Annapolis: The Cost of Failure

by Henry Siegman

Editor’s note: In its November 8, 2007 issue, The New York Review published “Failure Risks Devastating Consequences,” a letter to President Bush by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee H. Hamilton, Brent Scowcroft, Paul Volcker, and other former Washington officials from both parties, calling for urgent action toward a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement at the Annapolis conference. In response, many readers sent questions to Henry Siegman, the president of the US/Middle East Project, which was a co-sponsor of the letter. In this nybooks.com special feature, Mr. Siegman addresses some of those questions and provides his own analysis of what is at stake at the conference.

One of the first on-line responses to the publication of the letter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a simple, straightforward question: “What is in it for Israel?” The “it” referred to guidelines the letter proposed for an agreement that would end Israel’s occupation of the territories the IDF overran forty years ago in a conflict—as Israelis were reminded by the celebrated author David Grossman when he addressed a recent commemoration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination—that is now in its 100th year.

What is in it for Israel should be self-evident, but now that three new Israeli generations have been born having no memory of Israel without settlements, it no longer is; for too many, the occupation—and the spiral of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has come with it—is a given, the natural order of things.

An agreement that leads to the end of an occupation that with the best of intentions humiliates and brutalizes an entire nation should be more than enough of a reason to go for it. The subjugation and permanent dispossession of millions of people is surely not the vocation of Judaism, nor is it an acceptable condition for a Jewish national revival.

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