By Avi Davis
January 17, 2002
It didn't take long. Only hours after Yasser Arafat's worst public relations disaster in years, his loyal Tel Aviv claque swung into action. Determined that uncomfortable facts should never be allowed to interfere with an ideologic al quest, the Israeli papers were soon filled with justifications. Editorials by leading lights in the Oslo lobby, such as Gideon Levy, Shulamit Aloni, and Akiva Eldar, unsurprisingly aided Arafat's double talk and prevarications by snide attacks on the national unity government. The accusations resonated with the unfailing canard that the Palestinian leader, boxed helplessly into a corner, was left with no alternative but to wage open warfare against his neighbor.
Yet bellowing above all of them was the voice of author David Grossman. With both A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz in premature peace-lobbying retirement, Grossman is the sole Israeli writer of international stature whose ardor for Oslo remains undimmed by Palestinian turpitude. Unlike both of his secular compatriots, Grossman has never, apparently, experienced doubts about the efficacy of the peace process. Nor has he had misgivings about the corrupt, incompetent leadership of Yasser Arafat. Instead, Grossman remains an unapologetic critic of Israel's reaction to terrorism and a vociferous opponent of what he terms the evils of occupation - the cause, it seems, not only of Israel's current troubles, but of most problems of the Middle East as well.
In his latest Ha'aretz piece, however, Grossman raised his profile to a new level of self-righteousness. Comparing the shipments of the Karine A to the Haganah's illegal weapons' smuggling activities in the 1940s, he implicitly elevated Palestinian terrorists to the status of freedom fighters, justifying their atrocities as the reflex of an embattled people. That claim is a thinly veiled manipulation of history used to inflate an otherwise impoverished argument. Does one really need to remind Grossman that in 1946 the Jewish population of Palestine, which had for decades rejected armed resistance as a means of obtaining political objectives, did so only when British betrayal became so apparent that even doves became aware that their lives had been placed in mortal jeopardy? How then does that situation square with the events of July 2000 when Ehud Barak, in the course of negotiations, came within only a few square miles of satisfying nearly every one of the Palestinians' demands only to be answered with bullets?
But even if he cannot accept this, Grossman certainly does need to be reminded that Palestinian and Arab terror began well before the capture of the territories in 1967. From 1949 through 1967, the raids into Israel from Palestinian militias, known then as fedayeen, were unremitting and resulted in hundreds of Israeli deaths. There were no 'occupied territories' then to declare as obstacles to peace. There was no freedom to be regained by 'liberation from the Zionist yoke.' No one should therefore think of the Karine A's illicit journey as beginning at Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf. It began in July 1968, with the promulgation of the PLO Covenant. That document unambiguously called for Israel's destruction and anyone who fails to recognize it as the ideological blueprint for the Intifada, should visit the PLO's Fatah website. There they will find the same document displayed in all its unexpurgated, annihilationist glory. There is no indication that it has ever been amended.
It is, therefore, not occupation, not the demolition of houses nor Israel's refusal to negotiate under fire that drives this conflict. It is the Palestinians' outright rejection of Israel's right to exist. Every tragic historical incident, every ounce of Palestinian suffering, every reversal of Palestinian fortune stems from this central, unchanging belief.
Only when this realization is absorbed by the Palestinians and their leaders will they begin to appreciate their own fractured history, cease from repeating the same generational mistakes and make progress toward resolution.
Meanwhile the surviving members of the peace lobby will no doubt continue to mourn at the Oslo funeral pyre. They will obstinately proclaim negotiation with a murderer and anti-Semite as the only course open to Israel and denounce their own government when it fails to perform according to their high moral standards. But as the pyre burns, David Grossman's rhetorical angling 'Who has the strength to remember the beginning, the root of the matter?' has its answer already seared into the national memory. And inevitably history will record that those who risked so much of their country's security and sacrificed so many of its citizens' lives, ended up besmirching their own pristine reputations for moral clarity with a handful of ashes.
Views expressed by the author do not
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