The government of Israel will not deport President Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority nor kill him, although it has said it is considering both. (Whew. I think that is the first prediction in the history of this column.) This failure to act will not be due to international or U.S. pressure. Israel has breezily ignored both in the past. It will fail to exile or execute Mr. Arafat because, with him gone, who would it have to blame for every attack and suicide bombing carried out by Palestinians?

The emptiness of its one all-purpose explanation would become clear. It would be the equivalent of the U.S. getting the chance it demanded, to expose Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Or perhaps I’m being overly logical. Israel reoccupied the West Bank two years ago and Yasser Arafat has been under siege in Ramallah for a year.

They can cut off his water and electricity, and have. They can monitor his phones. Reports like yesterday’s routinely say “speaking from his partly demolished West Bank headquarters.” The PA infrastructure has been smashed along with any real Arafat authority. Yet Israel insists he alone is responsible for everything abhorrent that occurs. Maybe they’ll keep saying so after he’s dead. It’s a matter of degree.

The alternatives Israel proposed, exile or death, may seem incommensurable to most observers. Surely exile hurts less. So I’d like to take a moment to explain why the situation is more complicated.

In a certain light, exile is far worse, because of the histories of these peoples. The Jewish notion of history, in particular, is built on a sense of exile. Death, one might say religio-mythically, is a Christian motif, especially death at the hands of the occupying power. (That would be Rome at the time of Jesus.) Exile, on the other hand, is deeply Jewish.

This goes back more than 2,500 years, past the Roman exile of the Jews in 70 AD, to the Babylonian exile of 486 BC. It’s that earlier event that the biblical phrase, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” refers to.

The shame and pain of exile, the prayer and yearning to overcome it, further expulsions and wandering — these became the framework of all Jewish experience till the modern period. The 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah metaphysicalized the experience so that God Himself was in exile (the same term!) from His essence, and would only be reintegrated when His people returned to their land.

For such reasons, the issue of Yasser Arafat’s expulsion, and that of his entire people as called for by some Israeli cabinet ministers, is charged in a way that outsiders might miss.

So U.S. lawyer Alan Dershowitz, in a piece in this week’s Globe, is somewhat off the mark when he justifies Israel’s right to assassinate whomever it chooses. He still manages to be offensive, less by the position he takes than by the way he takes it without breaking a moral sweat. But the vital issue for the peoples embattled there is exile, not “mere” death.

Everyone in the Mideast knows this subtext. It is why Yasser Arafat said this week that he would choose death over exile. This is not about his general readiness to die; it is grounded in the mingled history of the two peoples. Israel was never just a “colonial settler-state” like, for instance, South Africa. It was a people who felt they were returning home.

For that reason, the moral legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise depended on Jews not inflicting on others what had been inflicted on them: exile from the same land, thus ending one exile by creating another. Pioneering Zionist voices like Martin Buber warned of and feared this tragic outcome.

Yet it occurred. The Jewish people managed to end its own two-and-a half-millennium nightmare by imposing the same nightmare on another people. All the founders of modern Israel, like David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan, to their credit, knew and acknowledged this; and when they failed to avoid the outcome, they at least admitted to having bad consciences. One cannot say the same for Ariel Sharon and his accomplices.

The point is not who was right and wrong, or who made what efforts at peace.

The point is, given these stakes, a reconciliation had to be achieved or conflict was bound to fester at an incredibly deep level, between the sides and within each. Now the new exiles are as resistant to abandoning their dream as the old ones were.

With stakes at this level, it is almost inconceivable for either side to lose, which at least would involve a resolution. They will each endure practically anything rather than abandon their (joint) homeland. The point is also, then, to cease talking about exiling or driving out the other, even if it is just a vain threat on both sides. That, and learning something about the human potential for failing to learn, which one might have preferred not to know.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.