Trying To Bridge the Gap

By Michael Kramer

And then there are the "good Jews," as they are known to their Arab counterparts, a hundred or so Israelis who meet regularly with an equally small number of Palestinians for round-table discussions that have all the naive earnestness of 1960s-style encounter-group sessions. Their meetings are arranged secretly with code words; they debate over coffee and cake in one another's homes; they talk about mistrust and victimization. The Jews recall the Holocaust, the Palestinians the humiliation of Israel's occupation. In common, they all deplore the intransigence of Israel's political leadership.

"We are one of the confidence-building measures the Shamir government claims to favor," says Hillel Bardin, 53, a veteran of the American civil rights movement. He was jailed for two weeks last year after trying to arrange a dialogue with Palestinians while on reserve army duty in the West Bank town of Ramallah. "You'd think the authorities would be delighted."

They are not. Publicly, Israeli officials are noncommittal. "Privately," concedes a senior Israeli army commander, "we are apoplectic. Acknowledging that moderate Palestinians actually exist in the middle of the intifadeh and that they are unafraid to meet Israelis when they know we can jail them on the flimsiest of pretexts means it might really be possible to achieve a peaceful solution -- which is exactly what Shamir is against. To him, calm talk can lead only to the thing he fears most, a Palestinian state in the West Bank."

Given their meager influence on Israeli public opinion, which is moving furiously rightward, these interlocutors are strengthened by such criticism. At one meeting in Bardin's Jerusalem home, Jad Isaac, a Palestinian biology professor imprisoned after urging West Bank Arabs to plant vegetable gardens to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, put it simply: "Even if all we do is talk, it is good."

Whatever the venue or composition of the groups, there are invariably two agendas at work, one psychological, the other political. "We Jews see the dialogues as a way of dashing stereotypes," says Leora Frucht, an Israeli writer. "The Palestinians want more. They say to us, 'We know you're here to assuage your guilt, and that's fine as far as it goes. Now what we need is to organize some joint actions.' They want us to refuse army service and lie down with them in front of the bulldozers when an Arab house is ordered destroyed. Because we won't do things like that, the Palestinians leave with unfulfilled expectations. We could be doing more harm than good."

Beyond the differing expectations lies a more fundamental disagreement. Although all the dialogue participants favor a two-state solution, the Israelis insist that a Palestinian nation be demilitarized. Suggestions that Israel also disarm are greeted with incredulity. "Creating alternative images of each other -- dedemonizing each other -- is worthwhile in itself," says Paul Mendes-Flohr, a Hebrew University philosophy professor. "But while many of us accept the right of the Palestinians to exist alongside us in their own state, even the moderate Palestinians with whom we meet only seem willing to accept Israel because of the fact of our strength." To which Israel's West Bank commander nods sadly. "Unless and until the right-vs.-fact problem is bridged," says Major General Amram Mitzna, "it won't ever matter what Arafat says, and the settlers' mentality will be closer to the feelings of most Israelis, even if most Israelis deplore the settlers' tactics."