Talking, Waiting, Killing

Between 2006 and 2008, I spent a fair amount of time working out of Jerusalem and covering matters Israeli and Palestinian. I’d guess it added up to about eight months in all. During that time, I grew familiar with a certain ritual, one that occurred in the run-up to any meetings between top governmental officials from the US, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. There would be a great deal of speculation in the press and from other commentators about what might happen, what might be said and to whom, what breakthroughs might await. Then Condi would meet Olmert, or Abbas, or either of those two men would meet Bush, or the Special Envoy of this one would meet the Special Representative of that one. Statements would be released, highly qualified commitments would be made, hands would be shaken as photos were taken. Words and body language would be parsed for some sign that something meaningful had happened, or might happen, and then… nothing would. No change in the status quo in any significant way. I’m not saying statecraft is easy, but each time this happened it felt more and more like a show that was pretty much forgotten by the time one left the theater, or that one eventually decided there was no need to see.

I have this in mind, of course, because of the recent visit Benjamin Netanyahu paid to Barack Obama. The expectations in this case were decidedly modest, perhaps because these guys didn’t spend the preceding days contorting themselves and their positions so it seemed like they actually agreed with each other and were enthusiastic about the prospect of working together. But meet they did. And then they emerged like partners in a troubled marriage who have learned the language of therapy, insisting that they exchanged views and understood where the other was coming from, on settlements, on Iran, on other matters. An opening, perhaps?

Well, no, not likely. The Israelis did make a show of dismantling an illegal outpost in the West Bank, but that hardly touched on the real issues involved and the outpost in question was on the way to being rebuilt the very same day. Netanyahu has refused to endorse a two-state solution and in recent days said that there was no way he would relinquish any sovereignty over Jerusalem, which is one of many issues that seem sure to undermine any effort towards a real peace agreement.

Point being, the Israelis and the Palestinians are very, very far away from common ground (even though they’re standing on it). The sense that it could happen needs to be maintained because otherwise everyone would just give up, and there are elections to be won and money to made and careers to be advanced, all of which this conflict can enable. And, in truth, anything is possible (“There is good in the world, Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for,” as was said in the second Lord of the Rings movie). But only once you get there, and stand on that common and contested ground, can one see how deep this thing goes, and how difficult it will be to solve (if that’s the right word). There are people on both sides, I’d submit, who very much believe this current state of affairs, this ongoing fight, is how things are supposed to be. The struggle defines them, confirms to them that they are doing their God’s work in a righteous way. Jerusalem will always loom in the background as an immensely thorny logistical, political, and spiritual issue. And beyond that, there’s this central notion of the right of return for Palestinian refugees versus the demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

This last one, that’s tough. Real tough. Because what it means, in short, is that each side needs to be told it is right. The Israelis need to be told that it was right and justified that they should have established the country of Israel as a Jewish homeland where and when and how they did, because that affirms the rightness of the whole enterprise, and it reaffirms the idea that there was some meaning in the suffering Jews have endured in so many places for so long. That makes sense, I think. But at the same time, the Palestinians needs to be told that it was not right that they were ejected from part of this territory, that it was not right, or fair, that their grandparents had to leave this or that village or this or that home in what is now Israel back in the days when Israel was a dream of the early Zionists and when it actually became a country. That, too, makes sense. Except they are, essentially, mutually exclusive concepts.

This is a psychological state of mind as much as a political or geographical or religious one. The politics, it might be said, are a real-world reflection of the construction, over decades, even centuries, of the psychological underpinnings of the situation and the people involved. You would need to get the various populations to a point where they can find a way to agree on principles that seem to contradict each other–yes, you were right, says one to the other; and yes, you were also right, comes the reply–where it would be understood to be in everyone’s self interest (this assumes an outsider’s sense of self-interest jibes with an insider’s, which is a big leap) and then to work out a logistical framework for how the mechanics of any accord could be implemented. That would require leadership of such skill, flexibility, bravery, and empathy that it now seems very hard to imagine, especially when both leaderships now in place are so weak and so accountable to extremists in their midsts.

As a point of reference–if you’re still with me–let’s look at Sri Lanka. There, you had longstanding personal, ethnic, geographic and religious divides. You had decades of ferocious and often unimaginably crude violence. And you had a lot of outsiders imagining how a solution could be possible. But Sri Lanka’ s president said, essentially, “screw it, I’m ending this thing, and I know that means civilians will die en masse, and I believe that means press and civil freedoms must be eviscerated, but it has to be done, and I’m going to do it. We’re heading in, we’re shooting to kill, ignoring all those caught in the crossfire, and willing to endure whatever noise the international community makes.” And that’s just what he did, winning a war but losing so much more. (More on present conditions at the Washington Post today).

The Tamil Tigers have little support outside some parts of the Tamil diaspora, though. The Tamil population of Sri Lanka doesn’t have much of a constituency, or, dare I say it, a lobby, either. And there are other things on the minds of most world leaders whose opinions matter. Three times as many people live in Sri Lanka as do in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. And I’d wager that the number of Sri Lankas who died in the last few weeks is significantly higher than the number of Israelis and Palestinians who have died in the past decade. Yet Israel and Palestine occupies much, much more psychological space in the minds of people in the region and around the globe, the implications of what happens there are much larger, and thus the politics of every little thing resonate far further afield. Sri Lanka’s government could do what it did because they rule a small land that pops up on the radar only infrequently, and then not for long. It’s not right, but that’s how it is. Such a thing could never happen in Israel and Palestine, not in such a concentrated and concerted way or time frame. So the slow burn is what’s left–the talking, the meetings, the rituals, and the continuance of the situation many agree just isn’t right but few can actually move in one direction or another.