It's not based on true love, or even altruism. The Israeli side, with its formidable resources, is a well-oiled machine compared to the one-man show on the Palestinian side. But former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon and noted Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh are certain that their peace initiative will succeed where others have failed
One of the first meetings between Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh was held at Ayalon's home. The spacious house in Moshav Kerem Maharal, near Zichron Yaakov, with its handsome garden and its view of the ever-green slopes of Mount Carmel, provided a setting of perfect symbolism for the encounter: One of the wings of Ayalon's home was built by the same Arab family that lived there until 1948. In July 1948, as Israel's War of Independence raged, the 3,000 residents of the village of Ijzim fled, never to return. A fig tree planted by the Arab inhabitants in the first half of the 20th century still stands in one of the corners of the yard. Ayalon hid nothing. Nusseibeh, himself the offspring of a family of refugees from the Ramle area, smiled thinly and said nothing. "People who know Sari," Ayalon observes, "know that he keeps his feelings to himself." Nusseibeh: "It's not that I have no feelings. I just think that we should not be captives of those feelings. My dreams are about the future, not the past."
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Faithful to this approach, the Palestinian Ph.D. in philosophy and the retired Israeli admiral, who was also the head of the Shin Bet security service, launched their ambitious peace initiative on June 25. Their aim is to have the members of the two nations sign a six-point Statement of Principles that they formulated, and which they signed on July 27, 2002.
The main points of the agreement are: Israel will withdraw to the lines of June 4, 1967; the Palestinians will establish a state on 100 percent of the territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War. To reduce the number of settlers who will have to leave their homes, "border modifications" may be introduced, "based on an equitable and agreed-upon territorial exchange" at a ratio of 1:1. The Palestinians will forgo their demand to realize the right of return, with the refugees making do with financial compensation and the opportunity to reside in the state of Palestine. The Palestinian state will be demilitarized. As for Jerusalem, it will be "an open city, the capital of two states," with the Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty and the Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty. "Neither side will exercise sovereignty over the holy places." The arrangement will be that Palestine "will be designated Guardian of Haram al-Sharif [the Temple Mount] for the benefit of Muslims. Israel will be the Guardian of the Western Wall for the benefit of the Jewish people." Both sides will agree that "the full implementation of these principles" will mark the end of the conflict.
The official invitation to the public to sign the Statement of Principles was issued two weeks ago. Full-page ads with photographs of Ayalon and Nusseibeh appeared in the Hebrew papers, under the slogan, "The People's Voice - signing an end to the conflict." The ads were published in the Palestinian press a few days earlier, under the headline, "The people's campaign for peace and democracy."
The success of the venture has been astounding so far, say the Israelis who are involved: At the beginning of this week, after the first 10 days, nearly 20,000 people had signed. "There were times when we had 700 people on hold," says Dror Sternschuss, from the Zarfatti- Sternschuss-Zamir ad agency, which is responsible for the campaign on the Israeli side. Across the Green Line, Nusseibeh said that nearly 2,000 Palestinians had signed so far. Given the conditions in which Nusseibeh is working, that number is considered a success. However, as everyone knows, in the months ahead the disparity is liable to hover as a question mark casting a shadow over the success of the entire project.
Marriage of interests
"It all began," Ami Ayalon recalls, "with a conversation between Aryeh, Boaz and Ami, three friends, three concerned citizens." Aryeh is Aryeh Rutenberg, from the McCann-Kesher-Barel ad agency, and Boaz is Boaz Tamir, from the Netafim company, which is engaged in water technology and irrigation solutions - and whose board chairman is Ami Ayalon. The conversation took place three years ago, and when Rutenberg heard what Ayalon had to say, he decided to cooperate with him.
"Ayalon's central thesis," Rutenberg explains, "was that on the Palestinian side, as on the Israeli side, there is a large majority that supports a compromise and who, like us, are convinced that there is no one to talk to. I asked him whether he could show me that majority, prove that it exists. After all, we Israelis are always asking why there is no equivalent of the Peace Now group on the Palestinian side. For Ami, the distance between talk and action is very small, and he immediately called Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub [then the Palestinian Authority's security chiefs for the Gaza Strip and West Bank, respectively] and asked them whether they thought it would be possible to get the Palestinian public to sign a compromise agreement. They said yes, and from that point things started to roll."
Ayalon: "The point of departure was the disparity between the public on both sides and the leaderships. According to all the public opinion surveys and studies we have, about 70 percent of the Israelis and the Palestinians are ready for peace in more or less the terms we formulated, but most of them don't believe there is a partner on the other side for such an agreement. We looked for a way to cut this Gordian knot, the feeling that prevails on both sides that `we have no one to talk to.' We reached the conclusion that the only way is to get the two nations to sign an agreement, and through the mass signing to force the leaderships to implement it."
As far as Ayalon can recall, he met Dr. Sari Nusseibeh for the first time at Givat Haviva, the education center of the Kibbutz Artzi movement, where the two had been invited to lecture at a conference. Nusseibeh, for his part, remembers first meeting Ayalon at a conference in London. The connection between them is hardly self-evident. Their body language discloses a large gap in temperament. Nusseibeh is relaxed, his motions moderate, and it looks as though it would not be easy to ruffle him. Ayalon exudes a frenetic energy, is taut as a spring, and projects assertiveness and determination. "It's not a story of friendship," says one of the people involved in the campaign. "Every few years the Israeli politicians discover the Palestinians. They fall in love with Dahlan because he's really nice and have some laughs together. But this is different. We're talking about two very businesslike people, who work from the head, not the gut."
Nusseibeh agrees: "We are different types. He's an army man who spent most of his life in uniform. I'm an intellectual, an academic, and I don't like violence of any sort and generally I don't like army people, either. Before I met Ami I saw him on television, and what I appreciated in him is his directness, the precision with which he expresses himself. My feeling was that he was someone who was not manipulative and who believed in what he was saying. What we have is not a love affair but a marriage based on a common interest and a shared pain."
Ayalon: "I accept the fact that the connection between us is on an ideological basis. No special chemistry has been created here. From the outset I wasn't looking for new friends. Anyhow, it takes me a long time to connect to people; I can count my close friends on four and a half fingers [Ayalon lost half a finger in a childhood accident]."
At the same time, he says, he feels that there is an emotional dimension to his relationship with Nusseibeh. "The most rational thing one can do here is to go our separate ways ... It's precisely those who want to do something, change things, address the situation who are not rational. The stubbornness stems from my hard feeling that we are heading in a very bad direction, and that feeling doesn't come from the head but from a place much lower down."
The stage of organizing ahead of the public aspect of the campaign took far longer than had been planned. Ayalon and Nusseibeh signed their Statement of Principles a year ago, in Athens, in a ceremony attended by the Greek foreign minister, George Papandreou, and Bill Clinton, who has a record of spectacular failures in trying to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians. Each side then proceeded to organize its ranks. It quickly emerged that even if this was a case of two halves of the same whole, the challenges on the two sides of the 1967 Green Line are radically different.
The Israelis
To mount a campaign of this order of magnitude, a sizable cash flow is needed, but Ami Ayalon stated from the beginning that he refused to rely on external donations. "Money has a color," he notes. "I knew that if I were to rely on European money, that would be used against me. It's important for me that the discussion be centered on the idea. We all know that in Israel there is nothing easier than to divert a debate to a sidetrack, and I don't want to supply ammunition to people who will try to do that."
So far, he has been successful. The list of donors - which is classified - has more than 100 Israeli and Jewish Diaspora donors. The board of the directors of The People's Voice includes Jacob Burak, the founder and Chairman of Evergreen Venture Capital; Moshe Ronen, the CEO of Golden Pages; and Yossi Pilus, from the Kesselman & Kesselman accounting firm. With a group like that, Ayalon doesn't have to worry about the project's bank account.
An active and particularly intriguing member of the board is Orni Petrushka. Petrushka leaped briefly into the headlines in 2000, when Chromatis, a high-tech firm of which he was the co-founder, was sold to Lucent Technologies for the stunning sum of $4.5 billion. At the time, the economic pages and the gossip columns busied themselves with the fateful question of how much of that money made its way to Petrushka's personal bank account. The estimates ranged from $150 million to $300 million. Petrushka, who has tried to keep his distance from the public stage, says he met Ayalon a year ago at a lecture and was taken by his ideas. "Thanks to the sale of Chromatis, I can devote most of my time to this issue," he says. Since their meeting he has introduced Ayalon to potential donors, and he himself has put in his own money. "Former prime minister Ehud Barak said that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is not a partner, but we are trying to show that there is a partner - the Palestinian public," he says. And if the project fails? "I'm an optimist by nature," Petrushka says, "but in any event, even if we don't succeed, this won't be the last effort."
Alongside the board of directors is a "council" that consists of 24 central activists whose names are more or less familiar, from a range of public spheres. Among them: Asaf Hefetz, a former national chief of police; Yaakov Kedmi, formerly head of Nativ, the "liaison bureau" in the Prime Minister's Office; Prof. Alice Shalvi, formerly director of the Women's Lobby; David Kimche, a former Foreign Ministry director-general and senior official in the Mossad; Brigadier General (res.) Giora Inbar; Prof. Avi Ravitzky, from the Hebrew University's Institute of Jewish Studies; Tami Molad Hayou, from the campaign of the social organizations; and even Zohar Yakobson, who runs an agency for performing artists. Bringing together people from different areas serves one of the important messages that Ayalon and the others are trying to get across in the campaign: the agreement, they say, cuts across parties and political opinions.
The close work with highly experienced advertising people - Sternschuss has worked with the Meretz party and with peace activist Yossi Beilin in recent years - is apparent in Ayalon's public appearances. In the past few months he made the rounds of a large number of media outlets in order to describe the project. He usually showed up for the interviews and background briefings with Orni Petrushka and a few people from the ad agency. Journalists who attended these sessions formed the impression that, as one of them put it, "He comes highly prepared, with an answer for every question, usually a short answer with a good punch line at the end. He has learned that if he wants his message to get across he has to speak in sound bites."
To run the campaign, a full-time director-general was appointed - he is one of four salaried employees on the project - Haim Ga'ash, formerly head of the Pardes Hanna local council on behalf of the Labor Party and, like Ayalon, a navy man. Ga'ash has a small office near the bourse in Ramat Gan. The telephone operation is located in the next room. In the meantime, those who want to add their names to the agreement can do so by phone and via the Internet (the source of most of the signatures so far). In a few days, booths will be set up in the big cities and the second stage of the campaign will begin.
"I refuse to check every 15 minutes to see how we are doing," Sternschuss says, adding, "It's a marathon." Ami Ayalon: "The rate of joiners is greater than we expected, but I can hardly say that I am walking around with a feeling of satisfaction. I assume that there were 20,000 or 30,000 people who just waited for an initiative so they could sign it, but our test will be in getting to the periphery, to every home in Israel."
What will you consider a success?
Ayalon: "I imagine that if within about half a year we get to 100,000 or so on the Palestinian side and two or three times that many on our side, we will be pleased. But the true test is not the numbers, it's the influence: whether, at a certain point the quantity of signatories will become a critical mass that will have an impact on the politicians. I believe we will reach that stage, but it depends on two things: good organization and what happens on the Palestinian side."
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