Globalist: An Israeli's Easy Smile Masks Unyielding View:
"Benyamin Elon, Israel's minister of tourism, has a sense of humor. In March last year, when the Iraq war began, he reckons that he was the only tourism minister in the world who knew 'each of his tourists individually.'

What is less funny about Elon is his vision of Israel's future and that of the Palestinians. The West Bank - or, as he prefers to call it, Judea and Samaria - should be annexed. Not one Jewish settlement should be abandoned, for to do so would be to hand the Palestinians, and the 'the pan-Islamic enemy,' a victory. Palestinians in the West Bank should adapt to Israeli rule or move out. A Palestinian state already exists: it is called Jordan. So there is no need for another."

"I am in favor of a two-state solution," Elon said in an interview, referring to Israel and Jordan. He dismissed the Bush administration's support of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank as a "three-state solution that would create a monster.…"

The resolution of any conflict requires first seeing, and then to some degree accepting, the enemy. The collapsed Oslo peace process briefly broke through the Israeli-Palestinian hatred that makes "the other" invisible. Its failure, in turn, has created open season for those whose inclination is to deny the enemy's existence.

As a result, a moderate center on both sides finds itself hostage to Palestinians who would eradicate the state of Israel and Jews who believe that Israel's borders must stretch from Jordan to the Mediterranean because so is it written in the Bible.

"The absence of any move toward a negotiated peace has allowed extremists on both sides to prosper," said Michael Tarazi, a legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization. "Extremists rule the street on the Palestinian side, and in Israel they rule the government."

Certainly, the sway of Elon and people like him has been evident of late. He is from the far-right National Union party, which holds a mere handful of seats in the 120-member Israeli Knesset, or Parliament. But the party is influential in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's governing coalition and was forthright in campaigning successfully this month to stop Sharon's party, the Likud, from approving a plan backed by President George W. Bush for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

"My prime minister made a mistake," Elon said, referring to the Gaza plan. "The grassroots will not give our enemy the image of destroying Jewish settlements, because we know that uprooting 7,500 Jews will not save us from one million ticking bombs."

The Likud vote went resoundingly against the proposed withdrawal. But it also crystallized the notion among Israelis that the country has been hijacked by a small minority. Perhaps 1 percent of the country's citizens torpedoed a plan strongly supported by a majority. How this will affect the longterm survival of Sharon's right-wing coalition remains to be seen.

Of course, Palestinians are in any event generally unimpressed with the Gaza proposal. Put bluntly, they see Sharon's proposal as ceding Gaza in order to take as much as possible of the West Bank. "Gaza does not convince us of anything," said Tarazi. "Sharon's aim is still to put on some kind of Indian reservation."

The two sides talk past each other and people die. They construct their own versions of history and reality in order to avoid the terrible conclusion that the only possible reality of the region is a shared one.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/international/europe/26globalist.html