As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were putting the final touches to
the agreement later to be known as Oslo II, the foreign minister once
again explained Israel's philosophy and guiding principles in this matter.
He reminded his audience of the new international and regional realities
created in the wake of the end of the Cold War, the need for Israel to
absorb tens of thousands of new immigrants and the need for Israel to
integrate itself into the Middle east as a leading industrial
technological and spiritual nation. Text:
We are in the midst of the peace process. It is not a simple experience,
nor an easy endeavor. Yet we do it out of deep conviction as a historic
verdict of our own people. I'd like to quote Woodrow Wilson, who said that
we are not here to prove our selfishness, but to prove our greatness: our
greatness as a people - because the decision we took is basically the
result of free choice.
Today, when Israel goes to peace, it is not because somebody forces us to
do so. I don't see any foreign pressure or imposition. I cannot see a real
military trap right now. Israel has a strong army and is in excellent
military shape. We have been in a good economic situation over the last
three or four years; we are enjoying an economic growth which is
unparalleled in the Western hemisphere and we do it against all odds. But
peace carries a cost, like war. We have to build new camps, new bypasses,
new installations. We shall spend this year, on top of the cost of defense
and immigration and absorption, a billion Israeli shekels just for the
redeployment of our army.
One might ask: Why are we doing it? What is more, we are permitting the
Palestinians to locate their self-rule in places like Jenin, which is not
more than nine miles from the beach, from the sea; or Kalkilya, which is
not more than ten miles from Netanya. We are handing them the
administration of areas east, south and north of Jerusalem and we are
taking a tremendous risk. And again, the question is: Why?
I could answer it very simply by saying that I am not sure that Bosnia can
become Israel, but I am afraid that Israel can become a Bosnia. If we
shall not take the proper measures when we can do it so willingly, out of
our own free choice, we may do it later on under pressure and tragedy.
Like Bosnia, we have here more than one nation and unlike Bosnia, we have
already had our Bosnia. We have experienced war, we took over land, we
were in command of the people.
Yet, in spite of it, we are changing course. We are doing it out of
moral consideration, we are doing it out of political choice. Morally, we
do not want to govern another people. We think it is a mistake. In the
final analysis, you cannot govern another people except by using force,
employing your rifles and having the rifle as the main instrument in
establishing a relationship with your neighbor. It's a dialogue of rifles.
And contrary to a peace dialogue, when rifles engage in dialogue, people
lose their lives and youngsters are killed.
Then again, we would like to keep both the democratic and Jewish character
of the State of Israel. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, we
have today four and a half million Jewish people. Never in history were
there so many Jewish people in Israel. Never in history did we have so
many Hebrew-speaking people in the land of Israel. There are today more
Hebrew-speaking people in Israel than Danish-speaking Danes in Denmark.
For us, it's quite an innovation. But we also have three and a half
million non-Jewish people. If we want to annex the land, we have to give
them political and human rights, which means that we immediately establish
a parliament where 60 percent of its members would be Jewish, 40 percent
non-Jewish. The Knesset is quite difficult to run, anyway. Imagine having
on top of it such a large minority. Israel would cease to be a country
that guarantees and guides the destinies and existence of Jewish life in
the future.
Furthermore following the great immigration we have had, the prospects for
immigration in the future are not as high as they were until now. The Arab
rate of birth is quite high and in not a very long time, they can
outnumber us. Ladies and gentlemen, I know from history that the first
advice you hear is: "Don't negotiate from a position of weakness." But
when you gain strength, you lose your appetite to negotiate. That's the
tragedy. When you're weak, you say, "Let's become strong." When you become
strong, you fall in love with your strength and you forget your wisdom. We
are at the peak of our strength and we think it is the time to negotiate.
I admit there is a disadvantage to negotiation. As long as you negotiate
with yourself, you're in an excellent situation. You win all the time, no
problems. And I do believe that the opposition in Israel has an advantage
over the government, because the opposition is negotiating with itself. No
wonder they win all the time. But when you have to negotiate with another
party, you must understand that as in war there is no alternative to
victory, in order to achieve peace, there is no alternative to compromise.
If you don't want to compromise, don't go and negotiate.
But compromise exists even before it's being written into the agreement
itself. People say: "Why do you give back land?" I'm asking myself: Do we
give back land? Was the land in our hands? I shall take Gaza, for example.
Gaza, all told, is 220 square miles. When we came into Gaza 27 years ago,
there were 350,000 Palestinians on those 220 square miles. Today there are
a million. Three times as many. The land is the same. The density went up.
The poverty went up. The revolt went up. The bitterness went up. The
violence went up, but not the land. So Gaza is not the land. Gaza is a
population.
As you know, after we were so criticized for giving up Gaza first - today
there is not a single person in the country who suggests that we should go
back to Gaza. Nobody. As a matter of fact, many people wonder and ask:
"Why did we wait 27 years for this solution? What did we gain? Why did we
have to risk the lives and the security of our youngsters?" And what is
true about Gaza is true about other Arab-populated areas.
What we are now trying to do is really to implement a series of five or
six steps to complete the peace agreement. The first, as I have said, was
Gaza and Jericho first. Then, as a result, we have made full peace with
Jordan and the peace with Jordan is totally successful. Now we are making
the third movement, which is to redeploy our army from populated
Palestinian locations so as to enable them to have free elections. The
Palestinians are saying and I think they are right, that they cannot have
their voting in the presence of the Israeli army, with the shadow of our
military presence. So we are leaving these places. I know it is not so
simple to introduce a democracy, but if you ask me, the best deterrent
against war is a democratic system, even more than a system of weapons.
I know it will take time before the Palestinian society will become
totally democratic. How did Arafat put it to me on one of those long
nights? He said: "Democracy - my God, who invented it? It is so tiring."
It is really tiring. You go from meeting to meeting, you have to assemble
coalitions, you have to watch that nobody will run away, that your tiny
little majority will be intact and that you can operate with a collection
of views that are so contradictory and so varied.
What we are doing is really to finish the agreement on the third issue. We
have had to overcome a lot of difficult problems. First of all, we have
agreed that we will leave three or four major problems for the permanent
negotiations and that the first one, Jerusalem, is not included in this
interim agreement. We have also decided that in our negotiations, we shall
not dismantle any settlement, nor shall we leave unprotected any settler.
That remains our responsibility. External security, as well as the
overriding security on the West Bank will remain in the hands of our
army.
The redeployment will be carried out gradually in three basic zones:
Zone A, which comprises all the major cities of the West Bank. There are
seven. We have agreed on six and we are negotiating now how to organize
the seventh, which is Hebron, the only city that has a small Jewish
population inside it - 700 Jewish and 120,000 Arab people. And in order to
protect these Jewish people, we are taking very strong measures. Then we
have Zone B, which comprises something like 420 or 430 Arab villages. In Zone
A, the Palestinians will take over administratively and otherwise. In Zone
B, they will take over administratively and we shall carry on our
responsibility for security in the zone. Zone C comprises the settlements,
the military locations and those parts of the land over which we have in
mind to negotiate when we shall come to a permanent solution.
It was a very tough negotiation. The air is loaded with emotions,
suspicions, prejudices, hatred. In our homes, there are many families who
lost their dearest, their youngest. The same is true on the Arab side:
125,000 Palestinians have been held in prison. Some of the people that we
negotiate with were in our prisons for 12 years, 20 years, 25 years.
And yet, not only were they liberated from prison; many of them were
liberated from hatred, which is a very great phenomenon and a very
impressive one. Then we shall negotiate the fourth step, which will be a
further redeployment, not just of populated areas, but of parts of the
areas that there is no sense for us to hold and the ones which are so
important for us for the future. And then we shall go to the fifth stage,
which will begin in May 1996, the negotiations for a permanent
solution.
It is so easy to make war. It is so easy to hate people. It is so easy to
discover disagreeable, revolting pictures on the opposite side. It is so
hard to accommodate, to forget, to give credit for the future. But
without it, we shall not be able to move. We build on peace and we are
building a peace based on our strength: the strength of our army, the
strength of our deterrence and the strength of our determination to bring
peace to the whole area.
We are entering a new era, the 21st century and Israel will be living -
not off of her land, which is not a very large one, nor off her water,
which is not plentiful; not off our national resources, which are rather
scarce. We shall live by our brains and our talent. This year, the GNP of
Israel will reach the impressive figure of 80 billion dollars - twice as
much as the Saudis are taking out of their royalties. In the competition
between brain and oil, for the first time, the brain has the upper hand.
The Americans laugh at us and say that the Middle East is being made up of
two sorts of countries: the oily countries and the holy countries. Israel
is clearly a holy country - look at the quantity of oil we have. And yet
we are progressing.
I want to tell you that without your help, without your participating for
so many years under such demanding circumstances, against so many opposing
winds and streams, throughout most of the time when we were alone and
isolated and part of the time supported by a very generous country like
the United States of America, we could not have achieved what we did. We
created something which is unprecedented and unique in history, when I
look now at the Palestinian autonomy and I compare it with our own
foundation of Jewish statehood, I say to myself: "The Palestinians are
supposed to have the support of 24 surrounding Arab countries." We are an
'only child'. If I want to wish the Palestinians something, it is that
they should enjoy the support and the loyalty which the State of Israel
enjoyed from the Jews - and they have not enjoyed from their fellow Arab
countries. I wish that instead of just declarations of support, we would
see the Palestinian autonomy become a reality that can cope with economic
means and the fresh air of freedom.
For the last two thousand years, we were chastened by catastrophes and
holocaust and fear. Today, we are driven by hope and choice. We want to
make the Jewish state not just a haven for the historic Jewish
catastrophes, but the heart of our dream and a daily commitment. We want
to see in the Bible not a book but a destiny; not something that you can
read, but something that can lead. This is what keeps us together. Looking
back, being together was great. Looking ahead, we need the same greatness
of being together.