The president of the United States uttered an unfortunate word during a (semi)private conversation with the prime minister of Britain, while a microphone was on that shouldn’t have been (we assume) and for the whole day or so afterward every news report I heard about the content of that conversation in the context of the conference obsessive, twitchingly, refered to the “S” word. That’s cutting edge news.
It was tiresome. The thing is, I agreed with Bush’s sentiment. What Hamas and Hezbollah are doing is exactly what he called it, and for there to be any progress in the Middle East it must stop.
The 80s and 90s were consumed with the politics of Israel and Palestine. The last real front left over from the Cold War, it had become something much worse–a blood feud. It’s bad enough when rival gangs or families or individuals indulge this sport, but when populations large enough to be considered countries do it, the only possible outcome is an international mess, one that drags all who get near it down into a cesspit of impossible dimensions. There is no solving it because the motivations are not rational. Those in the 30s who realized what Hitler was knew he could not be dealt with diplomatically because what he wanted and was willing to do to get it was irrational–indeed, insane–and until everyone around him was willing to admit that–including his own people–there was no solution.
Never mind now that Israel followed a program of apocalyptic paranoia between 1948 and 1993 and beyond. It is not as if they had no rationale. When faced with several Arab nations that subscribed, tacitly, implicitly, and explicity, to the conviction that Israel had no right to exist and should be wiped out, it is difficult to maintain equanimity. Israel’s subsequent treatment of the Palestinians, regrettable though it was and apalling in many of its parallels to other fascist regimes, was nevertheless comprehensible.
Through the efforts of several presidents, the United Nations, and other interested parties, Israel came to a point where it was prepared to compromise. Rabin’s death at the hands of an Israeli militant was tragic, but underscores the absolute insanity of the extremist positions. But we go on. They went on.
Israel is not one of my favorite countries, but it is an example of the kind of modern political problem solving that attempts to recognize the past and act for the future. We need not rehearse here the unfortunate history of the Jewish people, except to say that, even symbolically, a country needed to be created around them as a people. Otherwise the orphan status they carried for centuries would continue to make them vulnerable as local political scapegoats wherever they ended up in sufficient numbers. The irrationality of the rest of the world made the situation wherein this was necessary.
And even then, it seemed, many in the world hoped they would fail. When Britain pulled out of Palestine-cum-Israel, they left much of their military materiel in the hands of Arab groups who made their displeasure over events immediately apparent.
Enter the Cold War. Israel became the sold representative in time of Western ideals and economic policy, virtually surrounded by aglommerations of created nations (we forget often that the “countries” of the Middle east barely existed as such before WWI and only marginally after WWII, despite what maps might have said–these were spaces in which tribes coexisted, largely without national identities of any organic coherence, a circumstance we see reflected today in the constant in-fighting among groups we in the West can barely tell apart) bent on its destruction. The Soviet Union found fertile ground in which to deploy its policy of chaos, which is what it did as it had no sound policy for nationbuilding. (I make that claim based on the almost complete collapse of Soviet puppet states after the Wall came down–none of them possessed the internal cohesion necessary to maintain themselves as nations and in the absence of continual Soviet “support” devolved into civil strife. In this instance, the idea of the Strong Man had its chief successes in the Middle East where the traditions of royal families retained much of its older strength–hence the House of Saud could survive intact, centering much of Arab nationalism at least in an idea of statehood.)
Which brings me to the present crisis and the problem to be faced. Hezbollah and Hamas both are groups with mixed legacies. It is true that within their own communities they have often been a force for constructiveness. But they both possess this flaw, this irrational hatred of Israel, that continually subverts everything else they might try to do that the rest of the world will give a damn about.
Time for them to grow up and get over it.
Which is the problem. They can’t. Their entire image of themselves is built around this casus belli. They cannot compromise with Israel because they would have to admit that maybe they might have been wrong.
The irony is that until very recently, our own leaders, the Bush administration, have been largely incapable of admitting the very same thing.
But it would be a mistake to harp on that now, in the face of what is shaping up to be one of the chief international problems of the 21st Century–which is the Islamicist Movement. Moderate Muslims take pains to point out that many of these extremists are misinterpretting (a kind word in this context) Islam. The problem is, many of those very same moderate Muslims, in seeking to find byways and alternate routes around the chokepoints of diplomacy, will not, en masse, repudiate the radical Ayatollahs and Imams. The reason Israel finds it necessary (in their reasoning) to hit at civilian populations, is that those civilian populations protect, nurture, and support those radical elements which, one can only assume, they must implicitly agree with.
The rule of law requires that when the neighbor you grew up with and have known all our life suddenly decides to go nuts and joins a criminal group–even if you might in some sense agree with the larger political message of that group–you call the police, you turn him in, you stepo away and say “No, I’m not part of that, and you need to be in jail.” The failure to do this leads to things like the rise of the Mafia, the “successes” of the IRA (and the UDL), and the impossibility of snuffing out terrorism before it becomes an international movement.
Until this begins to happen in a large way across the Middle East, we will have what Mr Bush labeled very accurately as “this shit.”
End of rant.
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