The high-rise Jewish apartments of Tel Aviv and the red-roofed Arab homes in Jerusalem give little hint of the abyss separating Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. To the casual visitor, the Levantine bustle of daily life for both Jews and Palestinians, combined with the absence of obvious, large-scale communal conflict, may suggest that the seriousness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been exaggerated.
Beneath the surface, however, a cancer gnaws at the future of Jews and Arabs. The Palestinian ambush of an Israeli military unit outside Jerusalem's Old City last fall and the Israeli army's killing of two Palestinian students at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, combined with the PLO's return in force to Lebanon, may indicate that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has now reemerged as a major threat to world peace.
In 1985 and 1986, I interviewed a variety of Israelis and Palestinians concerning their predicament and their agenda for the future. These conversations offer little basis for optimism that any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is likely soon.
Since World War II, history has dramatically changed the status of both Jews and Palestinians, and it has been singularly unkind to the Palestinian people.
Although Jordan absorbed and provided citizenship for many of the 750,000 Arab refugees from what had become Israel, Palestinians who fled to other Arab countries were not similarly integrated into the host societies. The refugee problem worsened after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967, when another 234,000 Palestinians were added to those dispossessed in 1948.
Wherever they were, Palestinians dreamed of returning to their ancestral lands, as sanctioned by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 or (in more recent years) of establishing an independent Palestinian state.
Today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict centers on what is to be done with Jerusalem's Old City, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, those territories conquered by Israel in 1967.
Yisrael Gatz, director of the International Relations Department of Israel's Labor Party, is considered one of his party's doves. His views, however, suggest that there may be few major differences on foreign policy between Shimon Peres' Labor Party and Yitzhak Shamir's rival Likud. Ordinarily, Likud is regarded as less flexible than Labor on matters pertaining to the Occupied Territories and their Palestinian inhabitants.
Gatz maintained that Israel's real conflict is with the Arab states rather than with the Palestinian community, and he suggested that the Palestinian issue is not at the heart of the Middle East conflict. Israeli security, he said, "precludes a return to the 1967 borders." In his party's view, such security depends on Israel being "physically present" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Gatz believes that 52,000 armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank contribute to Israeli security by "diminishing terrorism." Apparently, the Labor Party does not consider the settlers to be fomenting Palestinian bitterness or offering exposed
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