By Gwynne Dyer, Contributor FOUR MONTHS ago, I ended an article by quoting David Goldberg, a senior rabbi at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John's Wood, London: "I feel it is going to rain flesh and blood for a while, but then a Palestinian state will emerge. It will then be in Palestinian self-interest to live in peace with Israel, and to deal with their own extremists. I have no doubt that will happen." Well, it's certainly raining flesh and blood now. How about the rest of Goldberg's prediction?
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is trapped in two rooms of his shattered administrative headquarters in Ramallah, while Israeli soldiers roam the rest of the building and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suggests that Arafat be given a 'one-way ticket' into permanent exile. In fact, Sharon recently said that he regretted having promised the US government not to kill Arafat - and an accident would be quite easy to arrange. Amidst all this violence, what reason is there for hope?
The first reason, paradoxically, is that the extremists are now in the saddle on both sides. The Palestinian 'rejectionists' who refuse to accept the very idea of peace with Israel - both the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their secular allies - are in the course of proving that they cannot defeat Israel even when they deploy their ultimate weapon, suicide-bombers. Their mirror images, Sharon and the religious right, are simultaneously demonstrating that even the huge military resources of the Israeli state cannot crush Palestinian resistance.
The notion that enough violence, deployed with enough ruthlessness, can force the other side to do your will is currently being tested to destruction. Through almost a decade of 'peace process', many people on both sides clung to the illusion that if the concessions needed for peace were too painful, they could always turn to the military/terrorist alternative. Now they are trying that alternative, and it isn't working for either side.
The bitter lesson is being taught that if ordinary Israelis and Palestinians want peace, the Israelis will have to dismantle the Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory and Palestinian refugees will have to abandon their 'right of return' to their ancestral homes within Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is quite hard, looking back over the delusional 'peace talks' of the past decade, to imagine how else this lesson might have been learned, but now both peoples are getting a crash course in reality.
The other two reasons for optimism are the recent enormous shifts in the world outside this encysted confrontation. Last month all the Arab states said for the first time that they would agree to live in peace with Israel if there were justice for the Palestinians, and the United States finally dropped its tacit support for the Greater Israel project.
If the Arab League had made Israel the offer it approved at last week's Beirut summit just after the 1967 war, when the Palestinian territories were freshly occupied, almost every Israeli would have jumped at it: full recognition of Israel's right to exist and "normal relations" with all 22 Arab states, in return for a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and a "just solution" for the millions of refugees whose ancestral homes were in what is now Israel.
As the current crisis shows, the choice for Israel is still between peace and the 1948 borders, or perpetual war -- but at least the Arabs are now ready for the deal Israelis would have welcomed in 1967. Last month's proposal came from Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia himself, and was
even endorsed by 'radical' states like Libya and Iraq. If the Israelis want peace, they can have it. They just have to pay the price, 'land for peace', which has not changed a bit since 1967.
The other great change internationally is that the US government has finally, very quietly dropped its support for Israeli expansionism. It is not trumpeting this fact for fear of the domestic political damage that would ensue, and President Bush's public statements are as pro-Israeli as ever -- but last month the United Nations Security Council for the first time passed a resolution endorsing an independent Palestinian state and condemning Israel's "illegal occupation" of the land on which it would be built.
It was the first time because the United States has always vetoed such resolutions in the past. This time, on the contrary, it was the United States that proposed it. Washington is not trumpeting this fact in order to minimise the domestic political damage, but America's Middle Eastern policy is quietly being brought into alignment with actual US interests in the region: the tail no longer wags the dog.
Put all this together, and you have the ingredients for rapid progress to a real peace settlement as soon as the crazies on both sides are discredited. It will rain flesh and blood for a while, and then there will be peace.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
