What Could Have Been

As I write this, Israeli author Abraham Yehoshua is being interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio's Author s and Company. The conversation has ranged across a number of topics, but the one I found most interesting was the profound change that came over Israeli society with the second Intifada.

I think we tend to forget how open the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians had become in the late 1990s. Hope was in the air with the Oslo Accords. The Rabin assassination by a radical settler had schocked Israeli society into a much greater acceptance of change.

When I visited Israel and the West Bank in early 1999, checkpoints were a mere formality and large numbers of Israelis routinely travelled to cities such as Ramallah and Jericho. The West Bank was enjoying its first taste of prosperity and per capital income was much higher than it is today. And this was under a Likud government.

A year and a half after my visit, two events changed everything. The first was Clinton's ill-advised attempt to force an accord before leaving office. This happened in July. I felt then and I feel now that this was driven much more by the ego needs of the President than by actual prospects for peace.

The second was Ariel Sharon's incredibly ill advised visit to the Temple Mount in October, escorted by hundreds of police. It was a deliberately provocative act and indeed this marked the start of the second Intifada.

And as Yehoshua recognizes, this uprising after a lengthy period of relative calm with real hopes for a lasting peace, had a devastating psychological impact on the Israeli people. Looking back, it seems that in the late 90s, a defacto one-state, or bi-national solution was emerging from the ground up. Not the one we are likely to see in the future with isolated Palestinian bantustans, but genuine, albeit very imperfect integration that likely would have improved over time.

It is increasingly clear that a two-state solution will never arise and that Israel is quickly evolving into something that resembles nothing so much as South Africa in the 1980s. Given what could have been, this is truly a tragedy.