DAVID TWERSKY
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Arab city on the West Bank. Or, if you will, in the pools of Hebron .
But this government is unable to offer the olive branch.
Aluf Hareven, writing in
Ha 'aretz,
sympathizes with the war's
aims but opposes the war itself on existential grounds. He sees the
aims as the elimination of the PLO and the isolation of Syria as the
only actively hostile front
to
Israel-aims that, if achieved, would
guarantee Israeli security and postpone indefinitely the Palestinian
question on the international agenda. "No one can dismiss these
goals, if they can be achieved; but we could exist without them."
This is the core of the existential critique of the war: How many
times can you demand that your citizens be prepared for the ulti–
mate sacrifice when there are other choices available ?
In response, Begin and Sharon held out the image of a Lebanon
free of the PLO and ruled by a stable, strong central government. It
would be Israel's aim to sign a peace treaty with such a Lebanese
government. Furthermore, the destruction of the PLO would free
Arab moderates on the West Bank, who currently fear PLO reprisal.
Moderates
is a word whose meaning has changed. Once used by
Israelis to describe Arabs who are willing
to
recognize Israel and live
alongside it in peace, then used by the Americans to mean pro–
Western Arabs (no matter what their position on peace with Israel),
the Likud government is now using the term to mean Arabs who will
play along with the Begin version of autonomy, that is, a one-way
ticket to Israeli annexation . Shlomo Gazit has called this a policy of
searching for quislin gs. Perhaps a bit cruel, but he's caught the basic
thrust of Menachem Milson's Village Leagues: theoretically, the
building up of a rural and more conservative leadership to bypass
the big city mayors, all radicals of one stripe or another. Milson's
approach is based on a rejection of the late Moshe Dayan's policy
from 1967 to 1974 of, in Milson's view, encouraging PLO support
on the West Bank so as to reduce the likelihood of Israel's ever nego–
tiating along the lines of the late Yigal Allon's territorial compro–
mise with Jordan, the policy still favored by the Labor Party major–
ity. Milson's tragedy is that he hitched his policy to Sharon's
annexationist scenarios; and despite his assurances, to Flora Lewis
of the
Times
last April, for example, that ultimately even Begin and
Sharon will be willing to discuss the West Bank-look what they did
with Sinai-one shouldn't entertain too many illusions. In any
event, the war is a direct extension of the policies Milson and Sharon
have been pursuing on the West Bank over the past year.
