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By Marc Sirois
(YellowTimes.org) -- There are good reasons to
suspect that the much-ballyhooed "road map" to peace was stillborn.
Palestinian militants have vowed to continue their campaign of suicide
bombings; the Palestinian Authority is powerless to stop them; and the
Israeli Cabinet castrated its "acceptance" of the blueprint by attaching
obstructionist conditions. All the same, the event and its aftermath
produced at least one radical change in Israeli behavior that bodes well for
some form of eventual reconciliation, however distant it may turn out to be.
The Cabinet decision was revolutionary in
that a hard-line government officially recognized the necessity of
Palestinian statehood, but the aforementioned conditions and subsequent
obfuscation by key ministers combined to mitigate its significance. The real
news was a comment that had jaws dropping from right to left, the statement
of an opinion so much at odds with past experience that observers were left
speechless, unable to either absorb or explain what they had just heard: "I
think the idea that it is possible to continue keeping 3.5 million
Palestinians under occupation -- yes it is occupation, you might not like
the word, but what is happening is occupation -- is bad for Israel, and bad
for the Palestinians."
It was not the substance of that statement that was so extraordinary,
acknowledgment of plain fact being insufficient in itself to merit special
attention. Instead, it was the identity and record of the man who uttered
those words that made them historic. Ariel Sharon is the Israeli whom Arabs
love to hate; the officer who bested their commanders on the battlefield for
decades, the defense minister who stood by as hundreds of Palestinian
civilians were massacred in Beirut, the demagogue who sabotaged the Oslo
Accords from their very inception, the agent provocateur who ignited the
second Intifada by leading 1,000 border policemen through Islam's
third-holiest shrine in a vainglorious expression of sovereignty over the
remains of Judaism's most sacred site, the infrastructure minister who
presided so prolifically over the illegal settling of the Occupied
Territories, the prime minister who put the nail in Oslo's coffin by
reoccupying the West Bank.
And yet it was he who told an audience of furious legislators from his own Likud Party after the Cabinet decision that Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is, in fact, occupation, that it is no different at bottom from the presence of any other foreign power on someone else's real estate. The audience was important as well, for Sharon had recently voiced similar positions, albeit far more vaguely, for general consumption. This time, he spoke the unvarnished truth to those most tightly wedded to a philosophy of denial.
One of the constants of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the ubiquity of references to Arab truculence. Ever since the first calls to "drive the Jews into the sea," Israel and its supporters have beaten the Arabs over the proverbial head with the notion that they (the Arabs) refuse to acknowledge the Jewish state's right to exist. There is copious evidence to the contrary (both the Arab League and the Palestine Liberation Organization have officially accepted this reality since 1982 at the latest), but there is certainly an argument to be made that this acceptance was tactical.
Either way, the opposite side of the coin was even more bellicose. While the Arabs did in fact long deny the State of Israel's right to exist, Israel and its supporters went further, denying the very existence of a Palestinian people. Now the hard-liner of hard-liners, the man revered by some and reviled by others as "Super Hawk," has not only agreed officially that there are Palestinians and that they have a right to statehood -- but also that his country's actions amount to occupation, that the "Other" is a people attached to a land that cannot be usurped without perilous consequences, both physical and moral, for all concerned.
It has not sunk in yet, but Sharon's words are in rarefied atmosphere as far the rhetoric of Middle East history goes.
In a speech to the Knesset on November 20, 1977, during his stunning trip to Jerusalem, Anwar Sadat declared that "there are moments in the lives of nations and peoples when it is incumbent upon those known for their wisdom and clarity of vision to survey the problem, with all its complexities and vain memories, in a bold drive toward new horizons … Peace is not a mere endorsement of written lines. Rather it is a rewriting of history. Peace is not a game of calling for peace to defend certain whims or hide certain admissions. Peace in its essence is a dire struggle against all and every ambition and whim."
On October 5, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin told the Knesset after it ratified the Oslo Accords: "We can continue to fight. We can continue to kill -- and continue to be killed. But we can also try to put a stop to this never-ending cycle of blood. We can also give peace a chance. The government chose to give peace a chance. The government chose to do something to achieve it."
Sharon's comments were not nearly so stirring, but, given his record, they might actually have even more impact in the long term -- provided he wants to follow through and is allowed to do so.
This is by no means a certainty. It will not be easy for a man like Sharon to have and retain so profound a change of heart after a lifetime of opposing compromise. In addition, there are those who will stop at nothing to derail whatever efforts he may make. Sadat, for example, was betrayed and assassinated by his own soldiers at a military parade on October 6, 1981; Rabin was shot in the back by a fanatical Israeli civilian at a peace rally on November 4, 1995.
The Islamic zealots who murdered Sadat and the Jewish extremist who murdered Rabin were, in effect, on the same side -- that of more war, more pain and more tears for both sides. Their ideological heirs continue to fight the same battles for the same odious purpose.
They might try to kill Sharon like they did Rabin and Sadat. They might succeed, too, but they can never erase what he said from the annals of history. More importantly, they can never extract it from his people's national consciousness.
The flame of hope offered by the road map may have been snuffed out before the document ever saw the light of day. In defending his government's halfhearted endorsement of the plan, though, Sharon may have given his country the one gift that no one ever expected of him: a chance to finally know peace by accepting at last the people with whom, sooner or later, it will have to be made.
[Marc Sirois is a Canadian journalist who lives in Beirut, Lebanon, where he serves as managing editor of The Daily Star. The proud and fanatically protective father of three beautiful princesses, his opinionated writing style owes to the fact that he is never wrong along with his holding monopolies on wisdom, logic, morality, and justice. He is also exceedingly modest.]
Marc Sirois encourages your comments: msirois@YellowTimes.org
Printed with permission from www.yt.org