As Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben Ami (Tangier, 1943) experienced first-hand the Camp David negotiations in 2000, the great lost opportunity to reach peace with the Palestinians. Born into a Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jewish family, the Labor diplomat and historian publishes Profetas sin Honor (RBA), where he considers the two-state solution dead and proposes ways out to avoid the reality – he laments – of apartheid.
Why is Camp David so important?
It was the first time that the parties tried to reach a final, total solution. They were confronted for the first time with what turned out to be the unbearable price of peace. They have become accustomed to war, because war usually unites nations. Peace is never perfect, there is a price to pay, and nations are inevitably divided. The two parties would rather stay in the conflict than sacrifice their national ethos and dreams.
The Camp David failure explains why the right has dominated Israeli politics ever since, you write.
After Camp David comes the intifada, which almost definitely destroys the trust of the parties, and turns public opinion in Israel to the right. The main commodity of the left was peace. And what people tell us is: “You have offered everything, the ’67 borders, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem… and the Palestinian response has been an intifada.” There peace died and today Israel is a right-wing country.
If Camp David was when peace was closest, is it now when it is furthest away?
No one really thinks about how to make peace anymore. They think about how to survive, how to manage the conflict rather than how to resolve it. And the cataclysmic perspective of the solution of a State opens up.
He says the two-state solution is “dead and buried.” Without a silver lining?
I believe that pessimism is morally superior to false optimism, to naive optimism. At least pessimism makes you think about trying other outlets. To continue talking about two states, as European countries do, is just repeating an empty cliché.
What are the alternatives?
We are already seeing one. There is a reality of a State. From the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, what there is is a State dominated by a superior race that is the Jews, where the Palestinians have no rights. an apartheid. Israel says that it is a military occupation, like that of France in Algeria or England in other territories, and that as such it is temporary, until there is a solution. It’s a hoax. The moment the political negotiation dies, the argument ceases to be valid. Apartheid is the solution, in quotes, that we are living and that we will live in a much more intense way as time passes, because the population will be mostly Arab. Israel will increasingly resemble apartheid South Africa, but without a South African solution. There is no possible scenario in which the Jewish minority will ever offer power to the Arab majority.
Is an Israel impossible in which Jewish and Arab citizens are equal?
In the Middle East, will we achieve what the Turks and Greeks have not been able to in Cyprus? What Yugoslavia did not achieve, will Israel achieve, with two such divergent and egocentric nationalisms? In a region where minorities are gassed, the Sunnis are at war with the Shiites, believing in a multicultural and multinational state is delusional. There is the incredible collapse of Lebanon, the only multi-ethnic state in the Middle East.
But hasn’t Israel always been an exception, the only democracy in the Middle East?
Notice that even when there are enlightened and liberal thinking people who are proposing the idea of ​​a State, like former President Rivlin, who is a good person, they talk about a State in which Arabs will have civil rights, but not the determination of the State. A country, for example, where there are limitations on the immigration of Arabs, but not on the law of return of the Jews. Furthermore, it would be a union between unequals, so exaggerated that it would never work. We are talking about a country like Israel, with all its military capabilities, a scientific and technological superpower… Yes, in Germany, so many years later, there is still an abysmal difference between East and West Germans!
In his book, he also proposes the unilateral withdrawal of part of the occupied territories.
It is not impossible. Retreating to the fence would mean annexing 8% of Palestinian territory and dismantling the West Bank settlements. That in itself can already lead to a fierce confrontation, and more now that the settlers have a majority representation in the Government. This alternative requires a brutal leader with benign intentions. Like Sharon.
Someone who knows that there is a price to pay for peace.
Sharon got it. He withdrew from Gaza and intended to do so in the West Bank, in fact it had already started, in northern Samaria.
And then he had a stroke.
I am one of those who think that the greatest tragedy for peace was not the assassination of Rabin, but the death of Sharon. Rabin’s assassination was a tragedy for Israel’s democracy, but not for the peace process, because I think he would have reached the same impasse as we did. Furthermore, Rabin did not always have the courage. In 1994, after the Goldstein massacre (a settler attack on a mosque in Hebron), he had a golden opportunity to dismantle the Jewish settlement in Hebron. He didn’t dare. Sharon would have had no problem. He dismantled all the settlements in Gaza, which included dismantling cemeteries, and I’m sure he slept soundly that night. I insist: it is not the great dreamers of peace who will resolve this conflict, but brutal leaders.
And on the right?
It may be from the left. Ehud Barak has that ability. Clinton used to say that he never knew anyone so brave.
He proposes a third solution.
A Jordanian-Palestinian confederation. At the Madrid conference (1991), there was no Palestinian delegation, they were represented in a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation. That meant the solution would be a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation, a much more natural confederation than the Israeli-Palestinian one. Natural in terms of religion, levels of development, collective mentality, common history.
But would the Palestinians give up?
What matters more to you, the end of the occupation or a state? I think the first. The state, in fact, was never an objective of the Palestinian national movement.
“Arafat was fighting to repair an injustice, not to build a future,” you write.
Indeed. It is a movement that speaks of restitution, of returning what was lost. Palestinian nationalism has a negative ethos, while Israeli nationalism is positive. I am not saying this in a moral sense, but in terms of building a future. What we wanted was a piece of land to be able to create a refuge for the Jews after the Holocaust, due to the historical persecutions, etc., and there unleash all our possibilities. Palestinian nationalism is negative in the sense that it does not talk about building a state. How much did it cost the international community for Arafat to start paying salaries through bank transfers and not in cash? And how much did it cost to agree to have a prime minister? State building was never part of the Palestinian national ethos. That does not mean that they want to live under military occupation.
And the Jordanians, would they be for the job?
Jordan has a responsibility. The ’67 war started because of the Jordanians, even though they were begged not to enter. King Hussein had a great fear of a Palestinian state, he did not want to hear about it. He proposed several times the confederate or federated solution. In 2008, two former Jordanian prime ministers proposed a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. You don’t propose that kind of thing if the king is against it. The strictly Palestinian solution has failed. And with horror. How many more years do we have to wait, how many more settlements, more radicalization, more wars? It is time to explore the Jordanian-Palestinian solution, and if that does not work, a unilateral withdrawal must be made. If not, let’s go to the suicide of the Jewish state, a full-blown harakiri, because this was never the idea of ​​the founding fathers of Israel.
There are Israelis who leave the country for moral reasons, because the occupation seems to them too high a price. Have you ever thought about it?
Well, there are also a lot of Americans who leave the country because they are fed up with the political stuff. The main reason for those leaving Israel is not that, but has to do with the state-religion problem. It is the central question of the current crisis, because what Netanyahu has done with this judicial reform has been to open Pandora’s box. It is no longer just the issue of justice. This government coalition is made up of nationalist religious from the occupied territories and orthodox religious. The Orthodox do not go to military service, a large part of them do not work and live on state subsidies. And that most liberals are willing to put up with. What they are not willing to put up with is that they want to change the public space where liberal Israel lives.
Many protesters against judicial reform warn that Israel is heading towards dictatorship. Do you think that Israeli democracy is really in danger?
There is a certain dramatization, which comes from the nature of the government coalition. It is seen as the final victory of those who have never wanted a democratic state, as is the case of the orthodox. People have the feeling that they are losing the state they wanted to build. Israel is two metaphors: one is Tel Aviv and the other is Jerusalem. They are engaged in a cultural war, a kulturkampf, which has been going on for many years. And unfortunately this type of confrontation, as occurred in Spain or the United States, the two most emblematic civil wars, never end in a pact, but in the victory of one of the two sides.
With his decision to freeze judicial reform, do you think Netanyahu is playing for time or has he really realized he has gone too far?
You miscalculated what the consequences of this step might be, and you’ve realized it. In addition, it has coincided with the crisis with the United States, with the Abraham agreements in poor condition, with the dream of an agreement with Saudi Arabia also buried for the moment by the rapprochement with Iran… Suddenly, the price of continuing with the reform is too high. Netanyahu is a tragedy. He is an intelligent, capable, cultured man, educated in the best American universities. A man who reads books, who has a world, and who has taken political refuge in an obscurantist coalition. But therein lies his lust for power. This is his government coalition and he has no other. He promoted judicial reform because power, the obsession of being on top, of staying in power, has been essential for him. On the other hand, there is also his personal problem, because Netanyahu has a pending trial and he hoped that the reform would allow him, for example, to appoint a new state prosecutor who would freeze the trial. All of that gets mixed up and he doesn’t know what to do. I have always believed that Netanyahu is envious of popular love for Yitzhak Rabin. That explains his obsession with repeating that there are murder threats against him. But if those who murder here are from the right! He wants to be liked by his natural parish, which is the left, at least culturally, no matter how much he is in power with the others. There are many ways to view Netanyahu. There is also something cynical in him. Normally a statesman tries to form the kind of coalition that can be the platform for executing his vision. Netanyahu is the other way around. He defines his vision according to the coalition that allows him to be in power. He is irresponsible and cynical at the same time. In 2014, in the negotiations with Obama, Netanyahu agreed to return to the borders of 1967, because he had Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak in the coalition. They were? What does he think is the solution? Because he is now doing the opposite.
The Abraham Accords are Netanyahu’s great triumph. Agreements based on the transaction, on the business. Is that the only way Israel will have to make peace with its neighbors, considering who its neighbors are?
It is necessary to distinguish between the Arab neighbors of the internal perimeter, such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or Egypt, from those who are in the second circle, whose sensitivity to the Palestinian question is more distant. With Jordan and Egypt, for example, we have peace, but we do not have normalization of relations. There is no travel, there is no trade, it is a refrigerator. With countries from afar, we have made peace agreements and there is normalization. You cannot imagine the number of flights between Israel and Morocco, between Israel and the Emirates, or Bahrain. In Sudan, almost the only ones who can mediate in the conflict today are the Israelis. With distant countries it has been much easier. If you don’t have to negotiate over territories or sacred places, it’s easier. With the neighbors it is not necessary to negotiate only about territories. The Palestinian question is more than that. It is the mythical aspect, the religion, the memory, the refugees, Jerusalem… it is all the intangible. In peace processes, the tangible is easy to resolve. The intangible is the hard part. I participated quite a lot in the peace process in Colombia, and I know something about the one in Northern Ireland. Both have intangible elements, but in the peace agreements these were left to be resolved after the peace. Here, on the other hand, the intangible is an integral part of the negotiation, it cannot be separated or left for later.
In Tunisia we are now seeing, twelve years later, the failure of the last Arab spring that was still standing. Has the failure of the Arab springs been good or bad news for Israel? Is it better to negotiate with dictators than with elected Islamists?
What the springs showed is that in the Arab world the choice is whether you want secular dictatorships or Islamic democracies. There is no scenario in which the secular dictatorship falls and a middle-class bourgeois democracy emerges. That pendulum does not exist in the Arab world, we have seen it in Tunisia, Egypt, even in Gaza, with the victory of Hamas when there were free elections. That is why in the West Bank there have been no elections for more than 20 years. If there were, Hamas would win. What is better for Israel, a democratic Arab world or the current one? In the short term, the current Because in the end it is not a peace between peoples, it is a peace between states, with regimes. When Israel talks about having an existential problem, it refers to the physical sense, to the destruction of the Jewish state. When Arabs talk about an existential problem, they mean the regime, not the state. To the survival of the regime. Another interesting lesson is that the Arab republics did not resist, while the monarchies did. It was for a question of legitimacy. The monarchy has a legitimacy that comes from religion: that is the case in Morocco, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia.
