ENCINITAS, California — A.B. Yehoshua, the renowned Israeli novelist, playwright, and thinker, fiercely independent and deeply rooted in the marrow of Jerusalem, wrote an article Monday for the Op-ed page of Ha’aretz. He declared that the time has come for Israel to talk with Hamas—something whispered about by many people on the Israeli side and secretly believed by a significant number of Jewish people in general.
Yehoshua has earned the right to make such an argument. His family has lived for many generations in Jerusalem; he is a former paratrooper; and his writings about the Israeli narrative have touched millions of people with their poignancy and truth. He has also taken on the Palestinian leadership(s) vociferously, calling them on their successive acts of hypocrisy and their patterns of corruption and even the exploitation of their own children for the sake of maintaining power and manipulating the sympathy of European and African governments.
Part of Yehoshua’s reasoning is based on semantics. He asserts that we called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) “terrorists” for decades until they became the Palestinian Authority and Israel recognized the PA as a legitimate governmental body for a real people deserving of statehood. The PLO thereby morphed from “terrorists” to “enemies” and then neutralized into a neighboring entity.
He points out that even though Syria had for decades terrorized the Israeli residents of the Galilee with mortar fire and bombs, Syria was never labeled “terrorists” and the Israeli government negotiated several deals with the Syrians in the wake of wars and skirmishes. He reminds us that even though Egypt under Nasser openly sought the extermination of Israel, it was not classified as “terrorist” and Israel negotiated the 1977 peace treaty with the former “enemy.”
Yehoshua goes a bit astray in his analysis when he includes even the Nazis as not being “terrorists” but “enemies” with whom the Allies negotiated an armistice. The Nazis remain the ultimate, if superbly uniformed and supremely equipped, terrorists in the history of the world—and the role model for all terrorist agencies and killer squads that thrive on systemic lies and mass murder. Sometimes, in his brilliance and poetry and his dreams of peace, A.B. becomes intoxicated with his own fiction.
And yet: there is a grim logic to what this true Zionist and humanist is suggesting. When Israel chose to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority (the so-called “Fatah” group that has basically refrained from terrorism since then and which has created something of a small federal structure in the West Bank, with massive Israeli aid), Israel was practical and its late leader, Yitzhak Rabin, publicly pleaded for “no more war, no more bloodshed.”
The former British Prime Minister Tony Blair did display notable pragmatism and courage when he sat down years ago with the terrorist leaders of the Irish Republican Party / Sinn Féin and negotiated a settlement. That daring act has created a lasting concord for the United Kingdom and the Irish people. Blair must have held his nose but his hands did give peace a chance.
If Israel, with its supremely perceptive intelligence operation, knows that Hamas, however reprehensible, is the linchpin in pulling together the fractured Palestinian coalitions; if the Israeli government, brandishing an extraordinary array of social, cultural, and technological achievements really wants to end this horrifying conflict; it will indeed find a way to talk to the Hamas entity in Gaza.
Only it should not send dreamers like the wonderful A.B. Yehoshua to the table. Let such good men and women write poetry about the peace once it has become a reality.
*
Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com