Shelly Schreter: We Hold These Truths – Manifesto for Moderates in Israel-Palestine
I am a 75-year-old Jew, Zionist, and Israeli, without quotation marks or apology. I have lived in Israel for almost 49 years and understood that the common enemy of all Jews, Moslems, Christians, Druze, and other groups in this region are the maximalists.
“Maximalism” is the striving for full, uncompromised expressions of each group’s ultimate fantasies, whether “The Greater Land of Israel”, or “From the River to Sea, Palestine Will Be Free”. The consequences of either program are evil. They have led to nothing but recurring bloody confrontations, with no end in sight. This cannot go on and forces us jointly to devise a formula for co-existence. Our deeply wounded people desperately need it, and the world can no longer abide by its absence.
The moderates on both sides must together initiate alternatives. The “together” point is critical. Without the credibility derived from being able to refer to the moderates on the other side, no such initiative can survive, or win.
The moderates have tried and failed before, most disastrously in the Oslo Accords of 1993. The growing costs of their failure are unbearable. The latest moderate iteration is by a former Prime Minister of Israel and former Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority, who jointly propose a Gaza ceasefire-hostage return deal and revival of the two-state solution [See: https://x.com/FareedZakaria/status/1832844309680271768 and https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-819251].
Both sides are cursed with abominable, entrenched leaders peddling a simplistic, good-guys-bad-guys worldview, which drags us all down into the abyss. It is no accident that this latest initiative comes from former insiders who are now outsiders, unbound by the hard-line mentalities and interests of their former colleagues. It is crucial that other moderates now join, reinforce and expand on them.
What can the moderates offer to counter the false maximalist ideologies? I don’t have a blueprint, but will attempt to outline a vision, for which I claim no originality. But it is important to articulate it again with clarity and vigour, in a strong attempt to break the vicious circle entrapping us, which starts with our thinking. It should even include immoderate standards of moderation, ideas far into the future, in order to provide standards against which to measure developments and proposals. Maximalism is happy to project long-term dreams as its goals, and so must a robust “moderationism”.
Many will dismiss this because the other side are fanatics who will never accept them because there is no good faith, no trust. Both sides will argue that the other respects nothing but force. I challenge the skeptics to show how their failed, lethal illusions of total victory beat these signposts to hope. Let the burden of disproof fall on them. Anyone who declines to endorse these principles is no true friend, not of the Israelis nor of the Palestinians. The zealots and apologists for maximalism have given us a full measure of misery and despair. We must liberate ourselves from them.
The mutual distrust cannot simply be wished away, nor the cumulative grievances of each side against the other erased. Trust has to be rehabilitated patiently, step by step. The monumental, joint motivation is: that our children and grandchildren be enabled to live and thrive in this region, without harming and eventually through co-operating with one another. The alternative is mutual destruction. Anyone who claims that their ideals and identities are violated by these principles thereby exposes themselves as an enemy of humanity. Both sides yearn for justice, for which the prerequisite is reciprocity, as manifested in the following propositions:
1. Both the Jews and the Palestinians are nations. Any attempts to delegitimize one another’s national credentials – for example by depicting the Jews as only a religion or the Palestinians as Arabs who only recently fabricated a separate national identity – should be repudiated as malevolent political rhetoric. Both peoples have experienced historical processes that have consolidated their national status. Both are now Indigenous, both are staying here, and both claim the same land. Deal with it, but not by pretending that only one side is a “real” nation.
2. Jews/Israelis and Palestinians have equivalent rights in Israel/Palestine. Neither can demand freedom, self-determination, and security for themselves while negating them for the other. Any attempt to do so inevitably corrupts and diverts their national movements into hideous side paths. The key to real national liberation for both groups lies in transcending the impulse to deny it to the other, releasing the wasted negative energies to positive applications. For Israelis that translates into relinquishing the quest to prevent Palestinian statehood and to annex the West Bank. For Palestinians that means declaring explicitly that the Jews have equal rights in this land and rejecting definitively the goal of eradicating Israel.
3. There is no military solution. Neither side can achieve a knock-out, total victory. Horrible suffering can be inflicted in both directions and has, but it will not yield a conclusive outcome. Short of genocide, neither side can ever be finally defeated, and genocide is not an option, not even after the sides reach nuclear weapons parity. (Clearly, that is a wish, but I do not see the global system allowing a cataclysm of mutual annihilation that would truly signal the end of the world.)
4. There is too much bad blood now for a single, bi-national state. Any attempt to force the two nations into a one-state format will result in ruinous conflict between them. Only a period of separate, neighbourly co-existence can prepare the ground for a future confederation, including other neighbours as well, similar to the European Community. The Abraham Accords can provide an initial platform. Even as separate states, cooperation on functional issues of common concern can and should begin immediately, e.g. regarding climate change, water and wastewater management, law enforcement, trade and banking regulations, bandwidth, air traffic control, etc.
5. In the same way that there are Arab citizens of Israel with full civil and voting rights, provision should be made for Jewish citizens of the future Palestinian state with full civil and voting rights. Being citizens means both accepting the obligations and enjoying the benefits of citizenship. Each state must assume full responsibility for the security of all its citizens, especially those belonging to minority groups (Jews, Moslems, Christians, Druze, etc.)..
6. Maximalist political movements should be declared illegal in both Israel and Palestine and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They must be recognized as directly threatening public safety and individual lives by seeking to undermine the principles stated herein and to incite violence against the other side. They must be defined as criminals seeking to turn both national movements – Zionism and Palestinian nationalism – into totalitarian, racist dogmas of mutual hatred and unending warfare.
7. The “insurance policy” to keep each side on target is constitutional democracy in both, with separation of powers, checks and balances, governmental transparency and accountability, charters of civil and minority rights, and freedom of speech and the press. This is easier said than done, and we know that democratic freedoms can be exploited precisely to undermine democracy. Let it then be an aspiration, but a serious and not just a theoretical one, a work in progress, as the best guarantee of the welfare of the people and the integrity of the principles stated here.
To have a future in this region, we must become the forceful champions of moderation. The alternative is too catastrophic to tolerate.
About the Author
Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, studied at McGill, U. of California, Berkeley, and the London School of Economics, living in Israel since 1976, former director of the WUJS Institute (Arad) and of the Israel-Diaspora Institute (Tel Aviv U.), involved in the Israeli plastics industry (former vice-president of ZAG Ltd.), and later in the aquaculture industry in Sri Lanka. Resident in Ra’anana.
