The Asymmetry of Pity.

• Author: Halevi, Yossi Klein

MY MOST instructive conversion on the Middle East conflict was not with a politician or a journalist but with a soft-spoken Palestinian Anglican minister named Naim Ateek, whose group, Sabeel, promotes a Palestinian version of liberation theology. During a long and friendly talk about two years ago, we agreed on the need for a "dialogue of the heart" as opposed to a strictly functional approach to peace between our peoples. In that spirit, I acknowledged that we Israelis should formally concede the wrongs we had committed against the Palestinians. Then I asked him whether he was prepared to offer a reciprocal gesture, a confession of Palestinian moral flaws. Both sides, after all, had amply wronged each other during our hundred-year war. The Palestinian leadership had collaborated with the Nazis and rejected the 1947 UN partition plan, and then led the international campaign to delegitimize Israel that threatened our post-Holocaust reconstruction. What was Rev. Ateek prepared to do to reassure my people that it was safe to withdraw back to the narrow borders of pre-1967 Israel and voluntarily make ourselves vulnerable in one of the least stable and tolerant regions of the world?

"We don't have to do anything at all to reassure you", he said. He offered this historical analogy: When David BenGurion and Konrad Adenauer negotiated the German-Israeli reparations agreement in the early 1950s, the Israeli prime minister was hardly expected to offer the German chancellor concessions or psychological reassurances. The Germans had been the murderers, the Jews the victims, and all that remained to be negotiated was the extent of indemnity

"So we are your Nazis?", I asked.

"Now you've understood", he replied, and smiled.

I have thought often of that conversation since the collapse last fall of any pretense of a mutual process of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. With disarming sincerity, Rev. Ateek offered the most cogent explanation I had encountered for why the Oslo peace process never had a chance to succeed.

From the start, Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking was burdened by asymmetry. The gap between Israeli power and Palestinian powerlessness was translated into a political process that required tangible Israeli concessions-reversible only through war-in exchange for Palestinian promises of peace: In essence, land for words. But the deepest and most intractable asymmetry has been psychological: it has been an asymmetry of pity, or, more precisely, of self-pity. The Palestinians, as losers of the conflict, continue to see themselves solely as victims, without guilt for helping maintain the conflict or responsibility for helping to end it; indeed, for many Palestinians, the war is not over borders but absolute justice, a battle between good and evil. Because history has been kinder to them, Israelis can afford to concede complexity and, indeed, the Israeli mainstream now perceives the conflict as a competition between two legitimate national movements over the same tortured strip of land. Aside from the hard-right m inority, most Israelis acknowledge that both sides share rights and wrongs.

Zinoism's Victory over Jewish Self-Pity

THE FIRST generation of Israelis after statehood resembled Palestinians today in their simplistic view of the struggle over the land as an absolutist moral conflict. In every generation, as the Passover Haggadah puts it, a new enemy rises to destroy the Jews and, for most Israelis, this was the Arabs' turn. A popular Yiddish pun emphasized the point: Hitler fell into the water it went, and emerged "nasser"--Yiddish for wet, and a reference to Egypt's president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Israel's great antagonist during its formative years.

Only gradually did Israelis begin to see the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world generally as a fundamental break from the pattern of Jewish history--that Zionism's hard gift to the Jews was to restore to us our collective free will, transform us from passive victims of fate to active shapers of our own destiny, responsible for the consequences of our decisions. A key turning point was the November 1977 visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel. Remarkably, a mere four years after Egypt's surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Sadat was welcomed as a hero in the streets of Jerusalem. The Israeli notion of the Arab world as an impenetrable wall of hostility began to change. So too, Israeli certainty about the justness of its cause was subtly challenged: Many Israelis, including Ehud Barak, began to suspect that Israel could have prevented the 1973 Yom Kippur War had it agreed to withdraw from the Sinai in the early 1970s. The subsequent invasion of Lebanon in 1982 , followed in late 1987 by the first intifada, reinforced for Israelis the moral ambiguity of the Middle East conflict.

At the same time, Israel's sense of siege began to ease. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the repeal of the UN "Zionism is racism" resolution, the post-Gulf War optimism in the Middle East, the mass Russian immigration and resulting Israeli prosperity--all reinforced the same message that Israel had entered a new era and was about to fulfill the long-deferred Zionist promise of Jewish normalization. Finally, a new generation of native-born Israelis that could take Jewish sovereignty for granted no longer saw itself as living in the pathology of Jewish history but in a new Israeli reality.

Indeed, young Israelis became so distanced from the traumas of Exile that the Israeli Ministry of Education felt impelled in the 1990s to introduce pilgrimages to Nazi death camps in Poland for high school students, as an emotional crash course in Jewish history. In politics, too, the Holocaust lost its centrality: Only the hard Right and the ultra-Orthodox continued to cite the genocide of European Jewry as a potentially recurring threat. Whereas...