Peace Now Leader: our strategy not to reveal true goals

Excerpts from an interview with Tzali Reshef by Ari Shavit - Ha'aretz
Magazine - 8 November 2002

[IMRA: This item is being distributed again as it provides important insight
into the modus operandi of Chaim Ramon, the man behind the current
netogiations between PM Olmert and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. For some reason
this item was published in the hard copy English edition but not on the
Ha'aretz website. Only the first part of the interview, that does not
include this segment, is available in the Haaretz Archives and the Haaretz
Archives misdates the segment it does have as 7 November.]

...

Question: There is a contradiction about you. In your private life, you are
a real-estate "shark." Unlike some of your colleagues, you don't lecture on
ethics in the department of philosophy. When what is at stake is your
economic interests and those of your clients and of the companies you own,
you know very well how to live in, and abide by the laws of, the jungle. But
when it comes to the national interest, all you have to offer us is
"vegetarian" recipes: concessions, withdrawal, good will.

Answer: "I think that precisely because of my professional and business
background, one can conclude that what I am proposing to the State of Israel
is neither lukewarm nor naive. I tell you that if I were representing the
client called the State of Israel, I would do so with the same toughness I
demonstrate when I represent my private clients. I would not conduct
negotiations in the same scandalous way that Barak did. Even though I am in
favor of a compromise in Jerusalem, I would not have placed the Jerusalem
card on the table at Camp David without first ascertaining that I would get
a quid pro quo for it.

Question: `The principle of the bus: ' Let's get back to the peace
movement. In fact, you, like the settlers, are a minority who imposed
yourself on the majority. After all, what characterized Peace Now for a
generation and what characterized the Oslo formula is the existence of a
small, sophisticated group of people with a radical agenda who generated a
decisive political change by not disclosing the full scale of the agenda to
the public at large.

Answer: "Our idea was to talk to the public in a language it was ready to
listen to, and not try to foist on it ideas it was not ready to accept. I
called that the principle of the bus: not to argue now about what the end of
the journey will be, but to invite aboard everyone who is ready to travel to
the next stop. If we had written in the officers' letter of 1978 [an open
letter from some 350 reserve officers to prime minister Menachem Begin,
urging him to press for peace with Egypt and not to cling to the
territories] that in order to obtain peace, we will have to return all the
territories and go back to the 1967 borders and divide Jerusalem and
recognize the human aspect of the refugee problem - very f ew people would
have gone along with us. We would have remained a pure but marginal
left-wing group.

"Therefore, I was insistent that our message not be radicalized and I didn't
want to have my photograph taken too often as part of the human rights
struggle. What gave Peace Now its great strength was our external image as
patriots and as people who do not represent the other side. We were able to
create a label that spoke to a great many people. That label is our success.
The result was that while the left-wing movements in which my parents were
members had dozens or hundreds of people, tens and hundreds of thousands of
people support our movement." Isn't there a manipulative element here? "Of
course there is. I was a manipulator when I was 24 - but a manipulator in
the positive sense of the word. I knew back then that if we said what we
thought, it would be taken badly. To say we have to make concessions is bad.
That is why we went with the officers' letter. That is w hy we took Yuval
Neria, who was awarded the Medal of Valor in the Yom Kippur War, and placed
his name at the top of the list. Do you really think that I thought Yuval
understood more than I did because he got the Medal of Valor and I didn't?

"We did it in order to combat the negative image and to talk to people in a
language that would make it possible for them to identify with us. You can
call it manipulation and there were some who called it opportunism, but in
my view, it was a farsighted strategy. I think it was smart."

Question: One thing it mandated was the creation of an undemocratic movement
establishment. Maybe it's no coincidence that there are no elections and no
elected institutions in Peace Now. It is a closed movement that is
controlled from above by a closed group in which you are at the center.

Answer: "Nowadays I no longer run the movement directly or on a day-to-day
basis. There is a secretary-general and there are other people who do that.
But there is something to wh at you say. Peace Now does not have elected
institutions and it does not exist in the form of a legal entity. You can
say that there should have been an assembly that elects a committee that
elects a chairman. But I say to you that if the small group that leads Peace
Now and cooks up matters had been cut off from its public, it would have
found itself alone. We face the test of the public at every demonstration.
People have faith in the label and in those who promoted the label over the
years, and there is no energy wasted over internal struggles. I think that
in many cases, we did in fact behave like an Athenian democracy. It was very
important for us to reach an internal consensus."

Question: Still, what you are describing is somewhat reminiscent of the mode
of activity of Trotskyite cells that in the 1960s and `70s seized control of
parts of the Labor Party in Britain. You seized control of the political bus
of the Labor camp and drove it where you wanted.

Answer: "We did not hijack the bus. After all, you sat with us in the front
row and saw all along where it was going, and you could have alighted at any
time. We didn't hijack it from anyone. But the fact is that at the moment of
truth, both Rabin and Barak boarded our bus, which was something
inconceivable in 1978."

Question: But then the bus fell into an abyss.

Answer: "I know that that is your opinion, but it's not mine. I think that
all that happened at Camp David is that the bus ran off the road a bit
because of navigational errors by Barak and Arafat, which can be corrected.
Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that we were right about everything.
It's possible that the social stratum of 1948 in the Palestinian society is
stronger than what we wanted to think. It's possible that Arafat is
incapable of telling a refugee in Lebanon that he will not be returning to
Lod. I will meet you even more than halfway and say that it's possible we
had an almost messianic faith that if Israel adopted certain positions an
agreement would ensue.

"I don't want you to leave here and say, `That guy hasn't learned a thing.
He will give them rifles again and repeat all the same mistakes.' But unlike
you, I don't think the Palestinians are fighting us because they want to
expel us from here. I think that, in practice, the conflict is over the
occupation and the settlements. That is why I still believe today that it
can be resolved by means of a compromise."

Question: On self-criticism: Your success lay in persuading the Israeli
public to accept the principle of partition; your failure was that you
didn't try and didn't succeed in persuading the Palestinians to accept that
same principle. Maybe this stems from a tendency to dump the whole burden
onto the Israeli side? Because when you organize Israeli-Palestinian peace
encounters, the Palestinians get up and attack Israel, and the Israelis get
up and attack Israel, and everyone is pleased and goes home saying there is
a partner.

Answer: "There are encounters of the sort you describe. Anyone who denies
that is lying. But I would like to inform you in all modesty that any
encounter in which I participated never looked like that. And above and
beyond that, I would claim that our responsibility is to educate the Israeli
public, not the Palestinian one. It is perfectly obvious that we reject
Palestinian terror. In that rejection, Effi Eitam and Uri Ariel are
partners. But despite that, the place in which I express myself, anger
people and am heard is a place in which I voice criticism of ourselves."

Question: Are you not afraid that at certain critical junctures,
demonstrations and political pressure by the peace camp weaken Israel's
bargaining power?

Answer: "For those conducting negotiations, democracy is a terrible system.
If I were conducting negotiations and I wanted to give the other side 100,
and one of my clients would yell out from behind me `give them 120! Or why
not give them 130?' I would quit immediately. It's a waste of time. It is
thus correct that Peace Now weaken's Israel's bargaining power. Yet, on the
other hand, there is a big contribution to the internal debate. It improves
the image of Israel and plays a central role in encouraging moderation on
the Palestinian side."

Question: During this entire conversation, you are really having trouble
criticizing the Palestinians. Naturally, your tendency and that of the peace
movement is to focus criticism on Israel.

Answer: "I am critical of Arafat for causing a general breakdown. But I am
not critical of him for forging a military option. I find it self-evident
that the Palestinian Authority should create that option for itself. I will
not say it is legitimate, but I will say that if Israel were to find itself
in the situation of the Palestinians, it would do the same thing."

Question: In contrast to your cautious approach regarding Arafat, you simply
cannot abide Ehud Barak.

Answer: "I think he was the worst prime minister in Israel's history."

Question: He makes your blood boil.

Answer: "Arafat also makes my blood boil. But Arafat is not one of us. Barak
is; he is a person I worked with and helped get elected. But that person,
who had four-and-a-half years ahead of him and the support of 56 percent of
the public, did not understand what Sharon understands in the middle of the
night when the stars come out: that you have to preserve the coalition and
keep your partners and maintain public support. Not to quarrel over whether
to transport equipment for the Electricity Company on Sabbath eve and not to
get entangled with the Shas party and with Meshulam Nahari [a Shas MK who
was deputy education minister in the Barak government].

"Barak made mistake after mistake and arrived at Camp David without a
government and without support and put forward positions of the extreme
left, but he did not get an agreement and brought about the collapse of
everything. I think that that shows a very basic absence of talent. Barak's
analytical mind is not so analytical.

"What Barak failed to und erstand is the principle of the bus. Instead, he
sat on some torpedo where there is room for only one person and flew with it
until the end, and blew up with it and destroyed the whole business. So I
impute most of the blame to him. He has a magic faith in himself, but he has
no qualifications to conduct negotiations or to manage large systems. The
myth that he tore the mask off Arafat's face is also nonsense. What is the
advantage in that? What would have been so terrible if the mask had remained
for another few years but we wouldn't have lost more than 600 lives."

Quetsion: Is the current process turning Israel into an apartheid state?

Answer: "If you had talked to me about apartheid 20 years ago, I would have
had reservations. Apartheid? Us? But today we are approaching it. Settlers
drive on the roads in the West Bank while the Palestinians are imprisoned in
their villages. The north road [out] of Jerusalem already has separate lanes
for Jews and for Arabs. And it's getting worse. Not because of race theory,
but because of the cycle of fear of repression-terrorism-repression.

"So, I tell you that we have no choice and we have no more time. We have to
act. We have to end the occupation immediately. And that is why I am so
angry with Fuad [Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer] and with [Foreign
Minister Shimon] Peres, who have conducted the catastrophic policy of the
Labor Party for the past 18 months and brought about a situation in which
the public thinks that Sharon's escalation policy is the only possible
policy that exists.

"But I see sparks of change. I think that what happened this [past] week in
the Labor Party is part of a comprehensive process of disillusionment.
Slowly the public is beginning to understand that it is impossible any
longer to accept the sentimental, vengeful and primitive approach of the
right. It is impossible to go on holding the Palestinians under the boot of
occupation."

Mr. Peace Now, Ari Shavit - Ha'aretz (Magazine Section) 8 November 2002