Why Israel Needs a Gentle Intifadeh Victory

By Michael Kramer

As diplomatic theory, its charm remains irresistible: the intifadeh is a blessing in disguise. A rising spiral of violence and economic dislocation will propel Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization to concessions deemed impossible before the Palestinian uprising began in December 1988. Get a peace process going, reason the U.S.'s Middle East savants. Any process. Get the parties a little bit pregnant, and there will be no turning back.

They are right about the pain, but they forget about the fear. In politics -- and especially political negotiations -- abortion is never illegal.

Israel's intercommunal war is steadily escalating. As in Lebanon, vigilante violence strikes innocents engaged in the most prosaic activities. As a result, people on both sides of the conflict have come to feel that even their individual survival hangs in the balance. Those who contend that the recent Palestinian attack on a bus full of civilians could be something other than a foretaste of future horrors are urged to recall that after 18 months of sticks and stones, the intifadeh command last month instructed its followers to "kill a settler or a soldier for every martyr of our people." And those who dismiss the settlers' increasing resort to acts of revenge as the scattered expressions of madmen are similarly out of touch.

On the ground, the rhetoric of peace counts for nothing. Few Israelis believe that the vast distance traveled by Yasser Arafat toward a credible negotiating position is anything but a ruse. The P.L.O.'s apparent readiness to bless a peace initiative whose salient points are at best ambiguous is dismissed as derisively as its earlier recognition of Israel's right to exist. The majority of Israeli Jews scorn as naive the possibility that the Palestinians may finally have decided to "settle" for something short of everything. How could they?, asks Yitzhak Shamir; the central problem has never changed: "We think the land is ours, and they think it is theirs."

From this, the Prime Minister's bottom line, a dangerous notion transcends Israel's current internal political crisis. It is the idea that the intifadeh must be defeated rather than merely calmed.

Surprisingly, the insistence on victory comes from both ideological poles, but for very different reasons. On the right, the unstated premise is simply put: no more intifadeh, no more need for peace. Even the downside is welcomed. Given the undisputed hardening of opinion -- especially among those Israelis and Palestinians who have reached their majority since Israel took the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 -- failing to resolve the matter peacefully now will almost inevitably lead to another region-wide Arab-Israeli war. "Which we would win," says an aide to Ariel Sharon confidently. "And then we will be that much closer to the transfer" -- Israeli-speak for kicking the Palestinians out of the territories once and for all.

On the left, a number of liberal-oriented senior army commanders -- Israel's so-called dovish generals -- justify an identical desire to win. Only by crushing the Palestinians, they say, can Israel assure that half a loaf will suffice. Says one: "From a military standpoint, with only a slight rectification of the present boundaries, we can certainly live with a demilitarized Palestinian state. But if they think they've won it from us rather than having had it granted to them out of our magnanimity, they will only be emboldened to strike for more later. Restraint would be fine if it weren't always seen as weakness."

This is another nice theory that misses the mark in practice. Winning ) produces a psychological high, all right, but it is often injurious to long- term stability. "This isn't like Viet Nam, where you resolve a situation and walk away," says the Israeli philosopher David Hartman. "Neither side is going anywhere. Give them peace after trampling them, and all you'll breed is resentment, even among Israelis. A sense of misplaced paternalism antithetical to a healthy day after will creep in. Like fathers and sons, we'll always be saying, 'Look what we've made of you, you ungrateful scum.' "

What is needed, then, is exactly what the dovish generals abhor, a Palestinian victory, but a mini one: a "victory" that accommodates the need to feel that an individual's accomplishments are earned through self- sacrifice, an affirmation of the Judaic notion of justice. Christianity is about grace; man is a sinner whom God loves in spite of his sins. Judaism invites a covenant in which God asks man to be responsible. At the same time, of course, a Palestinian victory must somehow quell the Arab sense of grandiosity that invariably distorts real power relationships. (He is mighty who controls himself, teaches the Talmud, a text with which most Arabs -- and an increasing number of Israelis -- are unfamiliar.)

Tactically, the intifadeh might be closer to victory if it muted its self- indulgent rhetoric, reined in its paramilitary operations and opted for civil disobedience: sit-ins, traffic obstruction, hunger strikes, marches in which the only words spoken, "We want peace," are chanted repeatedly. "Right now," says Hartman, "our nerves are rubbed raw because when we walk about in our own land, we are constantly afraid that rats are going to attack us out of the shadows. Gandhi-like moves would drive Israel nuts and productively appeal to the guilt feelings that inhabit the core of Jewish existence."

Some statesmen would help too, leaders who recognize what Maimonides and Plato understood, that the greatest rulers are therapists because the highest statesmanship crafts solutions in which everyone wins. Unless and until Israelis realize that a Palestinian victory is theirs too, peace will never be at hand.