The end of Israel's confidence
Jeff Greenberg
12/05/2000


IT'S now almost a standard insert in any dispatch from the Mideast: "Since the latest wave of violence erupted, nearly 300 people have been killed, mostly Palestinians." Add another casualty: the hope of peace, of a partnership between Arab and Jewish states. Day after
violent day, that dream has died a lingering death.

And now Ehud Barak's ever weaker government has been declared a terminal case. The Israeli parliament has voted to hold new elections come spring.

Something more than just another Israeli government has collapsed. So has Israel's confidence in the vaunted, decade- old peace process that its confident leader was going to see through to a happy completion.
Not just a dream of peace has died. Worse, it is now being recognized as a false dream, a trap, a lull that masked a nightmare.

With every rock thrown, firebomb tossed, child killed, holy site desecrated, car bomb detonated, mob unleashed, soldier lynched ... it slowly dawned on the Israelis: They've traded land not for permanent peace but for chronic war.

Israelis have also noticed that their leader has been reduced to acting only reflexively. Every time he's rebuffed by the Palestinian side, he just makes another concession.

What was Barak's first reaction to the Knesset's calling for elections to choose a new government? He offered to formally recognize the Palestinian state while the toughest issues were negotiated. Naturally
he was rebuffed.

Barak may be the last Israeli to recognize what a will-o'-the- wisp he's been chasing. Since the almost daily eruptions of violence began, a sea change has occurred in Israeli public opinion now that change has overtaken not just Barak's government but his fondest illusions. He thought he could retreat to peace. But at the end of all the concessions he's offered, his country has found nothing but low-grade, constant war.


More than a government is falling in Israel. Hope is giving way to the grim realization that a long, hard, daily struggle lies ahead. Barak's great disadvantage in this war has always been that he doesn't seem to
realize that his country is in one.

The Israeli public does. By spring and new elections, Barak and the Palestinians' Yasser Arafat may be able to paper over still another "peace," but it won't fool anybody but Barak. The hopeful intellectuals and bright policy-makers who fashioned the Oslo accords,
and who once dreamed of a step-by-step route to peace, have awakened with a start.

Shlomo Avineri, for example. He's the former director-general of Israel's foreign ministry who used to speak glowingly of a "two-state solution" to the Arab- Israeli conflict. After Israel's offer to share
Jerusalem with the new Palestinian state was rejected out of hand last summer, he caught on: "It suddenly dawned on us that we do not have a partner: only an enemy, who cannot even find a humane word when our
people are lynched. ... What came out on the streets, among the Palestinian elite on CNN, was sheer hatred and a fundamental rejection of Israel ... now we know there is no such thing as a Palestinian leadership with whom an agreement can be reached. We are at war."


Please note Avineri's choice of words: He spoke not of the Palestinian authority's fundamental rejection of Israeli policies or concessions or peace feelers, but "a fundamental rejection of Israel." Its very
existence. That objection was there all the time in the maps, textbooks and vitriol on which the next generation of Palestinians was being raised, but the Israelis preferred not to see it. They can no longer ignore it.

Ehud Barak is a dreamer and fighter, an idealist and loner, admirable in his perseverance, courageous in his search for peace. Barak is an honorable man. So was Neville Chamberlain. And no one is at a greater
disadvantage than the honorable when dealing with the dishonorable. Much as the Israelis may admire him, they just can't afford Barak any longer. The price is too high, in blood and in danger.

To be a democracy in the Middle East is to be an anomaly. To be a Jewish democracy is to be a pariah. And to believe that Yasser Arafat has had nothing to do with throwing all these children into the line of fire whenever there are television cameras present is to be a sucker.

Arafat's strategy is clear: Grind away at the Jewish state in a hundred little ways till it grows weary and demoralized. Respond to every concession by demanding more, even when half or more of old Jerusalem is offered. Talk peace but instill hatred. Then blame
Israel for the terror attacks launched against it.

After weeks of this, Israel's people seem to have awakened to grim reality, even if their leader hasn't. Which may explain why he may not be their leader much longer.