Footnotes turn into destiny
By Charley J. Levine

(August 18) - The story is well known. IDF soldiers
fought their way to the Western Wall in June 1967, Rabbi
Shlomo Goren blew a triumphal shofar and the Star of
David was hoisted high atop the Temple Mount. 

Within days, defense minister Moshe Dayan ordered the
flag removed. The status quo was intuitively opted for,
deemed the path of least resistance. 

Today, three decades later, Ehud Barak is reportedly
negotiating to permit the Palestinian flag to fly over that
same cosmic tract of real estate, considered to be the
holiest site in the world to the Jewish people. 

During the 1970s, a certain part of the Israeli people
concluded that the single vital challenge facing their
generation was to settle the internationally disputed areas
of Judea and Samaria, Golan and the environs of Gaza. 

Early government resistance to this program gave way
eventually to grudging cooperation and even warmly
embraced support as governments of different values
came and went. 

Today's leaders from the Left such as Yossi Beilin and
even Yossi Sarid, take it as a matter of fact that any
permanent peace formula will enable the vast majority of
Jewish residents of the territories to stay in place, under
Israeli sovereignty and security, even though most of the
actual land in question will be turned over to the
Palestinians. This position, ironically, was tacitly accepted
by no less than Yasser Arafat, according to reportage
coming out of Camp David II. 

History is a funny thing. To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., time is not sacrosanct; there is nothing inevitable
about the "march" or "flow" of time. Time is nothing more
than what we make of it. The decisions made in 1967 and
1977 unquestionably come back to confront us now, as
we approach a final peace framework. Footnotes turn
into destiny. 

Sometimes a little what-if is helpful to sharpening our
thinking. 

What if Moshe Dayan had left that Israeli flag in place on
the Temple Mount? The Arab world was never weaker.
The PLO, three years old, barely existed as an organized
force. World opinion was saluting heroic Israel, the
spunky little David. 

In time, the Arabs, supported by the Moslem world,
would have challenged Jewish control of this, their third
holiest site. They would have passed UN resolutions,
threatened oil sanctions and perhaps even made the
liberation of al-Quds as a leitmotif of the Yom Kippur
War. 

Ironically, most of those events came to pass anyway.
The only thing that did not happen was free, unfettered
Jewish access to these sacred grounds. 

Israel the victor behaved as the vanquished, and our
position of magnanimous conqueror shifted over time into
a self-fulfilling prophecy of absurd timidity. Today, Jewish
policemen physically prevent Israeli citizens from praying
on the Temple Mount, even though the worshipers are
backed by Supreme Court rulings in their favor. 

Imagine the uproar were Jews to be banned from praying
in a synagogue or any other property in Boston or
Beverly Hills. And yet in Israel, successive governments
have preferred equanimity to the assertion of essential
Jewish and civil rights. 

When the settlers began planting new communities, the
outcome was far from given. They might have failed
abysmally in their clarion calls and attracted mere tens of
thousands. They might have succeeded wildly and drawn
a half-million Jews to the territories. Or they might have
done what did in fact happen: firming up a respectable but
still small Jewish populace of 200,000 souls in the
so-called West Bank. 

Had Beilin and Yael Dayan today been handed a situation
in which 500,000 Jews lived in these areas, the
negotiating table at Camp David would have been a
totally different configuration; and the Palestinians would
have had no choice but to make even more far-reaching
breakthrough concessions. 

Deferred decisions, compromises of the moment,
expedient band-aid solutions: sometimes they seem so
tremendously appealing. Yet today's historical footnotes
have an uncanny way of coming back to haunt us, many
years later, many times magnified. 

We must not fear clashes of destiny. The State of Israel
exists today because its founders acted decisively. We
must not shirk from momentous challenges. We must only
be convinced of the justness of our position, and all the
rest will come naturally. 

And we must ask the ultimate question: How will today's
decisions look in 2020? 

(The writer is a Jerusalem-based public relations
consultant.)