Cultivating opportunities for peace
By GIL TROY
The Canadian Jewish News, May 20, 1999/Sivan 5, 5759

When May 4, Yasir Arafat's "sacred day," passed with no declaration of Palestinian statehood, most Jews sighed with relief.

Those on the left, hailed Arafat's discipline; he refused to endanger the Oslo accords and guarantee Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's re-election. Those on the right, celebrated the end of Oslo's five-year interim period and another Palestinian retreat.

There was a farcical, emperor-has-no-clothes element to this statehood declaration crisis. For like it or not, the Palestinians already have a state. But, even worse, this pinched, tactical, legalistic, too-clever-by-half approach to Oslo - from both the left and the right - is shameful and telling. And it will continue, irrespective of the outcome of this week's election in Israel.

It reflects our overall failure, in Israel and abroad, to embrace what may have been an extraordinary opportunity.

For years, Zionists yearned for peace - publicly, flamboyantly, promiscuously. Whether we sang Oseh Shalom - He who Makes peace - in the synagogue, or the hipper Shir LaShalom - song for peace - on the beach, we united in our peace fetish. "If only we had someone to negotiate with," we mourned. "If only the Arabs yearned for peace as intensely as we do," we sighed. "Ach, those Palestinians, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," we sneered.

Then along came Oslo, abruptly, surprisingly, miraculously. Seemingly overnight, we would negotiate with our fiercest enemies. Arafat, the murderer became a "moderate," the "peacemaker."

From the start, Oslo was an ugly agreement. It was messy, ambiguous, complicated, with too many pages, too many stages, too many maps, and too many unanswered questions. It rapidly became an ugly peace, as the healing image of Bill Clinton shepherding Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat into their awkward but sincere handshake dissolved into the heartbreaking images from the buses of Jerusalem, from the streets of Tel Aviv, of twisted metal, charred flesh, massacred commuters, murdered schoolchildren.

With the bombings, and with Rabin's assassination, extremists on both sides prevailed. Bad enough to leave something as precious as peace to politicians, abandoning it to fanatics was sinful. The history of the last five years proves that evil is singular, good plural. One single individual can do great harm, while good can only be sustained if it is mass produced.

Unfortunately, even with such sobering mathematics, many of us fiddled while Oslo fizzled.

How many Jews - in Israel or the Diaspora - did anything to make the peace work? Who among us lifted a finger to plant this peace in the grassroots, to nurture a workable reconciliation between neighbors, rather than an awkward ceasefire between enemies? Few Israelis approached individual Palestinians, while we in the Diaspora simply parroted the left-right debate. Few of us, there or here, did anything to "bring peace upon us and on all of Israel," as the prayer hopes; or "let the sun rise, the morning enlighten," as the song pleads.

After Oslo, five years ago, many Jews believed that the Palestinians had to bring peace to us. We said if they wanted to jump up and down in their jalabiyahs and call for jihad, holy war, the bloodshed would continue. However, if they calmed down and found common ground, the peace might work. In putting the onus on them, we waited for them to fail, we may have helped create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

True, Arafat continued to speak with his forked tongue, talking peace in English, and jihad in Arabic. He whispers sweet nothings into Clinton's ears and breathes fire to his people. True, their side repeatedly violated the letter and spirit of the agreements. True, their extremists began the violence. And true, real strength comes from geopolitical realities, not group hugs.

Still, all but the most zealous of rejectionists will concede that the last five years would have been different had the peace brought dramatic social, cultural, and economic changes.

The Netanyahu-Arafat minuet would look very different against an elaborate lattice of friendships, exchanges, investments. Yet, few of us tried to transcend the past; most remained imprisoned by hostility or passivity. Most Israelis were wary - justifiably; most Diaspora Jews were disengaged - understandably.

In waiting for "the peace" or the Palestinians to bring something to us, rather than going out and forging new facts on the ground, one of the great breakthroughs of the 1990s did little to change the status quo. Even if our sins have been sins of omission, not commission, we, too, have failed. Bobby Kennedy was right. By not being part of the solution, we became part of the problem. Few of us were zealots for peace, few embraced it, nurtured it, indulged it; those who did, most of us dismissed as starry-eyed peaceniks. We treated Oslo like a piece of paper to quibble about, rather than the chance for peace between peoples we craved.

Now we have something else in common with the Palestinians - besides a passionate attachment to the same, small, sacred piece of real estate. These days, alas, it seems that both Jews and Palestinians rarely miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

The time has come for all of us to start cultivating opportunities for peace, whoever wins the election.

Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University.