ARABS-ISRAEL - Nov. 16 - Survival War.

The following are excerpts from an article by Israel's former deputy major of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, to the Los Angeles Times published also by the IHT: "The current troubles... reflect a historical burden that both sides carry to this latest encounter in the 100-year conflict between Jews and Arabs over the Holy Land... The intercommunal conflict erupted in the 1948 war and resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Palestinian landscape that became Israel. Hundreds of villages, flourishing urban centers and 400,000 hectares of orchards and cultivated fields were abandoned by their inhabitants, almost 700,000 people, who became refugees. A new landscape was created by Jewish immigrants, who molded it to conform to their needs and their tastes. Scores of Muslim saints' graves were taken over and hallowed as Jewish Holy sites. For example, the grave of a local sheikh not far from Jerusalem became the sacred tomb of Dan, son of Jacob. Remnants of Palestinian civilization - flour mills, water apparatuses and old machinery - were restored and incorporated in parts of abandoned Palestinian orchards to demonstrate "the ancient way of life," but the Palestinian connection was sanitized. All Arab names of topographical features were replaced with Hebrew names, many of biblical origin but most invented by a government naming committee. Only one in 20 Jewish Israelis living in Israel today has personal experience of the 1948 war and its aftermath. No wonder Israelis have cast a thick veil of denial and forgetfulness over the events that led to the creation of the Hebrew language. The war of independence is narrative of the creation of Israel, and creation must be pure, just and heroic. The destroyed Arab landscape was overlaid with a blossoming and prosperous Israeli landscape. Anyone seeking to delve beneath it would not only arouse slumbering ghosts but undermine the entire structure. The 1948 war, so heroic and just in the eyes of the Israelis, is the Palestinian catastrophe. One cannot exaggerate the enormity of the blow Palestinians sustained: destruction of their society, banishment from their homes and homeland. Out of the misery of the wretched refugee camps, whose inhabitants have increased into the millions, came the rallying cry.

The Return. This national Palestinian objective is perceived by Israelis as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even those Palestinians who understood that actual return to their former homes was unfeasible, and bowed their heads to the reality of defeat, have emphasized that accepting a total withdrawal from the occupied territories constitutes an agreement to settle for less than one-quarter of their homeland. But Israelis refuse to open the old accounts, insist on retaining parts of the territories and utterly repudiate the Right to Return in any form. Thus, the obliterated Palestinian landscape, covered by the stratum of modern Israel, remains a symbol and a battle standard for both sides. Time has not alleviated the deep-seated emotions of fear, rage and urges for revenge, because these emotions are not simply irrational. The struggle for possession of the physical landscape, as well as for its symbolic assets (holy places, place names and signposts of memory), continues to unabated. Can there be a solution to such fundamental conflict? Definitely not a declared "end" to it. Intercommunal conflicts that involve issues of identity, absolute justice, affinity to the same homeland and antagonistic myths are organic, endemic, primordial. They are insoluble but manageable, not necessarily because the sides can forgo their emotions but because otherwise they will destroy one another, and in such conflicts there are no victors or vanquished. At present two national communities live in the landscape of the Holy Land. Their only choice is to manage their co-existence in the hope that better times, more conductive to peaceful relations, will arrive".