The Four Wars of Israel / Palestine
by
Michal Walzer
The great simplifiers are hard at work, but Israel/Palestine has
never been a friendly environment for them, and it is especially
unfriendly today. They are bound to get it wrong, morally and
politically, and that is a very bad thing to do, for the stakes
are high. There isn't one war going on in the Middle East, and
there isn't a single opposition of right and wrong, just and unjust.
Four Israeli-Palestinian wars are now in progress.
The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel.
The
second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside
Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within
the 1967 borders.
The
fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements
and the occupied territories.
It
isn't easy to say which war is being fought at any given moment;
in a sense, the four are simultaneous. They are also continuous;
the wars go on even when the fighting stops, as if in confirmation
of Thomas Hobbes's definition: "For war consisteth not in
battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein
the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known . . . "
Throughout the course of the Oslo peace process, some Palestinians
and some Israelis were fighting the first and fourth of these
wars-or, at least, were committed to fighting them (and their
will to contend was sufficiently known so that it could have been
dealt with). The actual decision to restart the battles was taken
by the Palestinians in September 2000; since then, all four wars
have been actively in progress.
Different
people are fighting each of the four wars at the same time, side
by side, though the overall emphasis falls differently at different
times. Our moral and political judgments have to reflect this
complexity. Taken separately, two of the wars are just and two
are unjust. But they don't appear separately in the "real
world." For analytic purposes, we can begin by looking at
them one by one, but we won't be able to stop there.
1. The war against Israel: this is the war that is "declared"
every time a terrorist attacks Israeli civilians. I believe that
terrorism always announces a radical devaluation of the people
who are targeted for random murder: Northern Irish Protestants
in the heyday of the IRA, Europeans in Algeria during the National
Liberation Front's (FLN) campaign for independence, Americans
on September 11. Whatever individual terrorists say about their
activities, the intention that they signal to the world, and above
all to their victims, is radical and frightening: a politics of
massacre or removal or of overthrow and subjugation. Terrorism
isn't best understood as a negotiating strategy; it aims instead
at total victory, unconditional surrender. The flight of a million
and a half Europeans from Algeria was exactly the sort of victory
that terrorists seek (the FLN was helped in its project, it should
be remembered, by terrorists on the European side).
Israel's
Jewish citizens have to assume that something similar is what
Palestinian terrorists are seeking today: the end of the Jewish
state, the removal of the Jews. The language of incitement-the
sermons in Palestinian mosques, the funerals where the "martyrdom"
of suicide bombers is commemorated, the slogans shouted at political
demonstrations, the celebration of terrorists as heroes in schools
run by the Palestine Authority (PA)-makes this intention clear,
and it is the explicit goal of the leading terrorist organizations,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But can it be called the goal of the
Palestinian liberation movement taken as a whole? Is this what
Yasir Arafat is really after? It isn't easy to read him; he may
think that he is using the terrorists; he may even hope one day
to kill or exile them as the Algerian government did to its terrorists
in the aftermath of independence. But clearly, whatever his ultimate
intentions, he is right now a supporter or at least an accomplice
of terrorism. (A note to European critics of Ariel Sharon: on
any account, including that of Palestinian oppositionists, Arafat
is more involved in the terrorist campaign than Sharon was in
the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.) His distancing gestures, the
occasional arrests and the perfunctory condemnations after each
attack, long ago ceased to be convincing; he cannot be surprised
if ordinary Israelis feel radically threatened. This first war
is a real war, even if it looks right now like a losing war with
terrible consequences for the Palestinian people and even if some
(or many) Palestinians believe themselves to be fighting a different
war.
2.
The war for an independent state: this is the war that leftist
sympathizers in Europe and America commonly claim that the Palestinians
are fighting, because they think that this is the war the Palestinians
should be fighting. And some (or many) of them are. The Palestinians
need a state. Before 1967, they needed a state to protect them
against Egypt (in Gaza) and Jordan (on the West Bank); since 1967,
they need a state to protect them against Israel. I have no doubt
about this, nor about the Palestinian right to the state they
need, even though I believe that the original seizure of the West
Bank and Gaza was justified. In 1967, the Arabs were fighting
a war of the first kind on my list, against the very existence
of Israel. There was no occupation in those days; Egyptian publicists
talked openly of driving the Jews "into the sea." But
the territories that Israel controlled at the end of its victorious
defense were supposed to be used (this is what its leaders said
at the time) as bargaining chips toward a future peace. When,
instead, the government sponsored and supported settlements beyond
the old border (the green line), it conferred legitimacy on a
resistance movement aimed at liberation. And the longer the occupation
went on, the more settlements proliferated and expanded, the more
land was expropriated and water rights seized, the stronger that
movement grew. It is worth recalling how peaceful the occupation
was in its early days, how few soldiers it required when it was
believed, on both sides, to be temporary (and when war number
one had been decisively defeated). A decade later, Prime Minister
Menachem Begin denied that there was any such thing as "occupied
territory"; the whole land was the Land of Israel; the government
adopted the ideology of conquest and settlement. And the occupation
was far more onerous, far more oppressive when its reality was
denied than when it was called by its true name.
So
it is certainly a legitimate goal of Palestinian militants to
establish a state of their own, free of Israel-and of Egypt and
Jordan too. The first intifada (1987), with its stone-throwing
children, looked like a struggle for a state of this kind, limited
to the West Bank and Gaza, where the children lived. It was not
exactly a nonviolent struggle (though it was sometimes described
that way by people who weren't watching), but it did show discipline
and high morale, and its protagonists seemed to acknowledge limits
to their struggle: it wasn't intended to threaten Israelis on
their side of the green line, where most Israelis lived. And that
is why it was successful in advancing the peace process-though
Palestinian leaders subsequently declined, so it seems to me,
to gather the fruits of their success.
The
renewed intifada that began in the fall of 2000 is a violent struggle,
and it is not confined to the Occupied Territories. Still, the
interviews that journalists have conducted with many of the fighters
suggest that they (or some of them) consider themselves to be
fighting to end the occupation and force the settlers to leave;
their aim is an independent state alongside Israel. So this second
war is a real war too, though again it isn't clear that Arafat
is committed to it. Does he want what some, at least, of his people
certainly want: a small state alongside a small (but not as small)
Israeli state? Does he want to trade in the aura of heroic struggle
for the routine drudgery of state-building? Does he want to worry
about the water supply in Jericho and the development of an industrial
zone in Nablus? If the answer to these questions is yes, then
we should all hope that Arafat gets what he wants. The problem
is that many Israelis, who would share this hope if they were
hopeful about anything, don't believe, and don't have much reason
to believe, that the answer is yes.
3.
The war for Israeli security: it is unclear how many Israeli soldiers
think that this is the war they are fighting, but the number is
certainly high. The reserve call-up that preceded the March-April
2002 Israeli "incursions" into West Bank cities and
towns produced a startling result. Usually the army calls up about
twice the number of soldiers that it needs; the routine pressures
of civilian life-sick children, infirm parents, school exams,
trouble at the office-are accepted as excuses; lots of reservists
don't show up. In March 2002, more than 95 percent of them did
show up. These people did not believe that they were fighting
for the occupied territories and the settlements; all the opinion
polls show a massive unwillingness to do that. They believed that
they were fighting for their country or, perhaps better, for their
safety and survival in their country. The 95 percent response
was the direct product of the terrorist attacks. It is possible,
of course, that Sharon exploited the fear of terrorism in order
to fight a different war than the one his soldiers thought they
were fighting. Still, whatever the war in Sharon's mind, a substantial
part of the Israeli army was defending the country against the
terrorist threat. The third war is a real war and, morally, a
very important war: a defense of home and family in the most immediate
sense. But some Israeli homes and families are located on the
wrong side of the green line, where their defense is morally problematic.
4.
The war for the Occupied Territories: the Israeli right is definitely
committed to this war, but the support they have in the country
is (again) uncertain. Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David
in 2000 believed that he would win a referendum for an almost
total withdrawal, if this were part of a negotiated settlement
of the conflict as a whole. Withdrawal under pressure of terrorist
attacks probably does not have similar support, but that tells
us nothing about the extent of support for the occupation and
the settlements; it tells us only that Palestinian terrorism is
a political disaster for the Israeli left. In the face of terror,
the left cannot mobilize opposition to the settlements; it finds
itself marginalized; its potential supporters are more and more
skeptical about its central claim: that withdrawal from the territories
would bring a real peace. And that skepticism opens the way for
right-wing politicians to defend the settlements-which are no
different, they argue, from cities and towns on the Israeli side
of the green line: if we don't fight for Ariel and Kiryat Arbah
(Jewish towns on the West Bank), we will have to fight for Tel
Aviv and Haifa.
But
the fight for Ariel and Kiryat Arbah guarantees that there won't
be a real peace. For the settler movement is the functional equivalent
of the terrorist organizations. I hasten to add that it is not
the moral equivalent. The settlers are not murderers, even if
there are a small number of terrorists among them. But the message
of settler activity to the Palestinians is very much like the
message of terrorism to the Israelis: we want you to leave (some
groups on the Israeli right, including groups represented in Sharon's
government, openly support a policy of "transfer"),
or we want you to accept a radically subordinate position in your
own country. The settlers' aim is Greater Israel, and the achievement
of that aim would mean that there could not be a Palestinian state.
It is in this sense only that they are like the terrorists: they
want the whole thing. They are prepared to fight for the whole
thing, and some Israelis presumably believe that that is what
they are doing right now. The fourth war is a real war. The vote
of the Likud in May 2002 to bar any future Israeli government
from accepting a Palestinian state suggests a strong commitment
to continue the occupation and enlarge the settlements. Still,
I suspect that most of the reservists called up in March, or those
who are now (August) patrolling Palestinian cities, would not
be prepared to fight for those goals if they thought that this
was the only war in which they were engaged.
It
was the great mistake of the two center-left prime ministers,
Yitzhak Rabin and Barak, not to set themselves against the settler
movement from the beginning. They thought that they would most
easily defeat the right-wing supporters of Greater Israel if they
waited until the very end of the peace process. Meanwhile they
compromised with the right and allowed a steady growth in the
number of settlers. If, instead, they had frozen settlement activity
and chosen a few isolated settlements to dismantle, they would
have provoked a political battle that I am sure they would have
won; and that victory would have been definitive; a gradual out-migration
of settler families from the territories would have begun. Failing
that, Palestinian radicals were able to convince many of their
people that compromise was impossible; the conflict could have
only one ending: either the Palestinians or the Israelis would
have to go.
The
right responds by claiming that this was always the view of Palestinian
radicals, even before there were any settlements beyond the old
border. And that is certainly true: the radicals object to Jewish
sovereignty on any part of "Arab" territory; they have
no interest in the green line. But the supporters of the settlers,
especially the religious supporters, are radical in exactly the
same way. They also have no interest in the green line; they oppose
Arab sovereignty on any part of the land that historically or
by divine gift "belongs" to the Jewish people. The aim
of the fourth war is to enforce this conception of belonging.
I
need to say something about the "right of return," even
though the refugees who claim this right, since they mostly live
beyond the borders of old Palestine, are not directly involved
in any of the four wars. Still, they may well be the crucial constituency
for war number one. Arafat's insistence that return is a make-or-break
issue must be directed in part at them; he has always drawn support
from the Palestinian diaspora. "Return" was probably
a crucial factor in the failure of the Camp David negotiations
in the late summer of 2000. Here, however, there is disagreement
among the participants: was Arafat insisting on a symbolic acceptance
of the right or on an actual return? Most Israelis choose to be
literal-minded about this, arguing that acceptance of the right
would open the way to the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians,
overwhelming the current Jewish majority. Return, they claim,
means two Palestinian states. Most Palestinians argue for the
importance of the symbolism and seem eager to postpone any discussion
of numbers. At Taba in January 2001 both sides did talk about
numbers and, apparently, the figures suggested by the two were
very far apart.
Among
Palestinians, only Sari Nuseibeh, the PA's representative in Jerusalem,
has been ready to argue that giving up the right of return is
the necessary price of statehood. That seems to me the right position,
since the claim to return effectively reopens the 1947-1948 conflict,
which is not a helpful thing to do more than half a century later.
All the other refugees from the years immediately after World
War Two, from central Europe to Southeast Asia, have been successfully
resettled. Palestinians are still in camps because a decision
was made, by their own leaders and by the adjacent Arab states,
to keep them there: this was a way of insisting that Israel's
independence war was not yet over. Today, however, if the Palestinians
are to win their own independence war, they must acknowledge that
Israel's is already won. Perhaps some number of refugees will
return to Israel, some greater number to Palestine (how many will
depend on the pace of investment and economic development). The
rest must finally be resettled. It is time to address their actual
misery rather than their symbolic claims. There will continue
to be a Palestinian diaspora, just as there continues to be a
Jewish diaspora. A clear statement by Arafat acknowledging this
simple truth would represent a big step toward undeclaring the
first war.
How
can we adjudicate among the four wars? What kind of judgments
can we make about whom to support or oppose, and when? A lot depends
on the questions I have not answered: how many Israelis, how many
Palestinians, endorse each of the wars? Or, perhaps better, we
might ask: what would happen if each side won its own just war?
If the Palestinians were able to create a state on their side
of the green line, would they (or a sufficient majority of them)
regard that as the fulfillment of their national aspirations?
Would they accept that kind of statehood as the end of the conflict,
or would the new state sponsor an irredentist politics and secretly
collude in an ongoing terrorist war? Arafat's behavior at Camp
David and after doesn't suggest a hopeful answer to these questions.
Similarly, does the Israeli defense of statehood stop at the green
line, or does the current government's conception of state security
(or historical destiny) require territories beyond that, even
far beyond that? Sharon's behavior since coming to power doesn't
suggest a hopeful answer to this question.
What
happened at Camp David is obviously important in shaping our moral
judgments of the two sides and the four wars, for it was Barak's
inability to conclude an agreement there that sealed his fate
and brought Sharon to power. Arafat refused to make peace and
survived; Barak failed to make peace and was defeated (we can
learn something about the constituencies of the two men from this
contrast). It is true that the state of the negotiations and the
proposals on the table at Camp David and Taba are still in dispute.
The people who were at the table disagree among themselves; I
have no private information to bring to this argument. But it
seems reasonably clear that each successive move in the negotiating
process brought the Palestinians nearer to statehood and sovereign
control over something close to (and with each move closer to)
the whole of the territories. The claim that the Palestinians
were offered nothing more than a disconnected set of "Bantustans"
seems to be false; an almost fully connected Palestine (the West
Bank and Gaza would still have been separate territories) was
at least a possible and even a likely outcome of the ongoing negotiations,
whatever was actually offered at this or that moment. So the decision
to walk away from the process and to begin, and then to militarize,
the second intifada is very hard to understand-especially hard
because we have to assume that Arafat knew that Palestinian violence
guaranteed the defeat of Barak's center-left government. It isn't
a crazy conclusion that he simply wasn't interested in or, when
the critical moment came, wasn't prepared for a historic compromise
and an end to the conflict-even if the compromise brought with
it a sovereign state on the West Bank and Gaza.
Hence
the order of the four wars in my presentation. I put war number
one, for the destruction of the state of Israel, ahead of war
number two, for statehood in the territories, because it appears
that statehood could have been achieved without any war at all.
And I put the war for Greater Israel after the defensive war for
Israeli security because the previous Israeli government was prepared
to renounce territorial "greatness" entirely. But if
the Palestinians make a serious effort to repress the terrorist
organizations, and if that effort does not move the Sharon government
to rethink its position on the territories, then these orderings
would have to be revised. In any case, all four wars are now in
progress: what can we say about them?
The
first war has to be defeated or definitively renounced. Critics
of Israel in Europe and at the United Nations have made a terrible
mistake, a moral as well as a political mistake, in failing to
acknowledge the necessity of this defeat. They have condemned
each successive terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, often in
stronger language than Arafat has used, but they have not recognized,
let alone condemned, the succession itself, the attacks taken
together, as an unjust war against the very existence of Israel.
There have been too many excuses for terrorism, too many efforts
to "understand" terror as a response (terrible, of course)
to the oppressiveness of the occupation. It is likely, indeed,
that some terrorists are motivated by personal encounters with
the occupying forces or by a more general sense of the humiliation
of being occupied. But many other people have responded differently
to the same experience: there is an ongoing argument among Palestinians
(as there was in the IRA and the Algerian FLN) about the usefulness
and moral legitimacy of terror. Palestinian sympathizers on the
European left and elsewhere should be very careful not to join
this argument on the side of the terrorists.
Winning
the second war, for the establishment of a Palestinian state,
depends on losing or renouncing the first. That dependence, it
seems to me, is morally clear; it hasn't always been politically
clear. If there ever is a foreign intervention in the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict, one of its goals should be to clarify the relationship
of the first and second wars (and also of the third and fourth).
The Palestinians can have a state only when they make it clear
to the Israelis that the state they want is one that stands alongside
Israel. At some point, a Palestinian leader (it is unlikely to
be Arafat) will have to do what Anwar Sadat did in 1977: welcome
Israel as a Middle Eastern neighbor. Since Israel already exists,
and Palestine doesn't, one might expect the welcome to come from
the other direction. Perhaps it should; at some point, certainly,
the welcome must be mutual. But the extent of the terror attacks
now requires the Palestinians to find some convincing way to repudiate
the slogan that still echoes at their demonstrations: "kill
the Jews!"
The
relation of the third and fourth wars is symmetrical to that of
the first and second: war number four, for Greater Israel, must
be lost or definitively renounced if war number three, for Israel
itself, is to be won. The March-April 2002 attacks on West Bank
cities, and the return of Israeli soldiers to those same cities
in June-July, would be much easier to defend if it was clear that
the aim was not to maintain the occupation but only to end or
reduce the terrorist threat. In the absence of a Palestinian war
on terror, an Israeli war is certainly justifiable. No state can
fail to defend the lives of its citizens (that's what states are
for). But it was a morally necessary prelude to that war that
the Sharon government declare its political commitment to end
the occupation and bring the settlers home (many of them, at least:
the actual number will depend on a negotiated agreement on final
borders for the two states). Perhaps UN officials would have condemned
the Israeli war anyway, whatever the government's declared commitments,
but the condemnations could then have been seen as acts of hostility-not
to be confused with serious moral judgments. As it was, the fierce
argument about the massacre-that-never-happened in Jenin obscured
the real moral issue, which was not the conduct of the battles
but the political vision of the government that ordered them.
The conduct of the battles seems to have conformed to the standards
of just war theory, though the use of air power (for example,
against the Gaza apartment house in July) has not always done
so. The current occupation of Palestinian cities and the practice
of collective punishment impose unjustifiable hardships on the
civilian population. In battle, however, the Israeli army regularly
accepted risks to its own men in order to reduce the risks that
it imposed on the civilian population. The contrast with the way
the Russians fought in Grozny, to take the most recent example
of large-scale urban warfare, is striking, and the crucial mark
of that contrast is the very small number of civilian casualties
in the Palestinian cities despite the fierceness of the fighting.
But the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense will finally be determined
by the size of the "self"-the extent of the territory-that
is being defended.
Almost
everybody has a peace plan: one peace for the four wars. And everybody's
plan (leaving aside those Palestinians and Israelis who are fighting
for the whole thing) is more or less the same. There have to be
two states, divided by a border close to the green line, with
changes mutually agreed upon. How to get there, and how to make
sure that both sides stay there once they get there-on these questions
the disagreements are profound, between Palestinians and Israelis
and also within both groups. Except in the most general terms,
I cannot address these questions. The general terms are clear
enough: Palestinians must renounce terrorism; Israelis must renounce
occupation. In fact, neither renunciation seems likely given the
existing leadership of the two sides. But there is a significant
peace movement in Israel, and several political parties, committed
to renunciation, and among the Palestinians, though no comparable
movement exists, there are at least small signs of opposition
to the terror attacks. Perhaps whatever forward movement is possible
must come independently from the two sides and, first of all,
from outside what we used to call the "ruling circles."
What
follows is a hard argument, and I don't make it with any confidence.
I shall simply repeat what some of my friends in the Israeli peace
movement are now saying (I can't speak for Palestinian oppositionists).
They argue that there is a way to defend Israeli citizens and
to signal, at the same time, a readiness to return to some modified
version of the 1967 border. A unilateral withdrawal from isolated
settlements in Gaza and the West Bank would instantly improve
Israel's defensive position, shortening the lines that the army
has to patrol, and it would provoke the political battle with
the settlers that (as I have already argued) should have been
fought years ago. In the near future, this withdrawal is more
likely to take shape as a leftist program than as a government
policy, but it would still begin the necessary battle inside Israel,
and it might encourage Palestinian oppositionists to begin a battle
of their own: a serious effort to rein in the terrorist organizations
so that the Israeli withdrawal, when it finally comes, does not
generate a wave of enthusiasm among the militants and then a series
of new attacks. That prospect is the obvious danger of any unilateralism,
and it is a real danger, as the withdrawal from Lebanon demonstrates.
But the risk might still be worth taking.
Ultimately,
the partisans of wars two and three must defeat the partisans
of wars one and four. The way to peace begins with these two internal
(but not necessarily uncoordinated) battles. An American or American/European
sponsored truce would help the moderates on both sides, but, at
the same time, the success of the truce depends on the strength
of the moderates. Right now, it is hard to judge whether the "reform"
of the Palestinian Authority would increase that strength. All
good things don't come together in political life: some of the
most moderate Palestinians are among the most corrupt, while the
suicide bombers are no doubt idealists. Democratic elections in
Palestine may well play into the hands of nationalist and religious
demagogues; this is a real possibility in Israel too. Still, a
more open politics among the Palestinians would allow public expressions
of support for a compromise peace, and that would be a major advance.
Would
it help to bring in an international force, under UN auspices,
to police the (temporary or permanent) lines between Israel and
Palestine? This is an increasingly popular idea, but it raises
difficult questions about reciprocity. The Israeli settlers would
have to be defeated before any such force came in, because the
border along which it was deployed would certainly exclude many
of the existing settlements. But the Palestinian terrorists would
not have to be defeated, because they sit comfortably on one side
of the line. It is easy to predict what would happen next: terrorists
will slip through the UN's multinational patrols and kill Israeli
civilians. Then Israel will demand that UN soldiers go after the
terrorist organizations, which, since that would involve a major
military campaign, they would refuse to do. And what then? An
international force prepared to use force (and accept casualties)
might well bring peace to the Middle East, but I cannot think
of any country that is seriously prepared to commit its soldiers
to actual battles. The UN's record in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East
Timor is appalling. So, the only force likely to be deployed is
one organized for peace-keeping, not peace-making, and then its
effectiveness will depend on the previous victory of Israeli and
Palestinian moderates. Internationalization is no substitute for
that victory, and it is certainly doomed to failure if it follows
upon the victory of Israeli moderates only.
There
is a form of international engagement, more ideological and political
than military, that could be genuinely helpful. It is critically
important to delegitimize the terrorists and the settlers. But
this has to be done simultaneously and with some modicum of moral
intelligence. The current boycott campaign against Israel, modeled
on the 1980s campaign against South Africa, aims at a very one-sided
delegitimation. And because the other side isn't led by an organization
remotely like the African National Congress, or by a man remotely
like Nelson Mandela, the success of this campaign would be disastrous.
It would strengthen the forces fighting the first war. Only when
European critics of Israel are prepared to tell the Palestinians
that there will be no help for a PA complicit in terrorism, can
they ask American critics of the Palestinians to deliver a parallel
message to the Israeli government. Intellectuals committed to
internationalism can best serve their cause by explaining and
defending the two messages together.
I
have tried to reflect the complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict. I cannot pretend to perfect objectivity. The Israeli
nationalist right, even the religious right, is a familiar enemy
for me, whereas the ideology of death and martyrdom endorsed by
so many Palestinians today is alien; I don't understand it. So
perhaps someone else could provide a more adequate account of
the four wars. What is crucial is to acknowledge the four. Most
commentators, especially on the European left, but also on the
Jewish and Christian right here in the United States, have failed
to do that, producing instead ideological caricatures of the conflict.
The caricatures would be easy to ridicule, if they did not have
such deadly effects. For they encourage Palestinians and Israelis
to fight the first and fourth wars. Those of us who watch and
worry about the Middle East have at least an obligation not to
do that.
Michael
Walzer is co-editor of Dissent.
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