So said Knesset member Avshalom “Abu” Vilan, describing what it’s like to be a proponent of peace in these troubled times during a recent San Francisco visit.
“People are saying the left has totally failed,” he said. “That during Camp David, you put everything on the table and their response was the intifada that has continued for more than two years already. They say we didn’t understand the political situation at all.”
A founding member of Shalom Achshav, the Israeli peace movement, Vilan represents the left-leaning Meretz Party. He was in the Bay Area on a U.S. tour with two colleagues to raise awareness about a newly formed umbrella group, the Israeli Peace Coalition. And while in San Francisco, he wore a second hat; he also delivered the keynote address at a Jewish National Fund dinner, which honored Mimi H. Silbert, president and CEO of Delancey Street, an S.F.-based community service foundation.
Noting that 620 Israelis and more than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, he said, “It’s well known that we can’t solve the issue by military force. Sooner or later, we’ll be back at square one, which is what we put on the table at Camp David.”
A solution must be found, not only to put an end to the violence but because of demographic reasons, he said.
With the Arab birth rate higher than the Jewish one, Vilan warned that the Arab population will outgrow the Jewish one in 10 years in the area that is pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. “We have a few years to find a solution,” he said. “Or we’ll either be a binational or apartheid state.”
Vilan spoke little about Israelis suffering from terrorism and instead focused on the Palestinians. “If you’re living in Gaza, you’re living on $2 per person per day. That’s less than $1,000 per person, per year. The unemployment rate there is 60 to 70 percent.”
While 70 percent of the Israeli public knows that the only realistic solution is something similar to what was offered at Camp David, Vilan said that paradoxically, that same 70 percent believes that only a hard-line leader like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can deliver it.
“It’s a Catch-22,” he said. Nevertheless, he remains optimistic. “Sooner or later, people will understand that it is the only alternative.”
Before coming to California, Vilan spoke to members of Congress in Washington.
And while the Middle East was definitely high on their agenda, it was not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they were so concerned with — it was Iraq.
“Some really agreed with our position, but they said the Bush administration is so Iraq-oriented now, it’s hard to change it.”
Vilan also talked about water, security and how the two are linked.
As a member of the Knesset committee that deals with the water issue, Vilan said JNF had been asked by the Israeli government to build reservoirs, which would allow sewage water to be cleaned and used for agriculture. This project is being funded by American Jews.
Vilan gave several examples of the effect of the water issue on the current conflict.
For one, Lebanon has been trying to redirect one of three sources of the Jordan River to one of its own villages.
“The water issue is not just an Israeli problem,” he said. When Israel and Jordan signed its peace treaty, it was agreed that Israel would share a certain amount of water with its neighbor. Last year, Israel gave less than the amount agreed upon, because it simply did not have enough.
In addition, he said, though the Palestinians are allotted much less water than Israelis, the Palestinians are totally dependent on Israel for their water.
“We have to solve these issues,” he said. “It’s well known that the water issue will be the most important in the next decade. The population is growing and we need more water.”
While Vilan admitted he was no expert in American foreign policy, he expressed reservations about Bush’s insistence on going after Saddam Hussein without anyone else’s backing.
“The problem is that without building a coalition or bringing in moderate Arab states, this can be seen as a religious struggle between Islam and the West,” he said. “Israel is a symbol of the West in the Middle East, and we can find ourselves in a difficult situation.”
Vilan continued, “The fires in the Middle East can sometimes burn so high they endanger other places too.”