darktime

In 1988, a left-wing Israeli historian and journalist named Benny Morris published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949," which challenged the traditional Zionist view that the problems of the Palestinian Arabs were entirely of their own making. The book demonstrated that the Palestinians had neither ordered themselves off their land wholesale nor abandoned it voluntarily in hopes of a triumphant and bloody return; on the contrary, they had left their homes in Jaffa and Tiberias, West Jerusalem and Haifa in the hundreds of thousands mostly because they were driven out of them in wartime. The founding of Israel, like that of the United States, was a historical victory but it had not been without its original sin.

Morris does not deny that the Palestinians, first in 1937 and again in 1947, adamantly and foolishly rejected internationally sponsored partition plans and then went to war against the Israelis. But his scholarly deconstruction of a founding myth of the state—a myth enshrined in popular history, high-school textbooks, and standard patriotic rhetoric—met with tremendous resistance. After his book appeared, Morris was eventually fired from his job at the Jerusalem Post. He had trouble getting work in the academy. And yet, with time, the "new historiography" that he helped to cultivate was one of many currents, political and moral, as well as intellectual, that led an increasing number of Israelis to question not the Zionist idea of a Jewish homeland but the blinkered, orthodox version of Zionist history. The French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan once wrote that a nation "is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors." Perhaps, but such unity is not immutable. Most Israelis, weary of the onus of occupation, proved ready to rethink the past and live with, if not adore, the Palestinians. Part of what masked the practical perils of the Oslo Accords of 1993 was the seductive notion that for the first time both sides were prepared to recognize each other and live peacefully as neighbors.

As it turned out, while even most conservative Israelis (including Ariel Sharon) conceded that there would, in the end, be a Palestinian state, the Palestinians had not necessarily altered their own founding myths and intentions. Forget Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their culture of martyrdom and absolute victory. Last year, Faisal Husseini, a decided moderate among Yasir Arafat's leadership ranks, gave an interview not long before he died in which he compared Oslo to a Trojan horse, an intermediate, tactical step leading to the elimination of Israel. He said, "If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: 'From the river to the sea' "—that is, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Right-wingers in Israel have long argued that such remarks reflect the true faith of the Palestinian mainstream. Hope was the reserve of the left. Now, it seems, there is not much hope left, and not much of a left, either—not in the short term, anyway. What is the evidence? A fairly indicative event was the publication in the London Guardian, a few weeks ago, of "Peace? No Chance," an essay by the same Benny Morris, in which he sheepishly concedes that Arafat's rejection of the Israeli and American peace plans in 2000 and the intifada that has raged for a year and a half have left him feeling "a bit like one of those western fellow travelers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956."

Morris is hardly one of those political performance artists (like the Dancing Davids, Brock and Horowitz) who make a career of ideological costume changes. His gloom is emblematic of the mood of many Israelis who for years insisted on moral decency and territorial compromise and now find themselves without a rejoinder to fury. Shlomo Avineri, a prominent academic on the Israeli left, has said, "Whoever expected Yasir Arafat to turn into Nelson Mandela was proved wrong, but admitting it is hard. Incredibly hard." And A. B. Yehoshua, who is among Israel's most distinguished novelists, and who is known for a certain gentleness of rhetoric, told the ArabIsraeli weekly Kul Al-Arab last December, "When Arafat stubbornly insisted on rejecting Barak's proposals at Camp David, he brought a catastrophe upon his Palestinian people. . . . Frankly, I'll tell you that personally, I hate Arafat from the bottom of my heart. The dream which we have been trying to realize since 1967—the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel—amounts today to fiction."

Now each day brings reasons for despair, a new one for every shattered body on every bloodstained gurney, and the surfacing of a peace proposal sponsored by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia does not automatically lift the spirit. The Saudi royal family is eager above all to repair its standing with Washington; its sincerity in the matter of peace with Israel may legitimately be doubted. And yet to stop at despair, in matters political as well as spiritual, is the unforgivable sin. There is no future in it. And there is promise in the idea of the Saudis lining up the governments of the Arab League behind a formal declaration of willingness to accept, recognize, and normalize relations with Israel (on the condition, of course, that Israel make every concession conceivable, and then some). There is promise, too, in the idea that Arafat—old, sick, and unchanging—may eventually be succeeded by one in his camp who will join the Israelis in giving up the divergent fantasies of the past and become serious about mutual compromise and normal life on this earth.

It is impossible to expect the Israelis, left wing or right, to embrace without hesitation such ephemeral-sounding hopes while they are engaged in combatting the suicide-and-murder intifada that is killing everybody, Jew and Palestinian, in body and spirit. But they have responded to promise in dark times before. The Saudis and the Arab League, in general, would do well to pressure the Palestinians to give up their Trojan-horse strategies and settle for lesser dreams. The compromises that are necessary have been obvious for years: an end to occupation and violence; the dismantling of Israeli settlements and the abandonment of Palestinian demands for a "right of return" that would effectively dissolve Israel as a Jewish state; a demilitarized but viable Palestinian state, with borders dictated by the rational demands of security, not the maximal demands of mythology and faith. The choices are difficult. But the alternative is the explosion in the marketplace and the assassin in the grass, and the sirens and the corpses that come after.