05 December 2008
Israeli President Shimon Peres is convinced that a single terrorist attack that took place in the Jordan Valley in October 1988 sealed the fate of the elections that were held the next day. Some observers concur that the reports of a mother burned to death with three of her children drew thousands of floating Jewish votes to the political right, far from the camp of Peres, who called for dialogue with our Palestinian neighbors.
Less than six years later, in April 1996, after Israeli artillery shells killed 105 people in a shelter in Qana in southern Lebanon in the course of Israel's "Operation Grapes of Wrath," Israeli-Arabs punished Peres at the polls yet again. Thousands chose to stay home and helped Benjamin Netanyahu return the Likud to power by a narrow margin.
The political and at times even the military leadership have learned to harness the Israel-Arab conflict to their needs. The right recruits the fear of terrorism, the nuclear threat and the lack of trust in the Arabs. The left, in contrast, recruits the hope that peace will put an end to terrorism and will aid in the struggle against Iran and stem the rise of Hamas. The right brandishes the failure of negotiations with the pragmatic Palestinian camp and even portrays the Oslo Accords as a strategic error. The left warns that ending the peace process will lead to a binational state - in other words fulfillment of the aims of hostile actors like Iran and Hamas.
One of the outstanding examples of this integration of Israel's external and internal confrontations occurred during the 1996 election campaign. Moshe Yaalon, then Israel's military chief of intelligence, stated that Iran was encouraging the terrorist organizations to step up their activity in order to bring about a change in government in Israel. In other words, the enemies of peace in the region preferred a government led by the right that would restore the conflict to its pre-Oslo days. Netanyahu felt obliged to pledge publicly that a government under his leadership would maintain the peace process - albeit "its way." Another example is a recent remark by Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas' political bureau, to the effect that the growing strength of the Israeli right was welcome news and constituted a motive for Jordan to enter into talks with his organization.
Every Qassam rocket that lands on Sderot merely oils the wheels of the Israeli political right by presenting yet another instance of the failure of the left's approach. Labor party leader Ehud Barak persuaded large portions of the Israeli left and center that Yasser Arafat did not want to reach a territories-for-peace deal. The Hamas takeover of Gaza became "proof" that President Mahmoud Abbas also could not make good on such a deal. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni admitted on several occasions that the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza strengthened Hamas and that it would have been preferable to hand over the keys to Abbas.
In order to make things right, in the course of the past year a kind of alliance has been formed between the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Ehud Olmert grasped that the only chance of strengthening Abbas, who was once compared by Israel's former prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to "a chick whose feathers have been plucked," and to stop the rise of Hamas, lay in activating the so-called "diplomatic horizon." Yet it's hard to present a "business as usual" image of negotiating on the eastern front at a time when on the southern front Israelis and Palestinians are buried deep in violent conflict.
The closer Israeli elections loom the greater the interest of Kadima and Labor to restore calm to Sderot and reconstitute the cease-fire. Confronted with photos of dead civilians and wounded soldiers, the Israeli public - 70 percent of which, according to the latest survey by the Berl Katznelson Institute, have lost faith in peace - tends to look for solutions involving force. The government, to counter the slogans of the right, is obliged to display its determination by supplying photos of leaders from Hamas and other radical organizations who have been targeted and border crossings that have been closed. Hamas can hardly sit idly by. Thus the circle of violence expands and the creaky wheels of peace are rolled back.
Hamas left peace negotiations in the hands of the PLO on the assumption that the gap between Palestinian and Israeli demands could not be bridged. One year after Annapolis, Hamas' gamble appears to have been justified. The "economic peace" that Netanyahu promises the Palestinians instead of negotiations does not come anywhere near answering the expectations of Fatah, which has championed the two-state solution. But Netanyahu's solution is likely to be welcomed by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya. Since winning the Palestinian parliamentary elections in February 2006, Hamas has repeatedly offered Israel both a cease-fire and a cessation of the peace process in return for de facto cooperation in matters of daily life.
Akiva Eldar is a senior columnist and editorial writer at the Israeli daily Haaretz. He is coauthor of "Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements." This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletter publishing contending views of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Copyright The Daily Star 2008.
