Behind the Facade

Once again, Haaretz’ veteran political reporter, Yossi Verter, scored a scoop. For a few hours on Friday, the newspaper’s Hebrew website sported the information that Shimon Peres no longer believes that peace with the Palestinians was possible. Foolish me—I didn’t think to save the article to my hard disk or look for an English translation, but I did print it out. It’s there on my desk, in black and white.

Verter was invited to a dinner at Ehud Barak’s house on Saturday night. Among the guests were Peres, the Jordanian ambassador and a prominent left-wing lawyer whose identity Verter is carefully keeping secret. The lawyer said he believed it impossible to make peace with the Palestinians. When the Jordanian ambassador protested vociferously, Peres backed up the unnamed attorney. Abu Mazen has no legitimacy in Judaea and Samaria, Peres said, and no agreement made with him can last for more than a day.

Interestingly, the article appeared on Friday. The dinner at which this conversation took place happened the preceding Saturday night. It took Verter six days to convince his editors to run this piece of news. .

When you think about it, it’s really no surprise that Shimon Peres has finally lost faith in his blood-drenched Oslo project. Peres is a politician with a politician’s instincts. His opinions are merely catching up with where the majority of the population has been for almost two years. And his current opinion is no guarantee that he won’t suffer a relapse in the future. Nonetheless it is significant that he finally admits what most other Israelis take for granted, and equally significant that he did so only in what he presumed, mistakenly, was a private context.

There are other important people who may be presumed to hold similar views. Up to the Annapolis conference Ehud Barak made a point of snubbing Abu Mazen. Only when Condoleeza Rice held his feet to the fire did he agree to go through the motions of meeting and consulting with him. Does Ehud Olmert really believe that peace with the Palestinian Authority is possible this year, or any year? Well, the fact is that buildings have been creeping up not only in Jerusalem but in many communities in Judaea and Samaria. It’s not supposed to happen but the will to prevent it is sorely lacking. And the latest ceasefire with Hamas is not the act of a government that has made a strategic choice to conclude peace with the nominal head of the nominal Palestinian Authority.

No, what’s interesting is not Peres’, or Barak’s, or Olmert’s likely views about peace with the Palestinians. What’s interesting is that they still can’t or won’t admit it. After all, more than a foreign policy is at stake. Peace Messianism is the official ideology of an entire ruling class. Like Communism in Eastern Europe last century, it is both the logical conclusion of their world view and the justification for their regime. If it is no longer believable, it draws both into question. It both explains and exacerbates their precipitate loss of morale. It means that an entire ruling class is living a lie, merely in order to hang on to power.

There is one other reason: The undue influence of diehard peace fanatics who cannot change their minds, such as Attorney General Menahem Mazuz, who holds Olmert’s fate in his hands, or Amos Schocken and David Landau, respectively the owner and editor of Haaretz, who must even now be regretting the decision to let Verter run his piece. To recur to the Eastern European example, these people fulfill the role in the Israeli political system of the Soviet Army. They will move in to bash anyone who exhibits loss of faith in the one true system. But the Soviet Army didn’t save Communism once even most Communists lost faith in it. And it’s only a matter of time till the Israeli establishment’s façade crumbles as well.

I should leave my readers with that hopeful note but I won’t, because one has to think of what comes after the collapse. One looming option is the rule of a populist autocrat, possibly with a heavy Russian accent, over a people that no longer hopes for the future or cares for its liberties and lets it happen because it’s merely the path of least resistance. The other is a new dispensation for Israeli society, led by a leader motivated by faith and able to articulate, if not a belief that appeals to the majority of the people, a comprehensive new set of policies that they are willing to support. To date, unfortunately, no likely candidate has come forth.