How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less Without Leaving Your Apartment by Gregory Levey

Author:Gregory Levey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

I Am Not Proud of My Behavior

I called Kevin at the White House the next morning, and again a secretary told me that he wasn’t there but he would call me back. There wasn’t much time to dwell on this, though, because as I sat wondering if I had pushed my luck with him, my cell phone rang. It was Yossi Beilin calling from Israel.

At the outset of our conversation, I told him that I would be happy to answer the questions he had for me for his book, but in return I wanted to ask him some questions of my own. He sounded amused by this, and agreed.

His questions were about my experience in Israel, about how I had ended up visiting and then moving there, and briefly working for the Israeli government. He also asked me about how the experience had affected my relationship with the Jewish state and my feelings toward the Middle East.

“It’s complicated,” I told him.

“I’ll have to read your book,” he said.

“I can send a copy to you.”

“No, no,” he said, “I’ll buy one.”

I definitely liked this guy.

So, even though it was complicated, I proceeded to give Beilin some of my thoughts about the region and my relationship to it: some of the stuff that was in my first book, and some of the stuff that I had thought about more recently as I tried to solve the conflict myself. He seemed genuinely interested in my experiences, asking probing questions focusing more on how I saw my relationship with Israel than on substantive political issues.

And then we switched roles, and it was my turn to ask questions.

I told him that in my own efforts, I was sometimes facing moments of doubt. Doubt that I was getting any closer to peace. Doubt that I could persevere.

“What pushes you forward against the odds?” I asked him.

“I fought in four wars,” he said. “Isn’t that enough? The greatest push for me came in the 1973 war. Before that, I was mainstream to the left, but mainstream for sure. The war in 1973 changed my life. We’d had six years of hubris. In order to have security, people believed we needed more territory. But in 1973, the Golan Heights settlements became an impediment instead. It was more difficult to take kids living there and hide them than to defend an empty area. The settlements didn’t secure Tel Aviv. They didn’t defend us.”

I was aware that in 1973, six years after Israel had taken over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights and first began to populate them with its own citizens, it had been the victim of a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. This was probably the closest Israel has ever come to being destroyed; it also resulted in the downfall of a government and still remains a particularly bitter memory in the Israeli consciousness. Although they are now gone from Gaza, the population of Israelis living in the always contentious West Bank and the

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