1967 – An ambivalent anniversary

This year more than ever, Israel is under the spotlight. This week in particular, the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, brings the country into even sharper focus. Extremists and rejectionists everywhere are in their element, pointing fingers and distributing moral brownie points; on Saturday the Enough! coalition is taking to the streets of London under the banner of ‘ending the occupation’, cloaking their true desire to erase the ‘Zionist entity’. Right-wing Zionists celebrate the Six Day War as an unmitigated success when the Land of Israel was ‘liberated’. Caught in the middle are Progressive Zionists, the subject of derision from both right and left. Since it was formed in 1992, Meretz has been a key player in the Israeli Peace Movement, becoming a major force during the Rabin-era when Yossi Beilin, its present leader, was architect of the Oslo Accords. In downtown Manhattan, Swords and Ploughshares reflected on this bittersweet occasion with Executive Director of Meretz USA, Charney Bromberg.

What will Meretz be doing to mark this anniversary?
I just spoke with Yael Dayan who will be an important voice since she represents the lineage of her father [Moshe] who was so central to the events of 1967. Yael was saying that the Peace Camp should be talking about this 40th anniversary, not simply in terms of commemorating 40 years of occupation and trauma for the Palestinians, but also finding a way of saying in the Jewish tradition that 40 years have past now and it’s time to look forward to positive change. Israel, I expect, will look at the 40th anniversary in ambivalent ways; as the anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem which for Meretz, and I would say the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, has to be interpreted in a positive light even if it is still a complicated, unresolved issue. The absence of any kind of political plan that will move things forward, means that the occupation goes on. Almost by definition, it becomes an uglier and more traumatic and entrenched proposition.

Hopefully for Israel the 40th anniversary becomes a time for some real stocktaking about what this whole 40 year experiment with the role of political and military strength has meant for Israel, what its advantages and implications are. What I’m hoping is that because Israeli politics and politicians are so weak, the philosophers of the country will find a way to jog the country.

In parts of Israeli society terms like ‘liberal’ and ‘leftist’ are banded around as terms of derision. How can the Israeli Peace Movement shake off this negative perception?
I used to have an easy answer to that, which is that the Movement needed to take ownership of the issues of consensus which the Israeli public has gradually moved towards. That is: a two-state solution, the end of occupation, the cost and negative impact of the settlements. These issues were the positions of the Peace Camp until Rabin joined and moved towards peace with Oslo and then even Sharon, in his own way, masterfully co-opted these positions and infused them with a hard defensive core. The settlements were a problem, and he was able to say that publicly, in terms of Israel’s security and international position, but Israel would deal with them on its own terms, which was unilateralism. So obviously for Meretz this created an interesting conundrum. Even though we understood and foresaw the disasters unilateralism would deliver, we also believe that whatever could be done to get Israel out of the settlements and the Palestinian territories was good.

But why is there no longer an easy answer? There’s no longer an easy answer because of the intifadas, particularly the second intifada, and the confusion about what happened at Camp David and subsequently at Taba. But the bottom line is that the violence that ensued pretty much stripped away the level of confidence that was built around the Peace Process. That level of confidence and integrity of the Palestinians was a critical ingredient, but it was sorely broken. Israel bears a huge responsibility in having broken the credibility of the peace elements within the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the PLO, not that they didn’t co-operate of their own free will or inability to do otherwise. So I think it’s a very tough proposition now.

It seems that every few months a new ‘peace plan’ is being proposed. Do you think we need these new initiatives to banish the ghosts of Oslo, or are they just reinventing the wheel?
Well, banishing the ghosts of Oslo is an interesting proposition. Oslo had enormous strengths and enormous weaknesses and it was really a measure of the popular and political will to determine whether the strengths or weaknesses would be the dominant factor. Oslo failed, in my judgement, because there were elements in Israel and among the Palestinians who wanted it to fail. And then all the structural flaws in Oslo became really cosmic, endemic flaws. You look at the basic structural composition of Olso to divide the Palestinian areas into sectors A, B and C which was meant to bring quickly the majority of the Palestinian population under the Palestinian Authority. But what its also did was create something that hadn’t existed before Oslo which: the tremendous number of checkpoints and demarcation lines between the three areas which became tension points in the relationship that began to wear down the feeling that Israel was serious about peace, and obviously the failure on the part of Barak and other Governments to cut settlements.

So, do we need these new plans? We need a new psychology and at the moment I’m on the pessimistic side that it’s there. It’s very hard for people to take seriously the idea of change without some engine, some external force, helping to guide the issue. So the Saudi Initiative, which the US allowed Sharon to trash [in 2002], comes back with some real strengths and weaknesses – but it was meant to break the logjam. But there’s nobody sitting at the table saying, we can get past this. We need a third party capable of doing that when the Israeli Government and public confidence is so weak. It is very important that these plans come forward rather than everybody just crawling into their own hole, saying it just can’t happen, and we’ll wait for some event, or some major change in American Government. But I am convinced that the key critical failure right now lies with the United States.

Where does Meretz fit into this and why do you think it is relevant today?
Meretz is relevant and will always be relevant in the sense that, as a political party, it has the individuals who are most creative in putting forward ideas and making contacts. Yossi Beilin is still the most creative thinker and I think history is going to view him as a far bigger force in Israeli politics, as the man behind Oslo and Geneva. If one looks at where Tzipi Livni is and things she has said and what Condi Rice has said, they are almost exact duplicates of ideas that Beilin has been putting out to break the logjam.

Jonathan Freedland said that what looked like a blessing at the time has turned into a curse for Israel. He “genuinely fears” that in 40 years from now “there will be no Israel left to defend”. Do you think these existential fears are justified?
You know, we came so close with Oslo… I wouldn’t have predicted that Sharon would have inflicted on Israelis and Palestinians, with America’s support, such disastrous policies. He decided he would discredit the PA but didn’t stop to think that wouldn’t rid him of the Palestinians as a people or geopolitical, geographical reality. But things do change. I think it’s absolutely critical that a new American administration has the drive to think about this creatively and new Israelis work to understand the Likud paradigm [that peace is not so much as attainable by bilateral duties between Israel and its neighbours as it is by securing protection for Israel’s right to exist], which means to accept the realities that exist right now and deconstruct them. I can understand why [Freedland] would write that and there’s a part of me that would feel the same. But I know too many Palestinians, people who are the best educated, most Western Arabs in the Middle East, that hate Arab autocracies and who have not succumb to the Islamists. And I pray that those forces can be rescued.