Uri Avneri:

My name is Uri Avneri. I'm a journalist by profession and I'm one of the founders of the Israeli peace movement "Gush Shalom", which is the most 'militant' part of the Israeli peace camp. I'm 77 years old. For the last 55 years or so I've devoted myself to trying to find ways of understanding between the Israeli and the Palestinian people. I was a member of the Irgun underground in the early days; I was a soldier in the war of '48 and I was wounded on the Egyptian front. I've been the editor-in-chief of a news-magazine called Ha'Olam HaZeh (This World) for forty years. In 1974 I started to have contact with the leadership of the PLO, especially with two people whose memory I would like to honor: Said Hamami, who was murdered by Abu Nidal and Issam Sartawi, who was also murdered by Abu Nidal. In 1982, in West Beirut, which was at that time besieged by the Israeli army, I met Yasser Arafat and since then I've held irregular meetings with him. In 1975 I, together with some of my friends, including the late General Matti Peled, founded the Israeli council for Israeli-Palestinian peace, which was - in a way - the pioneer movement in terms of contact between Israel and the PLO.

Well, one can speak about this on two different levels; the level of day to day events or in the more deep and perhaps profound level of what happened between these two people - the Palestinians and the Israelis. Let me start with an attempt to analyze the current situation as it is.

In Israel today you will hear slogans repeated endlessly by all the media and nearly all the politicians: "We had a Prime Minister Ehud Barak; he turned every stone on the way to peace; he offered the Palestinians concessions, which went far beyond any previous Prime Minister, but the Palestinians, instead of accepting these 'incredible concessions', which gave them nearly everything they wanted, started a war against Israel, which proves that the Palestinians never wanted peace, but that their real intention was instead to destroy the state of Israel and throw us into the sea."

This mantra, which, as I said, is being repeated endlessly and has become more or less the public consensus in Israel, should help explain many of the things which have happened. This mantra is the confirmation of what the right-wing in Israel has been saying all along; namely that "we don't have a partner for peace" - that "Yasser Arafat has been and remains just a terrorist" and that therefore it's quite useless to make any concessions to the Palestinians; Oslo was a terrible mistake; maybe the people that signed the Oslo agreement should be put on trial.

On the Israeli left - or so-called 'peace movement' - (and it should be noted that the whole concept of left and right in Israel has nothing to do with those terms in, say, Europe; left has nothing to do with social affairs or any social ideology. In Israel people say left meaning 'ready for peace' with the Palestinians, and right meaning those who are against this and instead for a 'Greater Israel'.) has been hit very hard by this turn of events. When we used to think about the 'peace movement' in Israel, it was of course a deceptive term because there never was a single 'peace movement' in Israel, there were many peace 'forces' of very diverse outlooks and agendas. I would divide this camp into two general parts; the one which defines itself normally as the Israeli Zionist peace movement or camp - the most prominent of which is/was Peace Now (Shalom Akshav) and close to this was the Meretz Party and the left of the Labor Party. This peace camp wants/wanted peace but it's not always quite clear with whom they want this peace!

To demonstrate the confusion this camp seems to have suffered I'll tell you a personal anecdote. Many years ago there was a big demonstration in Tel Aviv called by Peace Now, and we all went there because we always join their demonstrations - even if we don't agree with their approach - and somebody drew on a piece of paper a symbol representing the Gush Shalom and the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian peace (the symbol represents 2 flags; one of Palestine and the other of Israel). We'd never used this sign at the demonstrations of Peace Now because we didn't want to provoke them, but somebody had used it to make a poster and there was a terrible scandal! Peace Now said, "we have nothing to do with this," and they were attacked by the right-wing people for showing the flag of the "terrorist PLO". At the time I wrote a little humorous article about the incident stating, "this is the flag of the Palestinian people; if it's forbidden to show the flag of the Palestinian people at a Peace Now demonstration it means that Peace Now doesn't want to make peace with the Palestinians - so with whom do they want to make peace?…Holland?"

So this part of the peace camp in Israel, at least to my mind, was always more concerned with its own moral image; as if it looked into the mirror in order to be able to say, "we are moral, we want peace, we are ready to make concessions, we are wonderful people and we are sane people." They like to use this label "sane" as a means of making the contradistinction between themselves and the 'crazy' right wing. But this part of the peace camp never really had any profound understanding of the Palestinian side, nor any real contact with them, which explains why they came around to the concept of the existence of the Palestinian people and the necessity of the Palestinian state and the necessity of negotiating with the PLO very slowly. Nonetheless the Zionist peace camp did, in the end, come to most of these convictions, but it was always without real contact with the Palestinian side or the concerns, aspirations, traumas and anxieties etc. of the Palestinians.

On the other side we have the more radical side of the peace movement, which is not Zionist, and which tried from its beginning to find real contact with the Palestinian people in the hope of building a peace based on understanding the political, psychological and historical basis on either side. Here I would like to try to define where I see the real basis of our conflict.

Until this very day, from the beginning to now - 120 years or more - there is a Zionist, Jewish, Israeli way of looking at the conflict and an Arab-Palestinian way of looking at the conflict and there is absolutely no connection between the two. Looked at from the two sides, these are completely different conflicts and I don't mean just in terms of the general story but every single detail of what happened in the last 120 years looks completely different when viewed from the two sides. This was the problem with Oslo. Oslo represented two different things altogether for each side and every step on the way from Oslo to here looked different to each side. The gulf separating the two historical narratives is so profound, so deep, that when both sides use the same words they mean completely different things; I mean if Peres - if I may mention the name - meets Abu Ala, and they come to an "understanding" - when they get home they'll realize that one understood the 'understanding' one way and the other understood it another way; that they have been talking without really understanding what they mean.

What really happened here - and this may seem obvious but most people don't really take it into account when they speak about the conflict - is a clash between two national movements. On the one side there was the Zionist movement, which was itself basically a Jewish reaction to the emergence of the national movements in Europe, wherein all European people had become fervently nationalistic across the continent. Nearly all of these national movements in Europe were Anti-Semitic and the Jews suddenly felt that they were very much outside these national movements. What all this amounted to was the feeling amongst the Jewish people of being 'outside' the emerging Europe and that instead of people individually being drawn into assimilation within a European nationalist culture which didn't want them, they chose to assimilate themselves collectively. So a part of the Jewish people created this revolution of sorts, creating a new nation in the European sense and if all the European nations demand national status of their own then, "we should create a Jewish state of our own and be masters of our destiny." This, in short, was the basic essence of the Zionist movement.

The founder of the Zionist movement (Herzl) did not think about Palestine in particular; actually he did not like Palestine! He came here only once, in the month of November, it was much too hot for him - maybe it was a heat wave - and in a private letter he wrote 'Palestine is not suitable for us because we are Europeans and Palestine is not suitable for Europeans." But once he created this concept of the Jewish state, the masses of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe, who were basically religious, compelled him to turn towards Palestine with all its cultural, historical and religious associations for the Jews and so the Zionist movement came to be concentrated on Palestine.

More or less at the same time, all over the Middle East, there began the Arab national movement, part of which - of course - became the Palestinian national movement, which was an ordinary movement of nationalism; of trying to obtain independence and freedom, first from Turkey and then from the colonial powers who cut up the Ottoman territory between them. What happened was a natural process of the Jewish people coming into Palestine and the Palestinian people becoming more and more aware of the danger this posed to their national existence. There was, then, an inevitable conflict, which started from the day the first Zionist settler settled in Palestine and has lasted to this very day and whatever happened in the meantime was part of one continuous battle that sometimes appeared open, sometimes was more hidden and sometimes was armed, sometimes pacific…..but it was - without interruption - what somebody once described as the clash of an "unstoppable force meeting an immovable object".

This is where we are today and this is where we were a hundred years ago.

I should mention that the most extreme Zionist leader, a person called Vladimir (or Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, being the 'spiritual head' of what is today the Likud party, wrote in 1923 an article called 'The Iron Wall' in which he said, "the resistance of the Arab people in Palestine to our coming there is natural, inevitable and is the reaction of anyone faced with white settlement. It is impossible to bribe them, to bribe neighboring Arab princes, because the resistance of the people inside the country is inevitable." The conclusion that Jabotinsky drew from this was that we would have to form a military force in order to break the resistance of the people in Palestine - which he called the Iron Wall. This could have been written today, rather than nearly eighty years ago.

One of the major aspects, which developed during this fight, was the way the Zionists came to perceive what happened over the last 120 years completely differently from the way the Arabs see it. From the Israeli point of view, we came to this country - it's our country, it belonged to our forefathers, in the beginning we came peacefully and bought land with money and from the first moment the Arabs fought against us with arms, tried to kill us - they are just a murderous people and don't know what's good for them and we must defend ourselves against them and that actually there is no real chance for peace between us.

Of course for a long time the word "Palestinian" was taboo because it was an axiom of the Israeli establishment that there were no Palestinian people, that this was an empty country. The Zionist slogan from the beginning was "a land without people for a people without a land" (this is a slogan coined by a writer called Zangwill, who later left Zionism and decided to found a Jewish community elsewhere). The idea was that this was an empty country. After we came here and "made the desert blossom" and "created a viable country" the Arabs from neighboring countries; from Jordan, Syria and so on, came into the country attracted by the richness which we brought and then had the impertinence to call themselves the Palestinian people! Golda Meir was the 'priestess' of this attitude. I once, when I was a member of the Knesset, had the chance to respond to one of her famous speeches wherein she denied the existence of the Palestinian people. I said, "Mrs. Prime Minister, maybe you're right. Maybe all the Palestinians who believe they are a people are quite wrong, but if five million people mistakenly believe that they are a people - then they are a people."

Anyway there prevailed the idea that this was an empty country, which was essential for the Zionist conscience of course. Zionism is not an immoral movement. Certainly the first and second generations were deeply moral people, who came with ideas of utopian nationalism, created the Kibbutzim and the Moshavim, which at that time was an immense undertaking, and carried some beautiful ideas of social justice and equality and so forth. Because they were so moral it was so much more difficult for them to accept that what was really happening was that they were displacing another people and therefore it was so profoundly important for Zionists to deny the existence of the Palestinian people. Even today, after already signing all of those agreements it's still very difficult for Israelis to really accept that there are a Palestinian people and that these people were the inhabitants before we came here. This explains many of the attitudes held and actions taken by people educated by such myths, as we are from the very earliest childhood in our schools. There we learnt that this was an empty country, we came here and made the country blossom and of course it's our country and has always belonged to us and we came here to save ourselves from the "hell" in Europe…..and so on.

I don't have to tell you that, from the Arab point of view, all these things look completely different. To give you just a small example of the way in which every little detail is touched by this basic divergence of historical narratives; in Zionist history you have a very important chapter called 'Hebrew Labor'. Hebrew Labor, as it was called, covered the notion that 'we are not just bringing people here to Palestine to build our national state, our national society….but we are also creating a new Jewish society.' Jews in Europe, for historical reasons, were mostly merchants, bankers and the like - people who generally dealt with 'non-productive' things, so 'in our own country' we wanted to become laborers, peasants and so on; normal people. In order to achieve this we were turning music professors into construction workers…..and to do this we needed jobs, meaning that we needed to work towards an economy that serves this purpose. Thus, for many years we have been taught as an axiom, that there could be absolutely no similarity between the system we built here and the one in South Africa under Apartheid, because in South Africa the whites didn't work, but rather put the blacks to work; we, on the other hand, worked ourselves…as agriculturalists, construction laborers etc.. Well, as you know, this is a funny idea today, but at a point this was believed in fervently and therefore anyone who employed Arabs was considered a traitor because it was contrary to the ethos of the Jewish working man and the Jewish peasant tilling his soil. To take the jobs away and pass them into Arab labor, which of course was much cheaper and better, was considered a disgrace. This was a national and social idea; Hebrew Labor. The same thing, looked at from the Arab side, was a terrible thing which meant the Jews created their own economy in the Arab land and prevented any Arab from participating in that economy. It was a form of national segregation or Apartheid even.

Another national 'mantra' one hears frequently from all sides of the political spectrum today is that the early Zionists bought the land upon which they built their Moshavs and Kibbutzes prior to 1948. Well, this is quite true. But from whom did they buy the land? What looked from the Israeli side as their "coming in peace"….was really not quite like that. The land in question was generally owned by wealthy investors who had bought large amounts of land when the Ottoman's allowed its sale some 50 years earlier, but these investors, who may have lived in Europe, Monte Carlo or Haifa at the time, were not selling empty land; on this land were people who had been tilling and residing on this soil for generations, and they were, after the Zionist financers had bought the land, driven off the land - either by the Turkish police or, later, the British police. This is how these beautiful ideas - the Kibbutz, with its stress on equality etc. or Moshav - came to exist in reality. So again we see that we have always been talking two separate languages! The Jewish way of seeing things has no bearing on the Palestinian and there appears to be no bridge between the two views.

Now, to come to the present situation, Oslo saw two sides sign an agreement where both sides looked at the thing from a completely different perspective. For the Palestinians, of course, Oslo was thought to be the first step toward the creation of the Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip defined by the Green Line and with Jerusalem as its capital. There was great happiness upon the signing of the agreement and that derived from the conviction that this was indeed such a step. Meanwhile on the Israeli side the outcome was very far from certain and it was very unclear what kind of Palestinian state might emerge as a result, due to the fact that despite the Oslo document there remained very basic disagreement on the very fundamental aspects.

As far as Jerusalem was concerned, no Arab was ever prepared to give up sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa mosque, while the Israelis, since 1967, found it unthinkable that they might ever give up their Temple. The Green Line, meanwhile, has been eradicated from all Israeli maps by a government decree issued in 1968 and when the idea of a Palestinian state is raised it is expected that it must fit around new borders, which in turn are expected to fit around the settlements, which have been put where they are for the express purpose of creating new borders!! This was the whole meaning of the settlement movement. The terrible, terrible problem of refugees is yet another area of total divergence. At the end of the 1948 war about 750,000 Palestinians were displaced and the idea that they might return and become a demographic majority was an apocalyptic idea for the Zionists of the early state. Well today, after so long we have about 5,200,000 Jews in Israel and 1,200,000 Palestinians citizens and the whole demographic picture looks completely different - making, to my mind, a practical solution to the problem possible. However, the apocalyptic fear of this has remained unchanged and as it was. Today to even think about such things or speak about them publicly - even in the peace camp itself, is to invite accusations of "crossing the red line and becoming a traitor."

I myself have reached the conclusion that apart form striving on the practical level for a pragmatic and political peace - which I believe is possible - I believe that in order to truly create peace we need something much more profound and deep. We must educate our people and you must educate your people to see and understand the narrative of the other side - if not to accept it. We must be able to know what the other side thinks, fears, feels and hopes for, because if we don't do that we will be unable to achieve any kind of peace. It's not because it's 'nice' to understand another people - I don't want to sound like one of those do-good pretenders who say 'let's talk to people…and by talking we'll get to peace.' No, we can talk endlessly and not get anywhere! This is not my point, but rather that it is politically absolutely essential for Israelis to understand what the Palestinian people are about and I believe that it's very important for the Palestinian people to understand what we are about. The simple fact is that, as Edward Said has said, "if you don't understand the Holocaust you will never understand Israel" and that if the Palestinian Nakba is not understood you will not understand the narrative of the Palestinian struggle and national movement. Therefore I believe that the basic education on both sides is the only real basis for real peace.

My friends and I have, a few days ago, published a document trying to trace the narratives on both sides in an effort to see how things have developed and led to the situation today. I think that this is very important work - it covers the issues at the historical and political heart or background of all the events which are happening today and so is not abstract or a divergence form the realities of the time. The narratives of the two sides influence every event of the present day, from Khan Younis to Ramallah…our beliefs and motivations stem from a view of history that is conditioning the behavior of the two peoples and the individuals therein. I would like to make a last remark. If, at any point in this presentation, I have given the impression that I see any symmetry between the two sides, I want to disprove this immediately. Many things may look parallel from a certain view, but they are not really because it can never be forgotten that we are the occupier and the other party is occupied. We came to this country and they were in this country. So the fundamentals are far from parallel, while many of the symptoms of the ongoing conflict are, in fact, similar.

My personal stance is simple; I believe we should make peace and I think the components of peace are quite clear. I think we are in a rather strange situation where everybody serious knows what peace will look like when it comes about, but no one knows how to get there - generally it's the other way around. The components of peace must be the Palestinian state, the Green Line must be the border between Israel and Palestine. East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount (Al-Harem Ash-Sharif) must be the capital of Palestine, with the hope that Jerusalem as a city will remain united on the municipal sphere; with the West being the capital of Israel and the East being the capital of Palestine. I hope that the border between the two states will be open to the movement of people and goods, subject to the necessary agreements to protect the Palestinian economy. I believe that all settlements have to be removed, perhaps in negotiations there mat occur some exchange of territory that would allow for those settlements which are hard on the border, to be attached to Israel and for equally valuable land will be given to the Palestinians. There must be security arrangements to safeguard both sides.

The "unfinished business" of the refugees must also be addressed. I am actually rather optimistic about it. I believe that Israel must recognize the right of return in principle; I think it's a moral and inalienable right, which cannot be denied. I also believe that Israel must recognize its share in creating the Nakba; I know more or less what that share is, because - as I told you - I was a soldier at the time and I am a kind of eyewitness. I actually have a dream of one day having a kind of truth commission composed of Palestinians and Israelis and maybe certain experts and really go into what happened in 1948 and then fix responsibility by use of objective research on the facts. In terms of the implementation of the right of return, you'll know that under the UN Resolution 194, the refugees have the right to choose between compensation and return; I believe that this right must be granted. The big question then is 'return to where?' I believe it must be treated in a moral and quite practical way; by practical I mean that we must not change the basic composition of the state of Israel but I believe that Israel can return to the state of Israel a sizable number - more than a symbolic number - of refugees, without really changing the basic character and composition of the state of Israel. Today in Israel we have 1.2 million Palestinian citizens; if this were to become 1.3 or 1.5 or even 1.6 million I don't see there being a big difference, though I do realize how immensely difficult it would be to sell this idea to the Israeli public.

What I really suggest is that the time has come for Palestinian intellectuals and those Israeli intellectuals who accept the basic premise of such a peace agreement and work out a 'draft' peace agreement - not taking upon themselves the politicians' job of negotiating when the time comes, but rather of creating a paper that says that we, Palestinian, Israeli intellectuals are able to put on the table a proposal for peace and in working it out really argue on every single point, including the refugee problem which is probably the most difficult. I really call upon you all to put such a thing into motion. I think that it is the most important thing that can be done because Israelis, at this moment, believe that peace is impossible. Impossible because the Palestinians don't want peace; because the Palestinians, after Barak has "turned every stone" etc., etc., "showed that there is no partner for peace". If we were to sit together and show that people of good will on both sides can sit together and come close to working out a realistic proposal I think we would be making the most positive step at this point.

Nadim Rouhana:

My name is Nadim Rouhana and I'm a Palestinian from Haifa, and I didn't fight in the Israeli underground! I studied in an Israeli university for my BA degrees and then went to the US to pursue my PhD and have been long associated with American universities - most recently the universities of Harvard and Massachusetts. I came back mainly in order to set up a research center in Haifa that is called Madar, The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, which deals with the status and future of the Arab communities in Israel, their relationship with the Palestinians in the OPT and their status in an ethnic and exclusionary state, their role in transforming that state into a real one. My main work has been on the academic front, writing, researching and publishing in that kind of area.

I must start by remarking that Mr. Avnery has always been at the forefront of the peace movement even from its earliest days and that Gush Shalom has been a significant force for some time. However, by distinguishing between the Israeli Zionist peace camp and the non-Zionist peace camp, I think its important to indicate that the latter is the smaller, and when referring to the Israeli left or peace movement one is really talking about a Zionist left and that which revolves around it.

I think that the left wing in Israel has three major characteristics and that within them we can find an explanation for the recent rise of the right and the dramatic failure of the left in Israel. First; there is an amorality - not immorality - , a near absence of moral argument in the left in Israel. I think that Mr. Avnery gave, as a major characteristic of the left, their readiness to seek peace with the Arabs, rather than any social equality ideas, I think one could say that unlike almost any other leftist movement in the world, wherein rights, freedom, equality are most likely characteristics, the Israeli left has almost none of that. I'm bringing up the moral component not because of its importance in terms of historic debate - not at all - but because I think that, as Mr. Avnery implied, a pragmatic and workable solution cannot really be reached without going back to the moral issues. From my point of view a pragmatic peace cannot be achieved without going to the moral side of the conflict.

Now there has long been stress placed on examining the Israeli 'narrative' as though it were in a position that allowed some objectivity, as though the early Zionist commitments were now ready to be offered up to scrutiny as a normal society. These ideas draw guidance from the belief that we are in what is called a 'post-Zionist period', which is supposedly that of a normal state. I am shocked by my colleagues in the academic sphere who are eager to adopt this term - post-Zionism. How can it be a post-Zionist state while the Judaizing project is still going on? - not only in the West bank and Gaza but also in Israel itself! So Zionism continues every single day, whether it be inflicted on the Palestinian village or elsewhere. The jump by the left, over a hundred years of Zionism, and in the face of its continuation unabated, is really a jump over morality and over history. The lack of a moral framework also explains the Israeli left's response to the Palestinian demand for the right of return; if history is acknowledged then the Israeli mainstream left would surely have no problem accepting the Palestinian right of return in principle and perhaps push for negotiation on how to implement that right.

We have heard again here from Mr. Avnery, that if the Israeli hears about the right of return his or her hair stands up and it is "apocalyptic" or catastrophic. And I agree with Uri Avnery here; I have people saying to me 'we are for the 1967 borders, dismantling settlements…but this Palestinian demand for the right of return…the only way that we can answer this is by force'. Yes that's the reaction in the Israeli left; they construct of the right of return a 'dismantling of Israel'. I think there is a reason behind this and I think it is related to the moral argument. By making that reaction and making it instinctive as if you yourself exert no control over your free will, what you are really doing is saying that "my reaction to that has nothing to do with morality, it's just an instinctive and natural reaction and therefore I can deny the right of return." This lack of morality on the part of the left also goes some way to explaining the concept of 'generous concessions,' such as those we saw being hailed during Barak's government. How could the left in Israel speak about "generous concessions in the West Bank and Gaza," if they would even agree that the West Bank and Gaza were Palestinian land! So even the concept of 'generous concession' is based on the lack of understanding or -more likely - the denial that this land of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel itself, is Palestinian land.

This problem is also responsible for perpetuating the myth that the Palestinians missed "historic opportunities for their failure to understand." They present the Palestinian reaction to the "generous concessions" as reminding them of the Palestinian reaction in 1947/48, when Palestinians rejected the partition of Palestine. Even this lack of understanding as to why a people would not accept the partitioning of their own land in 1947 is shocking, but today they are trying to attribute the refusal of the Palestinians solely to Yasser Arafat, while in truth we all remember that it was the Palestinians themselves who were worried when Arafat was in Camp David, that he might actually agree to something so far beneath expectations. Contrary to the Israeli 'myth' here Arafat actually represented Palestinian attitudes totally.

The reaction of the left to the Intifada and their support for Sharon, as well as what many people have referred to as his crimes of war, can also be understood better in light of this lack of morality. This lack of morality is quite phenomenal when one thinks that the Israeli left argues about Zionist national history in a very, very, moral way; the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism, the Jewish experience in Europe, the Jewish experience in the world. In this sense the whole of their debate remains caught up in morality, yet as soon as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli-Palestinian discourse are raised, that morality disappears.

If we are to compare, as an example, the left-wing's political organization and activity vis-à-vis the Palestinians with the left's political organization and activity vis-à-vis the peace agreement with Egypt or the withdrawal from Lebanon, we cannot avoid asking why that left-driven peace movement was so active when it came to the withdrawal and the agreement with Egypt, and yet why it is so impotent when it comes to talking about the settlements and the peace agreement with the Palestinians. The whole willingness to face the right wing over the settlement issue in Israeli society, readiness to face the settlers and tell them that they are taking somebody else's land is completely absent. The second major characteristic of the Israeli left is, I believe, this lack of active politics. I believe that this stems from the fact that with Egypt and Lebanon there was no need to be rooted in any moral stance, as these saw motivations relying very much on the self-interest of the Israelis.

By the time we reached the Barak era there was something very strange already going on. The Israelis had imagined that the Palestinian state already existed and if you talked to Israelis in this period they would tell you "there already is a Palestinian state." Now why was that? Again, I feel that it points to the fact that the left are not really political enough and have freed themselves thereby of the responsibility of working against the right-wing, the settler forces and they've freed themselves of the need to work on raising the issue of Jerusalem, settlements and refugees and the social implications for Israeli society of a real 'historic compromise' with the Palestinians. There was, instead of such a period of awareness and readiness building, an imaginary peace process, an imaginary Palestinian state, an imaginary peace and what they did was instead of doing political work in order to struggle for peace, they negotiated with the Israeli right and fixed the parameters of a peace agreement accordingly.

This was all done in a way so as to avoid confronting the right inside Israel itself and brings us to the third characteristic of the Israeli left, which is that it is quite ethnocentric. It is ethnocentric and Judeocentric. The left wants peace in order to preserve the Jewish character of Israel; you hear that not only from Rabin and Peres, or Barak, but from those in academia and so on who associate with the political left; a very strong argument prevails that holds that peace with the Palestinians would preserve Israel's character as a Jewish state and help maintain the state as a Jewish and democratic state. I find that striking. I find that quite striking because it completely ignores the one million Arabs in Israel itself; it completely ignores the fundamental contradiction between being a Jewish state in the sense of Judaizing, giving privileges and passing laws in favor of Jews - having (as they do) even three 'constitutional' basic laws which discriminate against non Jews in Israel - and being democratic. The left, by and large, believes that Israel can be Jewish and democratic and it is this left that has produced the academia and the politicians (though particularly the academics) to 'develop' new theories to tackle that fundamental contradiction between a state that can be ethnically discriminatory and at the same time democratic - it's called "Ethnic Democracy" for those who are interested. This is the product of an Israeli academia that has combined these two and seeks to sell the union to other parts of the world.

Israel is not Jewish in the sense of being the state of the Jewish people; Israel is Jewish only in the sense that it discriminates against non-Jews and is Jewish in the sense of the continuing Judaizing project, not only in the West Bank and Gaza, as we know, but in Galilee and in the Naqab; in taking Arab land and transferring it - until this very day - to Jewish ownership. That ethnocentric component of this Zionist outlook is also responsible when we try to understand how the Palestinians in Israel are equally the product of the catastrophe, the Nakba, whose consequences continue until today.

Mr. Avnery has talked about understanding each side's narrative and so on, and I agree with him in that Palestinians will have to understand the Jewish experience in Europe and so on. However and while I know he is not trying to infer symmetry between the peoples' present circumstances, there is a major difference that must be stressed; with all the horrible, horrible consequences of that Holocaust project….it has ended - while the Nakba is continuing. The Nakba began before 1948 and now, more than 50 years later, it continues. The consequences of that Zionist project are being seen every single day, in Palestine - the West Bank and Gaza and in Palestine - in Israel itself. Unfortunately I think the Palestinians give the Israeli left the impression that it's okay to talk about Israel as a Jewish and democratic state as long as that left supports a Palestinian state. The Palestinians themselves fail to understand that a genuine political and moral support for the historical compromise with the Israelis cannot be based on ethnocentric and exclusionary nationalism.

In the many dialogue efforts over the years, I think the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza and those from the exile were not very concerned about the nature of Israel itself and its relationship with the Palestinians inside Israel. I think this was justified by saying that the national Palestinian project was and is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and that only. This might be justified, but I think the assumption is made there that they can make a genuine peace with Israel without Israel coming to terms with its history and responsibility vis-à-vis the whole Palestinian people. If Israel cannot come to terms with its history vis-à-vis the Palestinians in Israel, it can't do that vis-à-vis the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli society I think will have to introduce the moral component and I think that with out doing so the struggle will remain that which the Israelis perceive it to be at present, namely one of force. What we see now in Israel is a resurgence of the Jabotinsky school of right-wing thinking. The left, by recognizing the Palestinian national movement - in a way - by bringing or allowing the leadership of the Palestinian national movement here, left themselves limited for choice. They had either to make a compromise based on genuine peace, including all the things we mentioned and especially the refugees' right to return; or they had to go back to force, which in the absence of the moral component is what they chose to do.

I think that the Palestinians can and should, though, keep channels open to the real left in Israel and I believe that any dialogue with Israelis should be redefined ad reconstructed so as to accommodate only those who are ready to talk about the moral issues and history, and those who are willing to do so. If this is not the prerequisite for future dialogue we will again be missing the point and returning to the point we are at now. I think such dialogue will be aimed at Israelis bringing Israeli society to the acceptance of historic compromise and Palestinians would help by presenting a vision of what that historic compromise would be. Such a dialogue would have to be with a left who are willing to play a real part in the search for genuine peace by understanding the political work that needs to be done in Israel in terms of facing the right and Israeli society and bringing all the moral, historical and pragmatic issues to the fore of political and societal awareness.