DAVID TWERSKY
597
making will survive beyond Beirut, no matter what. To break the
vicious cycle, we must look back to the pools of Hebron from
Lebanon's summer slope. "The solution isn ' t in Beirut but in
Schem." Israel must restrain its annexationism; the Palestinians
must loudly endorse Israel's right to exist.
As to the U .S., cluster bombs aside, a policy along the lines laid
down by Henry Kissinger in his
Wtzshington Post
article on June 16
seems to me the most promising: "It is neither desirable nor possi–
ble," he writes, "to return to the status quo in Lebanon, but neither
is it desirable or possible to sustain the status quo on the West Bank .
. . . [As to the West Bank], the deadlock cannot be broken unless the
territorial basis for autonomy is defined.... That basis cannot be
the 1967 borders . . .. An American policy based on the indepen–
dence of Lebanon, fulfillment of attainable Arab goals on the West
Bank and protection of the balance of power and institutions in the
Arab Peninsula would reconcile all our objectives with those of our
friends in the area, Arab as well as Israeli." Or as Anthony Lewis,
who advocates appointing Kissinger as a kind of special ambassador
to the Middle East, puts it, "[America must] tell the Israelis that
they have come to a limit , [and] tell the Arabs that the Palestinian
cause should be carried on politically, away from Beirut." The
Israeli limit is not merely Beirut; it is the annexationism now under
way, in Schem and in Hebron .
It
will take a great deal of time to be able to tell whether
Lebanon's summer slope above the Be'eka and the
wadis
and the sea
will lead Israel out of the circle of war or back down a slippery slide
into further entanglements. Back to the passes and impasses where
ignorant-and not so ignorant-armies clash .
Isaac Rosenberg never came back from his war; heroism wasn't
enough. We need a strategy for survival.
It
is clear that the PLO
leadership is a complete failure, having needlessly prolonged the suf–
fering of its own people.
It
is clear also that Begin's annexationist
fantasies, however advanced into reality, are equally incompatible
with a peace process.
We've gone to the trenches-too often.
Now we must draw up the peace.
July 28, 1982
Kibbutz Gezer
