What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary.
— Rabbi Hillel
At the end of July 2002, Sari and I signed our agreement in a modest ribbon-cutting at a hotel in front of our core supporters. In the navy we like reciting the Roman writer Seneca, who said that no wind will help a sailor who does not know where he wants to sail. With his destination chosen, the same sailor can use any wind to get there. Our paper, which we called “a destination map,” aimed to set such a goal.
But a philosopher and a retired-admiral-turned-drip-irrigation-executive needed a lot more than a roomful of well-wishers to draw attention to our plan. Months earlier President Bush, with a stirring quote from the Book of Deuteronomy—“I have set before you life and death; therefore, choose life” — began promoting his Road Map to Peace. Bush got the Europeans and Russians, along with Sharon and Arafat, to sign off on a path both Sari and I knew would lead nowhere. First, it demanded absolute security from the Palestinians, which given their shattered institutions they couldn’t provide even if they wanted to. It was also unworkable because of the wild success of Barak’s “no partner” slogan coupled with Sharon’s strategy of destroying Palestinian institutions. The Palestinians will never be partners, he was saying, therefore we must act strictly from our self-interest, with no regard for Palestinian aspirations.
The new Palestinian government, installed through international pressure, brought no change in my government’s underlying position, even though Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, a pragmatist and longtime opponent of political violence, had the courage to tell his people that terror and violence would bring only destruction and death. With his second in command, Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, a graduate of the University of Texas who was equally opposed to an armed uprising, Abbas presided over institutions in ruins.
Our war continued. Within days of our ceremony in the hotel lobby, an air force F-16 dropped a one-ton bomb on the home of Salah Shehade, who after being released from Israeli prison in 2001 had taken over as commander of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades in Gaza. Fifteen people died in the blast, including Shehade, his wife, and his fourteen-year-old daughter. Dozens of bystanders were injured.
This attack, praised by Sharon as “one of our greatest successes,” led to international condemnation and widespread dissent within the Israeli air force: a group of thirty Black Hawk helicopter and F-16 fighter pilots signed a letter refusing to fly bombing raids on Palestinian cities. “You hear it in the streets of Israel; people want revenge,” said one pilot. “But we should not behave like that. We are not a mafia.”
It was in this context that, over the coming weeks, Sari showed himself to me as much more than an ivory tower philosopher. Having known him for nearly twenty years, I can say about Sari that he has an endlessly curious mind coupled with a steely determination to defeat our occupation using words and arguments and grassroots activism. During the First Intifada, Sari ran afoul of the Shin Bet, and wound up behind bars, because he smuggled messages from Abu Jihad to activists. He has also shown an independence and willingness, always in short supply in our part of the world, to break nationalistic taboos. Shortly after the Six-Day War, he volunteered on a kibbutz just to get to know Israelis.50
Sari and I usually met on Fridays at hotels, in cafés, or in his office. Our conversations helped me understand and interpret events in the West Bank. From him I learned how areas hitherto governed by Arafat had degenerated into fiefdoms ruled by warlords; boys with peach fuzz for whiskers lugged around machine guns and barked out orders. Instead of soccer stars, kids worshipped the shahid batal, the martyr hero. “Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up,” Sari told me, quoting a local leader. “This is a new phenomenon. You have no idea how big it is.”
Sari thought much of the mayhem in Palestine arose directly out of Sharon’s diabolical brain. The prime minister’s ultimate aim, he argued, quoting the Israeli political scientist Baruch Kimmerling, was “politicide” — to destroy the Palestinians’ will for self-determination and sovereignty over what they considered their homeland. Sari cited approvingly from Kimmerling’s book Fighting the Demons: Israel’s Killer General and His Legacy: “The aim…is to make life so unbearable that the greatest possible majority of the rival population, especially its elite and middle classes, will leave the area ‘voluntarily.’ Typically, all such actions are taken in the name of law and order; a key aim is to achieve the power to define one’s own side as the law enforcers, and the other as criminals and terrorists.”
Sari knew Palestinian history a lot better than I did, and he rattled off a long list of Sharon’s attempts to kill Arafat and destroy the PLO. Sharon’s current plot, Sari said, was to produce Somalia-like chaos in the West Bank and Gaza, thus delegitimizing Palestinian nationalism and justifying our continued occupation.
Like a lawyer in a courtroom, Sari presented as evidence the constant raids on his university as well as the way IDF troops had ransacked the PA’s Central Bureau of Statistics and shut down the Arab Chamber of Commerce offices and the nascent stock exchange in Nablus. “A war on terror is one thing. But why go after the stock market?”
I couldn’t argue against Sari’s politicide thesis. Some of my colleagues in the military liked to say about Sharon that he was all tactics, no strategy. This assessment badly underestimated a man who, even when he was dead wrong, always thought in political-strategic terms. While no one can say if Sharon realized he was handing Palestine over to Hamas by dismantling Arafat’s regime, he certainly knew what he was doing when he crushed the hopes that the Palestinians could be partners.51
Our strategy since our first meeting had been to change the narrative of the conflict by taking diplomacy out of the smoky back rooms and into the streets. The question now was how to get the public to take notice of our proposal. Aryeh Rutenberg, who had issued the original challenge that led me to approach Sari, opened the conversation by suggesting we launch a PR campaign, replete with billboards and radio ads. But we knew we’d have to do more to get the number of signatures we were hoping for.
One day in December 2002, not long after Arafat, ever the unpredictable despot, fired him as the PLO representative in Jerusalem, Sari and I sat in a café and discussed a central paradox of our conflict.
As the cycle of killings and revenge attacks quickened, we noticed a strange paradox. Shikaki’s polls continued showing that average Israelis and Palestinians were ready for peace more or less along the lines of our paper.52 Seventy percent on both sides wanted a two-state solution, the highest numbers in recorded history. Yet these same people were calling for blood. In the face of an immediate threat, it seems, people lose sight of why we are killing and being killed and turn to a strongman who promises security. But the same people, when asked about the future, say they want peace and prosperity for their children within the framework of a two-state solution and claim they will do almost anything to secure it.
The reason for the schizophrenia, we hypothesized, was that almost no one trusted the leadership on the other side. We thought if we showed Israelis and Palestinians that we all wanted a better future more or less along the same lines, we could translate the optimistic opinion polls into a mass movement. Individuals would be asked to express their opposition to the status quo and their support for our proposed solution through the simple act of signing off, with their names, on our document.
While we had no idea how many signatures we would collect, our quest on the Israeli side was to gather enough to create public opinion pressure on Knesset members and ministers to adopt our platform.
We set the official launch for June 2003, giving us six months to create two organizations, one Israeli and one Palestinian, to gather the signatures.
Sari called his organization Hashd, an Arabic acronym for the “People’s Campaign for Peace and Democracy,” and presented a platform with the message that to liberate Palestine, Palestinians had to end the armed uprising, stop terrorism, and show skeptical Israelis that they have a partner. The tacit threat was that if the Israeli government continued to refuse the terms of peace, the masses could form a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign along the lines of South Africa’s African National Congress.
Drawing on his experiences as a leader during the First Intifada, Sari recruited ex-prisoners, people with credibility on the streets, as his local leaders. One of his recruits had been wounded in a gun battle with a settler and spent nine years in prison. Sari’s man in Nablus had been Abu Jihad’s assistant; another deputy had developed an expertise in making Molotov cocktails during the First Intifada. His point person in Hebron had worked for Jibril after serving a ten-year prison sentence.
Our Israeli organization, the People’s Voice, had a board of directors whose twenty-four members hailed from nearly every sector, including the leader of a feminist organization, a former Israeli chief of police, an ex-senior-official in the Mossad, a professor of Jewish studies, and the owner of a talent agency — no ex-cons, though.
For our headquarters we rented two rooms in a building next to the stock exchange in Ramat Gan. We recruited dozens of volunteers who took time out from their regular jobs to help. To gather signatures, hundreds of students were slated to knock on doors, stop people on the street, and approach shoppers in malls.
At the end of June, at a press conference in Tel Aviv, Sari and I launched the campaign. I had always operated discreetly — under the surface of the sea and in the dark. Now I had to rouse support in assembly halls, schools, and social clubs, shaking hands and talking to people from all backgrounds, including Russians, Ethiopians, traditionally right-wing religious Jews, and Israeli Arabs. Putting myself in the spotlight was for me like leaving water and crawling onto land.
In my stump speeches I avoided meandering political theories or reflections on Clausewitz; my talks omitted flashbacks to the Jewish humanism of our Declaration of Independence. I boiled down our message to its hard-hitting core: We needed a two-state solution not because we like Palestinians or we think Arafat deserves a state, but because if we don’t withdraw from Palestinian territory and acknowledge their right to have their own state, Israel cannot survive as a Jewish democracy. Continued occupation would inevitably lead to a single state and end Zionism as we know it.
At first, my message encountered plenty of skepticism. “Yes, yes, Sari’s a great fellow,” I heard a hundred times. “But we’re not making peace with him, but with them” — the violent, murderous inhabitants of the jungle. Soon, though, the signatures began to flow in, and in greater numbers than I had expected. By October ninety thousand Israelis had signed the statement, and each month we got twenty thousand more; following Orni’s idea, we got signatures from three former Shabak directors, Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, and Carmi Gillon. Needless to say, my parents, as well as most of the members of Kibbutz Ma’agan, signed onto the plan, even though the water level of the Sea of Galilee or the size of the banana harvest were probably more important to them than peace with the Palestinians.
An Israeli journalist described Sari’s campaign this way: “As compared to the financiers, managers and advertising experts who are working with Ami Ayalon, Nusseibeh gives the impression of trying to navigate around a blocked dirt road in the territories with a beat-up old car.”53 Since telephone and internet lines rarely worked in bombed-out Palestine, signatures needed to be collected one by one, face-to-face. Sari and his band of former jailbirds walked, rode donkeys, hitched rides on farmers’ tractors, whatever it took to reach villages, refugee camps, and cities under curfew.
Sometimes Sari’s activists were harassed by Hamas who saw them as enemies and collaborators with the Israelis, and sometimes IDF soldiers arrested them at checkpoints because they had spent time in Israeli prisons. Some of Sari’s team in Jenin were hauled in by Shabak agents who tried to win them over as informants. When they refused, the agents retorted, “But you are already collaborators. Look, you are working for Sari, and he is working with Ami, and Ami was once the head of the Shin Bet.” Sari’s critics blasted him for partnering with the “man who has attacked us, tortured us, and assassinated our leaders.” They predicted that his would be the only signature he collected. Sari’s mother Nuzha, for instance, refused to sign.
“Ami used to be an enemy, I’ll give you that,” Sari responded to his critics. “But you don’t make peace with peaceniks, and besides, we have mutual interests. He knows that what’s best for Israel is for us to have a state of our own.”
A combination of Sari’s tenacity, sincerity, and reasoning power succeeded in bringing in the signatures. In the Arroub refugee camp near Hebron, eleven hundred out of nine thousand residents joined. In Jenin, Sari won over three thousand supporters and seventy local Fatah leaders. Thousands more signatures came from Gaza, where Hamas had its stronghold. One woman told Sari she signed because she had lost her son in the first week of the Intifada. She supported the campaign because “I don’t want to lose more children.”
We also attracted a lot of support internationally. The European Parliament endorsed our project. In a New York Times op-ed, Robert McNamara, who had been secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, joined Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, Reagan’s secretary of defense, and Warren Christopher, Clinton’s secretary of state, in a statement of support. Separately, Bush’s secretary of state Colin Powell indicated his approval in public statements by his spokespeople.
In October 2003, Sari and I took the show on the road. We spent an hour with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a neocon security hawk, in his Pentagon office overlooking the Potomac. He found our plan so convincing that he praised it in a public speech at Georgetown University. With someone so influential inside the US administration endorsing the plan, Israeli policy makers suddenly sat up and noticed. “Everyone in Israel is reading [Wolfowitz’s speech] very carefully,” an Israeli official said. “If it comes from him, it’s serious.”54
Back in Israel we received an invitation, in late December, to present our plan at the Herzliya Conference, an annual gathering of Israel’s and the Jewish world’s financial, political, and academic elite. The conference has evolved into a forum for introducing new thinking on strategic issues facing Israel and is where the prime minister typically delivers the Israeli version of the State of the Union address.
Sari called it a beauty contest because ours and various other peace plans were to be discussed. He was also dubious because, a year earlier, Sharon had used the conference to unveil his plan to erect a wall cutting Israel off from much of the West Bank and Gaza. It ran straight through the Al Quds University campus in East Jerusalem.55
I assured him that attending the conference would be a good thing. It was a golden opportunity to tell the Israeli political and intellectual elite the truth.
Meanwhile Orni came up with a different way to get our message to the masses. His idea was to get Yedioth Ahronoth, with its circulation of six hundred thousand on a Friday, to do an interview with me and the three former Shabak directors who backed the People’s Voice. Yedioth considered it a coup — never before had the mystery-shrouded heads of our secret police addressed the public.
Readers of the Friday interview were in for a shock. “The former Security Chiefs,” went the article, “warn of an impending ‘catastrophe’ for Israel and urge the public to rally behind a document created which sets out the principles of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”
During the interview, Yaakov Peri, the director during the First Intifada, waved off any suggestion that he, or any of us, were “leftists.”
“One of these days someone should study this sociological phenomenon. Why does everyone — heads of the Service, chiefs of staff, former security people — after a long security career become a standard-bearer of reconciliation with the Palestinians? Why? Because we’ve been there. We know the people, the landscape; we know both sides.”
Carmi Gillon, my predecessor, translated the message of People’s Voice into terms average Israelis could understand: “I am very worried about our future. I look at my daughters, who are still young, and it’s clear to me that we are heading toward disintegration.”
I pitched in that if we continued along the present course, our victory over terror would “march us steadily toward a place in which the State of Israel will not be a democracy and a Jewish national home.”
In retrospect my most fateful words, as I would learn at the upcoming Herzliya Conference, were these: “In these terrible circumstances, when citizens are slaughtered in restaurants and on buses, I don’t think there’s any other path but to take independent steps. If the State of Israel would get up tomorrow morning and get out of Gaza, and seriously begin dismantling illegal settlements as we promised the American president, then I believe, from my years of familiarity with our future partners, that the Palestinians would come to the table.”56
Handing Gaza to the PA would prove that we were serious about negotiations, force them to step up, and rebuild a working relationship that had stopped Hamas terrorism once and could do so again.