The Mideast Peace Process:
An Autopsy
by Neal Kozodoy,
San Francisco: Encounter, 2002, 148pp, USD $16.95
Joel Fishman
Neal Kozodoy, editor of Commentary, America’s
leading journal of contemporary Jewish opinion, has selected and published
several essays on the peace process which have appeared in its pages over the
last decade. As the subtitle, “An Autopsy”, suggests, it is his understanding
that the peace process is dead. The work of the following authors appears in
this collection: Neal Kozodoy, David Bar Ilan, Yigal Carmon, Douglas J. Feith,
Dore Gold, Hillel Halkin, Nadav Ha’etzni, Yuval Steinitz, Daniel Pipes, Norman
Podhoretz, Fiamma Nirenstein, Efraim Karsh, and Mark Helprin. These essays are
factual and analytical, reflecting careful efforts to improve our
understanding of this episode in Israel’s history. Many of the authors, either
trained abroad or living abroad, bring a fresh perspective to the subject, one
which transcends the usual terms of reference of the local Israeli debate. The
terms and assumptions of the various authors are far less constricted than in
Israel, where the peace process has the status of a “non-subject”, a type of
black hole, where a challenge to its fundamentals would likely be suppressed
by means of intimidation or encounter icy silence. (At one time, those who
questioned the soundness of the peace process were accused of being against
“The Peace”.)
While David Makovsky’s Making Peace with the PLO
gives a good account of the diplomatic process and the progression of events, Kozodoy’s collection of essays, through its analysis of the basic issues of
public policy, adds a new dimension to our existing knowledge. Both should be
read together. There is a need for this book, because an understanding of the
peace process is vital to the understanding of Israel’s present condition.
Although new facts seep into the public domain from time to time, many of the
most difficult questions relating to the peace process still cannot be
answered. One of the reasons for the present state of affairs is that the “architects
of Oslo” never frankly explained their meaning to the public. Even worse, they
concealed and misrepresented some of its basic aspects. Writing in January
1996, Hillel Halkin described how many Israeli citizens felt:
...the Rabin government continued to keep
secret from its own people what its aims were in the peace process,
including the borders it planned to insist on and its conception of the fate
of tens of thousands of Jewish settlers living beyond them, much of Israel
felt like passengers on a ship that had been hijacked by its own captain and
crew, who were now piloting it through a dense fog and mined waters, with
the consent of half of those aboard, toward an unrevealed and perhaps
calamitous destination.
In this respect, there is a legitimate need to understand
how the concept of the Oslo peace process developed, its basic assumptions,
what the government of Israel expected from the other side in exchange for its
concessions, and what transpired in the end. Even at the time, it was not
possible to grasp its logic. David Bar Ilan described the situation as it
looked to him in September 1993:
The Labor government’s negotiating
strategy is not easy to fathom. From the start, Rabin made one concession
after another without a hint of reciprocation. Before the tenth post-Madrid
round he declared – implicitly acknowledging what he had been doing up to
that point – that the time of one-sided concessions was over. But he never
said what he expected of the Arab side.
Considering the great civilian losses that resulted from
this peace process (over 1,100), the polarization of public life, the strains it
placed on Israeli society in general, and the destruction of the economy, the
issues which these contemporaries raised must still be addressed. The
following are several points that the various contributors have raised:
-
According to Dore Gold, the Rabin government did not
have the benefit of expert and impartial advisors, and according to Yigal
Carmon,
the Israelis were there [on August 20,
1993 in Norway at the secret ceremony to initial the DOP] for one of the
most momentous diplomatic moves in history – without having consulted a
single military authority, a single intelligence officer, or a single expert
on Arab affairs.
-
One of the central fallacies of Oslo was the assumption
that the PLO would protect Israel from terror. In his discussion of the
subject, Dore Gold acknowledged David Makovsky who wrote the pioneering
monograph, Making Peace with the PLO (1996). Makovsky stated that the
assumption that the PLO would fight terror “appears to be one of the big
miscalculations of Oslo”.
-
There is another point which seems to be continuously overlooked in
the Israeli debate, and that is how the peace process represented a
departure from Israel’s parliamentary democratic tradition. Hillel Halkin
explained that Labor abandoned its official 1992 campaign platform, which,
among other things, contained the following planks:
Israel will continue and complete
negotiations with authorized and agreed-on Palestinians from the territories
occupied by Israel since 1967... There is a need for an agreement in a
Jordanian-Palestinian framework... and not a separate Palestinian state west
of Jordan... Jerusalem will remain united and undivided under Israeli
sovereignty... In any peace agreement with Syria, Israel’s presence and
control, both military and in terms of settlements, will continue [on the
Golan Heights].
When the Rabin government
abandoned the positions to which it was publicly committed and also displayed
a radical
reversal of Israel’s traditional policies, it should have called new elections
in order to secure a new mandate. In Halkin’s view, the failure to do so
constituted a serious violation of the democratic process. He wrote:
...it is one thing to lie about ordinary
matters of political expediency, another to lie about a momentous decision
that will profoundly affect the future of one’s country for as long as it
continues to exist. If the question of Israel’s borders, of their location,
and of their defensibility, of who lives and rules on either side of them,
and of their relationship to the claims of thousands of years of Jewish
history is not something about which to consult the Israeli public within
the framework of democratic politics, what is democracy for?
Within a broader perspective, Norman Podhoretz explained
that Israel’s leaders had not been truthful with the public. He wrote that the
unbearable reality which Rabin and Peres evaded was that
Israel’s yearning for peace was shared
neither by the Arab world in general nor by the Palestinians in particular –
that their objection was not to anything that Israel had done or failed to
do, but to the very fact that it existed at all. Then, as time went on, and
episode after episode occurred exposing the illusion of Oslo for what it
was, more and more rationalizations had to be invented, and more lies had to
be told, to keep it alive.
The basic problem, according to Podhoretz, was the very
proposition that the peace process would bring peace.
This discussion brings us to the larger issue, namely the
government’s obligation of truthfulness to its citizens. The obligation exists
in all democracies but is all the more important in a land of citizen
soldiers. This is part of the original “Iska”, which dates from the early days
of the state and is the implied contract upon which our reserve system is
based. It is a matter of crucial importance that the public’s trust in its
elected representatives be preserved, because this is the foundation of
democratic legitimacy. (It is for this reason that Israel’s enemies are
working with their allies in Israeli society to undermine this relationship,
because if it can be done, the country will not be able to defend itself.) In
the last resort, the healthy functioning of a democracy must be based on truth
and trust and not the manipulation of public opinion through cynical tactics.
The publication of this book raises a second issue,
namely, the need for a critical and authoritative history of the failed peace
process, based on documents and interviews. In this respect, we may learn from
the example of postwar Netherlands. With the Liberation, the Kingdom of the
Netherlands commissioned an official history of that country during the Second
World War, and Professor Lou de Jong, Director of the Netherlands State
Institute for War Documentation, wrote the multi-volumed account, The
Kingdom of the Netherlands during the Second World War (Het Koninkrijk
der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog). It was an honest history,
which covered nearly all aspects of the Dutch experience, including the high
incidence of collaboration with the Nazis on all levels of society, including
the bureaucracy and the police force. Although some aspects of this account
were absolutely horrifying, it enabled Holland to confront its past. On the
whole, the effect of this contribution was favorable. In contrast, the history
of Israel has many blank spots. For example, there is no authoritative history
of the political and military failure of the Yom Kippur War. Further, the fact
that many aspects of the War for Independence and the early history of the
State had not been examined critically and authoritatively created a moment of
opportunity for the New Historians. By the same logic, Israeli society clearly
needs a critical examination of the peace process and a full appreciation of
why it went wrong. In this respect, it would be valuable to document the
financial relationships between the Palestinian and Israeli political elites.
Such a recommendation should not be viewed as partisan but in the national
interest.
In a healthy democracy, it is important for a
well-educated public to be conversant with the national past. This factual
awareness and the perspective it would afford is necessary for the formulation
of sound public policy. In this light, there is the assertion by one of the “architects
of Oslo”, Shimon Peres, that history is misleading and lacking in merit.
Moreover, it should be remembered that with good reason totalitarian regimes
blot out and falsify history. Cultivating historical amnesia is a basic means
of controlling and manipulating the public.
Kozodoy’s book, The Mideast Peace Process: An Autopsy,
has the virtue of offering a well-chosen selection of essays which give a
clear and balanced understanding of the subject. His contribution is brief and
elegant. This fine book might have been just a bit more complete with two
extra essays: one on the role of the American administration, and the other on
that of the European Union. It is a need and guarantee of a democracy that the
public be properly informed. For this reason, this excellent collection of
essays should be translated and published in Hebrew.
