In a famous line from the movie “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen likens a relationship to a shark: It’s got to keep moving forward, or it sinks.
That sums up the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.
Had Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat not signed the Hebron accord, the Mideast peace process would have gotten mired in a morass of political bickering, growing mistrust and, inevitably, bloodshed.
Opponents of Israeli redeployment from Hebron — and let there be no mistake about it, the eventual handover — say the opposite is true. Israel’s pullout means the Jewish state is leaving a few pioneering settlers to the whim of Jew-haters. These opponents paint a nightmarish scenario: Jewish blood will flow as Israel abandons its historic and spiritual center.
The path out of Hebron, these opponents say, leads directly to surrender of all the Jewish soil on the West Bank to Palestinian statehood.
Yet Netanyahu, after years of such tough hard-line talk, has followed the steps of his Labor predecessors by making the peace process a work in progress, leaving its final form to negotiations.
For only such negotiations can form the basis of a lasting relationship.
Netanyahu has tried to alter the nature of Israeli-Palestinian ties by slowing the Hebron withdrawal and overall pace of the peace process. That has sparked conflict, shed blood and proved untenable — pitfalls he had blamed on the Labor-led process.
Now Netanyahu assures us the slowdown has produced a safer redeployment that will avert the very disasters its opponents predict.
We must pray he’s right. We must also move forward with the Palestinians, for standing still risks stagnation. As the late Yitzhak Rabin said, the road ahead will be difficult. But all roads lead out of Hebron.