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.Arafat refused tomake peace and survived; Barak failed to make peace and wasdefeated (we can learn something about the constituencies of thetwo men from this contrast).It is true that the state of the nego-tiations and the proposals on the table at Camp David and Tabaare still in dispute.The people who were at the table disagreeamong themselves; I have no private information to bring to thisargument.But it seems reasonably clear that each successivemove in the negotiating process brought the Palestinians nearerto statehood and sovereign control over something close to (andwith each move closer to) the whole of the territories.The claimthat the Palestinians were offered nothing more than a discon-122T H E F OU R WA R S OF I S R A E L / P A L E S T I NEnected set of   Bantustans  seems to be false; an almost fullyconnected Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza would still havebeen separate territories) was at least a possible and even a likelyoutcome of the ongoing negotiations, whatever was actually of-fered at this or that moment.So the decision to walk away fromthe process and to begin, and then to militarize, the second inti-fada is very hard to understand especially hard because we haveto assume that Arafat knew that Palestinian violence guaranteedthe defeat of Barak s center-left government.It isn t a crazy con-clusion that he simply wasn t interested in or, when the criticalmoment came, wasn t prepared for a historic compromise and anend to the conflict even if the compromise brought with it asovereign state on the West Bank and Gaza.Hence the order of the four wars in my presentation.I put warnumber one, for the destruction of the state of Israel, ahead ofwar number two, for statehood in the territories, because it ap-pears that statehood could have been achieved without any war atall.And I put the war for Greater Israel after the defensive warfor Israeli security because the previous Israeli government wasprepared to renounce territorial   greatness  entirely.But if thePalestinians make a serious effort to repress the terrorist organi-zations, and if that effort does not move the Sharon governmentto rethink its position on the territories, then these orderingswould have to be revised.In any case, all four wars are now inprogress: what can we say about them?The first war has to be defeated or definitively renounced.Critics of Israel in Europe and at the United Nations have made aterrible mistake, a moral as well as a political mistake, in fail-ing to acknowledge the necessity of this defeat.They have con-demned each successive terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, often123C A S E Sin stronger language than Arafat has used, but they have notrecognized, let alone condemned, the succession itself, the at-tacks taken together, as an unjust war against the very existenceof Israel.There have been too many excuses for terrorism, toomany efforts to   understand  terror as a response (terrible, ofcourse) to the oppressiveness of the occupation.It is likely, in-deed, that some terrorists are motivated by personal encounterswith the occupying forces or by a more general sense of thehumiliation of being occupied.But many other people have re-sponded differently to the same experience: there is an ongoingargument among Palestinians (as there was in the IRA and theAlgerian FLN) about the usefulness and moral legitimacy of ter-ror.Palestinian sympathizers on the European left and elsewhereshould be very careful not to join this argument on the side of theterrorists.Winning the second war, for the establishment of a Palestinianstate, depends on losing or renouncing the first.That depen-dence, it seems to me, is morally clear; it hasn t always beenpolitically clear.If there ever is a foreign intervention in theIsraeli/Palestinian conflict, one of its goals should be to clarifythe relationship of the first and second wars (and also of the thirdand fourth).The Palestinians can have a state only when theymake it clear to the Israelis that the state they want is one thatstands alongside Israel.At some point, a Palestinian leader (it isunlikely to be Arafat) will have to do what Anwar Sadat did in1977: welcome Israel as a Middle Eastern neighbor.Since Israelalready exists, and Palestine doesn t, one might expect the wel-come to come from the other direction.Perhaps it should; atsome point, certainly, the welcome must be mutual.But the ex-tent of the terror attacks now requires the Palestinians to find124T H E F OU R WA R S OF I S R A E L / P A L E S T I NEsome convincing way to repudiate the slogan that still echoes attheir demonstrations:   Kill the Jews! The relation of the third and fourth wars is symmetrical to thatof the first and second: war number four, for Greater Israel, mustbe lost or definitively renounced if war number three, for Israelitself, is to be won.The March-April 2002 attacks on West Bankcities, and the return of Israeli soldiers to those same cities inJune-July, would be much easier to defend if it was clear that theaim was not to maintain the occupation but only to end or reducethe terrorist threat.In the absence of a Palestinian war on terror,an Israeli war is certainly justifiable.No state can fail to defendthe lives of its citizens (that s what states are for).But it was amorally necessary prelude to that war that the Sharon govern-ment declare its political commitment to end the occupation andbring the settlers home (many of them, at least: the actual num-ber will depend on a negotiated agreement on final borders forthe two states).Perhaps U.N.officials would have condemnedthe Israeli war anyway, whatever the government s declared com-mitments, but the condemnations could then have been seen asacts of hostility not to be confused with serious moral judg-ments.As it was, the fierce argument about the massacre-that-never-happened in Jenin obscured the real moral issue, whichwas not the conduct of the battles but the political vision of thegovernment that ordered them.The conduct of the battles seemsto have conformed to the standards of just war theory, though theuse of air power (for example, against the Gaza apartment housein July) has not always done so.The current occupation of Pales-tinian cities and the practice of collective punishment imposeunjustifiable hardships on the civilian population.In battle, how-ever, the Israeli army regularly accepted risks to its own men in125C A S E Sorder to reduce the risks that it imposed on the civilian popula-tion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]