In the mid '70's I was active in the National Lawyers Guild, editing its paper among other things. At a meeting I spoke with the PLO's UN representative and was stunned by his blunt talk of solving problems with a single bullet. I understood that holocaust survivors saw Israel's survival as an utter necessity. And that the Palestinians saw in it only catastrophe. I saw no place for me in the fight and so have been a passive observer, expecting that ultimately the two state solution's simple logic would carry the day.
Over the next three decades I read the work of Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books - long my favorite periodical. Elon's death prompted me to look back at the Review's archives and find this 1968 !! essay The Israel Arab Deadlock. I certainly did not read it at the time: I was in a fishing village just north of Bombay, serving in the Peace Corps. An unblogly lengthy excerpt follows.
I think it an astonishingly accurate piece of journalism. Such efforts are often described as a first draft of history. Elon's first drafts were better than others' last.
The Israel-Arab Deadlock
By Amos Elon
Israel and World Politics
by Theodore Draper
Viking, 278 pp., $2.25 (paper)
The Road to Jerusalem
by Walter Laqueur
Macmillan, 350 pp., $6.95
Now that most of the fighting is over, and only sporadic raids and counterraids continue across the River Jordan, the origins of the third Arab-Israeli War are likely to be again obscured by events, as were those of the first (1948) and the second (1956). New blunders blot out old. Arab intransigence continues; the Israelis may yet discover that a great victory, as Nietzsche wrote, may be "for human nature…more difficult to bear than a defeat." The forces that caused the last war remain. They may soon be responsible for bringing about still another one.
Even last summer, soon after the war, the rapidity and seeming ease of Israel's victory overshadowed the pre-history of the war, its origins in the tactics of power, and the disastrous interplay between mass psychology and leadership. Now, a year later, the picture is further blurred by current preoccupations: the plight of the innocent refugees, acts of terrorism and sabotage, and their natural consequence of mass arrests and blown-up houses. United Nations Ambassador Gunnar Jarring, wandering from one Near Eastern capital to another, has spent the last six months trying in vain to square the circle. The Arabs say, "Withdrawal first, peace (maybe) later." The Israelis say, "Peace first, withdrawal (maybe) later."...
Most Israelis and many of their sympathizers abroad refuse to admit that two rights have clashed over Palestine. It is a persistent Zionist legend that the Arabs will eventually see the light in social and economic progress introduced by the Jews, and then gladly trade their nationalism for symphony orchestras, schools, and hospitals. While this may not be such a bad alternative to anybody's nationalism, it is highly unrealistic to expect it in the Near East, just as it would be in Europe.
On the other hand, there is not only the rivalry between Arab and Israeli, but rivalries between Arab and Arab (Syria still claims Palestine for her own province), Moslem and Non-Moslem Arabs, Russian and Chinese communists, and, of course, The United States and the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the old debate about the rightness or wrongness of Zionism still confounds all discussion. Should there be a Jewish State? Why should the Arabs atone for Nazi crimes? During the past decade this argument has become irrelevant and certainly impractical, and today it has become largely obsolete. Immigration to Israel has come to a standstill.
Two-and-one-half million Israelis are now a nation, cohesive and resourceful, whatever the argument over Zionism. For Israelis, the issue is not one of theory, but one of physical survival, of individuals as well as of a community. There is no other place to go, as there was for the French community in Algeria....
The talk of desirable solutions will continue, but at this juncture at least, none seems even remotely acceptable to both sides. It is possible to imagine a solution imposed from outside by mutual agreement of the great powers. But this too seems improbable.
The deadlock is likely to continue. We know nothing of the human heart if we imagine that Israelis will easily forget fifty years of near-total Arab enmity and twenty years of threats of annihilation; it is also native to believe that repression can make the Arab masses confident, or esteem Israel, or forget that Palestine was "stolen" by the Zionists.
For decades the Jews have tended to belittle the force of Arab nationalism, and have consoled themselves with the thought that the Arabs could live very well without the tiny piece of Arabia that is Palestine. The Arabs too have indulged for decades in the luxury of underestimating the enemy. They have ignored the fact that to preserve any sense of reality, there must be a sense of the relativity of enmity, as indeed of friendship as well.
There is some hope, albeit not much, in the increasing contact between Israelis and Jordanian Arabs on the occupied West Bank as well as with East Bank residents who are now being granted visitors' permits. If it is true that total enmity is possible only where there is complete lack of communication, the West Bank situation, if it lasts, holds some hope. One day both Arabs and Israelis may begin to doubt whether an enemy to whom one can talk is really an enemy at all.
If this hope too is just another pipe dream, the present deadlock is bound to continue. And both sides are condemned to inflict death, pain, and hardship on each other.
excerpted from The New York Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 1, 1968
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