The Guardian (UK), Friday October 17, 2003

'We have done the gruntwork of peace'

By Amos Oz

I went to the Israeli-Palestinian conference in Jordan in a

sceptical frame of mind. I estimated that, as so often in

the past, we might succeed in drafting a joint declaration

of principles about the need to make peace, to halt terror,

to end the occupation and oppression, to mutually

recognise each other's rights, and to live as neighbours

in two states for two peoples.

We have done all that many times before, at all kinds of

conferences and gatherings and with agreements and

public statements and what have you. At many points in

the past 10 years we have been in striking distance of

peace, only to slide again into the abyss of violence and

despair.

The same old points of dispute would, I feared, trip us up

again: "the right of return" or a solution to the refugee

problem? "Return to the 1967 borders" or a logical map

that also takes the present into account, and not just

history? Open and explicit recognition of the national

rights of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples to live each

in its own country, or just some equivocating platitude

about "peaceful coexistence"? Explicit Palestinian assent

to finally and absolutely renounce any additional future

claims, or "black holes" that would permit an eventual

renewal of conflict and violence?

In previous agreements, including the Oslo agreement,

the two sides were very careful not to get caught in the

"radioactive core" of the conflict. Refugees, Jerusalem,

end of the conflict, permanent borders - all these

minefields were marked off by white ribbons and their

resolution put off to a better future. The Camp David

conference collapsed, after all, the minute it trod on those

mines.

A two-family house, not a double bed

On the first evening, the members of the two groups meet

for an opening talk. It is a few days after the murder of

families and children at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, a

few hours after the killing of several innocent

Palestinians in Rafiah, children also among them. A

strange ambience pervades the room. Here and there

someone tries to crack a joke, perhaps in order to mask

the mixture of emotion, resentment, suspicion, and

goodwill.

Colonel Shaul Arieli, former commander of the Israel

Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip, sits facing Samir

Rantisi, a cousin of Hamas leader Abd al-Aziz Rantisi.

The son of the late Faisal Husseini, Abd al-Qader al-

Husseini (named after his grandfather, who in my

childhood was referred to as the commander of the Arab

gangs, and who was killed in 1948 in a battle with Israeli

forces) sits facing Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, a

former deputy commander of the Israeli army's strategic

planning division. Next to David Kimche, formerly senior

Mossad official and director-general of Israel's foreign

ministry, sits Fares Kadura, a leader of the Tanzim, a

Palestinian militant guerrilla group.

Through the window, beyond the Dead Sea, we can see

the small cluster of lights that marks Kibbutz Kalia, which

the Geneva document would transfer to Palestinian

control. We also see the large dome of lights marking

Ma'aleh Adumim, the Jerusalem suburb along the road to

Jericho that, according to the same document, would

become an inalienable part of the State of Israel.

We talk and debate (in fluent Hebrew) until after midnight

with Hisham Abd al-Raziq, who spent 21 years - half his

life - in Israeli prisons. Now he serves as the country's

minister for prisoners' affairs. He is almost certainly the

world's only cabinet minister for prisoners' affairs. But our

own minister-prisoner, Natan Scharansky, is apparently

the only person in the entire world who bears the title

"minister for diaspora affairs". Some day, Palestine will

most likely have a minister for diaspora affairs instead of

a minister for prisoners' affairs.

There is a certain intimacy at such meetings: the Israelis

and Palestinians are enemies, but not strangers. The

Swiss observer at the conference was certainly

astonished to see the frequent switches that took place

here, in the rooms and in the corridors, between anger

and back-slapping and between jabs as sharp as slivers

of glass and simultaneous outbursts of laughter.

(Nervous but liberating laughter was brought on by

unintentional double-entendres, such as when an Israeli

said, "Could I detain you for a moment?" and when a

Palestinian said "I'll blow up the meeting on this point.")

When the day comes to sit down with the Syrians, faces

will be rigid and stern on both sides of the negotiating

table. So the Palestinians are, they say, with the Saudis.

But here, in the hotel on the Dead Sea shore (Israeli

Knesset member Chaim Oron and former Palestinian

cabinet minister Yasir Abd-Rabbo walk around in

sandals and shorts) we are more like a long-married

couple in their divorce attorney's waiting room. They and

we can joke together, shout, mock, accuse, interrupt,

place a hand on a shoulder or waist, throw invective at

each other, and once or twice even shed a tear.

Because we and they have experienced 36 years of

intimacy. Yes, a violent, bitter, warped intimacy, but

intimacy, because only they and we, not the Jordanians

and not the Egyptians and certainly not the Swiss, know

exactly what a roadblock looks like and what a car-bomb

sounds like and exactly what the extremists on both

sides will say about us. Because since the Six Day War,

we are as close to the Palestinians as a jailer is to the

prisoner handcuffed to him. A jailer cuffing his wrist to

that of a prisoner for an hour or two is a matter of routine.

But a jailer who cuffs himself to his prisoner for 36 long

years is himself no longer a free man. The occupation

has also robbed us of freedom.

This conference was not meant to inaugurate a

honeymoon between the two nations. Quite the opposite

- it was aimed at, finally, attenuating this warped intimacy.

At drafting a fair divorce agreement. A painful,

complicated divorce, but also one that unlocks the

handcuffs. They will live in their home and we will live in

ours. The Land of Israel will no longer be a prison, or a

double bed. It will be a two-family house. The handcuffed

link between the jailer and his prisoner will become a

connection between neighbours who share a stairwell.

A common memorial

Nabil Qasis, a former president of Bir-Zeit University and

the Palestinian Authority's minister of planning, is a

polite, introverted, melancholy man. He is also a tough

negotiator. He is perhaps the only member of the

Palestinian group who has no inclination to jest or trade

mild jabs with the Israelis. He stops me by the bathroom

door to say: "Try, please, to understand: for me, giving up

the right of return to the cities and villages we lost in 1948

is to change my identity from here on out."

I really do "try to understand". What the words mean is

that Qasis's identity is conditional on the eradication of

my identity.

Afterwards, during a discussion in the meeting room,

Nabil Qasis raises his voice and demands that the word

"return" appear in the document. In exchange, he and his

associates will consent to the word being accompanied

by reservations. Avraham Burg, a religious Labor

member of the Knesset and its former speaker, also

raises his voice. He, too, is angry: let Nabil Qasis give up

part of his national identity just as I, Avraham Burg,

hereby relinquish no less than a part of my religious faith,

inasmuch as I am prepared to agree, with a broken heart,

to Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

For my part, I say that as far as I'm concerned, "return" is

a code name for the destruction of Israel and the

establishment of two Palestinian states on its ruins. If

there's return, there's no agreement. Furthermore, I will

be a party only to a document that contains explicit

recognition of the Jewish people's national right to their

own country.

This was one of any number of difficult moments of crisis

during the conference. In the end, neither the term "right

of return" nor the word "return" appear anywhere in the

document. It speaks of a comprehensive solution of the

entire Palestinian refugee problem, outside the borders

of the State of Israel. Moreover, the document we signed,

the Geneva Initiative, recognises, unequivocally, the right

of the Jewish people to their own country, alongside the

state of the Palestinian people.

As far as I am aware, we have never heard from any

representative Palestinian actor the words "the Jewish

people," and we have certainly not heard any word of

recognition of the Jewish people's national right to

establish an independent state in the Land of Israel.

At 2.30am, over the 15th cup of coffee, in a break between

argument and drafting and between discussion and

bargaining, I tell Yasir Abd-Rabbo and several of his

associates: some day we will have to erect a joint

memorial to horrible folly, yours and ours. After all, you

could have been a free people 55 years ago, five or six

wars ago, tens of thousands of dead ago - our dead and

your dead - had you signed a document similar to this

one in 1948. And we Israelis could have long ago lived in

peace and security had we offered the Palestinian people

in 1967 what this document offers them now. Had we not

been inebriated with victory after the conquests of the Six

Day War.

We'll even bear Sharon on our shoulders

There is no point at all to the hysteria that the document's

opponents are now encouraging. Its authors know very

well that Sharon and his cabinet are the legal

government of Israel. They also knew that their initiative,

which is the fruit of an intense series of meetings

between the parties, conducted in strict secrecy during a

period of two years, is no more than an exercise.

The goal of the exercise is solely to present the Israeli

and Palestinian publics with a window through which

they can view a different landscape - no more car bombs

and suicide bombers and occupation and oppression

and expropriation, no more endless war and hatred.

Instead, here is a detailed, cautious solution that does

not circumvent any one of the fundamental questions.

Its fundamental principle is: we end the occupation and

the Palestinians end their war against Israel. We give up

the dream of Greater Israel and they give up the dream of

Greater Palestine. We surrender sovereignty in parts of

the Land of Israel where our hearts lie, and they do the

same. The problem of the 1948 refugees, which is really

the heart of our national security predicament, is resolved

comprehensively, completely, and absolutely outside the

borders of the State of Israel and with broad international

assistance.

If this initiative is put into action, not a single Palestinian

refugee camp, afflicted with despair, neglect, hatred, and

fanaticism, will remain in the Middle East. In the

document we have in hand, the Palestinian side accepts

contractually, finally, and irrevocably that it does not have

and will never have any future claims against Israel.

At the end of the conference, after the signing of the

Geneva initiative, a representative of the Tanzim told us

that we now perhaps see on the horizon the end of the

100-year war between the Jews and the Palestinians. It

will be replaced, he said, by a bitter struggle between

those on both sides who promote compromise and

peace, and a fanatical coalition of Israeli and Palestinian

extremists.

That struggle is now in full force. Sharon opened it even

before the Geneva initiative was published, and the

leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad rushed to support

him, using the very same vocabulary of vituperation.

What does the Geneva initiative document not have? It

has no teeth. It is no more than 50 pages of paper. But if

the people on both sides accept it, tomorrow or the day

after, they will find that the gruntwork of making peace

has already been done. Almost to the last detail. If

Sharon and Arafat want to use this paper as a basis for

an agreement, its authors will not insist on their

copyright. What if Sharon presents a different, better,

more intricate, more patriotic plan that is also accepted

by the other side? Let him do it. We'll congratulate him.

Even though Sharon, as everyone knows, is a weighty

personage, my friends and I will bear him on our

shoulders.

c) Amos Oz 2003. Amos Oz is one of Israel's leading

novelists and a founder of the Peace Now movement.

Translated by Haim Watzman.

Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited

2003