Meron Benvenisti: The Less Heroic, the Better

Roni Ben Efrat and Stephen Langfur interview Meron Benvenisti in his Jerusalem home on August 7, 2006 (27th day of the second Lebanon War).

Meron Benvenisti's unflinching analyses often cause squirming both on the Right and the Left. He served as Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem in the 1970's, administering the city's annexed Arab sections. In the 1980's, before the first Intifada, he founded and directed the West Bank Data Project, an eye-opener with regard to the effects of Israel's policies. His most controversial conclusion was that these policies amounted to de facto annexation. He claimed that because of the settlements (then a mere smattering compared to today), the situation had become irreversible. As a corollary, Benvenisti has long maintained that, given the realities of population and resources, the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean cannot accommodate two states.

His books include Jerusalem: The Torn City (1977); Conflicts and Contradictions: Israel, the Arabs and the West Bank (1986); Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (1995); City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem (1996); and Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (2000). His most recent work, Son of the Cypresses: Memoirs, Reflections and Regrets, is due to be published by UC Press in April 2007.

In Haaretz on July 26, in a piece on the war called, "The turnabout will come quickly," you wrote that "the major loser will be the people of Israel who, by an unmeasured reaction to a provocation, established their position as a foreign element in the region, as the neighborhood bully, the object of impotent hatred." Are you saying that the war was not compelled by circumstances?

Of course it wasn't. No war is compelled by circumstances. In this case, the response and its scale were not at all compulsory. But our response is always the same response, which we then make justify itself, calling it a war for existence. And someone like me, after seventy years of sitting in this country, is quite fed up. If this is really to be our fate, each time having to fight a war that puts our existence at stake, each time having to find some enemy who duly rises to destroy us so that we have to rise and kill him – if this must go on forever – then the whole enterprise was a mistake. A society can't live so long in such struggles, and the truth is, that's not really how it lives. I think one of the things that will perhaps save the Zionist enterprise is the fact that the Jewish public isn't willing to go on enduring this. It isn't willing to rally around the concepts of the generation that grew up with the state, people like [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert and others. The public has a completely different world picture, so it responds differently. For example, Tel Aviv is said to live in a bubble. On the contrary, it lives a life of normality! The fact that other people want to compel the public to live a mobilized life, as if always fighting for existence, doesn't mean it must obey every time. Here I hope the public will be wiser than its leaders, and precisely because of concepts that are less heroic. The less heroic, the better.

I also don't accept the notion that we have to burn something into someone's consciousness. We are constantly being called on to burn something into the enemy consciousness. We've burned things into the enemy consciousness to a point where we're simply deranged as a nation. The neighborhood bully. Do I want to destroy Lebanon? I want to be a friend to Lebanon! I'm dying to visit Lebanon! I want to connect with the culture of the Lebanese. What's this then? I have to go kill them?

During the election campaign, Ehud Olmert defined what we seek as "a country it's fun to live in." There was a sense that he represented the upper middle class that wants to push forward, advancing the economy and itself – never mind about the poor or the Arabs. For a certain social layer, it is fun to live here. Now suddenly comes this war, pulling the whole project back. Clearly it's not good for the economy, for Israel. How do you analyze this shift in direction?

If you look into Israel's history you'll see that every time the banner of social reform began to rise, something external came up that the leading group could perceive as a threat. It's in their genes. They are the classic product of Zionist education from the 1950's and 60's, which established the principle that when the army whistles, everybody snaps to attention.

But this principle is based (to continue your metaphor of the neighborhood bully) on a certain understanding of the neighborhood reality. Is this understanding not correct?

It is not. Listen, for instance, to how you [Israel] talk about having to "deter" the Arab countries. How many Arab countries are still in a state of war with you? Do you have a problem with Egypt today? With Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq? With Syria? You no longer have "the Arab world" against you. So they invent a new scarecrow: Iran! Now you have to cope with this new thing – but what will you do about the Arab countries that in the end want you on their side against Iran? Why instead do you keep harping on "the Arab world"? Why do you revert to the concepts of the 50's and 60's? Because it's convenient. It arranges reality in a way you're used to: there's a war for existence, you're alone against the Arab world, so you can go and kill every Arab. By all this talk about the Arab world, you avoid the real problem: the issue with the Palestinians. This Lebanon campaign is secondary. Danny Rubinstein, in Haaretz today, calls it a metastasis of the Palestinian conflict.

Why then do you need [a war with] the Arab states? Because it enables you to unite your public. The war with the Palestinians divides you left and right. Fighting in Lebanon, you bask in a national consensus. Look how people came down on Olmert the other day when he dared to mention his Convergence Plan again. "Here we are enjoying the nice warm Jacuzzi of a Lebanon War! Why remind us of this other conflict?"

As of now, August 7, Olmert and [Defense Minister] Amir Peretz enjoy widespread public support, but the interesting thing is that even stalwart leftists back the war, people like [playwright] Yehoshua Sobol and [poet] Ilan Sheinfeld, who have strongly opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They too snap to attention–

The Left wants to be part of the consensus, you see, as in the previous Lebanon War, and here they get a chance to connect with the people instead of arguing with them. Who can resist the temptation? And the war's opponents constantly feel they must justify themselves, finding reasons to reinforce their position. I'm constantly searching for reinforcements. I hate this war instinctively. It's immoral. But time and again you feel … every time someone is killed, you feel it… what can you do, you're part of a collective, and the drums of war have always had their effect. So I'm not surprised at people on the Left.

Returning to your analysis, I wonder if you aren't omitting something that is new here. All Israel's wars to date have been with Arab nationalism. Today's war in Lebanon and Gaza is with fundamentalist Islamic currents. Isn't this new?

I think it's an invention by all sorts of Arabists who find it convenient to invent a clash of civilizations. I don't accept it.

Hamas is what it is, but this fact does not require me to exalt it so high as to justify a claim that I'm fighting Islamic fundamentalism.

Then test them. You're looking for non-rational components, but you never checked for rational ones.

This too can be seen as rational. Israel promised him Kuntar [Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese guerilla jailed since 1979 for killing three members of a family in the northern Israeli city of Naharia]. They promised Kuntar and didn't deliver. In the negotiations for the release of [Elhanan] Tennenbaum, Israel promised through the German mediator that Kuntar would be released in the next round. The idea was to avoid the appearance of an immediate connection. Since then, Hezbollah has kept trying to kidnap soldiers in order to bring about his release. So if you want to find a rational response, here you've got one. But Israel doesn't want to acknowledge it as rational.

Or take another response. What about the story that they began the war by shelling us. They shelled two moshavs [during their attack on July 12] as a decoy action. But it was the Israeli government that decided, that same night, to bomb the international airport at Beirut. Look, the question in this sort of argument is always "Who started?" What is the cause and what's the result? There's no sync. What we call "cause" they call "result" and vice-versa. Their sequence is different from yours. The facts are the same, but causes become results and results become causes.

Sure, there was a provocation by Hezbollah, but the question concerns the response. At first there was a local response. Then, in the evening, the government met and decided to bomb Beirut. Suppose we start the sequence with this decision. No one in Israel even begins to think of the sequence that way, but this is exactly how Hezbollah sees it. Until today they say that the war began because we started to bomb Beirut.

There is one narrative and another. I claim that you can also find a rational position among loonies like Hezbollah. I am not obligated to translate the conflict into a clash of civilizations unless I am sure this explains the matter and doesn't just serve as a pretext. In this case I say it's a pretext.

Some claim that Hezbollah wanted to heat up the conflict because, ever since Israel left Lebanon, it has lacked a justification for remaining there as an armed militia separate from the Lebanese army.

Look, I don't tell people what they need to do. I find it amusing that we set out to teach the Lebanese what sovereignty is. All our concepts of sovereignty are synthetic, like the notion that this border line represents "our sovereignty," as if the only conceivable system is the one we live in. They have another system. They have the Taif Agreement [1989], which distributes power among them. They don't relate to national sovereignty as something sacred. Nor to the army. In Lebanon the army was always worthless. The military ethos doesn't interest them. Now within this Lebanese framework, at least 40% are Shiite, and the Lebanese system demotes them to secondary status. That's how it's built, on a national charter, where a demographic fiction translates into a national fiction. The Shiites have a representative in Hezbollah, which we invented, by the way, because the previous Shiite representative, Amal, wasn't good enough for us. We invented them just as we invented Hamas. Now suddenly this golem arises and, lo, it's fundamentalist! It consists of an army and a network of social services, a result of the fact that there is no Lebanese state to provide these things. We find, then, 18 ethnic groups that live in peace, or quasi-peace, after years of civil war, and the one thing they all want is no more violence. So I'm supposed to teach them they ought to have an army? You want to do political engineering on them? Because you think you can, you launched this war. It began on the assumption that we could create so much pressure, making people into refugees and using them for leverage, that everyone would turn against Nasrallah. Four times we've tried this stunt, but it doesn't work. Why not? Because this man, Nasrallah, has deep roots in the Lebanese system. What kind of a sovereign state doesn't care if its flag waves on the border? But they really don't care.

To bang Hezbollah on the head in a limited, local way. If we'd destroyed a few positions, they wouldn't have fired Katyushas. But that's not enough for you! You have to restore your power of deterrence! Deterrence against whom? And how do you restore it? Either you've got it or you don't. When you tried to deter the Palestinians, did they panic? In 2002 [in the operation Israel dubbed "Defensive Shield"], you tried to burn fear into their consciousness. Did you succeed? In fact you only got screwed. You've been screwed every time. And despite the changes in Arab positions, you go on living with the fixed idea that everyone's against you. You are the one who makes it so. After you destroy Beirut, then the world really is against you! This is an extremely rational approach, the Israeli approach, is it not? Unlike what they say about Nasrallah, we of course are always the rational ones!

Here's the great rationality of the Israeli government: keep inflating the importance of the war to make it equal the price in lives, hoping people will believe this. The prattle about fundamentalism is meant, in the end, to stoke the tribal bonfire.

What about the theory of the proxy war – that this is a dress rehearsal for a future war between the US and Iran?

[Gesture of dismissal.] One can always build conspiracy theories. But supposing we take this seriously, why should you have to be America's mercenary? Do you have to be the one who leads a fight against Iran?

Iran doesn't know this already? You don't have a border with Iran. You can attack them, but they're not going to attack you. That's my view. Until a few months ago Olmert said of Iran, "That's not my war. Here we stand with the whole western world." Now suddenly the war is ours?

And what if we manage to prove an Iranian connection? Will that help defeat Hezbollah? In my opinion, all this talk about Iran derives from the unpleasantness of admitting that an idiotic organization like Hezbollah, with 3000 fighters, is beating you. So you have to go look for a global context.

If Israel had any sense, it would know from the start that it can't defeat them, because it's a guerrilla war. The guerrilla doesn't sit and wait for you. He escapes and reappears. Just today two more Israeli soldiers were killed at Bint Jbeil. The army had "cleansed" it three times already. How do you explain the fact that they always reappear? And now you have another excuse: it's not that they're big heroes, after all, it's the anti-tank missiles they got from Iran. They're not fighting us with swords!

We would like to look now at the Palestinian part of the conflict. The war broke out in two arenas, Gaza and Lebanon. Israel had withdrawn from both unilaterally. Do you think the war has buried the concept of unilateral disengagement?

Disengagement doesn't interest me, it's unilateralism that interests me. Unilateralism is an arrogant Israeli conception which holds that I can do what I please and the Arabs will just have to bear it – if not, they're anti-Semites. This war happened because the Israelis don't want to pay a price. To withdraw from Lebanon by agreement would have required a pact with Syria. If they'd made a pact with Syria (or, in the case of Gaza, with the Palestinians) we wouldn't see what we see today. But they didn't want to pay the price of a pact with Syria [namely, the Golan Heights], so they said, "We're returning to the blue international line. We've given Lebanon back to the last centimeter!"

The Israeli conception defines sovereignty on Israel's terms. We can deny Syria's sovereignty forever on the Golan and in the same breath complain about Hezbollah crossing the blue line. How can they say that without blushing?

This whole story of the blue line, the international border– why do I have to divide between them and us? Let's work out a system where I don't have to divide. What will be the price? A treaty with Syria? Fine. An internal Lebanese agreement whereby they don't screw the Shiites? Fine. Why must my allies be the fat cats in Junia? Why don't I feel closer to the Shiites in Nabatia? Who turned the Shiites into my enemy? Why?

The same rationale applies to Gaza. You pretend you've escaped from 1.5 million Palestinians, changing the demographic balance (another scarecrow!), returning to the international border. But what is Gaza? A state made up of refugees. Where did they come from? It was you who turned them into refugees in 1948! You can't suddenly say, "To me they're like Indians in Calcutta." All such words are hypocrisy, and we find it, by the way, among the Left as well. It's an attitude that unites all Israelis, except those on the narrowest margins. The word "occupation" is a copout, because occupation is a temporary thing, a thing that will end.

Domination, quasi-permanent. This is an integral part of the ruling apparatus that has turned us into a binational state de facto. There is a binational reality that you evade, a quasi-permanence that you evade, by calling it "occupation" or "Algeria" or "colonialism." I say that whether or not you build a fence doesn't matter much, because you rule on both sides anyway. Or if you do give up control on the other side, it's only when you're certain that there won't arise what you call "a terrorist state," which would impede your domination. The present war perpetuates this. Show me someone today who will argue against my thesis on de facto binationalism, on the irreversibility of what has been done. It will take a long time to dismantle this national consensus that unifies Sobol with Bibi.

Look, maybe, just maybe, there might have been a development like in Gaza. People were talking about it before the war broke out. Everyone was sure that convergence was going to happen. Now there isn't the slightest chance. They will lick the wounds of this war and wallow in the national consensus.

But you write that the turnabout will come quickly. So there won't be a national consensus.

The debate will be about the conduct of the war, not its goals or causes. They'll say it was justified, but its management was terrible. Very few will be willing to deal with the connection between the war and the Palestinian issue.

And there's another good reason not to deal with this issue. Money. It will take years to pay for the war. Who will finance it? Are you going to finance it together with convergence? Convergence would have cost 70 billion shekels [ca. $16 billion]. Who will fund it now?

There's another factor too: the legitimization of orange! [Orange is the color of the right-wing protest movement against dismantling settlements.] They are fighting there, these orange ones, they're being killed there, these orange ones. They're fighting for you and you're planning to evict them from their homes? All these factors create a situation where– if anything was about to happen, it's been put off another 20 years. How many sets of 20 years do you have? When you reach 100, will you still call it a temporary occupation? You've reached 40 already.

In an article before the war, called "Lucky me, I'm an orphan" [Haaretz June 15, 2006], you claimed that given the demographic pressure of 12 million people between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, there is no longer a possibility of resolving the conflict by means of two states. You pointed to the limited natural resources which all must share, but you also mentioned another impediment: the growth, over the years, of a huge economic gap between Israelis and Palestinians. What then would the solution be? If we talk instead about one state, the gap remains.

We must think of ourselves as a single entity with enormous gaps in every department of life, and we must begin to address these gaps. We must do so as if treating a problem of poverty, as if dealing with people who have no civil rights. Start dealing with the immediate problems, as they did in South Africa. I'm talking about the position to take. It's clear that the State of Israel will oppose such a thing, but if there's a Left that's alert to inequality, this must be its position.

But of course there's one problem: the Palestinians don't want it. They want self-determination. They don't want to equalize. And you can't make the choice for them. This problem is diminishing, though, because many are beginning to see the situation this way. After the war you'll find more Palestinians saying that there's no chance for two states. It's not to be. The next step will be to say, "Annex us! We want civil rights!" Then will begin a classic struggle by radical, socialist and liberal publics who want to create equality. And then all kinds of problems will arise, problems of everyday life that are much more difficult and complicated than the slogan, "Two states for two peoples." If there are two states, you can say, "What do I care about Gaza? That's another country. Do I care about Bangladesh?" But if you begin to grasp the fact that Gaza is a part of you, a part that you must come to grips with, you have to deal with what happens there from day to day. You can't postpone this, kidding yourself that it's a colonial occupation and that when it ends you'll draw a border.

But there was a time when you could have said that the West Bank and Gaza are the PLO's responsibility, and attending to them should be its business.

Still, in the 80's, even before the PLO became a corrupt regime, you called the situation irreversible.

Look, the PLO did get something. If it had managed things properly, we might have had something like what happened in Belgium. There the southern French related to the Flemings as if they were trash. But with proper leadership, little by little, a reversal took place: the French drifted backward and the Flemings came forward. In my view, the approach that said, "I give these people a communal identity," calling it the Palestinian Authority, was a positive development that could have been better cultivated.

All I'm saying is this: even for the sake of argument, let's try a different paradigm. I'm not saying I'm right, but if you try to see the reality not as one of occupation, rather as one of domination, where one community, the Jewish, dominates another, the Palestinian, in a form that is quasi-permanent and that cannot be erased by lowering an iron curtain, then you must begin addressing day-to-day problems that are much more difficult.

As for the Left, the realization that you could have reversed the process, and now it's too late, is hard to bear. As a result, a big part of the Left is unwilling to face this fact. And then it becomes convenient to hide behind the old concept of occupation. So in the 40th year, which is nine months away, we need someone who will stand up and say, "Hey, pals, you know what? Let's look at the possibility that this concept only strengthens the status quo, and let's try 'changing the diskette.'" But I don't succeed in this undertaking, to my great sorrow. It's too difficult.

I'm for what are called "soft borders." Hard, international borders are the most rigid things in the world, and if you undo them you create problems. For example, if you make hard borders to form a Kurdish state in Iraq, you at once create problems in Syria, Turkey and Iran. My philosophy speaks of soft borders. This is a situation where borders do exist, but they don't define sovereignty, don't obligate you to make an absolute distinction between what is done here and what is done there. In a situation of soft borders, you obligate people to create a balance between the interests of one group and those of another. But today all this is just dreaming. The war is leading us precisely in the other direction.

From Challenge # 99, September - October 2006