Irreconcilable differences at the heart of the Mideast
The Israeli-Palestinian dispute never ends
Like a recurring migraine, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is again pounding our brains, dominating newspaper columns, airtime and cyberspace. A Palestinian organization called Hamas lobs rockets from Gaza into Israel. Israeli fighter jets blast targets in Gaza. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dashes to the region to help put out the fire. Then, the United Nations grants nonmember observer status to the Palestinian Authority and Israel responds by authorizing new settlements.
To many Americans, this business must be as remote and dreary as another fight between the Hatfields and the McCoys. What is this seemingly ageless, endless Middle East hassle all about, anyhow? And why should Americans care about who wins it and who loses it?
A lot of important people have asked themselves that second question. President George W. Bush wanted to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian dispute if he possibly could. He thought it was just too complicated, too messy, too dangerous and just too damned unsolvable. In a sense, Bush was right.
The Israeli-Palestinian dispute really is all those things, plus other things politicians want no part of. But, try as they might, American presidents have been unable to avoid spending a lot of time, energy and political capital on it. It just sucks them in like a whirlpool or a black hole. They can't escape it.
I spent a lot of my professional life visiting, reading, writing and thinking about the Middle East, and I still can't completely explain why this should happen. Part of the explanation has to do with oil, much of which is produced in the Middle East. Any new war in that part of the world would send the price of gasoline sky-high, and that would propel a very heavy sledgehammer smack into the guts of our country's fragile economic recovery. In that case, we would probably slide back into another recession, even deeper than the last one.
Another part: American taxpayers are financially involved in the region. Last time I checked, they sent about $3 billion a year in foreign aid to Israel. They give another $1 billion or so to Egypt. Plus, many American Jews have powerful emotional and religious ties to Israel, and their lobbying organizations dominate U.S. policy toward the region. Presidents can no more ignore the Israel lobby than they can ignore the gun lobby, the insurance industry or the drug companies.
What might be called the modern origins of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute began in the early 20th century, with the birth of strong aspirations among Arab intellectuals for liberalism, modernity and free political expression. At roughly the same time, Jewish intellectuals such as Theodore Herzl began writing books, tracts and articles portraying the dream of returning to their ancestral homeland, which they expressed in a movement called Zionism. Both Jews and Palestinians centered their dreams on land that was later to become the State of Israel.
Matters came to a head after the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, which seemed to validate a central tenet of Zionism: Jews would be in danger of their lives in any country where they were a minority. Germany had assimilated its Jewish population more deeply than perhaps any other country in Europe. If Jews could be massacred there, where could they be safe? To many Holocaust survivors, the obvious answer was Israel, which at the time was Palestine, a pre-state governed by Britain. It was, as Israel Zangwill, an eminent British author, famously called it, "a land without people for a people without a land."
Except that there were people there: as many as 500,000 Palestinian Arabs. But to the new immigrant Jews, haunted by the Holocaust, obsessed with survival and building themselves new lives and a new country, the Palestinians were invisible. The chapter on this subject in Walter Laqueur's magisterial "A History of Zionism" is called "The Unseen Question."
Things might have worked out, except that the two peoples occupying the same land were - and remain - very different; and, like a hopelessly mismatched couple, the differences are irreconcilable. Since Israel's creation in 1948, there have been four Arab-Israeli wars, plus a host of spasms of terrorism and reprisal.
It is difficult to imagine how this quarrel will end. The only apparent solution is separating the mismatched peoples: Israel living side by side with the to-be-created Palestine. Unfortunately, the current Israeli government is slowly absorbing the West Bank, which is where the new Palestinian nation would be founded. Virtually every country in the world, including ours, has said these West Bank settlements are illegal. Even the legal adviser to the Israeli foreign ministry, in a secret memo in 1967, declared that the settlements violate international law.
Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza, refuses to recognize Israel's existence, and Israel refuses to recognize Hamas. The other Palestinian group, the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, for whom the word "feckless" might have been invented. (Of Arthur Balfour, an early 20th-century British prime minister and foreign secretary, Winston Churchill once said, "If you wanted nothing done, Balfour was the man for the job." The same can be said of Abbas.)
What we are left with, then, is a migraine that won't go away and can't be ignored. Maybe the only thing to be learned and gained from this vicious dispute is a grim lesson: Death and taxes are not the only inevitable realities of life. So is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.