June 27, 2002
Sherard Cowper-Coles, British
Ambassador to Israel
Professor
Susser, Friends,
I am
an optimist. Not despite
everything. But because of
everything. I want this evening to
tell you why.
What
follows is a personal view. Not the
view of the Her Majesty’s Government, or of the Foreign Office in Whitehall,
or even of the British Embassy here in Tel Aviv.
But the view of someone who, over more than 20 years of acquaintance of
varying intimacy, has come to know and love Israel and its people. Someone who has the personal and
professional privilege of serving as his country’s Ambassador in this
extra-ordinary land, at this extra-ordinary time.
It is
also, as advertised, a European view.
Not the European view, if such exists, which is improbable, but
the view of one individual European. A
Gentile, certainly, but one whose family, mostly English but part Dutch, have
known and in some small way shared what the Jewish people have suffered at
European hands this past century. At
Dovercourt holiday camp, for example, on England’s icy Eastern seaboard, where
in the winter of 1938-39, my father, then a Cambridge undergraduate, used to
welcome and work with those fleeing Nazi persecution, into the arms of
strangers. Or, four years later, in
the forests just West of the Dutch-German border, where my great uncle’s
efforts to offer Jewish children sanctuary in those woods were betrayed, and all
paid the price. No European can
forget his part in the Jews’ struggle for sanctuary, for a state they can
safely call their own.
Of
course what I say will draw on the experience of nearly a quarter of a century
in the British Diplomatic Service.
Twenty
four years in which I have seen up close: the problems of fighting terrorism and
making peace in Ireland; of agreeing with China on the transfer of six million
people from one sovereignty to another in conditions which guaranteed their
basic rights; of experimenting in Europe with new ways in which peoples and
states may work together in the common interest. From slightly further away I have watched empires and
federations across Central and Eastern Europe come apart, and then come back
together again in new formations of still unproven durability.
It
has been a time in which I have been lucky enough to engage in particular with
four countries, their politics, peoples, fears and passions: an Egypt from which Sadat was snatched
away by Islamic terrorism, to be followed by the man who is still Ar-Rayyis;
Reagan’s America, and much of the Presidency of the father of the man now
American President; France, proud, difficult, and divided between Chirac and
Jospin; and, again and at last, this land, so dear to so many of us, but across
which dark shadows now pass.
There
have been other, less intimate, associations: with politicians of left and right
and now somewhere in between, of my own country and of others; with the media,
so much maligned, so important, so powerful, often so courageous, physically and
morally, but sometimes so craven; with advisers and functionaries of every hue,
the time-servers and the talented, from the bravely independent to the most
dangerous of all, the policy equivalent of the butler who always serves his
master exactly the advice he wants; and,
I have to say, with the stage army of academics and commentators who travel from
conference to colloquium, and back again, dispensing great knowledge and much
wisdom –without, sadly, those who make policy taking the notice they should.
But
still this will be a personal view: mainly because I want to be franker with you
than I could otherwise be; but also because I suspect that optimism is not a
subject on which HMG has an official view.
There
are three broad reasons for my optimism. The
first derives from my perception of human nature; the second from what we have
learned from the terrible events of the past couple of years; the third from my
understanding of the only sane way to resolve this conflict.
Human
nature first. Two and half
millennia ago Thucydides set down his analysis of the causes and course of the
devastating war between Athens and Sparta and their allies. He said he wanted his History of the
Peloponnesian War to be, in Greek, a ktema es aei, a possession for
all time. He did so, on the ground
that human nature did not change much or at all, and that his history might
therefore be of some use to those who wished to avoid similar catastrophes in
future. He was right then, and
right now. Human nature does not
change much.
That
has good consequences, and bad ones. The
latter are easy to discern. As we
see here, day after day, sometimes - on bad days - hour after hour, the veneer
of human civilisation is very thin. When
that veneer goes, when trust and hope evaporate, restraint is removed, and
hatred reigns, human beings are capable of inflicting, deliberately, the most
appalling atrocities on each other. Suicide
attacks against civilians are the most obvious and awful symptom of such evil. But there are many others, great and
small, which feed the seemingly ceaseless round of attack and retribution.
That
is not the whole picture. The
violence can cease. What is
more, it has ceased, for example over the turn of the year, when, largely
as a result of international pressure, levels of terrorism fell right back. And violence will cease again. Not just because such things never go on
forever. But because most people here in Israel, just like most people in the
Palestinian territories, want it to end. Because
what they want most is what you want most: a decent future for their children. And they, like you, have the sense to
know that remorseless murder and retribution is the worst way of bringing that
about.
In my
short time back here I have come more than ever to believe in the fundamental
good sense and decency of people on both sides of the Green Line. Poll after poll shows not only that most
people want peace, but that they understand the sorts of difficult compromises
that will be necessary for peace.
That
will sound to many of you like a ludicrously optimistic assertion. But the horrific events we have been
witnessing for the past couple of years and which we may continue to witness for
some time yet have one merit: they show that a situation so awful cannot long
continue. Ordinary Israelis cannot
be left to live in daily fear of life and limb from indiscriminate terrorist
savagery. Equally, it must be
obvious to every decent Israeli that, whatever short-term measures Israel
chooses to take, more than three million Palestinian men, women and children
should not be kept for ever confined by military force to a series of security
zones in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Parallels
with Northern Ireland are inexact. But
I well remember in the dark days of 1988 good people saying with absolute
certainty that the problem was insoluble. The
fighting would go on for another 100 years before the two sides wore themselves
out. That was when, you remember, a
Protestant terrorist got into a Catholic cemetery in the middle of an IRA
funeral, and started hurling hand grenades at the mourners. When, in an echo of
events here, a Catholic mob lynched, in full of view of the television camera on
a British Army helicopter overhead, two corporals who had lost their way in West
Belfast. And when Mrs Thatcher
expostulated “will these people never learn?”
But ten years later the problem had been transformed, although not yet
solved. In its essentials, the
solution was the same one the British Government had put on the table at the
Sunningdale Conference more than 20 years earlier: as one Irish politician put
it, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 was “Sunningdale for slow-learners”.
So,
when here, in Israel, we travel the deep valleys of despair, we should always
turn our hearts and minds to the hills around and beyond. Memories of evil are too long, of good too short. We forget how much was achieved in the
1990s, how close agreement was only 18 months ago. We forget how much becomes possible once the gears of
peace-making begin to engage. Things which before seemed quite impossible
suddenly become possible.
Back,
for a moment, to human nature. To Thucydides’s view that it changed little
through time. Too many people here,
on both sides, believe that this conflict, that their problems, are unique in
human history. Of course, in part,
they are right, in the sense that every human being, every human event, has its
special characteristics. But the
fundamentals of this struggle, for land, for power, for security, for mutual
recognition and acceptance, are not so different from many such similar clashes
in human history. The Jewish people
have more reason than most, perhaps more than any, to be aware of their own
vulnerability, and to be sceptical of security pledged by others. I sometimes wonder if any Gentile can
ever understand the black blind fear that the Shoah strikes in the heart of
every Jew – an evil beyond understanding, on top of two thousand years of
pursuit and pogrom. That midnight
memory of terror that haunts every Jew can never be lightly set aside.
But
the unmatched injuries inflicted on the Jewish people should not blind us to the
wider lessons of human history. They
do not mean that the laws of human behaviour are somehow, uniquely, suspended in
this corner of the earth. We need to look elsewhere, in time and place, for
suggestions on how this conflict might best be resolved, in ways in which all
parties can take proper pride. To
do otherwise is lazily to surrender to self-deception and, dare I say it, to
self-absorption.
But,
many will say, the problem is not so much the Israelis, all of whom yearn for
peace, and understand only too well what needs to be done, as the lack of a
willing and credible partner for peace on the other side.
And
that, surprisingly, brings me to my second main reason for optimism.
The
world has learnt much in the past couple of years. About Israel’s suffering at
the hands of the suicide bombers. About
the true nature of terrorism. About
the problems of governance in the Palestinian Territories. But, most of all, about a breakdown of
trust so total, a situation here so grave, that it is beyond being resolved by
the parties themselves, if it ever was. The
world now understands that both sides, but perhaps particularly the
Palestinians, need help in achieving and then delivering a settlement.
In my
own personal view, what will be required is nothing less than a large-scale and
lasting international presence, led by the United States, overseeing and
underpinning first the reform, and then the development, of the Palestinian
polity, economy and security apparatus.
How that presence would be described and deployed would be for discussion
and agreement with and between the parties.
But surely there can no be no serious question over the principle of such
a benign international intervention, intended to give Palestinians the help with
nation-building they deserve, and Israelis the confidence they need to end
occupation and settlement.
In
stark terms, somebody has to provide security and order in Palestinian
territories devastated and divided by nearly two years of conflict. The choice is simple: between the
unhappy conscripts of the IDF, equipped neither by training nor by inclination
for what the British War Office called in the 1930s “Imperial Policing” and
the US Defense Department in the 1970s Counter-Insurgency Operations; and a re-formed and re-moralised
Palestinian security forces, under the aegis of willing and trusted members of
the international community, starting but not ending with the United States. I
am confident that my own country would, if asked, be willing to make a serious
contribution, as we are already doing with the prison monitoring operation in
Jericho.
Nothing
that has happened before, during or since Operation Defensive Shield, nothing
that happened last week or this, or will happen next, will change that simple
truth.
My
third reason for optimism reflects my view of the options for the future. No one with any knowledge of the history
of this region or of such conflicts at other times or places can believe that
there is an acceptable military solution to Israel’s present troubles. The truth is that the appalling events
of the past couple of years have served to underline two stark facts: that, for
all the fire and smoke, sound and fury, there is still only one sane solution to
this dispute; and that the shape of that solution – Israeli withdrawal from
the territories, cast-iron guarantees for its security, and sensible compromises
on territory, refugees and Jerusalem – is much the same as it has always been.
One
has only to consider the alternatives. None would bring Israel the full security
to which it is entitled, after so many years of suffering: not continuing
occupation, or rather creeping re-occupation, underpinned by military force; not
population transfer, also quite unworthy of the Jewish people; nor unilateral
separation, which can at best bring only partial and temporary relief from the
scourge of terror.
So,
inexorably, one is led back to the sort of solution offered in 1937, in 1947 and
again in 2000. There is plenty of
scope for arguing over the rights and wrongs of how and why those offers were
made and rejected. But the real
point is that, after more than a century of Zionism, the conflict here between
Jew and Arab can still be settled on acceptable terms only by partition of this
land, in which Palestinians are given, under benign international supervision,
the rights to rule themselves of the kind for which Jews fought so hard and so
long.
But
why is this a reason for optimism? Because
only two years ago a settlement on these lines was put forward, and the
political sky in Israel did not fall in. Because
I believe that the great majority of the Israeli people would accept a
settlement on these lines - provided they believed it brought them the security
for which they yearn, not just for themselves, but for their children and their
children’s children.
I do
not pretend that such a settlement would bring an immediate or absolute end to
terrorism. Anyone who said so would
be selling you political snake oil. The
lesson from efforts to end many such conflicts, including Northern Ireland but
also from the early years of the Oslo process, is that credible peace efforts
drive the extremists to an even greater frenzy of atrocity. But such a
settlement would be part of wider process of reform and regeneration, which
would bring a huge reduction in terrorism.
It would at once remove from the terrorists the mask of pseudo-legitimacy
they use to recruit, incite and intimidate. It would gradually dry out the sea
of popular support in which the terrorist fish swim. And it would give us a much
stronger political base from which to isolate and then eliminate the terrorists,
putting them beyond the threshold of society.
So
there you have it: as Churchill might have said, the worst solution – except
all the others.
Some
will quickly claim that the Arabs have only themselves to blame, by turning down
the offer made at Camp David nearly two years ago. I suspect that the truth of what did and
did not happen there and in the talks that followed at Taba and elsewhere is
more complicated than the apologists for either side admit. But the point is that, just because such
a deal wasn’t once agreed at once doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for all
time. If at first you don’t
succeed…
So
there you have my three broad reasons for optimism, caricatured as: human
nature; the belief that there is no alternative to international intervention to
end the present awfulness; and the certain knowledge that the solution is, more
or less, what it has always been.
But I
confess that this fundamental optimism is alloyed with certain twinges of
shorter-term pessimism, as we witness another round of suicide attacks, followed
by the return of the IDF to the towns and villages of the West Bank. There is,
however, a big difference between my optimism and my pessimism. The immediate difficulties, only too
easily discerned, do not mean the destination is wrong, or the journey
impossible.
We
can explore this further in questions. But
let me anticipate some of them. Each
day, my inbox fills up with e-mails expressing similar anxieties. Reasons why peace is impossible. Reasons why Israel is, more or less, all
right, and the others, more or less, all wrong. Why the struggle over this land
is really part of a clash of civilisations. Carefully collated evidence that
Arafat (overwhelmingly and above all), the Arabs, Muslims, the EU, the BBC and
even now CNN are in different ways and in different degrees at fault. Sadly, these days it is not hard to find
people not on Israel’s side.
Yet I
wonder how the charge sheets which seem to circulate round the Internet at
ever-increasing velocity, spreading the contagion of anxiety and isolation,
really contribute to building peace. Knowing
your enemy is one thing. Convincing
yourself, in elaborately researched detail, that he is an anti-Semite or a
terrorist – which we probably already knew anyway – doesn’t seem to me to
help much.
In
fact, it can be worse than that: the rigorous application of the Law of the
Excluded Middle –those not wholly with us are wholly against us – can be
deeply destructive of rational discussion of this subject. Believe the best of people, and you get some good from
them. Believe the worst, and you
reap the whirlwind. In the real
world, constructive politics is the art of the possible, not the impossible. Creating opportunities from what is
available, not blocking them. Making progress means accentuating the positive,
not harping constantly on the negative.
Every
true friend of Israel and of the Jewish people should resist, with all the
reason at his command, the simplification that characterises much discussion of
this subject. This is especially
important for those whose attachment to this country is compounded by their
distance from it. No one who truly
loves a friend, a child, a spouse would ever dream of giving him or her
unqualified approval for anything or everything he or she did: that would be a
betrayal of trust, of the duty of care. So too those who really want to help
this country secure its proper place of safety and success in the world should
not abandon the judgement they might otherwise apply to issues of such
importance. When someone you love
is in difficulty he needs to be assured, first, of that love, but, second, of
how tough that love can be when circumstances require.
I
remember only too well in the America of the late eighties politicians deeply,
and no doubt genuinely, committed to the Irish Catholic cause. But they
contributed most to peace when they came to see, and say, that it was all a bit
more complicated than they had first thought, and that the good was not all on
one side.
Conclusion
Perhaps
I am naïve to be optimistic, to see silver linings in some very black clouds. But, as Churchill would also have
said, I see no point in being anything else. Every true friend of Israel, Jew or Gentile, has to believe
in a better future for all the people of this region than the misery they have
endured in recent years and months.
At a Rosh Hashanah dinner here in Israel last year my 18-year old son was placed next to a young Israeli of the same age. One was about to start university, with few cares in the world apart from being the coolest kid on the King’s Road; the other, with pride and courage, beginning three years’ army service, made to be a man before his time. I could not help thinking that, more than 50 years after Israel had won its hard-fought independence, its young people deserved to be given back some of the best years of their lives.
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