Eytan Bentsur
Director General, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
"Yediot Aharonot", March 3, 1998
"The Washington Times", March 24, 1998
Throughout its five decades of independence, Israel has held to two basic strategic goals: First, to prevent the possibility of war and to defend the state if attacked; and second, to secure international and regional acceptance as a member of the community of nations. We have sought survival and acceptance - security and peace.
Peace requires that we have faith in its sublime essence. Genuine peacemaking requires conviction and determination, vision and a profound understanding of peace's inherent worth. Peacemaking requires a consistency of purpose and the unwavering drive to find creative solutions to complex problems, be they large or small, through negotiations and treaties. It demands the willingness to create a new reality - to aspire to greatness - while always guided by one's responsibility to one's people and its fundamental interests. This understanding of peace must be inculcated to the wider population and our partners to the peace negotiations.
From the outset peace was a moral, human and strategic goal for us. We first tasted it thanks to Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Anwar Sadat, whose courage and leadership enabled us to breach the vicious cycle of war and hostility. What previously seemed impossible now seemed attainable; peace had changed from a coveted national dream to a reality within our grasp.
The Madrid Peace Conference, which revived the possibility of a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, was the crowning jewel of a diplomatic initiative derived from and founded upon the essential qualities of peacemaking - conviction, inspiration, determination and great diplomatic skill.
The Madrid conference was designed to serve as the launching pad of a long process, along which circles would be squared and bridges built to overcome the diametrically opposed positions of the sides. The parallel tracks created at Madrid were designed eventually to converge and to bring about a comprehensive peace settlement. The seeds of the peace treaty with Jordan and the Oslo accords with the Palestinians were sown at Madrid.
As these early days of peacemaking teach us, in order to achieve genuine peace, genuine effort must be made. Thus the "strategic" choice for peace, to which the Arab countries constantly refer nowadays, must also be given a moral, human dimension. In its absence we find ourselves dealing with the hostile decisions of the Arab League, the almost atavistic expressions of hatred towards Israel, the unrelenting Arab campaign against normalization, and the expectation that Israel will divest itself of all effective defensive and deterrent capabilities. All these arouse deep concern, for they represent a tendency to contradict - in both word and deed - the spirit and way of peace.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, guided by our mandate to promote a peace-based foreign policy, is seeking to address the next phase of the peace process, to mold the concept of peace and the path towards it, consistent with our country's fundamental interests and needs.
From the outset we knew that this process would require fateful choices and compromises. Such decisions can only be made in an environment of security and trust between peoples and their leaders. It is imperative therefore that trust be restored between the sides if we are to be able to derive the great potential inherent in the peace process in our region. This requires, among other things, that we arrive at a joint understanding of what peace means, of its essence, its component parts, its manifestations, its purpose, the nature of bilateral relations under conditions of peace, and the structure and direction of the Middle East in an era of peace.
The question of normalization in the relations between Israel and the Palestinians and the countries of the Arab world must be addressed fully, an it must be done now. If the peace process is to work, normalization can not be made conditional or held hostage until such time as Israel complies with every Arab demand. Normalization can not be treated as a prize nor as a precondition. On the contrary, it is a dynamic that must accompany all formal efforts to reach a settlement. Normalization should give impetus to the efforts to create the positive environment needed for genuine peacemaking, in the style and spirit of Helsinki. The Helsinki experience is instructive: the weighty agreements reached there in 1975 were preceded by years of confidence-building measures between the two sides of the East-West conflict in Europe, without which the entire Helsinki process could not have progressed.
Today, however, to our consternation, the dominant approach among our neighbors is a revisionist one, which seeks to delimit and marginalize the goals of peace, questioning the possibility of cooperation, and turning true, credible peace into something remote and unattainable. This reversal of the trend towards normalization represents a strategic danger to the stability of the Middle East, threatening the vitality and survival of the peace process itself. If allowed to go unchecked, if normalization is discarded, the danger is that we may lose the constituency for peace across the region.
Those who truly desire peace will act to establish processes of normalization now. They will act to advance cooperation in economics, science, medicine and health and the people-to-people contacts that imbue participants with tolerance and mutual respect; they will also promote the adoption of a code of conduct that would reject incitement to hatred and violence and facilitate the revitalization of the multilateral track of the Madrid process.
Our supreme obligation today is to educate our peoples - through the process of normalization - towards mutual respect, acceptance, tolerance and cooperation. The sense among the leaders and the peoples of the region that we are indeed proceeding towards secure and genuine peace will facilitate a more expeditious and courageous march towards the realization of this goal.