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West Bank and Gaza. The Peace Now conviction about these zones
is that Israel should never annex them, nor should it attempt to
Judaify those territories by building settlements . To make it even
emphatic, if all the heads of the Arab nations convened at midnight
tonight and decided to give those territories - the West Bank and
Gaza - on a silver platter to Israel for its thirty-seventh birthday, I
would still say, "No thanks, this is bound to turn Israel into another
Belfast; we don't want it ." The other thing is the Peace Now convic–
tion that it is time to reaffirm the Israeli national consensus over war
and peace - that is, never fight an optional war, like the war in
Lebanon. Fight only when the very existence of the nation is at
stake. Nothing short of that justifies a full-scale war. Harassment,
infiltration, terrorism, hijacking only justify sometimes limited
military measures, as opposed to a full-scale war. That's Peace Now
in a nutshell.
ASG:
Why did you leave the Labor Party in the early 1960s?
AO:
Because at that time I thought Ben-Gurion was leading the
Labor Party into a policy which he described as "mamlachtiyut" - an
almost untranslatable Hebrew term whose closest English rendering
would be "statism." He was in the process of reducing the value of
voluntary movements, minimizing the importance of individual
responsibility in society . In short, he expected the Israelis just to sit
back in their chairs and enjoy what their government was doing for
them.
ASG:
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol is a character in your latest novel,
A Perfect Peace,
set in 1966. Did you know him?
AO:
Very well . Moreover, I loved him. Our acquaintance started
with a now-archaeological business called the Lavon Affair in Israel
in the early sixties, a complex political affair into which I will not
dive right now. Anyway, I criticized Eshkol in a newspaper article. I
was frightfully young at that time - about nineteen or twenty - and I
called him all sorts of names of which I am somewhat ashamed now.
He invited me for a personal conversation , gave me a wonderful
monologue - you know this was a generation of monologue-makers
rather than of conversationalists, as you could have seen in
A Perfect
Peace-
and I quite thoroughly fell in love with him. This is not to say
that I didn't scream and yell at him, and go on criticizing his
policies, but I loved him dearly . He was a wonderful man. He was
one of those very few politicians - and I have known many politi–
cians in my life-who was humane all the way, who had a genuine
