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Gershom Gorenberg: Prefer Peace to the Temple Mount

One might think the Geneva accord is the formula for a pyschedelic drug rather than a model for Israeli-Palestinian peace: It produces hallucinatory reactions in its opponents. Prime Minister Sharon labeled the unofficial accord, product of long negotiations by Israeli doves and Palestinian moderates, "an attempt... to topple the government by illegitimate means" -- as if Yossi Beilin, the central Israeli negotiator, had circled the Knesset with tanks. Ehud Barak called it "delusional," and said it "clearly harms the interests of the State of Israel." The real delusion is Barak�s, who has repressed his own failure as a negotiator by proclaiming that Palestinians are incapable of making peace. It clearly harms Barak�s interests for the public to see someone else reach a deal in which the Palestinians give up the right of return.

But the bizarrest reaction came from Natan Sharansky, a member of Sharon�s cabinet, who asserted in a Ha�aretz op-ed that it wasn�t peace "for which the Jewish people prayed for thousands of years. The Jewish people prayed for Jerusalem." Gosh. I guess I was using some other religion�s prayer book this morning at shul, when I read the words, "Give peace... to Your people Israel."

What provoked Sharansky�s fury is the section of the proposed peace deal that would put the Temple Mount under Palestinian sovereignty. Though Sharansky doesn�t mention it, the same section recognizes the "unique religious and cultural significance of the site to the Jewish people" and limits Palestinian sovereignty by banning any construction or excavation on the Mount without Israeli approval.

Sharansky is undoubtedly a hero of Jewish history. Ironically, his article shows that his own knowledge of Jewish history is weak. But he can be thanked for cutting through the security arguments that are so often covers for ideological positions, and getting to the deep issue: What matters more for Israel -- what land we control, or how we live (or die) on it?

Since Sharansky mentioned prayers, let�s start there: Jewish liturgy contains constant pleas both for peace and for the return to Zion. The question is the relation between them, and the best indication is the line, recited daily, that translates literally: "Bring us to peace from the four corners of the world..." The goal is peace; the return is a means. The point is not some intrinsic sanctity of land. As philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz indignantly reminded us, to treat land as inherently holy is idolatry.

In any case, prayers didn�t get Jews to return to their land; the political movement of Zionism did. That movement was born of Jews� need for a physical and cultural refuge in the face of modern anti-Semitism and assimilation. Sharansky correctly notes that early Zionists rejected creating that refuge outside the Land of Israel. But after that, a split developed between those who were unwilling to accept anything less than the whole Land of Israel -- which they often described in the overheated erotic language of romantic nationalism -- and pragmatists ready to create a state with a Jewish majority in part of the land.

In 1937, David Ben-Gurion unsuccessfully urged the Zionist movement to accept the Peel Commission plan for a Jewish state in a small slice of mandatory Palestine, without Jerusalem. Jewish dissatisfaction wasn�t the only reason the plan failed; Arabs also rejected it. Golda Meir, who opposed the compromise, later admitted that "when the Holocaust came, I could only live with myself because I knew that in 1937 it wasn�t me who swung the balance on whether there�d be an independent Jewish state or not." A truncated state might have saved uncounted European Jews. A decade later, Ben-Gurion won acceptance of partition. Had the U.N. enforced its partition decision, preventing the War of Independence, we would have had a smaller state -- and prevented the death of thousands of Jews in battle. At the end of that war, Ben-Gurion rejected a plan to conquer the entire West Bank. Afterwards, he explained to poet Haim Gouri that doing so "would have forced on us an impossible choice": endangering the state�s Jewish majority, or using "Deir Yassin" methods -- a reference to a massacre perpetrated by rightists -- to expel Arabs.

The unexpected conquests of 1967 again turned partition into a choice, rather than a fact. If Barak had succeeded three years ago in reaching a deal along the lines of the Geneva Accord, over 800 Israelis and 2,000 Palestinians killed in the conflict would be alive. If the Sharon government reached that deal today, it would prevent the casualties to come. It would also reduce defense to one concern among many, and turn our attention to the essential, long-evaded debate over what it means to create a sovereign Jewish society.

Sharansky manages to raise one apparently cogent argument, but it�s obsolete. Palestinian denial of the Jewish connection to the Mount did, indeed, imply a denial of our historical roots in the land; it suggested Jews were colonists. But the Geneva Accord explicitly makes "recognition of the right of the Jewish people to statehood" the basis of peace between Israel and Palestine; it enshrines the Jewish tie to the Mount, and makes all changes at the site subject to Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The symbolic statement it makes is the correct one: This is our homeland, but we�re willing to accept less than all of it in order to live in it in peace.

Religiously, which flesh-and-blood rulers own the Mount is less than irrelevant to its sanctity. A midrash composed 1800 years ago, recorded in Bereshit Rabbah, underlines the point: It says Cain and Abel agreed to divide the world between them. Then they fell to arguing over who�d get the place where the Temple would be built, and "Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him." Fratricide began with the illusion that one could possess the sacred. I note that it was not the secular Yossi Beilin who asserted this.

Sharansky is right that the choice between peace and the Mount forces us to decide what values are most basic to our state. He�s wrong about what choice we should make.