John Roughan: Where there's no trust, peace seems improbable

I hadnever really known an Israeli until six or seven years ago. He is an earnest, delightful man until you mention the Middle East, which I did over lunch at our first meeting not long after he had migrated here.

The Oslo initiative was sputtering along and it was an optimistic time. Peace was breaking out in places such as South Africa and Ulster. The Palestine Liberation Organisation had recognised Israel's right to exist within its 1947 borders and Israel was bargaining on the occupied territories.

I must have been talking in that happy vein because after a while he stunned me to silence. Why, he asked, did everyone imagine peace was the solution there?

"Well, ah ... "

Peace, he said, was impossible with "these people". He did not trust them. They would not rest while Israel continued to exist.

A peace settlement with the PLO meant far greater risk to the lives of his family even than they had endured already. They were safer, he insisted, in a continuing, possibly permanent, state of war.

Israel is a vigorous democracy and my friend makes no claim to represent the majority view. But everything that has happened since suggests to me that he does. Lately, he has become despondent at the reporting of Ariel Sharon's offensive against the Palestinian militias and particularly resents comparisons to the Holocaust of events such as the destruction of Jenin.

He often mentions that his parents were imprisoned and enslaved by Romanian fascists. They survived and went to Israel as refugees when he was a baby.

The dangers of life in a defended country must be endurable after the terror of a concentration camp, but couldn't younger Israelis look forward to something better than continuous war? This week I revived our first conversation.

Did he think Israel was any safer for the apparent success of Sharon's operation?

"Things will be quiet for a while now," he said. "We see this sort of thing about every 10 years. We saw it in 1948 [following partition], 1956 [Suez crisis], 1967 [Six Day War], 1973 [Yom Kippur], 1982 [Lebanon], 1991 [Gulf War] and now this [the War on Terror, I guess]. It will be quiet now for a few years but it will erupt again."

Surely, I suggest, he sees some way out of this cycle. How does he see it ending?

"The Arab-Israeli problem is just a symptom of a deeper problem of the Middle East. Peace will come when the deeper problem is fixed. You cannot put the cart before the horse."

The root of the trouble, as he sees it, is the repressive regimes that rule the Arab states. If they can be overthrown and Arabs helped to become democratic and prosperous - just as Germans and Japanese were helped after World War II - he believes the problem would solve itself.

There would be no more regimes fomenting antagonism to Israel as an excuse for their own failings, no need for 4 million Arabs to come back to Palestine and, he believes, no further demand for a Palestinian homeland. The 5.3 million Jews and 1.2 million Arabs could live happily together in a state that already gives the Arabs full civil rights.

But wait: why shouldn't the Palestinians who fled after the creation of Israel be allowed to return?

"No. Impossible. It would destroy Israel's Zionist character," he said, and my jaw drops.

"Tell me, John," he says. "If 4 million Maori had left New Zealand when it was founded and now wanted to come back, would you let them in?"

Speaking for myself, yes.

"Anyway, how big do you think Israel is in relation to New Zealand?"

About the size of the South Island, I guess.

"I wish," he replies. "Israel is the size of Northland."

Okay, but how, I wonder, would a democratic and prosperous Middle East end the demand for a Palestinian state? Everything I have read suggests an Arab democracy would be more nationalist, more religious, more antagonistic to Israel than the monarchies and dictators have been.

"There is a great deal of myth and propaganda about this," he says. "Journalists who go into those countries report under Government supervision."

Well, how does he know Arab opinion. During 30 years in Israel did he associate with them?

"At university I was part of a left-wing group with Arab friends. I wanted peace and happiness and integration with them. I wanted, for them, civil rights as an important minority.

"I withdrew from that party because one of these Arab people was found in 1973 to be working as a spy for Syria. He visited the Golan Heights and gave the Syrians the outline of Israeli defence lines. I had friends killed there."

His distrust dates from that experience and he still does not believe that after 55 years of failure to dislodge Israel, Palestinians would settle for a co-existing state.

"The idea of a Palestinian state was unknown until 1967 with the formation of the PLO by the Egyptian Government. The territories the PLO now claims were part of Jordan and Egypt in 1967. Why did they not form a Palestinian state then?"

Because at that time they still hoped for the whole of Palestine.

"Right. And if they can't get it in one step, they will try to get it in two."

He has two nephews serving in the Israeli Army and his son will soon leave here to join them. Naturally he worries. So goes the war without end.

Feature: Middle East

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UN: Information on the Question of Palestine

Israel's Permanent Mission to the UN

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Jerusalem Post

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US Department of State - Middle East Peace Process