 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.
The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker
this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for
such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's
"ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching
their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews,
describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from
those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey.
You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend
it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his
findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here.
One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary
gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above.
Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this:
The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team
says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state
that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build
more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to
the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at
the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant
of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world.
We have to make this an argument about apartheid."
The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a
sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and
withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to
the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last
"official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently
opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the
occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered
Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and
uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready
to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by
an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of
occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently
which side they support, as Goldberg reports.
There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every
confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every
attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of
Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide
bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the
moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered
though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and
their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than
ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the
Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that
all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it
is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in
its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine".
And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the
poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with
one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not
stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would
merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were
extinguished from their holy
land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to
scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite
violence and then say "I told you so."
There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the
tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the
insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful,
and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next,
inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely
produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to
treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease.
Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the
extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no
one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that
render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze
Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not
along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the
Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas.
The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how
little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's
politics.
As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps
centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian
issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to
lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions,
and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not
religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't
matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or
unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way
they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is
entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents
the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to
come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live
there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we
should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have
recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we
understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead
invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even
as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the
religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod
in assent.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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