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A.B. YEHOSHUA:
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The War of the Borders
 If I had to name the two-year-old war between the Palestinians, I would call it the War of the Borders, referring to two conceptual dimensions of the term "borders." The first refers to an ordinary border conflict, the kind with which we are familiar from wars between many nations. In other words, a conflict over where to draw the border between two nations, with each recognizing the other as a separate entity with the right to sovereignty in its own territory, and the dispute being limited to the physical location of the border. While the Palestinians demand the location of the border between us to be exactly congruent with the June 1967 lines, including the area that was under Jordanian-Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem, the Israelis demand the area under their control to include both East Jerusalem and parts of the Arab villages surrounding it, and the large settlement blocs including the ones in the Jordan Valley.
This is where the major Israeli political parties are divided, from the Labor Party that is prepared to concede up to 93 percent of the land captured in the Six Day War, to the Likud under Ariel Sharon that may speak of a Palestinian state, but on land that is only some 50-odd percent of the territory occupied in the Six Day War. It is a real and bitter conflict, and the differences between the sides are vast and problematic, but still, at the foundation of this border war is the clear recognition on both sides of the right of two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, to live side by side.
Yet at the root of this border war is a much more essential, fundamental and sharp conflict.
On both sides there are many who deny the very principle of a border between the two peoples. On the Israeli side are the Right and the settlers who believe that ultimately Israel should rule over all of the Greater Land of Israel, while offering a meaningless and vacant autonomy to the Palestinians. On the Palestinian side there still is a clear contingent that demands the right of full return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, thereby actually negating the state's Jewish essence, undermining the sovereignty of its identity, while blurring the political border and eventually turning the entire area into Palestinian territory.
These two parallel wars, one over the location of the border and the other over the very existence of a border, provide the bitter and tough struggle taking place today, both with its cruelty and its lack of moral clarity. That is also what makes it so disillusioning.
The writer is a novelist, scholar and political essayist.
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