DAVID TWERSKY
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nalized it. The situation is increasingly depressing because, com–
pared to the unfortunate (if unavoidable) occupation, the new
occupation-with-intent-to-annex is worse. As Abba Eban has writ–
ten, "the State of Israel is a democracy, the Land of Israel is not."
Thus we live in a confused set of overlapping maps. And the land of
Israel, in some ways, is more real than the State ofIsrael, because it
embraces the current political experience.
One by-product of these developments is the increasing knowl–
edge about the West Bank among Israelis. Deeply stung by the Syr–
ian-launched attack on Arafat's Fatah, which ended in Arafat's sec–
ond forced departure from Lebanon in two years, West Bank Arabs
have begun to speak openly in favor of a rapprochement with Jordan
and an unequivocable peace initiative toward Israel. When a bomb
went off on a West Jerusalem bus on December 6, killing two young
girls and an old man, Arafat's WAFA news agency claimed credit for
the attack. But former mayors Khareem Halaf, Rashad a Shawa,
Anwar Nusseiba, Mustafa Natashe, and the editors of the East
Jerusalem (and pro PLO) Al fajr newspaper condemned the attack
as "an obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian understanding." (Halaf is
himself the victim of a car bomb which blew off one leg.) These ac–
tivists speak of a "Labour Party" option and understand the nuances
of Israeli society -less and less does one encounter the traditional
Palestinian "rejectionist" argument that "all Zionists are the same"
and that the Likud is merely the naked iron fist without Labour's
deceptive velvet glove. What bothers some observers is the nagging
doubt that Arafat might want to "pull a Sadat." They fear that he
ultimately might maneuver towards a superpower enforced Israeli
withdrawal from the territories - with the 1956 Israeli withdrawal
from Sinai as the paradigm. However, if that were to be his ploy,
Arafat should not be encouraged to think that he could have "peace
on the cheap."
There are proposals for getting the West Bank situation off its
present disastrous course (e.g. a unilaterally imposed autonomy,
new elections for mayors, a freeze on Jewish settlements), but these
probably require a change of government in Jerusalem. This possi–
bility is no longer as remote as it once may have appeared, as the
economic situation and Lebanon have led to the Likud's decline in
popularity.
Although the post-Begin government is less confrontationalist
in tone, its policy essentially is not different. In terms of Lebanon,
