As the chaos again grows in the Middle East, one can almost hear Ronald Reagan’s famous “There you go again” or perhaps Yogi Berra’s classic “It’s deja vu all over again.”
Once again (sigh), the radicals have stepped out of the curtains and taken over the show. Israelis, a substantial 60 percent of whom still support the withering “peace process,” have politically given in to the forces of settlements and thus separatism. Palestinians find themselves even more torn between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the avid suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The nights and also now the days belong to the radicals. Two young Palestinians, dressed carefully in suits and ties, blow themselves up in a West Jerusalem market. Not only Israel but also the United States is grist for this somber mill of death and destruction, as two young West Bank Palestinians are mercifully captured in New York before they can begin blowing up Americans.
Everywhere, the center no longer holds.
One can talk endlessly about “why.” There is no question that the ambitious Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu very deliberately took the first step to turn the tide against the peace process by reneging on the promises of Oslo not to change the status of Jerusalem. Starting the Har Homa settlement neatly did that.
Equally, there is no question that PLO chief Yasser Arafat, feeling pushed to the wall by Hamas and Jihad, has been less than efficient in containing the radicals or in giving Palestinians a real stake in the process by developing the Palestinian economy. (Per capita income among Palestinians has actually dropped by a third in the three years of the peace process.)
Yet a question here that is only occasionally being addressed is why the two “centers”–the Israeli and the Palestinian alike–cave in so easily the moment a handful of extremists again arrive on the scene. (There have been, after all, only 15 suicide bombers, although 140 people have tragically died at their hands.)
The wise Israeli writer Amos Oz, in The New York Times, recently spoke of those on both sides who see peace not as something desirable but as something that compromises and threatens their absolutist nationalist or religious ambitions:
“The moment they see progress being made, or hear rumors about advances, the enemies of peace rally to carry out some contemptible act whose purpose is to enrage the other side, so that the other will see red, plunder in despair, and become more extremist in position.”
People–and peoples–hate to change. It is far more comforting and comfortable to be able to hold to prejudices or convictions rather than to have to change.
This is a variation on my mother’s old wisdom: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.”
For change and compromise mean that at least part of what you thought and acted upon was wrong. They mean you have to change metaphysically and spiritually. You have to become something other than what you felt you were–and what you had indeed become–after centuries of persecution or decades of oppression.
How much “easier” it is psychologically, despite the killings, for people on both sides to be able to pull back to their old selves and say, “See, I told you so–they will never change!”
We have seen seemingly miraculous transformations in human and national lives in only our lifetimes. Post-World War II Germany and Japan come quickly to mind–but they were defeated, a status that remarkably opens minds.
We have been far less successful in the newer forms of resolving conflicts, particularly those ruled by that neutralism so predominant in the thinking of the UN mentality, a neutralism that eschews moral judgments and the use of force.
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Somalia collapsed after a huge UN effort. Cambodia is (again) collapsing only three years after it was declared a UN “success story.” Bosnia was partly neutralized, but the underlying problems remain totally unsolved.
The sad thing about the Israel-Palestinian situation is the fact that the peace process there was working. People were tired of endless conflict. It needed about two more years, I believe, for both Israelis and Palestinians to be able to weather the bombers. As it turned out, there wasn’t that much time.
One can only hope and pray that those vulnerable centers on both sides re-establish momentum. At the moment, too many are again thinking that “the other side will never change” for one to be optimistic about that.