Hero in War and Peace
First Self-Respect, Then Peace
by Uri Avnery

Sometimes a single sentence is enough to reveal a person's mental world and intellectual profundity. Such a sentence was uttered by Shaul Mofaz, the Minister of Defense, some days ago during a visit to the Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip.

"With our enemies, it seems, no shortcuts are possible. Egypt made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War. That will happen with the Palestinians, too."

This means that there is no political solution. There is only war, and in this war we must "defeat" the Palestinians. A simple, simplistic, not to say primitive, view.

But the revealing sentence is: "Egypt made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War".

Revealing, because it utterly contradicts the almost unanimous view of all the experts in Israel and around the world--historians, Arabists and military commentators. These believe that the exact opposite is true: Anwar Sadat was able to lead Egypt towards peace only because he was admired as the commander who had defeated Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Only after the Egyptian people had won back their national pride were they able to consider peace with the enemy (with us).
[...]

If one wants to draw a parallel between the Egyptians and the Palestinians, as Mofaz tries to do, the conclusion would be: only after the Palestinians win back their national self-respect, will they be able to make peace with Israel. The first intifada, which Palestinians consider a victorious struggle against the immense might of the Israeli army, allowed them to accept the Oslo agreement. Only the second intifada, which has already proved that the Israeli army cannot subdue the Palestinian uprising, enabled them to accept the Road Map, which is supposed to bring about peace between the Israeli and the coming Palestinian state.
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