Jewish
Frontier

In Yiddish, as in German, the word "unbedinkt" connotes urgency. "Er broicht unbedinkt a glus seltzer." (He urgently needs a glass of seltzer.) Clearly after the disaster in Lebanon which cost Israel 2,000 lives many citizens had come to feel that the bloodletting on the northern border must be brought to a halt. For them and thousands of others peace had become urgent, "unbedinkt." Yet as the peace negotiations progress it is becoming abundantly clear that while one can find Arab spokesmen who also feel passionately about peace, a matching popular sense of urgency does not yet exist on the Arab street. They enter the negotiations as an aggrieved party and demand corrections of past history that go to the very existence of the Jewish state. It is that disequilibrium which partially accounts for the peculiar relationship of the two sides in the peace negotiations. Though Israel has by any measure earned her right to exist she somehow comes to the negotiating table as a supplicant while Palestinian and formerly Syrian negotiators assume the posture, if not of victors, then at least as if something is owed to them for a great past injustice.

They enter the negotiations with the assumption that they have been wronged and that Israel must therefore make reparations. Hannan Ashrawi, the articulate spokeswoman for the Palestinian cause, does not speak of the possible terms for peace but of only the "arrogance" of Israel determining what shall be given back to its rightful owners. The notion of two historic rights that must somehow find a way does not enter her head.

First things first. There are demands for resettlement or compensation of third and fourth generation "refugees" and a share of Israel's capital, Jerusalem. It is not merely that there is a desire for a Palestinian state to be established but for the Jewish state to be disestablished in the process. How has this happened? How has a feisty little nation fully ready to defend itself and, some would argue even expand its domain, become so uncharacteristically willing to tamper with the fragile roots of its own continued existence. Part of the answer may lie in the impact of the urgency factor. After fifty two years of war Israelis are ready to move on.

In international as in human relations the party who more urgently requires certain needs to be met is actually diminishing his or her bargaining power. Is there anyone who is unfamiliar with a romantic relationship where the loved one needs to give little while the lover needs to promise all? Something similar happens when the urgency for peace is greater for one party than the other. The recent failed negotiations with Syria illustrate that peculiar phenomenon. Syria rejected the notion of the return of the Golan unless every inch of what she thought was coming to her was given back. Yet Syria's state power is on a downward trajectory, as is its economy. Her once formidable defense forces are in critical need of being brought up to date and there is no power on the horizon who will do that for her. Yet that disparity in power is not reflected in its negotiating posture. Syria continued to insist that all of the Golan must be returned as if it was not she that suffered a defeat in an aggressive war she waged but rather that Israel did. The differences were minuscule but Assad let the opportunity slip by. Damascus was under little popular pressure to make peace. She remains premodern which means there is no urgency to implement an agenda like an improved infrastructure or better health care. Unlike Israel's citizenry its people do not yet crave self-realization above all else. If its leaders fear dire consequences should the agenda of basic needs not be met, or should a key province like the Golan not be regained, we do not know of it. In contrast Israel suffers all the "weaknesses" of democracy including the fact that it must answer to its citizens who increasingly aspire to the kind of life they imagine awaits them if there were full peace with their neighbors.

Peace is becoming imperative for Israelis who crave normality. Peace is the sine qua non of modernity. It becomes "unbedinkt" for societies, like Israel, who hunger for its benefits. That is the meaning of the fifty six percent majority vote Barak, who ran as the peace candidate, received in the last election. If anything the referendum now required to ratify any forthcoming peace agreement may show that Israel's fractious party politics does not fully reflect the growing popular sentiment for peace at almost any price throughout Israel's society. It is that desire to go beyond the low level war which persists that serves as the background of what must surely be one of the most amazing paradoxes in modern history. By the normal calculus of power which includes not only wars won but cell phones owned, Israel has far outpaced its Arab neighbors. Yet she is the supplicant for peace and for that reason is viewed as defeated in the Arab world. When one observes how Hezbollah celebrated its victory in the formerly Israeli occupied security zone we can sense how much the Arab world wants to believe that it has defeated Israel on the field of battle. Imagine the escalation of demands had such an unlikely event actually happened. Apparently in the Arab mentality giving up territory can only indicate weakness. The notion that it is a concession made to win the peace is inconceivable. Should the positions have been reversed no "land for peace" formula could have emanated from the Arab world.

Why is peace not as urgent in the Arab world? Do not Arab families feel the sting of losing loved ones as much as Israelis? The difference goes beyond the "land for peace" formula which trades an abstraction for a concrete asset. It has a great deal to do with the impact of the vision of modernity and the belief that in its wake comes material advances, Except perhaps for pre-Syrian Lebanon, the Arab world remains mostly untouched by this vision of modernity and the endless appetites it arouses. Modernity, at least its western version, is feared and much effort is expended to counteract its effects. It goes beyond wearing the chador. The individual need for self-realization is still overshadowed by the tribal need to undo real and imagined injustices. Without resolution of what is considered a great historic injustice, the loss of their land, they cannot move on. That is what Hannan Ashrawi and Edward Said are saying. It is that which is imperative rather than the benefits of peace. The sense of injustice has been nurtured for more than half a century. It is the reason why a martyr suicide bomber who is promised a place in Islamic heaven can be recruited in the Arab world while merely the thought of such a sacrifice would be repugnant in Israel. Modernity tells man to nurture the self. From that perspective Israel's Arab neighbors are going nowhere. The modern agenda which counsels self realization and freeness of spirit is barely discernible in the Arab world which means that nothing is really urgent, certainly not an end to the endless flow of blood that currently prevails. Islam like its related Abrahamic religions Judaism and Christianity is a "command" religion. But in the throes of modernity Judaism and Christianity have learned to mute their command structure. They adapt to a new reality in which the "free" citizen is basically self commanding. In the Islamic world the adjustment seems much more difficult.

What if the possibilities of regional peace VV must await a matching quest in the Arab world which ultimately are anchored in the aspirations of modernity. In such a case, deprived of its natural regional markets and unable to free resources for its internal development because of a perennial security problem, Israel's future becomes misshapen, its growth hampered, its life less comfortable. It may be possible to leap frog over such regional restrictions by integration into the European common and cultural market, which many are convinced is where Israel really belongs in any case. For many Arab leaders Israel's quest to belong to the European union, as a replacement for their natural regional one, serves as proof that it is a foreign island in an Islamic sea. Economic integration with Europe has a downside not the least of which is the possibility that Israel's technocracy would abandon the homeland for less locked-in more comfortable quarters. Continually recruited by hi-tech corporations who realize their value, such technocrats are more subject to the seductions of modernity which include comfort, high status and freedom with which the appeal of tribal loyalty would be hard pressed to compete. Clearly thus far Israel is able to manage its regional isolation. In fact with its current edge in technology Israel is closer to the global economy from which theoretically at least, all good things would flow. The reverse case which requires the Palestinians to imagine that a comparatively powerful Israel economy does not exist leaves it in an impossible situation. The economic dependency of the Palestinian state will not be altered by the ephemera of nationhood. The envisaged Palestinian state would still have greater need to send its surplus labor to Israel than Israel has need of it. It is that fact of continued dependency more than others which stands in the way of Arafat unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state. For the Palestinians the bitter reality is that their economic dependence on the Israel they abhor will continue for the foreseeable future. They too need peace.

The Oslo agreement was predicated on the idea of a friendly divorce between two hostile contenders for the same land. A "warm" peace with normal economic relations cannot easily emerge from such bitter antagonism. Even with peace Israelis would likely face the discomfort of being imprisoned in a hot little country surrounded by a militant retrograde Islamic world which shows every sign of having to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

In the end no matter what shape an ArabIsraeli peace takes it will only be one factor in a relationship which, even after all other problems are solved, is still faced with the fact that the contending parties are in different states of historical development, the one already entering post-modernity the other having not yet become modern. That means they will continue to think differently about how life should be lived. That is a factor beyond the control of either side.

Few would dare venture an opinion on when and how the surrounding Arab world will find its way to modernity, even of an Islamic sort. When it does the impact would be easily recognized. Everywhere modernity has made its debut there is a new spirit which places improved conditions for personal life, freedom, health and hope above tribal imperatives. The Arab world seems to be going in the opposite direction. From an Israeli perspective the Middle East will probably therefore remain a "bad neighborhood" for some time to come.

However the current negotiations at Camp David conclude, and at the time of this writing the prognosis is not hopeful, the urgency for peace that Israel brings to the table, as noble as that sentiment may be, is not matched in the Arab world. Yet we cannot counsel that Israel abandon it. In any case such a visceral sentiment, something like a prisoner's desire to be free, cannot be altered to suit the historic moment, nor should it be. Yet the alternative, to wait until the Arab world develops a matching urgency, also leaves us nowhere. Failure to attain peace now goes beyond the near certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of young Israeli and Palestinians may be denied the opportunity to live out their full lives.

The truth is that even an imperfect peace is desperately needed by both sides and the alternative is too horrendous to consider. In the post peace world which is surely coming there will be dozens of internal and external problems that assure that this region will never possess a Scandinavian tranquillity. But that can be lived with. Lack of comity and periodic crisis is by any measure better than war. But even such an imperfect peace does not seem sustainable given the Palestinian notion of a people wronged by history and unwilling to move forward until that wrong is corrected. It is the startling lack of middle ground that makes the current situation so ominous. What nettles is that the basic outlines of the imperfect peace between Palestinians and Jews are mostly known. Yet because the two parties operate on such antonymic assumptions regarding what is important even such a peace agreement, imperfect as it is bound to be, seems impossible to achieve at this historical juncture. Both sides must feel that peace is "unbedinkt." What a shame to have come so close and yet to be so far apart.