This is a letter that Marianne wrote in response to a phone conversation
she had with an old friend who used to live in Israel and now lives near
San Francisco, California. Even though the friend is very concerned about
what happens here, her views are very much influenced by the information
that the media presents to her. The letter might interest you, and it
gives a you a feeling for the views of most mainstream Israelis today. 

Marianne
============================================================== 
Dear Yoka, 

After our emotional phone conversation, I have felt a need to clarify
certain things that came up. Gary feels very uncomfortable about there
being disagreements between us and has repeatedly urged me to write to
you. I have not felt able to do it so far. Today is Memorial Day (Yom
HaZikaron) for our fallen soldiers and yesterday I went to a shiva for one
of the 13 soldiers that was killed in Jenin. Maybe that has pushed me out
of the feeling that I cannot communicate with you. 

Last night we watched the ceremony from the Western Wall on TV. There was
such an atmosphere of quiet dignity and national pain for the loss of each
individual that I must remind you of the following: We are not lovers of
war, we do not take pleasure in the spilling of blood, neither theirs and
nor ours and we do not look for revenge for our dead. The speeches by our
leaders were sober and dignified and they called for the immediate
resumption of negotiations. Arafat has conditioned his agreement to resume
negotiations on our withdrawal from the Palestinian towns. That might
sound reasonable, but it isn’t. Where was his readiness to negotiate two
months ago, one month ago? At that time we were not inside the Palestinian
towns. At that time he was busy signing papers sending out human bombs to
hurt as many of our civilians as possible. His money orders for the
suicide bombers have been officially published. 

Arafat has never denounced terrorism, and surely not strongly nor
unequivocally. To our great disappointment, Arafat has proven beyond any
reasonable doubt that he has remained loyal to his former occupation:
terrorism. His speeches to his people have always been inflammatory, full
of hate and blood thirsty. He has never tried to tell his people that we
are also human, that we have a history behind us, that the two peoples
must build bridges of peace. In spite of that, the Israeli Left (including
us), was willing to gamble on him and put our future into his hands. The
Israeli public voted left and Barak and Clinton spent endless hours
composing a peace proposal which was abruptly rejected out of hand. There
was nothing to talk about. At that time both Barak and Clinton reached the
conclusion that Arafat was no partner to peace. 

The tragic results of Arafat’s failure to take a realistic look at what it
is possible for the Palestinians to gain in a settlement is the
destruction of the whole infrastructure which has been build up by
European and American funds over the last 8 years plus countless dead and
wounded people. I want to qualify my reference to the funds from Europe
and America. I should say the percentage of the funds which did not end up
in the private accounts of the Palestinian leaders. (This has been
verified by the European press.) 

We always felt that if the Palestinians had something to lose they would
be more pragmatic, unwilling to lose what they had gained. Another false
assumption! That might be how we function, but not how the Arab mentality
works. Pride, honor, glory and ideology take precedence over any other
consideration. Who will build up what has been destroyed? Again the
pictures of suffering human beings, hungry for food and lacking shelter
will be flashed across the TV screens. The world will not blame the
Palestinian leaders for bringing this destruction on their people, but us
for having caused it. 

There were several things that upset me in our conversation. One was that
you called me a fanatic. I am not a fanatic. I was a member of Women in
Black demonstrating for an end to occupation before the Oslo Accords. I
have no desire to rule another people nor do I wish suffering on the
Palestinian people. I want us to reach reasonable agreements. We can’t
hang on to all the settlements we have established and they have to give
up their dream of a glorious Palestinian Kingdom and settle for borders
which are realistic. No matter the borders, they will have to deal with
poverty, illiteracy, health, employment and other prosaic matters. The
leader of the Palestinian state will not have the glory of Saladin (in
Hebrew and Arabic: Salach-adin). He will have to lead his people out of
backwardness and give them some hope for a better future. So far no such
leader has come forward. There is no Ben Gurion, no Martin Luther King, no
Nelson Mandela who is willing to start the though job of construction
rather than destruction. 

You spoke evenly about Sharon and Arafat, as if they were made of the same
stuff. I have related to Arafat so I will not repeat myself. About Sharon
I will say that I dreaded getting him as Prime Minister. I was never a
supporter of a hard liner like him and it is needless to say that I didn’t
vote for him. Then I will say that he surprised me from the beginning of
his premiership. He started by declaring his willingness to negotiate
follow with the Palestinians. Then he agreed to the Mitchell and Tenet
plans, still referred to by all parties (except the Palestinians) as the
first step to reconciliation. About 6 weeks ago he declared a 10-day
unilateral cease-fire, in which Israel would only act defensively, and he
declared his acknowledgement of the necessity for a Palestinian state. He
has acted in a restrained and calculated manner and in that way pulled the
majority of the Israeli population behind him. 

Internally we have had peace, only a few extreme groups on the Right as
well as on the Left have had sporadic demonstrations. Mainstream Israelis
feel that this is a no choice war, another war that we MUST win in order
to have any hope of peace in the future. What started 18 months ago is not
another Intifada (a spontaneous uprising of a suppressed people), but a
cleverly and carefully planned war by leaders who incited their people to
kill and convinced them that the root of all evil was the Jews and nothing
to do with their own corruption and inefficiency. I think that the Israeli
population deserves a great deal of respect for its restraint and
composure over these 18 months. It has been a war in which the civilian
population was the enemy’s target. In spite of that there has not been an
atmosphere of incitement and hate among the Right wing elements of the
population, as we witnessed when Rabin was the Prime Minister. 

I also can’t accept your comment, “I can’t see what good going into
Ramallah will do.” After 18 months of war and daily terrorist attacks, we
had run out of options. Nobody was able to stop the terror, not America,
not Europe and not Egypt and maybe no Palestinian leader: it had run wild.
We had to go in and dig out the terrorist cells and eliminate the stocks
of explosives and other weapons that had been collected. Most of all we
had to get hold of the leaders of the terrorist strategy, whom Arafat
refused to lay hands on. 

Unfortunately, the Palestinian fighters have decided to make their own
civilian population a living shield, thereby making it impossible to get
to them without hurting innocent people. They have no qualms about sending
a 16 year old girl out to blow herself up in the name of freedom. Believe
me, we have more respect for their civilian population than they do. This
is one reason why we try to avoid bombing the terrorists from the air --
the strategy America has used in Iraq and Afghanistan -- not to mention
Hiroshima! They fight with absolutely no rules. A couple of weeks ago an
ambulance was stopped and checked. The soldiers found explosives hidden
under the stretcher on which a sick boy was lying. This case was also
documented by the European Press and a formal complaint against the
Palestinians was filed by the Red Cross. Even though I am sure that
irregularities occur, our soldiers, as a rule, behave in accordance with
human decency in inhuman conditions. The first question my neighbor asked
her son who is serving in Ramallah was, “Did you behave as an officer and
a gentleman?” He said that he had tried. I just wonder if that would have
been a Palestinian mother’s question. 

Dear Yoka, I am tired of this long letter. I wanted to write a whole
section about the one-sided racist reaction of the world, but I have run
out of steam. I will just quote our rabbi, Maya Leibowich. She said that
the murder of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe did not happen overnight. It was
preceded by an extensive and elaborate process of propaganda dehumanizing
and delegitimizing the Jewish people. That is what is happening now under
the cover of anti-Israelism. 

I understand how scary and unsettling it must be to feel it all around
you. It is scary for us too because it will eventually hurt us as well.
But at the moment we are a bit more distant from it than you are. If you
study the case of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was abducted
and murdered in Pakistan, you might find some answers. His case is an
example of what can happen to someone who dares express negative views
about the Muslims. Fear, violence and intimidation that is the name of the
game. Journalists here in Israel reported being threatened if they didn’t
destroy films showing the celebration of the Palestinians after the
destruction of the Twin Towers on Sept 11th. Objective reporting, forget
it. The anti-Semitic flame has been rekindled in Europe in the guise of
anti-Israelism and covered in a cloak of humanitarian concern for the
suffering Palestinians. 

You might think I sound callus, but you know that I’m not really like
that. Furthermore, we will not have peace until the Palestinians have
something to live for. 

Love Marianne