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I recently read a Jewish peace activist's eyewitness account of the Israeli army's destruction of a Palestinian home.(1) No stranger to such stories, I was nonetheless upset by its distressing details. The walls of the house fell one by one, mauled by the bulldozer's relentless arm, until its roof was sent crashing down. This was apparently not enough for the soldiers overseeing the operation, who mowed down the fruit trees in the rear and rammed an adjoining water tank until it toppled. After some young Palestinian men began throwing stones, the soldiers ran up the hill after them, firing round after round of live ammunition, a clear breach of official regulations that soldiers shoot only when their lives are in danger. When the peace activist confronted him with this violation, the commander shrugged his soldiers and did nothing.

A Palestinian youth struck by a bullet ended up in the same hospital as the mother of the family whose home was destroyed; she had been injured by soldiers while attempting to dissuade them from carrying out the order. Fortunately, there was one hopeful sign in the aftermath of this tragedy - a group of Palestinian and Jewish activists would be meeting the following week to reconstruct the home. Never mind that the army would most certainly raze it again. They would rebuild.

This and other house demolitions symbolize for me not only the breakable edifice of the peace process, but the shattering of my once pristine vision of Israel. As a child, I had joyously sung the classic Zionist lines:

Anu banu artza levnot ul'hebanot.

(We have come to the land, To build and to be built up within it.)

Now, I cannot help but ask: Has Israel "built itself up" through military might alone? Can it, with equal resolve, overcome the past and build a relationship with Palestinians that truly recognizes their humanity? Most critically, will Israel feel secure enough to take all of the necessary risks for peace?

I will address these questions by examining some salient aspects of the Jewish biblical tradition of active risk-taking. My analysis will explore the fragile renewal of Israeli risks for peace since the Wye summit in the context of risk-taking as an expression of the deepest well-springs of Jewish faith.

Peace Negotiations as Active Risk-taking

On the most fundamental level, dividing up land into parcels labeled "ours" and "theirs" is the way both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have come to terms with each other's nationalist claims since the start of the Oslo accords. Traditionally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has maintained that the peace process offers Israel no security benefits; to the contrary, it has said that every square mile of territory handed over to the Palestinian Authority entails grave risks for Israel's Jewish population.

The truth is that the collision of Jewish and Palestinian nationalist aspirations is far from a contest between equals. Israel, operating from its double-edged advantage of sovereign control and military superiority, cannot expect the Palestinians to perform political magic at the negotiating table, or anywhere else. Although Palestinian nationalism is, at this point, undeniably as passionate as the Jewish nationalism that conceived and forged the state of Israel, it can only be measured against the backdrop of humiliation, dispossession, subjugation, and economic privation that has been the lot of Palestinians since their nakbah (catastrophe) of 1948. A people whose back is to the wall can hardly enter into a quid pro quo relationship with its occupier.

However vociferously Likud exhorts Arafat to resolve the problem of Hamas extremists or to generate democratic institutions, the fledgling Palestinian entity will be hard-pressed to do so in short order. Given the dismal facts on the ground, most of which are the direct result of more than thirty years of Israeli occupation, Israelis cannot escape the prospect of taking greater risks for peace and security than Palestinians.

Whatever anxieties active risk-taking in the peace process engenders for Israel, the benefits it stands to gain over the long term are as crucial as they are manifold. Instead of a future of continuing military expansion, loss of life, and suppression of Palestinian rights, a determined commitment to the peace course will allow Israel more humanely to "build itself up" from within. Free to invest energy and resources in overarching social problems such as poverty, religious intolerance, women's rights, domestic violence, and the socio-economic divide between Ashkenzai and Sephardic Jews, Israelis gradually can move beyond their old siege mentality. In direct proportion to the army's fading centrality, they will be empowered to rebuild their national character through a redefinition of priorities.

Lamentably, during the first part of Netanyahu's tenure, a combination of factors chased risk-taking for peace underground. The nation lapsed into an atavistic nightmare of its own making, fixating on every traumatic aspect of its past - wars, terrorism, isolation in the world community and at the U.N. Fear of Hamas and mistrust of Palestinian intentions seemingly triumphed at the expense of the precious vision of peace for which Yitzhak Rabin had died.