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4/21
2000
38
V
any of us had the
opportunity to hear
Maj. Gen. Shlomo
Gazit on his March tour
as local scholar-in-residence sponsored
by the Jewish Community Council,
the Labor Zionist
Alliance and Na'a-
mat USA ("Gen-
eral Says: Seize
The Day," March
31).
As reported in
the Jewish News,
the general was
very much inter-
ested in "seizing
JEROME S.
the day" to make
KAUFMAN
peace with the
Special to
Arabs. Gazit made
the Jewish News very clear his con-
cept of peace. He
did not mind if
the 144 communities of Judea and
Samaria with 200,000 Israeli citizens,
and all the Arab villages that now com-
pletely surround Jerusalem, along with
those Arab communities within
Jerusalem, were.turned over to Yasser
Arafat to become part of his Palestinian
state. He did not conclude that such an
approach would strangle Jerusalem or
extinguish any opportunity for Israel
itself to grow as a sovereign nation. _
His concept was to keep that popu-
lation in the confined area along the
Mediterranean Coast overwhelmingly
Jewish and, therefore, immune from
invasion by the Arabs totally sur-
rounding it. Evidently, he was not
aware of the fact that the Arabs have
already made claim to 80 percent of
western Jerusalem along with large
portions of Haifa, the northern corn-
munities of Israel and where ever else
they conjecture a previous Arab pres-
ence. He even went so far as to say,
"So what if there is no Jewish people
in a few hundred years"!
His statements did not surprise those
of us who know something of Gazit's
past history. This is the man who, two
years ago, at a conference at Tel Aviv
University, compared the kippot worn
by some IDF soldiers to the swastika on
the armbands of Nazi soldiers! He also,
according to the Jerusalem Post,
expressed fears over the appointment of
kippa-wearing officers to senior posi-
tions. He later withdrew the remarks
amid public outcry.
The rest of his conclusions, as listed
Jerome S. Kaufman is a Bloomfield
Hills resident and national secretary of
the Zionist Organization of America.
in the Jewish News, were equally
mind-boggling. He concluded that
Israel must hasten into these nation-
threatening decisions before:
• Arafat dies
• Islamic rule is adopted in bordering
areas
• An Arab nuclear weapon is devel-
oped
• The U.S. loses its status as a world
power
• Fatigue in Israel
Does he really believe that giving
up the few miles of territory and the
Jerusalem that Israel has left will
appease the Arabs or have any effect
on the major projected world changes
he has listed?
By happenstance, we experienced
the proof of the pudding, as to the
essence of Gazit's philosophy. The Jew-
ish News related how Gazit appreciat-
ed the welcome he just received from
the Arab students at the University of
Michigan-Dearborn — as opposed to
their greeting in 1988. The Arabs,
unlike many Jews and many of their
organizations, once again proved that
they labor under no surreal illusions.
They have no difficulty distinguishing
friend from foe.
❑
from page 36
Like an Orthodox Jewish dance
and because it is in their respective
national interests, both sides will
occasionally touch the opposite ends
of the negotiating handkerchief when
it is held by the United States. Only
furtively do their hands touch; a pub-
lic embrace or hand shake are rare
and usually off the record. Washing-
ton provides the manpower to pre-
vent a major confrontation and regu-
larly provides new batches of glue to
keep yesterday's agreement from
unraveling and new sets of handcuffs
to keep negotiating occupants in close
but certainly not loving proximity.
And because this is a negotiating
process and not a peace process, the
questions of trust abound.
Can Assad, Arafat or their respective
successors be trusted to keep an agree-
ment? Will a future Israeli government
of different political inclination imple-
ment or freeze a previous understanding
or one not yet negotiated?
Let's be realists. For decades, the
present state of imprecise Arab-Israeli
negotiations, with its diverging inter-
ests, uncertainty and continued peri-
odic loss of life, may be as good as it
gets. Lower the bar of expectations. ❑
PEACE