My most instructive conversation on the Middle East conflict was not
with a politician or a journalist but with a soft-spoken Palestinian
Anglican minister named Naim Ateek, whose group, Sabeel, promotes a
Palestinian version of liberation theology. During a long and
friendly talk about two years ago, we agreed on the need for a
"dialogue of the heart" as opposed to a strictly functional approach
to peace between our peoples. In that spirit, I acknowledged that we
Israelis should formally concede the wrongs we had committed against
the Palestinians. Then I asked him whether he was prepared to offer a
reciprocal gesture, a confession of Palestinian moral flaws. Both
sides, after all, had amply wronged each other during our
hundred-year war. The Palestinian leadership had collaborated with
the Nazis and rejected the 1947 UN partition plan, and then led the
international campaign to delegitimize Israel that threatened our
post-Holocaust reconstruction. What was Rev. Ateek prepared to do to
reassure my people that it was safe to withdraw back to the narrow
borders of pre-1967 Israel and voluntarily make ourselves vulnerable
in one of the least stable and tolerant regions of the world?
"We don't have to do anything at all to reassure you", he said. He
offered this historical analogy: When David Ben-Gurion and Konrad
Adenauer negotiated the German-Israeli reparations agreement in the
early 1950s, the Israeli prime minister was hardly expected to offer
the German chancellor concessions or psychological reassurances. The
Germans had been the murderers, the Jews the victims, and all that
remained to be negotiated was the extent of indemnity.
"So we are your Nazis?" I asked.
"Now you've understood", he replied, and smiled.
