Free The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine by Miko Peled Page B

and its army with the fact that I, along with my father, was going against popular opinion.
    In the early 1970s Israel still held military parades during Independence Day. My father believed whole-heartedly that they ought to be part of the Independence Day festivities—that without the IDF there wouldn’t have been an independence day at all. It was a huge affair and I loved it: there were tanks and missile launchers and infantry brigades displaying their colors. They would enter the stadium at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where a stage was set up for the VIPs. The stadium was packed with people who looked up at the IDF air force flyovers by U.S.-made F-5 Fantoms and French-made Mirage fighterjets. We got to sit in the VIP section, and I thought it was the best thing in the world. In those days, it was quite common to see the retired generals show up in their uniform for the Independence Day parade, but my father refused to follow the tradition.
    “Come on dad, why not?” I was dying to see him wear his uniform again.
    “This is not a masquerade and the uniform is not some costume,” he said sharply. I would look at the one clean and pressed uniform he had sitting in the closet with admiration, and wonder when if ever he might wear it again. He never did. I would play with his older ones, wearing the hat and the medals and pretending to be a general myself, but he never encouraged this. He saw no particular pride in the military; he thought of it as a tool, not an identity.

     
    In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, which we named the Yom Kippur War because it began on that holiest of Jewish holidays, my father shifted even further from the mainstream and aligned himself with Israel’s Zionist socialist left. His association with Uri Avnery for example, a veteran journalist who was a leftist, anti-establishment political activist his whole life, was a major shift. It was a relationship that lasted many years.
    Then, along with Avnery, Yaakov Arnon, and several other dissident members of the Zionist establishment, he founded the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.
    The council sought to promote private and unofficial dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, which they hoped would lead to official negotiations between Israel and the PLO. Its charter called for Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967 and for an independent Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza, with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. At the time, the idea was unthinkably radical.
    I remember that I and everyone else were surprised at the amount of attention the council received, particularly from the foreign press. Soon word came through back channels and intermediaries that key members of the PLO, Yasser Arafat’s people, wanted to meet. It was a big step for both sides. Until that point, the PLO had a policy of talking only to non-Zionist Israelis who were open to the idea of a “secular democracy” in all of Israel/Palestine, where Jews and Arabs would live in one state. This notion was totally unacceptable to my father: He was a Zionist—he believed in a state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. For him, any other solution would lead to endless bloodshed. Still, I wonder if his devotion to Zionism would have waned at all had he been alive today.
    Great precautions were taken and a great deal of mistrust had to be overcome before the first meeting took place. It was in Paris where my father was firstintroduced 7 to Dr. Issam Sartawi, a close confidant of Yasser Arafat and the PLO’s representative to Paris. To borrow from the classic movie Casablanca , this was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” as Dr. Issam and my father became peace partners.

A close friend of my father’s, Issam Sartawi was a close confidant of Yasser Arafat and the PLO’s representative to Paris.
     
    In an article he published in 1977, my father described in great detail both that