Peace Now. Almost.

Yochai Maital (narration): Our story begins with the radio. Or, to be more specific, with one radio station broadcasting out of Ramallah. It begins with two reserve officers sent out on a mission. It begins… in 1967.

Radio Announcer: [In Hebrew] The President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, imposed a siege on Eilat. [Goes under].

Yochai Maital (narration): In mid-May, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the popular Egyptian President, demanded that the UN withdraw its peacekeeping forces from Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. A few days later, Egypt blockaded the Straits of Tiran, effectively cutting off Israel’s main oil supplies.

Levi Eshkol: [In Hebrew] The IDF will thereby stand prepared, weapons in hand, ready to meet any challenge, and to show that when needed, it is mighty and can prevail.

Yochai Maital (narration): The Egyptian army amassed troops in the Sinai, and Israel – too – mobilized forces to its southern border. And, as all this drama was taking place, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant and IDF reserve officer by the name of Dan Bavly was anxiously waiting to be called up for war.

Dan Bavly: The few weeks leading up to the Six Day War were very vague. It was unclear what’s going to happen. There was a lot of tension in the air.

Yochai Maital (narration): That tension was, of course, resolved at exactly zero seven forty five, on the morning of June 5th. Within just four days of its preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields, Israel had conquered vast swaths of land, and Dan – whose unit had been deployed in the Jerusalem area, was released home for the evening. After kissing his wife and hugging his kids, he picked up the phone and dialed his best friend, Mossad operative Dave Kimche.

Dan Bavly: And Dave said, “oh it’s so good that you phoned me, I have just the right kind of assignment which your help will be very appreciated.” His assignment was to try to reopen the Hashemite Broadcasting Service, in other words, the radio service of the Kingdom of Jordan.

Yochai Maital (narration): Now, as Dan explained to me, the ‘60s in Israel? It was a totally different world back then. One in which it made total sense for a Mosadnic to ask his best friend to join him on a sensitive mission. In any case, Dan was up for the challenge. The very next day the two of them got into a car and headed into the newly conquered territories.

Dan Bavly: So we drive to Ramallah. This was early in June, late spring, the fruit trees on the roads were blossoming, it was an unbelievable place.

Yochai Maital (narration): As you’re imagining Dan’s idyllic description of the road to Ramallah, bear in mind that the battles were still raging. This was day five of the Six Day War. Still, that didn’t stop them from driving right up to the house of the radio station manager, one Mister Udde. Dan and Dave walked up, knocked on the door… And he wasn’t in.

Dan Bavly: But…

Yochai Maital (narration): One of the locals told them.

Dan Bavly: There’s a man living here across the street, that I think would be very good that you meet. And his name is Aziz Shehadeh.

Yochai Maital (narration): In 1948, Aziz Shehadeh had fled Jaffa with his family and had since become one of the most prominent lawyers in Ramallah. Aziz walked right up to the two Israeli officers, offered his outstretched hand, and said…

Dan Bavly: And now we can make peace. It was a total surprise. And for a minute we thought the guy is nuts. That he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Shake hands, he offers us coffee, nice little Arab coffee, introduces us to his family, his wife, his four children.

Raja Shehadeh: I remember that very well, of course. I was already sixteen then.

Yochai Maital (narration): That’s Raja Shehadeh, Aziz’s son.

Raja Shehadeh: I’m a lawyer and a writer, and my father was Aziz Shehadeh, who was a lawyer also.

Yochai Maital (narration): Back in the Shehadehs’ living room, an unusual conversation was taking place.

Raja Shehadeh: They started talking and he said he thought that the best way for the conflict to end is immediately to do something, and then they said, “well, what do you propose should be done?״

Dan Bavly: We really didn’t take him seriously. We thought this is a dreamer, where does he live? But as we went on, and we started listening to him, he came out with a program of how to make peace between the Palestinians and Israel.

Raja Shehadeh: He envisaged the whole thing. And he envisaged all aspects of what should happen.

Dan Bavly: Convene an ad-hoc constituent assembly of forty-three Arabs.

Raja Shehadeh: How it should happen…

Dan Bavly: Establish a government of twelve or thirteen ministers…

Raja Shehadeh: On what basis it should happen.

Dan Bavly: Based on the temporary Green Line borders reaching out a full peace treaty.

Raja Shehadeh: And… and he also believed it should happen very quickly because he knew if it didn’t happen quickly, it would be disrupted by all kinds of forces from the outside.

Dan Bavly: Then we ask him, ‘OK, you think that but what about the whole Palestinian leadership?’ He said they’ll all approve. On this platform, they will all approve. So we asked him, “can you put all this in writing?”

Yochai Maital (narration): So as soon as the two officers left, Aziz sat his son Raja on the…

Dan Bavly: Hermes baby typewriter…

Yochai Maital (narration): And began dictating.

Raja Shehadeh: He was very excited, he thought… he thought this is the moment that the conflict can be resolved. He was very excited. He shut himself up in a room and wrote it and nobody had… was allowed to bother him. And he was… had a great capacity for concentrating and he concentrated and did it. The document still has some of the typing mistakes that I made.

Yochai Maital (narration): Early the next morning, on the sixth and final day of the war, Dan and Dave showed up at Aziz’s doorstep. As promised, Aziz handed them a typed copy of his peace proposal, along with a list of forty-three dignitaries, whom – he believed – would support it.

Dan Bavly: Then we went off to check the list that we received from Aziz.

Yochai Maital (narration): By now, the two officers had all but forgotten about their original mission, reopening the Hashemite Broadcasting Station. And focused, instead, on a new – slightly more ambitious – goal: Making peace with the Palestinians. And so, as the last battles on the Golan Heights were winding down, two unarmed reservists in khakis drove up and down the West Bank.

Dan Bavly: Between the south of Hebron and up to Jenin, Tulkarem, Shechem.

Yochai Maital (narration): Meeting with top Palestinian leaders – governors, ministers, mayors, businessmen.

Dan Bavly: And almost everyone of them said, “it’s a very good idea, I’m in.”

Yochai Maital (narration): They managed to interview all forty-three people on Aziz’s list in just under three days. When they were done, they drove back to HQ, and reported that while they didn’t get very far with finding Mr. Udde and reinstating his radio station, they might just have stumbled onto something a bit bigger. So as the entire country was busy rejoicing – planning military parades, designing victory albums, awarding medals, and other such manifestations of a country patting itself on the back – Dan and Dave sat down with their notes and drafted a report.

Dor Danino: [In Hebrew] An independent Palestinian state shall be established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This state shall request to be admitted to the U.N. The state will be linked to the state of Israel and they will have ties in the realms of security, economics, tourism, transportation… [Goes under].

Yochai Maital (narration): They made four copies, and sent them out.

Dan Bavly: To Eshkol (the Prime Minister), to Dayan (Minister of Defense), Sapir (Minister of Finance), Yigal Allon (Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Labor)…

Yochai Maital (narration): Then, they patiently waited to hear back from one of the statesmen.

Dan Bavly: Only hope, only hope. Hope and hope for luck.

Yochai Maital (narration): But no one responded.

Akiva Eldar: Dayan says that he is waiting for a telephone call from Jordan or Egypt or Syria. He got a telephone call, not even a long distance call, from Ramallah, but the line was busy.

Yochai Maital (narration): That’s Akiva Eldar, a journalist who’s been covering the conflict for more than thirty years.

Akiva Eldar: I’m old enough to remember, that the message that we got from the highest echelons was that the Arabs keep saying no, and Israel wants peace. In a way it was true, until ‘67.

Yochai Maital (narration): At the time Aziz, Dan and Dave were outlining a peace agreement, Akiva was studying at the Hebrew University.

Akiva Eldar: As a student in ‘67 who lived in West Jerusalem behind the walls, we really didn’t realize that there are people on the other side of the wall. And if there are people there they wake up in the morning and are asking themselves, ‘where is the Jew that we can kill?’ People who believed that we can make peace were naive, were even ridiculed.

Yochai Maital (narration): But Dan and Dave came from the heart of the establishment. They weren’t Abie Natans or Uri Avnerys – types that could easily be dismissed as fringy members of the radical left. Yet Aziz, Dan and Dave’s peace proposal… today it’s just another piece of paper; one of millions of pages collecting dust in the archives of the Israeli Ministry of Defence. Dan still has a hard time getting over it.

Dan Bavly: I’m a sabre, I grew up, I fought in the War of the Independence, I lived through to 1967, I married, we had four children by that time, and then came the Six Day War, and it was our opportunity, and we missed… everything we missed. It was our opportunity and we fucked up.

Yochai Maital (narration): Akiva, who spent many hours talking to Dave Kimche about the saga, reported similar feelings.

Akiva Eldar: Dave Kimche went to grave with grapes of wrath, with bitter feeling. I think that they even felt that maybe their friends have lost their lives because of this missed opportunity. That maybe the Yom Kippur War was not inevitable. For them it was traumatic, because they had to go to bed every night and wake up every morning with the feeling that they had it, they held it in their hands, and their leaders… The people in whom they believed, just let it go. At least he knew, that he tried.

Yochai Maital (narration): Aziz Shehadeh was also disappointed. He never lived to see how similar his proposal was to the document Arafat and Rabin would sign, twenty-five years later, on the White House lawn. On a cold evening in December 1985, Aziz was stabbed to death outside of his home in Ramallah. The case has never been solved. Almost everyone involved in this story has long since passed away. Dan Bavly is, basically, the last man standing. Now, we often like our stories to have a neat, tidy ending. But this one doesn’t have that. The silence with which the proposal was met, it didn’t stop any of the folks from believing that one day we’ll be able to live together.

Dan Bavly: I’m only eighty-seven-and-a-half, so I don’t have all that much time, but I’m optimistic. Slicha, I often believe that things happen around the corner which you don’t see, and they happen quite suddenly.