counter proposal or you continue the negotiations. This is obviously what did not happen, and instead of continuing the negotiations we got up one bright morning with an intifada.

Now, I’m not a member of Mr. Sharon’s party. I have not voted for him. If anything in the world I have opposed him, and for a long time. But I think it would be rather naïve for us today to believe that the intifada was started by the visit of Mr. Sharon [to the Temple Mount]. It may have been the match that lit the fire but it was there brewing for some time. It was, as a matter of fact, as we know today planned, and if we ask ourselves why all of this happened, why did the violence burst out, I think today we have a few good explanations. We believe today that essentially three things happened. First of all, for the first time in many years, it was the street that led the way and not the leaders, not Mr. Arafat. There was frustration, including with the leadership, certainly with us and the outburst of violence started spontaneously by the people, but it was used and manipulated by Mr. Arafat. We signed a number of agreements with Mr. Arafat to stop the violence. None of them were respected.

The second reason why we think that this happened is because, during the course of negotiations, not only did we put on the table what was considered by us and by President Clinton very generous offers, but basically the international community supported Israel. In all the relations that we’ve had with the Arab world--but certainly with the Palestinians--the international community does play a role and it has always been the hope of Mr. Arafat to, at the last moment, bear pressure on Israel by the international community. But exactly the opposite happened after we came back from Camp David. When I accompanied the Prime Minister to New York during the celebration of the millennium at the United Nations the Prime Minister met with forty heads of state. They were all supportive of our plan and, in fact, they were all putting pressure on Arafat. Probably the fact that Arafat was cornered also created that kind of reaction.

But more than that, if you all remember, as a sign of good will and in order to finish conflict that had been brewing for a long time, Israel decided to pull out unilaterally from Lebanon and it did so last July. It did so out of its own free will. We had been there for eighteen years which had been too long a time. Lebanon is not our enemy. We’ve been there to defend our territory. We did it because the people of Israel wanted it. However, in the mind of Arafat this became a model, and he thought that with a little bit more violence the Israelis would give in and would give up everything just as in the case of Lebanon. That, I believe, was a very big miscalculation as all the rest. Thinking that the Israelis would give in to intimidation or to terrorism or to violence is misreading the Israeli mind. I believe that even though we have negotiated now for over ten years, probably the biggest gap that has remained between us is a cultural gap. We have really probably never totally understood what was happening in the Arab mind or in the Palestinian mind, but I believe that neither have the Palestinians, even though we’ve lived so closely with each other, even though there’s so much kinship, even though there’s so many common traits and so many things that we have in common—they have never really managed to understand us.

It takes usually violence to bring the Israelis closer together, and basically coming back to what I started with, in October of last year 69 percent of the Israelis still believe that peace was possible, still were ready to make sacrifices. What totally changed the perceptions of the Israelis was the use of force. This is something that we cannot tolerate. Every people probably has an ethos; we have an ethos. We as Israelis have an ethos and that ethos is security. This is the one thing that nobody will be able to force the Israelis on and the change in the mood of the Israelis and the loss of support for the peace process did not come because we were ready to make too much sacrifice. We could have convinced the Israeli people. Sixty-nine percent were for it. What changed the mood and what disillusioned all those of us who really believe in the peace process was the fact that without any justification, without any reason, [Arafat] could have had a Palestinian state at Camp David. He could have had a Palestinian state up to almost the last day of the government of Mr. Barak. Arafat chose, instead of taking the opportunity of a lifetime, he chose violence and this is something that is incomprehensible, this is something which no Israeli will be able to live with.

Now, I would like perhaps to try to see what went wrong on our side. We went to Camp David believing that the other side was ready to come to critical decisions. After all, we’d been negotiating for over ten years, but probably we missed a few cues. What we must have missed is the fact that the Palestinians would not be ready, or that Arafat would not be ready, to go the extra mile. Even though many Israelis think that it was wrong that we should not have put everything on the table, I believe that Mr. Barak did the right thing for many reasons. First, because we did not have a choice. We had an international obligation to put those issues on the table and to discuss the final deal, but more than that it was our duty to try to reach this agreement or to come back to the Israeli people and to say, “This agreement is not possible.”

Basically, what happened was that the achievements of Mr. Barak, as strange as it may seem, are three. The first one was that he managed to unmask the real thinking of the other side. Today we have sobered up and we do know that this time there is no possibility to reach a final status agreement with the Palestinians. They’re simply not ready for it. The other thing is that he has finished the illusion of many Israelis. Those who thought that peace was just around the corner, and I’m one of them and I’m ready to admit it, and those who thought that you can have peace without being deprived. I believe that today almost every Israeli knows that when we reach that stage we will have to pay a heavy price, but we also know, and we will insist, that we are not the only ones to pay the price.

Now, where does all of this take us? We have a new government in Israel. The government has been put together, the government will be sworn in this coming Wednesday around noontime, it is a very wise coalition, it is led by General Sharon. General Sharon was elected by the people in order to foster another policy. What is so disorienting for all of us is that for the first time we really don’t know what the road map will be. But there are two or three possibilities. I know what Mr. Sharon will not do. I can say that Mr. Sharon will not turn the clock back. He will not, as some may suggest, try to reinvade territories that have been ceded to the Palestinians. He will not try to provoke a war and he will not impose any solution on the Palestinians. But he will take his time and I think a majority of Israelis support that today. He will take his time. He has made it very clear that he will respect all the agreements that we have signed but certainly not those that we have not signed. At Camp David we had suggested things. We had certain understandings but since those were not signed they are not binding on the new government. So [Sharon] will try as a result to reach an interim agreement, an interim agreement based on ceding more territory, on giving in as a sign of good will some more parts of Israeli territory.

I think that what he agreed, or what he announced that he would do, was that he was willing to go up to 42 percent of Palestinian territory. To be very honest with you, even if I accept the idea of an interim agreement, I have very strong suspicions that if Mr. Arafat did not accept 92 percent of the territory he will not have any good reason to accept less. So, that option does not seem to be very plausible. We may be in for surprises. Much depends also on the international community. There’s a new administration in Washington. As I said, it is shaping up its new policy. There are not only the Americans but also the Europeans that are playing a role. It is very possible that Arafat seeing that the violence leaves him nowhere, having miscalculated, may perhaps want to get into that kind of interim agreement. My only hunch, or my only analysis, is that I do not think it will last very long.

There is another possibility, and that is not to get into an interim agreement only as an interim agreement, but to try to draw another road map with an idea of what the finality will be and to go step by step. That may have a better chance if Arafat will know what is the end station.

A third possibility which was considered by Prime Minister Barak when he saw the peace negotiations fail is to do what is called “unilateral separation,” meaning that one day we’d draw an artificial border between ourselves and the Palestinians. That is again not a total solution. It is mainly a solution meant to assure our security. One way or the other, I believe that the big problem is to try not to get drawn into any kind of violence of a war. As long as this government, the Barak government, has been in power what we have tried to do is to act with restraint. That has been seen with a great deal of criticism by the Israeli public. All of you who live here and who have been exposed to television reporting and who have seen pictures of Palestinian people facing Israeli soldiers have a different view than ours. There’s always a discrepancy of how things are seen from the outside and how they’re seen from the inside. Living in Israel, being vulnerable to acts of terrorism every day, living in the neighborhood in which I live in Jerusalem and seeing every evening from seven o’clock onwards Palestinians shooting at my neighborhood, I can assure you that this is unsettling and that most Israelis are losing their patience. As so there has been a great of pressure on the Israeli government from the people to react more strongly to that kind of violence. However, reacting more strongly means that things can get out of control, that violence can only spiral upwards. Whoever says that violence can spiral up, it means that it can spread out to other countries.

Where is the Arab world in all of this? I must say the Arab world has acted with great tact, with great wisdom, and with great restraint. I believe that most of the Arab leaders have tried to talk Mr. Arafat out of the violence, have taken stringent measures in their own countries because they have feared that this violence might spread out to their own streets, but basically have not been involved, have not supported wholeheartedly Mr. Arafat. I would like here to mention one thing and one thing alone. Abba Ebban, who used to be the Foreign Minister of Israel, used to say the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This is basically what has happened again, and this is the basic tragedy not only of the Israelis but mainly of the Palestinians.

The Palestinians were offered a state in 1937 by the Peel Commission. At that time it had been the suggestion of the Peel Commission to divide Palestine in two. Had the Palestinians accepted that proposal at that time, they would have had the bigger part of Palestine and we would have had a miniscule state. In 1947, with the U.N. resolution on the partition of Palestine, we were allotted a state that I’m not sure would have survived. It looked like a spaghetti and all the rest of Palestine would have belonged to the Palestinians. The Palestinians and the Arab world refused; they could have had a state then, there would have never been the kind of Palestinian refugees that we see today, they would have spared their people the suffering, they would have spared us so many wars. In 1978, when we signed an agreement with President Sadat, the first person who said the Palestinians should have legitimate rights was Menachem Begin. We then gave back to Egypt all of the Sinai and we signed the other part of the Camp David agreement at that time which was supposed to give the Palestinians autonomy for five years in all of the West Bank. At the end of the five years we would have negotiated with them the final settlement, meaning that in 1983 they could have already had a state. And here we are in the summer of 2000, and we are offering the Palestinians a state on a silver platter with international help, with a great package coming from the United States to resettle the refugees, and they refuse again. The question is, “Whose tragedy is it?” And I’m only sorry that the Palestinian people as well as we have to suffer from that.

I do not know where this is going to lead us. Right now if there would be a possibility of an agreement, the kind which Mr. Barak offered in the summer of 2000, I’m afraid most Israelis would vote it down because we have lost confidence. But what I’m trying to say is that we should continue. We have no other alternative. The two realities which I’ve mentioned will continue to be with us. So, as I’m speaking here tonight, it is not with exaggerated hope, it is not with exaggerated despair. It is with a sense of realism that we will continue to live in the same neighborhood for a long time. That after having fought for a long time we will have to come back to the same conference table with exactly the same problem, with exactly the same question marks. We could have been spared that, the Palestinians could have spared themselves and us that. After a few months of fighting we have had over 450 victims. I hope that we do not need another 450 victims before going back to the conference table, but I believe there is a role for the international community and I believe that there is a very important American role. Even though the new administration is not going to follow in the footsteps of the previous administration, meaning it will not want to get as intimately involved in the negotiations as the previous administration, I believe that the circumstances will make it be active. I think that perhaps the emphasis will be different. I believe that our region today is seen more on a global strategic basis than on a simple Israeli-Palestinian basis, but I believe that at the end of the day we will reach again the moment when we will face the same questions. Hopefully, there will be on the other side a bold enough, courageous enough partner that will take a hand and that will, in fact, sign an agreement. What that means is simply that we have to bear up, not lose hope, and continue with perseverance, with realism and certainly with a lot of patience.

And I thank you for your patience.