By Rabbi Dow Marmur
JERUSALEM–Avishai Margalit, arguably Israel’s most significant living philosopher, has recently published a book with the intriguing title, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises. As I haven’t read it, I’m not in a position to comment on it, but one quote as it appears in John Gray’s review in The New York Review of Books, struck me as highly relevant: “The book is in pursuit of just a peace, rather than of a just peace. Peace can be justified without being just.”
Margalit is said to deal mainly with “the moral dilemmas that surround World War II.” But in view of his long and distinguished record as an Israeli “peacenik,” his formulation seems eminently relevant to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trying to follow what’s going on in Israel, one comes easily to the conclusion that as long as justice is defined in absolute terms there’ll be no peace in the Middle East. Here not only religious Zionists but also secular nationalists believe that the whole of the Land of Israel belongs solely to the Jewish people; for the former because God so decreed, for the latter because history has bestowed it upon us. Anything less would be regarded by them as a rotten and untenable compromise.
Palestinians also see the whole land as theirs and theirs alone. According to them, it has been forcibly settled by Jews, many using the Holocaust as an excuse for occupation. They accuse the Jews of having distorted history to provide a framework for their claim, which is nothing but a version of neo-colonialism. The only just outcome, in this scheme of things, is for Jews to accept the one-state solution for all of Palestine and learn to live as a minority within it, just as they once did under Muslim rule in the region.
In practical terms neither version of absolute justice can be realized and no outside force could impose it, even if we concede that the issue is a struggle between two rights, ours and theirs. The way to resolve the impasse is through compromise: just a peace even if not a just peace. In the many peace plans on the table each side would get much less than it wants and that it deems to be just. For Palestinians it may mean a state of their own, albeit not of the size and the sovereignty they would want. For Israelis it would mean giving up territory and learning to make do with less, perhaps much less.
It seems that this is the kind of (not rotten) compromise that the new United States administration is trying to impose on the two sides. To reassure the Palestinians as part of his overall plan for the region, Obama has put the screws on the government of Israel. Nobody seems to know if the new US approach will work and what the consequences might be if it doesn’t. The danger of a nuclear Iran is always in the background.
The risk is, of course, that if they don’t settle for a compromise, each may end up with a rotten compromise. That’s why many serious analysts are saying that the clamor for what they see as a just peace is endangering the existence of the Jewish state no less than the Palestinian Authority while enabling enemies of both to take undue advantage.
This leads to the not unreasonable conclusion that while intransigence may be the order of the day, the popular consensus at least in Israel is pointing toward a compromise: just a peace, whether or not it’s a just pace. If this can be achieved under Israel’s and the Palestinians current political leadership is difficult to predict. Looking in from the periphery as I do, the consequences of not achieving it are too gruesome to contemplate.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. He now divides his time between Canada and Israel.