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Featured Commentary

Delivering the Third Miracle

By Gadi Baltiansky, director general, The Geneva Initiative, former press secretary to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Original commentary for Middle East Bulletin.

posted on 05/09/08

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once said that anyone who wishes to be realistic in Israel must believe in miracles. Two miracles have already taken place in Israel: the miracle that prompted the establishment of the state and the miracle that has sustained it for the past 60 years. Now, we—the realistic people—are waiting for the third miracle.
A people’s ability to maintain its character, identity and tradition for thousands of years of exile, suffering and persecution is never certain. It was never guaranteed that the surviving remnants of the Jewish people would establish a state, surrounded by hostile neighbors, strengthen its security, and build a complex social mosaic of people from dozens of countries around the world.

Even less foreseeable were two phenomena experienced by the people of Israel every day, every hour, their exceptional nature almost unnoticed. One is the use of the Hebrew language. The fact that this almost dead language would experience a cultural rebirth and become a lingua franca for all the inhabitants of Israel, must be regarded as nothing less than a miracle itself. Similarly miraculous is the vibrancy of Israeli democracy–messy, multi-lingual, still with much work to do to improve the rights of its Arab minority and others–and yet the fact that Israel has never known a single day of non-democratic rule is a rare one in our world and in Israel’s own neighborhood.

Unfortunately, the Israeli-Arab conflict was more foreseeable than either of the miracles embodied in the founding and sustaining of Israel. To claim that Zionism was the return of a people without a land to a land without a people was to make assertions without factual basis. Hundreds of thousands of Jews returning to a populated land were not likely to be greeted by the locals with open arms and “gifted” the land that had been worked for generations. The conflict that developed over this land is natural.
But so, too, could be the resolution to the conflict, following a battle that has gone on for three generations. This must be the third miracle. Palestinians did not accept the Partition Plan of ‘47 because they wanted the entire land. Israelis began settling the territories they occupied in ‘67 because they believed they could rule most of them. It took Israeli military force and Palestinian resistance to convince both sides that neither people would allow the other to rule all the land, that each required a homeland. The solution, accepted by both majorities, suggested a division of the land into two states. This solution, however, has yet to be implemented.

The absence of any solution on the ground–or tangible progress toward reaching it–may transform the conflict from one of geography to one of ethnicity. If the trend of frustration and despair that exists on both sides escalates and triumphs, Israel will face a much more difficult struggle than it has to date. Even if Israel progresses in improving the lives and rights of its Arab minority, as it must to strengthen its own democracy, but fails simultaneously to make progress toward resolving the broader Palestinian conflict, it may face an ethnic conflict at least in part of its own making. In such conflict, there may be no difference between a Palestinian from Nablus and one residing in Jaffa. If both are under the same rule, with no political border separating them, sharing similar frustrations and a mixed array of rights, regulations, and restrictions binding them, they could well join together to fight the same battle. Both would raise the flag of "one person – one vote," with the Nablus resident wishing vote like his brother in Jaffa, and the latter wanting this to increase his relative power in the joint state.

This would lead to the failure of the Zionist movement.

There is an alternative route. It does not involve leaving Israel, despite recent polls that reveal that three out of every four Israelis believe a war will break out within five years and that 52 percent do not rule out moving to another country. It may in fact be the only route available to save Israel as we know it. Most of us are unwilling to give up on the miracles we have experienced in the Promised Land. The majority of Israelis are also realistic. Seventy percent according to the most recent polls, support a two-state solution.

So this vast majority, the most realistic among us, know the direction we must take. We even understand, in our heart of hearts, the rough contours of what a two-state solution looks like. We need to fortify and empower our leaders to deliver this third miracle, understanding that the sacrifices necessary to do so are small only in comparison to what we will sacrifice if we fail to act. After 60 years, these realistic people must act in the spirit of Ben Gurion’s statements. Israel must not merely believe in the third miracle—it has the right, obligation and ability to realize it.