The same old marbles, Mr. Schocken

One day many years ago, Haaretz's editor in chief, Gershom Schocken, phoned me at the newspaper. "Mr. Marcus, can I have a word with you?" I hurried over to his room and sat down across from him. When he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, I understood that something was bothering him. He leaned back in his chair and approached the subject something like this: I've been following your interesting writing, but I've noticed that you focus too much on the same three or four "marbles" - Golda Meir vs. Shimon Peres, Yigal Alon vs. Moshe Dayan, Pinhas Sapir and again Pinhas Sapir, and Moshe Sharett and Pinhas Lavon and so on.

"What can I do? These are the people in the news," I said. Schocken responded that there had to be other subjects as well, from architecture that obscured the scenery to whether to let Wagner be played in Israel. It's important to broaden readers' horizons, and you can do it, he said.

In the years since, I find myself, like many colleagues, concentrating on the same three or four marbles. The names (other than that of Peres) have changed but the ritual repeats. This week Defense Minister Ehud Barak boasted during a tour in the north that calm had returned to the Lebanese border and that not one shot had been fired from there. Unlucky for him, a Katyusha rocket was fired at Israel that very evening. A similar incident happened to Alon; a day after he declared that no Syrian aircraft had been invented that could cross the border with Israel, a Syrian plane flew over the border and caused a sonic boom over Haifa. Excessive arrogance didn't benefit politicians in those days, just as it doesn't now.

Alon, who traveled a great deal, knew that it was unacceptable to stay in ostentatious hotels like the Waldorf Astoria. He chose a hotel in New York named Essex House, which sounded like the equivalent of a simple bed-and-breakfast in Safed, but which was in fact a luxurious and expensive hotel that Sapir loved. This reminder is meant to point out that the names change but the lust for the good life at the public's expense doesn't.

Today's problems are the same old problems. The implementation of UN Resolution from 1947 about dividing Palestine into two countries has not yet succeeded. One time it's the other side's fault, the other time it's ours. Meir decided that there was no Palestinian people while the Palestinians hoped to throw us into the sea. The political rivalry between the nationalist Herut and socialist Mapai parties of blessed memory bordered on seething hatred. When Menachem Begin would get up to speak in the Knesset, David Ben-Gurion would leave the chamber. When B.G. wanted to criticize Begin, he would never use his name but called him "the man who sits next to MK Bader."

But of all the politicians, it was the "fascist" Begin who signed the historic peace treaty with Egypt, dismantled settlements and withdrew to the very last millimeter. And it was he who signed the document recognizing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, he kicked Moshe Dayan out of the cabinet when he tried to put this into effect.

The leaders of pre-state Israel who were prepared in 1949 to give up large sections of the land in return for recognition from the Arabs took advantage of the Arab's refusal to expand. It was the left's leaders who started the settlements. A settlement policy was never on the right-wing Revisionists' list of things to do. Slowly, war after war, and in the 60th year of its establishment, Israel remains the only country in the world without permanent borders.

The politicians have been lucky over the generations that the United States supports Israel. During one of my visits to South Africa, a tough Afrikaner said to me that if they had had 5 million Afrikaners in America, they would never have given up South Africa. Maybe this is so and maybe not. But there is no doubt that the American Jews' strength has caused even those presidents who have not especially loved Jews to support Israel, or will win their support for Israel in the future.

Israel's leadership today is prepared, on the face of it, for a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Our experience with Yasser Arafat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, was a failure. Even though Arafat truly had the ultimate authority to make decisions, he chose the path of terror. "The leader of a liberation movement cannot bring himself to make concessions," he explained once to an interviewer. Now Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is proposing two countries for two peoples. But the status of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has gone to his head; Abu Mazen is threatening that he will not begin talks unless Israel immediately stops all construction in the territories.

Abu Mazen is a weak leader. If he goes ahead with his threat to hold elections, he will lose Gaza. If he goes ahead with his threat to resign, he will fade away completely. Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni held talks with Abu Mazen for about two years but didn't achieve anything. The result will be the same if the talks are renewed.

True, it's easy to write articles about Israel's achievements and values, but we'll wait until the next Independence Day supplement to do so. Meanwhile, the marbles are the same old marbles that lead the country nowhere, and we'll continue to hit them until they learn to be leaders.