Can Arab-Jewish peace survive the ongoing violence in Israel?

The assassin vanished under a hail of police bullets. His target, the first PLO leader to advocate recognition of Israel, and also to openly hold talks with Israelis, was soon pronounced dead, along with his message.

Sartawi’s Israeli interlocutors came from the thick Left, people like Maj.-Gen. (res.) Matti Peled and former Labor Party secretary-general Arieh Eliav, but when shot he was but one wall away from Shimon Peres, who would become prime minister the following year.

Rumors of a planned meeting between the two were probably unfounded, but to the assailants – the Abu-Nidal terrorist group – that didn’t matter; Sartawi spoke peace, and that made him anathema and his death foretold.

It was part of a pattern, one that neither began nor ended on that sorry day in April 1983, and in fact laces Israel’s history almost from its birth to these very days of awe; days which make many assume fatalistically that peace-killers will always defeat the peacemakers. Well they haven’t, and they won’t.

THE FIRST of the peacemakers to fall in the line of duty was Jordan’s King Abdullah, who was shot in 1951 at the Mosque of Omar’s entrance after holding secret talks with David Ben-Gurion’s emissaries.

Two years before Sartawi’s murder, Anwar Sadat was mowed down by four Islamist gunmen who emerged from a truck during a military parade and emptied their Kalashnikovs at the presidential podium killing, besides Sadat, another 10 men. The young peace treaty with Israel, though only part of a broader Islamist agenda, was a key element in the squad’s motivation.

The following year Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, who had been dialoguing with Israel for a while and was widely expected to make peace with Menachem Begin, was blown up along with 26 others during a political meeting in Beirut. The assassin, widely believed to have been activated by Syrian agents, cited the alliance with Israel as the cause of his act.

The common denominator among all these assaults is the belief that Arab-Jewish peace, no matter how limited or embryonic, is an abomination that must be nipped in the bud.

Now this history is once again at play; not in Hamas’s quest to fight – that’s a given that needs no pretext – but in its timing. Hamas could have started this round of violence long before or well after this month. What made it press the trigger was Israel’s first-ever Arab-Jewish coalition agreement, which was but several days away from being signed.

The extraordinary Bennett-Abbas-Lapid government was set to inspire a great Arab-Jewish reconciliation, a prospect that from the viewpoint of Hamas was intolerable. Like Sartawi’s evolving dialogue and like Gemayel’s burgeoning peace – it had to be preempted. Hence the rush, scope, and total abandonment of measure with which Hamas unleashed its wrath.

Time will tell to what extent the fighting’s spillover to Israel’s mixed towns was micromanaged by Hamas operatives. However, it is clear already now that the rampages in Lod, Acre and Jaffa served Hamas well, and that whether or not they were conducted from Gaza they were clearly incited from there.

Worse, in terms of its immediate aim the ploy worked. The breathtaking move Naftali Bennett had already introduced with the inspiring statement that “a broad government is not a default, it’s an aim,” was summarily shelved.

Like that peace with Lebanon’s elected president which Israel was already touching and smelling only to see him and his gospel murdered, the great reconciliation that Bennett and Mansour Abbas seemed ready to launch was trampled, overnight, by thugs who lynched pedestrians, shattered storefronts, and torched synagogues.

The question this plunge from utopia to dystopia raises is therefore this: Can peace survive its murder?

STRATEGIC SURPRISES are good at what they announce – surprise – but their planners often fail to plan for what their surprises uncork.

Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and Egypt’s crossing of the Suez Canal were stunning. All three, however, were ultimately defeated. Hamas’s strategic surprise is headed the same way.

The Germans disparaged the Russians’ industrial ability, the Japanese underestimated America’s fighting spirit, the Egyptians didn’t calculate Israeli improvisation, and Hamas doesn’t understand what the sight of a torched synagogue does to a Jew, any Jew, even a leftist, an agnostic or a convert.

On this front the counterattack is already underway, with hundreds of arrests that will be followed by harsh indictments that will produce lengthy jail terms.

Equally swift will be the physical restoration that the peace-murderers’ carnage demands. It will take months, but every ruined synagogue, hotel, restaurant and shop will be repaired, as will all the vandalized parks, playgrounds, plazas and bus stops, not to mention ransacked police stations.

Much more difficult will be the rehabilitation of the surprise attack’s big target: communal relations that were built over generations.

Yes, the struggle ahead of us is daunting, the civic version of defending Stalingrad and wresting Iwo Jima, but like those battles, it will end in evil’s defeat.

Anwar Sadat was murdered, but the peace he struck survived him, and lives to this day.

Mansour Abbas’s emergence in an Israeli coalition has apparently been derailed, but he still showed up at the burnt Beit Yisrael Synagogue and, with Lod Mayor Yair Revivo (Likud) alongside him, denounced the arson as anti-Islamic and vowed to participate in its reconstruction.

Yes, the Arab-Jewish coalition which Middle Israelis crave, the situation begs, and nearly half the Arab electorate endorsed – is dead. Its spirit, however, lives on.