Newsday

'Bad News' Is Framework for Peace

By Gershom Gorenberg
Gershom Gorenberg, an associate editor of the Jerusalem Report, is the author of "The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount."

August 8, 2002

Sunday is the first day of the Israeli workweek. It began with news that at a country junction in the forested hills of the Galilee, next to the sandwich joint serving vacationers on their way to summer cottages, a terrorist had blown up a bus. "Dozens injured," said the radio announcer, gulping for air - meaning that the number of dead would soon follow.

But by the time that news came in it had to compete with the attack outside Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, where a terrorist with two pistols had opened fire on a phone-company truck. And that news soon slipped to item two after the shooting at an Israeli bus on a West Bank road. By now it was all of early afternoon at the start of a fresh week.

These are bad news days. Even to suggest grounds for optimism seems crazy. Yet, the headlines about bloodshed tell only part of what's happening. Alongside the violence, there are hints of weariness and rethinking that could open the way to peacemaking. The crucial question is how many more lives will be lost before that opportunity is seized - by Israelis and Palestinians, and by the one outside force capable of forceful diplomacy, the U.S. administration.

This week, for instance, the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace at Tel Aviv University released its monthly poll on Israeli attitudes. At first glance, the results showed a predictable hardening of opinion: Today one half of Israeli Jews define themselves as "right wing," which is to say hawkish, on security and foreign policy, while barely a quarter call themselves left wing. Anger at terror, you'd say, has convinced Israelis they can't compromise.

Yet, when the pollsters asked about specific issues, they saw a very different mood: Sixty-one percent say they support creating a Palestinian state as part of a lasting peace agreement - including half the self-declared rightists, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's constituency.

Most striking is the attitude toward the symbolic issue at the heart of the conflict: the future of the Temple Mount, aka Haram al-Sharif, the Jerusalem holy site claimed by both nations. Today 53.5 percent of Israeli Jews are ready for a peace agreement in which no one would have sovereignty over the site. Palestinians would administer the Haram itself for Muslims, while Israel would administer the Western Wall at its edge, where Jews pray.

Just two years ago, the Temple Mount was a key reason that the Camp David summit failed. Each side insisted it had to own those 35 sacred acres, out of loyalty to its faith and history. When then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak indicated afterward he might compromise, he provoked Ariel Sharon's visit to the site - which ignited the current conflict.

With the Israeli army shutting off movement in the West Bank, no one can poll Palestinian opinion. But two weeks ago Ziad Abu Zayyad, a member of the Palestinian legislative council and ex-minister for Jerusalem affairs, spoke publicly at a conference in Belgium. He presented a proposed set of principles for peace. One principle was that there'd be no sovereignty at the disputed holy site. Another was that Palestinian refugees would realize the right of return to their homeland by settling in the Palestinian state - not Israel. That would defuse another of the issues that blocked peace two years ago. For Abu Zayyad, a mainstream politician, to take those positions suggests careful estimation that the Palestinian public is ready to consider them.

Two years ago, peace capsized because each side insisted it had gone as far as it could. The other side would just have to accept its positions. Barak tried using international pressure to get Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to accept his last, best offer. When the intifada began, the Palestinians presumed that violence - and world sympathy for the underdog - would force Israel to accept their position.

Today there's far more bitterness, far less trust than during the Oslo process. Yet Israelis and Palestinians are realizing they can't just bend the other side to their vision of peace. The situation is somewhat parallel to that at the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Both Egypt and Israel could claim victory - but both knew they'd lost, and began negotiating.

There's one big difference: Back then, the United States saw the opportunity - and the immense gain for American interests that Mideast peace represented. The Nixon, Ford and, most of all, the Carter administrations stepped in forcefully to bring peace. Today President George W. Bush is doing virtually nothing - except, perhaps, keeping his secretary of state from diving in. Bush appears eager to wage war in Iraq, but utterly unwilling to wage peace in the Holy Land. That's really bad news.