The violence in the Mideast raises doubts about the capability of the Israelis and the Palestinians to settle the conflict in peaceful ways, and an even more troubling question: Do they really want to make peace with each other?
When it comes to Israel, just before the clashes began, 66 percent of Israelis said they supported the peace process. Even after the gruesome pictures of the lynching in Ramallah, when one could assume that Israeli support for the peace process had gone out the window, together with the mutilated body of the Israeli soldier, support for peace remained at a surprisingly high 62 percent.
We are strange people indeed.
What about the Palestinians? At Camp David in July, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak leaned over backward to accommodate Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat but was flatly rejected. As for the Palestinian masses, their attitude is best portrayed by the rallies where Israeli flags are burned, and Saddam Hussein is hailed as a hero.
Since peace can come only as a result of compromise, what are the chances of peace when the Palestinians won't even take Yes for an answer?
Furthermore, the chances of future generations of Palestinians to embrace peace are also questionable. Just browse through the textbooks in Palestinian schools, where students continue to be indoctrinated that Israel is the enemy and an illegitimate entity, or listen to the incitement by Palestinian media or by imams in mosques, preaching to agitated masses of worshipers that it is their duty as Muslims to kill Jews.
A responsible leadership would restrain the masses and try to educate them.
The Palestinian leadership, on the contrary, is both inciting the mobs and simultaneously being directed by them. In his visit in Tunis on the first week of the clashes, Arafat said: ``The stream of Palestinian blood, flowing for so many years, will go on flowing against Sharon and his like, for he tried to desecrate Al Aqsa Mosque. Our people will continue to shed their blood to protect Jerusalem and the sites holy to Muslims and Christians.''
What does he say about the Jews? Arafat is as ambivalent as ever, but his past conduct can give us a clue. A few days after he reluctantly had signed the Cairo Accord in May 1994, Arafat appeared in a Johannesburg mosque declaring that the Palestinians would continue their jihad until they liberated Jerusalem. He later tried to claim that he didn't mean that ``Jihad'' but the other ``jihad,'' but Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was furious: How could Arafat have promised that the PLO would commit itself to a peaceful resolution and at the same time contradict it by continuing the violence and terror?
More than a year later, Arafat gave an interesting answer to that question.
While to the world media he sang the praises of the peace he had signed with the Israelis, in a speech delivered in Cairo in August 1995, he said different things. ``If some of you are opposed to the agreement or, at least, to some of its terms, I have a thousand objections to that document. But I must remind you, my brothers and sisters, of just one thing: When the Prophet Mohammed signed the Hudaybiyah agreement. . . . I am only reminding you of that point. I am not introducing anything new; all I am doing is providing you with a reminder.''
Hudaybiyah refers to the peace agreement between the Prophet Mohammed and the Quraysh clan, which ruled Mecca, signed in 628 C.E. Two years after the Hudaybiyah agreement was signed, Mohammed took over the city by force of arms. What is the lesson? That it is justified to violate any agreement you may be coerced to sign with infidels because of your inferior military position.
I'm sure we Israelis never will give up hope of living in peace with Palestinians. I'm afraid that we still have a long way to go until we see the prophecy of Isaiah come true, that ``the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb.'' Even when this happens, we had better be the wolf, not the lamb.
Uri Dromi is the publications director at the Israel democracy Institute in Jerusalem. This article was origionally published Friday, November 3, 2000, in the Miami Herald. Reprinted with permission.
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