Dwell not upon thy weariness, thy strength shall be according to the measure of thy desire ---Arab ProverbHe who fights monsters should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you. ---Friedrich Nietzsche
| Right wing Israelis are talking about 'transfer' - the expulsion of all Arabs. Shocking as it sounds, the idea once had support from British and Arab officials, reveals distinguished Israeli historian Benny Morris. And, continuing our series on the Arab-Israeli conflict, he argues the Middle East might now be at peace if Israel's first leader had driven out all the Palestinians in 1948. --- The Guardian; A new exodus for the Middle East |
The distinguished historian, Benny Morris, may be right in some hyper-pragmatic sense (side bar). Many conflicts have been solved throughout history by win-lose solutions such as relocating the losers to undesirable terrain, or more often, by simply burying them beneath it.
For example, America forced the indigenous Indians that were not exterminated outright onto remote reservations where they remain to this day as underprivileged "Sovereign Indian Nations" (wink). During the 1904-1906 Herero-Hottentot rebellion in Namibia, the German colonialists took this approach a step further with the extermination order: "Every Herero found within German borders, with or without guns, with or without livestock, will be shot. I will not give shelter to any Herero women or children. They must return to their people, or they will be shot." Hermann Goering's father was involved in the early stages of this conflict, leading some historians to surmise that it may have even been a forerunner of the Nazi's "Final Solution" for the Jews during World War II. [1]
Such win-lose problem solving certainly "works", and can even lead to peace in the end. Certainly, Germany and America don't have problems with their indigenous populations like those between Israelis and Palestinians today. Thankfully, the Jews are reluctant to impose what they experienced during the Nazi Holocaust on others, and the Muslims have not acquired the means of the often-stated goal of pushing the Jews into the sea. Not yet, at least.
The focus on win-lose solutions has caused all sides to overlook the fact that history provides just as many examples of difficult situations that were solved by win-win solutions. In fact, win-win solutions work better in that they yield a unified population, undamaged by war and invigorated by treating diversity as a strength, not an invitation to conflict.
The win-lose solution results when both sides pursue resistance and confrontation, with the goal of forcing the capitulation or elimination of the other side. Win-win solutions result when both sides adopt policies of reconciliation and cooperation, often culminating in integration and coexistence within a unified, non-discriminatory state. A win-win solution could also work in the Middle East if both sides were to adopt policies of reconciliation and cooperation instead of present policies of resistance and confrontation.
Even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism destroyed ... The `victorious' Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the needs of war. And all this would be the fate of a nation that - no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries - would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.
To Save the Jewish Homeland: There is Still Time
Hanna Arendt; May 1948
All sides of this conflict agree on one thing...that there is no solution except dividing into mutually hostile, discriminatory states, a Jewish state for the Israelis and an Islamic state for the Arabs. The term, discriminatory, is not used here pejoratively. It is used as the name of the root cause of this conflict. It refers to discrimination, regardless of severity, based on religion, ethnicity, race, social class, gender or any other personal characteristic other than outright criminal behavior. In particular, the terms "Jewish State" or "Islamic state" are prima-facie evidence of discrimination because they imply religion is a matter of interest to the state.
This belief is terribly and fatally wrong; the core reason this conflict has persisted for the same half century in which other grave conflicts were solved through reconciliation and cooperation. Unfortunately, this belief is now codified as international law. Oversimplifying greatly[4], the United Nations Partition Resolution divided Palestine into one state for the Jews and another state for the Arabs. The Israelis accepted the resolution and won United Nations recognition shortly afterward. The Arabs chose war instead, initiating a fifty-year long conflict of daily skirmishes and major flare-ups in 1930, 1947, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1979, 1982, 1987, 1993, 2000 and 2002. The formation of an Islamic state has so far been abortive since the Arabs have lost each of the wars launched to achieve it.
And even today the daily news is saturated by detailed accounting of who did what to whom when, brainlessly adding fuel to the fire without proposing a solution, and indeed, no apparent interest in finding one[3]. How the conflict might be avoided is never considered. The one thing everyone does agrees on is that there is no solution but dividing into mutually hostile discriminatory states, the same toxic notion that brought events to this point.
The alternative solution is for the two sides to reconcile their differences and cooperate within a unified state that does not discriminate against the ethno-religious diversity of its citizens. Lest this alternative be rejected out of hand as impossibly naive in view of the suffering both sides have inflicted on the other, this section provides several examples of conflicts that were resolved by reconciliation and cooperation after just as much suffering. A concluding section outlines how a similar approach might be adopted in the Middle East.
This section provides several examples of conflicts resolved via reconciliation and cooperation to show that the alternative approach has been followed successfully in other conflicts.
The closest parallel to events in the MidEast is the remarkable story of South Africa after apartheid. Just as in Palestine, an indigenous majority had been subjugated by a colonial minority. Just as in Palestine, terrorist acts were common on both sides. All the makings were in place for an Israeli/Palestinian style bloodbath.
Yet thanks to Nelson Mandela's remarkable vision, once the apartheid government had been overthrown, the new government's first act was to declare Truth and Reconciliation hearings, during which full amnesty was granted to all who applied, on the sole condition that they revealed the full truth at the hearings.
The post-war history of the reconciliation of Japan and Germany with the Allied powers is sufficiently similar that only Japan need be re-examined here.
The wartime hatred between Japanese and Americans equaled and possibly exceeded the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians today. Both sides routinely machine-gunned sailors from sunken ships. Wounded soldiers were shot on sight out of the real fear that they might be hiding a grenade to take out a few more of the hated enemy. Japanese commanders and staff members committed hari-kari to atone to the emperor for defeat. When defeat became inevitable, the Japanese originated the tactic of suicide bombing, recently rediscovered in the Middle East. Nor was the hatred confined to the military. Japanese women jumped to their deaths with their children in their arms on the cliffs of Okinawa, demonstrating a depth of conviction that earned Japan the dubious distinction of being the only country ever been bombed with nuclear weapons. Their distinction is unlikely to remain as fanatics scramble for the nuclear, chemical or biological means of repeating this debacle on anyone that doesn't share their particular religion.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is sometimes traced to "differences between Hebrew and Islamic religious faiths". However, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are branches of exactly the same monotheistic tradition, with differences that are barely perceptible to this non-Hebrew, non-Islamic, non-Christian American. They have precisely the same god, most of the same prophets, many of the same ideals. They all teach peaceful cooperation in places and bloodthirsty "eye for an eye" persecution in others. They all urge persecution if not extermination of "unbelievers" and "apostates" in places and urge peaceful coexistence in others. The closest thing to a substantial difference is that the Koran is more consistent than the Bible in the rejection of riba, loaning money for interest. Yet Muslims, Christians, and Jews have all discovered means for modern financial life to proceed regardless, even riba is controversial within Islam to this day [2]
Of course there are differences, but they are truly minor in comparison to those between Japan's and America's. Japan's Shinto/Samurai religion revolves around duty to emperor, whereas America's constitution so emphatically separates church and state that a state-sponsored religion is unthinkable. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Shakers, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Agnostics, plus too many other cults and religions to enumerate manage to coexist with only rare conflict. Yet, these truly huge differences played no discernable role in the post-WWII reconciliation of Japan and America.
The search for ethnic or racial explanations is similarly unproductive. Americans and Japanese are entirely different races, insofar as ethnicity has any basis as a objective trait. The Jewish and Muslim "races" arose from exactly the same Semitic stock that emerged in the Middle East with Moses or before.
The post-WWII reconciliation of Japan and America began with Japan's defeat after the fire-bombing of its major cities, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a long string of defeats in the Pacific, the Russian invasion of Mongolia, and the certainty of an invasion of the home islands. The surrender in Tokyo Harbor inaugurated a full military occupation which concentrated on destroying the military clique deemed responsible for the war while helping to reconstruct the Japanese economy and rehabilitate their infrastructure, thus laying the foundation for their re-emergence as an independent nation.
This transformation began with the simple change that is hardest to imagine in the Middle East... people changed their minds. Neither side can claim full credit for both sides somehow realized that resistance and confrontation could only lead to more confrontation, and that reconciliation and cooperation might be a way out. Over time, both sides gained reason to trust that the change in mind-set was real; that the other side had genuinely relinquished confrontation and resistance in favor of cooperation and reconciliation.
This trust led through innumerable tentative steps to the removal of military law and to the ultimate re-emergence of Japan as an independent world power. In only a few years, Japan achieved the very objectives through reconciliation and cooperation that she had once fought to obtain through resistance and confrontation. Is it really so naive to think Hebrews and Palestinians couldn't do the same thing, when present policies have failed to bring peace after fifty years of bloody struggle?
Of course, the Japanese example is not an exact duplicate of the Palestinian situation. Japan was an independent nation before the war, whereas there has never been a Palestinian nation. Moreover, full political independence was never a goal of either side, being satisfied with commercial interdependence between the original independent states.
This section is phrased in the first person because the author is a native South Carolinian whose ancestors were once in the position of today's Palestinians. The Confederates in the agrarian south started and ultimately lost a major civil war with the industrial north. The Confederacy excelled at guerilla warfare, but soon discovered that guerilla tactics were no match for the industrial might of the north, just as the Palestinians are discovering today. The Confederacy's goal was political independence from the north, just like the Palestinian goal of independence from the Jews. As early successes turned into defeats and the north's industrial might prevailed, the south was destroyed and defeated.
Yet in spite of the war and the ensuing period of turmoil, this terrible period is mostly remembered today as a lesson of the benefits of reconciliation and cooperation and of the costs of resistance and confrontation. I think of myself as an American, a United States citizen whose Confederate heritage plays no role in my affairs. Is it really so naive to think this couldn't be repeated in the Middle East?
The third and final example is the desegregation movement in America. The movement originated from a long-standing legacy of slavery, lynchings, and other discriminatory policies dating from before the Civil War. This was a level of racially based discrimination that even Israelis and Palestinians, to their credit, would find unimaginable today. This could have easily led to the kind of hostility of the Middle East had not both sides adopted policies of reconciliation and cooperation in time and avoided most of the resistance and confrontation that dominates Middle East politics to this day.
Of course, no one could claim that America's record of reconciliation and cooperation is perfect. Blacks, Women, Mexicans, Muslims and other minorities claim, often with justification, to suffer from racial and/or religious discrimination to this day. No one would claim that we've arrived at the destination of the Voyage of Discovery described in the closing section of this article. I only claim that enough people, the majority by far, have committed to the journey and are struggling to get there. Is it really so naive to suggest that the same could work in the Middle East?
These examples succeeded where the Middle East has failed because both sides explicitly rejected the falsehood that the only solution is dividing into mutually hostile discriminatory states. But Israel incorporated the notion of a "Jewish State" into its very constitution after having experienced the consequences of Germany's "Aryan State" first-hand. And, just as a coin bears the image of the die that produced it, the Palestinian cause revolves around the equally toxic notion of an "Islamic State", ideally one that is committed to "pushing the Jews into the sea".
There is plenty of history to show where state-sponsored discrimination leads in the end. Europe suffered years of war from state-sponsored Catholicism or Protestantism, with its toxic residue remaining in Northern Ireland to this day. Japanese-American history would have unfolded quite differently had the Allis required the Japanese to convert to some religion dictated by the Allies. America's own history would have unfolded very differently if its diverse mixture of religions had been required to convert to some state-approved religion.
The problem with state-sponsored discrimination that reconciliation and cooperation begins with the quiet reflections of the individual mind, the same mind that holds that individual's religious and other sensibilities. If the individual has even the slightest suspicion that the state will discriminate against its convictions, there is no likelihood for change. Just as we've seen in the Middle East.
The plan would seem mad enough if a single individual were to undertake it; but if many Jews simultaneously agree on it, it is entirely reasonable, and its achievement presents no difficulties worth mentioning. The idea depends only on the number of its adherents.
Theodor Herzl, 1896
Der Judenstaat
The three examples show that there could be hope of a solution if both sides could put aside the discriminatory ideal responsible for the resistance and confrontation, allowing both sides to adopt reconciliation and cooperation instead. Obviously, this non-Israeli, non-Arabic, non-Christian outsider cannot presume to provide a detailed plan for problems of this magnitude. A plan must be based on precise details available to those with far more to lose, and far more knowledge of local conditions, than I. Therefore I will describe how an alternative might be pursued in metaphorical terms, as a "Voyage of Discovery", with the precise details to be added by those actively involved in the voyage.
This Voyage of Discovery is not a geographical journey; Palestine is far too small for that. It is a metaphorical journey from an old world of resistance and confrontation within two warring discriminatory states to a new world of reconciliation and cooperation within a united, non-discriminatory state. Such journeys are not vacation cruises; low-risk trips to a destination that is known in advance and during which the participants only task to enjoy the ride. This is more like the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Leif Ericsson, Magellan, and Captain James Cook, high-risk, high-involvement journeys to a destination that is only vaguely understood until achieved and during which all decisions is made by those engaged in the journey.
The first and most crucial step is the decision to change; the realization that high-risk journey to an uncertain new land might be better than the known risk of continued resistance and confrontation. This leads to the emergence of a community of those committed to the voyage. At some point, the community chooses a name and develops its own means for accepting new members. Until then, I will process membership requests as described at the end of this article.
The subsequent steps are the usual community-building process: meeting, discussing, and deciding what to do next. These discussions do not focus on the long-range goal for that was decided in step 1. The focus is always on the very next step; e.g. tangible, near-term, achievable steps towards the goal. Should we turn the rudder left or right now? Should we raise sails or lower them? Should we stop at this or that island as a step towards the destination?
For example, one early step towards a fully non-discriminatory state is the commercial integration of a population that is currently separated by mistrust, codified in the form of multi-colored work permits, license plates, and identity documents, with discrimination enforced by restrictive work quotas and multi-lane vehicle inspection lines, a fast lane for Jews and a slow lane for Palestinians. Once the "New World" community has grown to respectable numbers and is recognized by both sides as being fully committed to reconciliation and cooperation, it might issue a special stamp to be attached to the holder's identity document that entitles the holder to pass inspection checkpoints with less delay.
With this as an intermediate goal, innumerable smaller goals fall into place. How could the new community protect its credibility against extremists (on either side) seeking to use the special stamp to plant bombs, for example? The stamp signifies a belief in reconciliation and cooperation. Such beliefs will be reflected in words and deeds, and these are subject to inspection. If a stamp holder associates with those known to favor violence, or frequents mosques or synagogues that advocate the same, the community might protect its own credibility by rejecting the offender.
Obviously, this is not a foolproof solution, but no solution to problems of this magnitude is foolproof except genocide and extermination. Reconciliation and cooperation will certainly be attacked as naive, certainly by those with a stake in perpetrating the conflict. But resistance and confrontation within mutually discriminatory states has been tried for a half century and has clearly failed to bring about peace. Isn't it time to try a new approach based on reconciliation and cooperation within a unified, non-discriminatory state?
If you are involved in either side of this conflict and are interested in adopting the win-win solution described in this article, subscribe by sending email to bcox@virtualschool.edu. Introduce yourself and provide your own thoughts on how this community should evolve. For the time being, I'll broadcast the traffic to all subscribers manually and consider installing automated support at: http://virtualschool.edu/mideast.
[1] The Final Solution in South Wet Africa by Jon Swan, The Quarterly Review of Military History. Also see The Colonial Period: German Rule The Resistance Struggle Culminates In Genocide: 1904-1906.
[2] Judgment on Interest Given by the Supreme Court of Pakistan: The Federal Shariah Court of Pakistan had declared the laws allowing interest repugnant to Islam in 1991. The Federal Government of Pakistan and certain banks and financial institutions filed 67 appeals against this judgment in the Shariah Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court. This decision is a disposition of that appeal. It is the final verdict of Pakistan's highest court.
[3] Summary of a professional investigation regarding the killing of a 12 year old boy at Netzarim junction. A Israeli analysis that I find persuasive makes the horrific claim that the Palestinian child, Mohammed al-Dura, at Netzarim Junction was intentionally killed by the Palestinans to inflame world opinion against the Israelis.
[4] Critical Analysis Of The Birth Of The Palestinian Refugee Problem By Benny Morris. A well-researched article arguing that the claim that the Arabs rejected the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine, and consequently attacked the Jewish state, and lost the 1948 war is as a self-serving fabrication by the Israelis.
[5]Forced Eviction and Dispossession of Palestinians in Occupied Jerusalem by Current Israeli Policies by Orient House. Discriminatory Israeli policies in the Jerusalem area. For the inverse story of discrimination by Arabs against Jews, search the web for "Throw the Jews into the Sea".
| Last modified March 28, 2004 | © Copyright 2003 by Brad Cox |