As we know, memory has a
way of reconstructing itself, but I like to locate the origin of my enduring
but rather puzzling interest in the Middle East in a single image. As a
youngster I’d regularly receive a copy of the wonderful Look & Learn
magazine. In one issue appeared a full-colour satellite photograph of the Sinai
peninsula – a view quite novel in those days. Something about the startling
contrast between the bleached sands of the desert and the deep, deep blue of
the surrounding sea, something about the great wedge of it, like an ancient
stone hand-axe, bewitched me.
I began reading, in a
patchy and desultory way. On school-free afternoons I’d slither into Umtali’s
Turner Memorial public library, hook out the massive black-and-gold volumes of
Keesing’s Contemporary Archives – a cumulative file of distilled world news
reports – and start making notes on events in Israel and its neighbours. I
started nowhere in particular and had no defined goal – typical of the slew of
misconceived and uncompleted projects that litter my life. I suppose I learned
something. Why the Middle East? A mystery.
Part if it was probably
that, in white colonial Rhodesia, Israel was much admired for its military
courage and success; we lapped up the drama of the 1967 Six-Day War. Both
countries were, in their ways, artificial creations and pariah states, both
seeing themselves as under siege from undisciplined hordes of terroristic
barbarians. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s taking Israeli athletes
hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics did much to consolidate that impression.
(In that grim precursor to the October 7 Hamas attack, all the athletes were
killed.) When Israeli forces freed more hostages from a hijacked airliner at
Entebbe in Uganda in 1976, we Rhodesians crowed as if we had done it ourselves.
I admiringly read a biography of Israeli general Moshe Dayan, and found his
eye-patch dashing. A parallel biography of the scrofulous-looking Yasser
Arafat, I approached with my metaphorical nostrils pinched, and retained
nothing of it.
With the end of Rhodesian
rule in 1980, suddenly the tables turned: the new Mugabe government vilified
Israel as oppressive, colonial and more-or-less white, and hosted the country’s
first Palestinian ambassador. We unreconstructed whiteys vilified him,
or at best regarded him with intense suspicion. At that juncture, as an
undergrad student at Rhodes, I happened to embark on a years-long immersion in
Christian activity. I became interested less in the myth-laden moralising than
in the historicity or otherwise of the three thousand year-old textuality on
which Christianity is founded: Werner Keller’s The Bible as History
(1955) I remember as a key text. In the end, thanks in part to William Blake
and Ed Echeverria’s philosophy course on the Problem of Evil, I failed
spectacularly to become a faith-filled Christian. But I did become better
versed in the complexities of the Israel-Palestine situation – a conflict that
has rumbled on ever since David slung a rock at the Philistine Goliath in
exactly the territory now known as the Gaza Strip.
Over the years, I’ve kept
on circling over the region. I read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews
with interest, though a Judaic (not Jewish) historian friend of mine said he
didn’t think highly of it. Later, Austrian-Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s The
Invention of the Jewish People (2009) fascinated me, especially as I’d been
studying an arguably parallel case, the ‘invention’ of Zulu ‘statehood’ and
identity. Sand argues that, given the fluid centuries, multiple evictions and
wars and invasions and redrawings of borders, and given the porousness of
self-identifying Jewish/Israelite groups to genes from non-Jewish neighbours,
neither claims to territory on Biblical grounds nor assertions of ethnic purity
hold a great deal of water. Predictably, this provoked howls of protest. A
South African Jewish colleague, currently ducking missiles in Tel Aviv, whose
intellect I admire enormously, told me she thinks Sand is “a lunatic”.
Nevertheless, I thought that if the maverick historian had stirred up that much controversy,
he must have touched a raw nerve somewhere, and not just because he once said
that Israel’s “a shitty place to live.” Most recently I’ve been reading the
voluminous Story of the Jews by Simon Schama, as brilliant, versatile
and eloquent an historian as you’ll find anywhere. He too is disparaging of
Sand, but the implications of his own research rather tends to support him. And
over four decades I’ve read a slew of related stuff, from T E Lawrence to
Mahmoud Darwish.
All that said and done,
I’m far from being an expert in the area. I’ve never physically been there, I
know scarcely a single Palestinian, and am only mildly acquainted with a
handful of Jews, who themselves manifest a slew of wildly differing views. I still
don’t know quite what to make of it all. Nor is it the only baffling regional
conflict I repeatedly visit and read about: my father being an Ulsterman, the
centuries-long Irish situation has always been closer to my heart. But even
there I don’t feel any strong partisan loyalties. As for the Israelis and
Palestinians, I really don’t care how they style their identities, or even what
they think of each other. But like many, I react viscerally and sadly to the
atrocities occurring right now (yet again), as I do to those occurring in other
comparably vicious and even more destructive theatres: Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan,
the DRC. While having a rather hopelessly jaded view of human nastiness and
stupidity, I do fervently wish the brutality could be somehow ameliorated. Some
might well tell me to butt out; saying almost anything about the conflict is
bound to upset someone somewhere. But none of the present participants seem to
have any viable ideas, and maybe my position as a detached outsider conveys
some advantages (as I think it did in the Zulu case).
So I’m going to stick my
neck out and float an idea, and the logic behind it. I’ll try to be
non-judgemental. As my mother often said, in most disputes everybody is right,
to some degree, and recognising that provides a better base for negotiation
than taking sides.
Obviously the situation
is ferociously complex. I think it was David Grossman who wrote that just the
tunnels beneath Gaza make it a three-dimensional problem, not just a
two-dimensional territorial one – let alone the many dimensions of historical
mythologies, the intangible attachments and grievances going back centuries.
Still, the same used to be said of Northern Ireland, a colony since 1660; that
conflict may not be solved entirely, but at least the violence has been largely
defused. With sufficient compromise, ingenuity and negotiated empathy, the
Gordian Knot might just be cut again. I’m well aware that far cleverer and more
powerful people than me have tried repeatedly to do that, and repeatedly
failed. I’d be surprised, actually, if someone at some point hasn’t floated
something like my idea already. But if the current horror is not to just grind
on indefinitely, something quite radical has to shift.
Ideally, both sides would
undergo a radical shift in mentality, from simplistic hatred to mutual
empathy, or at least non-lethal co-existence. Unhappily, the extreme brutality
of the present war has catapulted almost everyone a long way from that miracle.
And yet. There is also a venerable history of peaceful co-operation between
Muslims and Jews; Schama relates a number of examples, from mediaeval Spain to
Azerbaijan, of mutually fruitful relations that persisted until some deluded or
self-serving rabble-rouser would fire up the ancient shibboleth of
antisemitism, provoke another pogrom and exile. But if you’re going to call on
history to justify present actions, as everybody does, why not take the history
of peace as your benchmark, rather than the persecutions and wars?
Moreover, there are not
only two sides. Both Palestinians and Israelis are internally fragmented.
Months of demonstrations in Israel show that many disagree with the incumbent
hardline government and its tactics. Palestine is equally fractious, with no one
sufficiently in charge to negotiate anything – a circumstance the Israelis have
been able to exploit. It’s reflected in the way both Gaza and the West Bank
have been sliced up, zoned, barricaded, infiltrated with settlements and
checkpoints, subjected to the world’s most intensive surveillance system. Yet
there are many Palestinians living in Israel, and numerous groups advocating
and practicing co-existence and mutual understanding. The other day I watched
Israeli and Palestinian musicians getting together to create beautiful sounds.
Such initiatives seem frail in the context of the cycles of murderous revenge,
but there they are, showing what’s possible.
Still, we may have to
accept that a more widespread shift of that kind is unlikely any time soon. It
would entail the decentralisation of sundry fiercely-defended myths: myths of
racial difference, of being special, of being at existential risk, of complete
domination or obliteration, of religious rectitude, of divinely sanctioned
possession or reward, and more. Very, very hard, if not impossible, things to
dislodge, but perhaps – as elsewhere – these myths can at least be dampened,
laid aside as less important than the imperative to avoid more suffering and
death now. But practically speaking the conditions for that shift
will have to be created first. Therein lies my grand idea. (I’ll get there; are
you enjoying the suspense?) Just two more preliminary observations.
The first preliminary is
to note that over the centuries the region’s territorial boundaries have been
repeatedly redrawn – by Persians and Romans and Turks and the French and the
British – most pertinently by the last-named, through the 1917 Balfour Declaration,
leading to the volcanic creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Maybe it’s time
to redraw the boundaries again.
A big part of the problem
is that the borders were imposed from without; the Balfour Declaration
explicitly stated that “the Arabs are not to be consulted”. That short-sighted
policy set the stage for, or at least exacerbated, the uneven wars of the ensuing
century. Ideally, a new redrawing would happen with a majority acceptance of
both parties; an awful lot of preliminaries would have to be emplaced, not
least a ceasefire and hostage deal. Right now, even that looks out of reach.
But the diplomatic noise does seem to be growing. Hope must persist.
The second preliminary
point concerns the perpetual tussle between the One-state and Two-state
“solutions”. It seems entirely beyond
Israel’s capacity to contemplate the One-state option (though it’s effectively
one state now, under military control); and there’s little enthusiasm for the
second option either. But there appears to be no third plan, except to grind on
and on, merely deepening the crisis of hate. One thing is certain: neither
belligerent has the capacity to wipe the other “from the face of the earth”,
whatever the extremists on either side might encourage or boast. And as anyone
who has studied civil and guerrilla wars – or lived through one, as I have –
should know, purely military solutions are chimerical. Paradoxically, the more
you kill people – the line between ‘civilian’ and ‘combatant’ always being
fuzzy – the more you drive the population into antagonism, and the worse it
gets for you. At some point of stalemate or political intervention, the warring
parties always have to talk about humane co-existence.
Maybe part of the
impediment is that everyone is looking for a solution. There is
no solution, no finality; there can only be an incremental process of
mitigation and defusing. The more the opportunities to safely flourish, the
less the attraction to, or perceived necessity for, extremist movements. To
move definitively towards that condition of shared safety and flourishing, it
seems to me some radical break to the present impasse must be made.
SO HERE IT IS: THE IDEA!
It would appear that
there’s a stark choice between the One- and Two-state scenarios. But my idea
takes elements of both. First, the Two-state element. Palestinians will
never be happy without their own sovereign state. At present it’s in two
disjointed bits; as the grand apartheid “homelands” scheme in South Africa
demonstrated, such fragmentation is ultimately unworkable. So how to forge
Palestine into a single unit? Some people talk of “liberation from the river
[Jordan] to the sea”. Now you can’t just join Gaza and the West Bank by some
form of corridor, since that would divide Israel in two: no good. I
think the only way is through a territory swap.
So here’s the plan. The Palestinians abandon
Gaza, which is largely unlivable now anyway, and give up some edges of the
West Bank already heavily occupied by Israeli settlements. In return, the West
Bank is extended north to the Golan Heights, whose occupation by Israel has
anyway been recognised as illegal since 1967, then across to the sea and the
ports on the Mediterranean (an area already partially evacuated because of the
conflict with Hezbollah). This would afford Palestine less fettered access to both
east and west, enhancing trade opportunities and the feeling of viable
independence. From the Israelis’ perspective, this would provide a buffer zone
between them and both Syria and Lebanon, loci of constant irritation. An
intricate compromise would have to be made to make the swap roughly even in
both territory and the number of people making a move from one state to the
other. This number would be considerable, but it could hardly be worse than the
present dislocations. An upheaval, to be sure, but at least not one involving
mass slaughter. (My border-lines on Map 2 are straight because they are
schematic, just to illustrate the principle.)
Simple in principle, but
… This idea emphatically does not pretend to be an entire solution in itself,
and one can already anticipate a hundred valid objections and obstacles. But
once the main principle is accepted, those obstacles will manifest as localised
issues. Where exactly would the new border run? Which illegal settlements would
have to be evacuated as Israel effected a complete withdrawal from the West
Bank? What to do about access to ever-problematic holy sites? How open or
closed to make the borders? What level of international oversight might be
required? These are troublesome details, but still, in relation to the main
move, details, intrinsically more manageable and negotiable.
One major likely
objection would be people’s understandable reluctance to move from places they
have always inhabited, or to which they feel that non-rational but powerful
sense of historical attachment or right. This is where the One-state element of
the idea comes in. People need not be forced to move; there’s been more
than enough of that. But ‘remainers’ in either state – Palestinians in Gaza,
say, or Israelis in the north – would have to be reassured that they will be
safe and enjoy the rights of any other citizen, as in a One-state scenario.
Perhaps some form of dual citizenship arrangement would help. There would
doubtless be endless niggles on the ground, but, as I mentioned, there are
already many Arabs living more or less peaceably in Israel. Both peoples are
afraid of being numerically overwhelmed by the other; this consolidation of
Palestine would reduce ‘remainers’ in both states to a less threatening
minority. As South Africa has shown, despite its high crime and murder rates
and its persistent inequalities, the vast majority of us are at least
co-existing without tearing each others’ throats out. Our situation also shows,
nevertheless, how much work needs to be done to get there; our shortfalls
underline how long it might take, and how fragile the gains are.
I wouldn’t be
particularly sanguine about the chances of acceptance of some such scheme, let
alone of success. The hatreds run deep, and deepen every day another
Palestinian child is dismembered or a misguided missile descends on Tel Aviv.
Religiously-inspired terrorism won’t ever quite disappear, but its raison d’être
can be diminished. The consolidation of a coherent and inviolable Palestine
would not solve wider Middle East issues, such as the roles of Saudi Arabia and
Iran, but it would certainly help clarify some of the present muddy diplomatic
waters. Something needs to break the deadlocks. All most people want is
to have the chance to flourish, to nourish an identity, to live their lives in
some sort of fulfilment and safety. To reiterate, I offer not a solution, but a
sturdier foundation for the laborious work of reconciliation, the
never-quite-ending road towards that shared peace
Pass the idea along.
Anyone know anyone in the UN?
*****
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment