The Distance Between Two Points May Narrow With Time

Ehud Barak went a very long way toward the Palestinians, even before the beginning of the Camp David summits. He went further than any of his predecessors ever dreamed of going; further than any other Israeli leader is likely to go in the foreseeable future.

On the way to Camp David, Barak proclaimed such a dovish stance that it caused him to lose his parliamentary majority, his coalition government, even some of his constituency. Nevertheless, while shedding wings and body and tail on the way, he carried on, like a flying cockpit. Seemingly, Yasser Arafat did not go such a long and lonely way toward the Israelis. Perhaps he could not--or lacked the fierce devotion to making peace. The Camp David summit may threaten to falter, which is by no means the end of the struggle for peace. After all, we have seen time and again Israelis and Palestinians walking out of conference rooms, throwing their hands in the air, lamenting the impossibility of doing business with such terrible counterparts. They always reconvene after some time, preparing together the next crisis: In this way the peace process limps its frustrating way toward a two-state solution.

And so, between one crisis and the next, the outlines of the future map of peace emerge out of the soot and smoke screen of the current disagreements. At this point, Israelis and Palestinians are divided by no more than a few disputed kilometers on the West Bank and perhaps a few disputed hundreds of meters in Jerusalem.

Naturally, those last remaining plots of land are loaded with wrath and pain and fear and raging frustration. Yet let us not forget that for almost 100 years--100 years of solitude and bloodshed--the two parties differed not over who gets how much of the land but over who should go away and give it up altogether. This conflict is, despite the diplomatic stalemates and feuds, on its last legs now. Peace is impending.

Even the extremists on both sides who hate the idea of compromising “sacred ancestral rights,” even they know now that the country is on its way to becoming a two-family unit, a semidetached house.

Who gets how much of the land? Who gets how much of Jerusalem? Barak and Arafat, or their successors, will have to sort it out eventually.

Those Israelis and Palestinians who oppose a peace agreement based on a painful compromise are obviously haunted by insecurity, by a fierce sense of injustice, by theological and ethical doubts about renouncing “sacred rights.”

Yet peace, even domestic peace, can never be based on the notion of “all rights reserved.” Among the basic rights that every individual and every nation deserves to exercise freely, there ought to be the elementary right to forfeit, at will, some of your rights in order to fulfill and secure your prime right to stay alive, to live in peace and freedom.