Lack of education has led to a corresponding lack of opportunity, but opportunity is further hindered by the structure and politics of Arab society. One is either born into a position of stature and influence or one is not. Sideways mobility is the best one can hope for, upwards mobility an alien concept. Whereas Israel is a meritocracy that would frankly frighten privileged people like me, Arab society would wrap its arms around me, respect me for how I was born and politely - always politely - ignore what I have become.
The lack of education and opportunity and the social stagnation have led to a lack of progress in any sphere. It has been well observed that if no Muslims had been born in the last few hundred years the world would be exactly as it is now. For the Arabs this has also led to a debilitating inferior- ity complex towards the West in general and Israel in particular and may go some way to explain the blatant heart-on-sleeve anti-Semitism one finds on the famous Arab street. The vehemence of this anti-Semitism is shocking to one used to the Western or Christian version - now thank heavens not only deeply unfashionable but practically extinct; neither is it the distorted logic of the Nazi extreme; with the Arabs it feels like pure emotional hatred. The Nazis haven’t been forgotten though: Mein Kampf, according to the British Daily Telegraph, is consistently in the Palestinian bestselling books list.
Where does that leave the young population of the young Israel, the happy souls chatting outside the Buddha Bagel? Looking west - at the West. It seems to me that as if collectively they have said to their neighbors: “Look, we have tried everything. We have offered you our own country, you said no. We have offered you $30 billion, you said no. We have asked just that you recognize us, you said no. We have offered to pull back the settlements, you said no. We have even offered you a thousand of your prisoners for one of ours, you said no. You think we are just another crusade episode that you will eventually defeat, we say get real, this is our home and we’re here to stay. If you don’t want to live in peace that’s up to you. We have built a wall around us and you can’t touch us now. Sorry it’s messed you up about - but if you will suicide bomb us, what do you expect? If you don’t want peace, fine, but we’ve moved on.’
***
Three or four nights later we were back on board Vasco da Gama looking through some of Gillian’s photographs of the Galilee. They were great and so is the Galilee, but it prompted the question: why is Israel every tourist’s least favorite destination? Better rephrase that: Why is Israel every Gentile tourist’s least favorite destination? Conversely why is Syria, let’s face it politically the bad boy in the Middle East, everyone’s favorite destination?
One answer is the rudeness, the brusqueness and a total lack of any form of charm. It is quite unique in the world. People used to complain about Paris but that is really only noticeable because it is in such variance to the rest of France. In Israel it’s not just in the center of Tel Aviv but in every corner of the land. Even people in whose interest it is to be welcoming, hotel and restaurant staff for example, are unwelcoming and everyone else actively dis-welcoming. Ask for any help, finding anywhere or with the language, and your askee will not just be unhelpful but actively dis-helpful. As for charm, any delightful scene that one comes across, a hilly village, an Alpine meadow, will be spoilt by a bossy official or a snarling roadblock or an officious sign or an authoritarian rabbinical pronouncement. To use Syria as a counterpoint, the very opposite of all these apply: they couldn’t be more welcoming and helpful and charming - and bossy signs and officials aren’t the Syrian way.
So why so rude? One theory is as follows: the reaction of new Israelis seeing the Holocaust footage of their parents and grandparents being sent off to the concentration camps with no seeming resistance was to vow there would never be such meekness again. They unkindly call the victims “soaps”, as bars of soap was what they would become. No more soaps! This is an explanation of the unsettling machismo that even young girls show, swaggering egos buttressed by military conscription which all non-ultraorthodox boys and girls must undertake.
This warrior mentality, this macho posture, this rejection of the feminine principle is profoundly unspiritual - if such a concept can be said to exist. In Israel, one never feels a deeper level of meaning; no coincidences jump out and greet you, ironies prefer to keep their own company and paradoxes are swamped by all that logic. Mystical spirituality is the opposite of patriarchal monotheism and monotheism in Israel is omnitheism and all the more annoying for it - annoying on levels political, cultural, personal, intellectual, decorative, social, demographic, proportional, preferential, culinary, aesthetic, commonsensical, and above all, yes, religious. But one doesn’t feel alone, the nine per cent of Israelis who aren’t fundamentalists agree with your assessment of the “body-snatchers” but have had to learn to live with this vociferous, over-self-privileged, self-righteous sanctimonious swarm in their midst.
The Gentile tourists’ other grumble is a strange one, the lack of humor. Anyone from the Anglophone world will been brought up on a steady diet of American-Jewish humor full of irony and subtlety - more than this, one’s own sense of humor will have been shaped by it. So why is there no humor in Israel? Maybe it’s the first-generation nation-building, maybe the first generation of Jewish immigrants to America were equally earnest and solemn and it wasn’t until there was enough wealth that subsequent generations could afford the luxury of humor and irony?
So Sam, as a good journalist you will have read about all the effects and will be asking about the causes. Why no humor? Why no mysticism? Why so earnest? Why no charm? Why, above all, is it just no fun?
Religion apart, all answers come back to “It’s the Occupation, stupid.” The Occupation poisons everything. It has made Israel an unhappy country because it has split its personality: a democracy, yet one without common decency, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch snapping at its heels; a victim of religious hatred and a practitioner of religious arrogance; a victim of racism and a culprit of racism; the brave defender and the callous invader; a lover of children and a conscriptor of youth; aspirationally sincere and morally suspect; an economic miracle and an international pariah; troubled by complexes of inferiority and superiority and not knowing whether to praise itself or blame itself.
The way they treat the Palestinians is disgraceful. Yes, the Palestinians can be unreliable partners, yes, they have a less literal version of the concept of truth, yes, they are hamstrung by a backward theology and a chauvinistic society, yes they are frustrating to deal with, yes, they lack leaders and are addicted to squabbling, yes they have elevated futile gestures to an art form, yes, they wish the Israelis would go back to from whence they came, yes, it’s annoying when they throw leavened sandwiches into the reservoirs at Passover, so the crazier rabbis forbid drinking the polluted water, yes to all these and more, but where is Israel’s sense of magnanimity? What is there to prove by humiliating them? By impoverishing them? By breaking up their families? By confining them? Stealing their land? Diverting their water? Why do they treat Arabs in Jerusalem like undesirable aliens in their own city? Can’t they see - as outsiders do - the moral similarity between what went on in Warsaw and what goes on in Hebron? Is it really worthwhile having the country on a permanent war footing, with conscription and all the machismo and hatred that spins off it? More to the point, is the Occupation worth the lives of these conscripted young boys and girls? Is it worth being an international outcast, even being asked not to stamping visitors’ passports? What does it say about a society that accepts state-sponsored torture and squalid refugee camps? What message do the images of schoolchildren throwing stones at tanks send to the world? Why is there no one with the vision to break the spell? Could it be that some of the ultraorthodox Judaic view of Muslims (and Christians) as inherently inferior has seeped through to even modern freethinking Israelis? Could it be that in their bones they still believe that Palestine is “land without a people for a people without a
land”. Why do they just carry on building settlements and pandering to the religious maniacs who will never rest until Israel is a theocracy? Do reasonable Israelis actually want to live in a theocracy? If not, why tolerate those who do while not tolerating those who would live in peace?
Sam, this brings me on to the last part of the letter: we’ve seen the problems, what are the solutions, where does it all go from here? The following summarizes current thinking, what my friends at the Jerusalem Post, the embassy people one meets at receptions and the great and the good who debate and give conferences all call “informed opinion”.
The first point is to put the ultimate cause, religious bigotry, to one side as unsolvable. I’m sure you would agree with all the wise souls who have observed that the Israel-Palestine saga should be an easy one to solve. You have two races who cannot live together, races of roughly equal size claiming the same piece of land. Surely it can’t be beyond the wit of man to divide the land, give one chunk of it to one race as one state and the other chunk of it to the other race as the other state? Ah, the wise souls continue, then you factor in religion to this utopia and the problem becomes unsolvable.
All true, but this dismissal of religion forgets the fact that if it hadn’t been for the rabbis and their interminable man-made laws the tribe of Israel would have disappeared in the great human mix many centuries ago - like all the other tribes of the biblical Middle East have done. Secular Jews never forget this. Over dinner they will tell you that the whole biblical jurisprudence edifice doesn’t stand up to any intellectual examination. They reveal gleefully that archaeologists have discounted the Egyptian exile story, cast doubt on the very existence of Solomon and David, claimed that the Israelites of Exodus were actually the Asiatic Hyksos and most shockingly of all have suggested that the “One God” Yahweh actually had a consort, the goddess Asherah. These may very well all be the case, the secularists will say, then remind you again that on an historical level their sectarian religion has kept them intact as a race and, ultimately, delivered them a nation. In one of the few ironies hereabouts the indisputable truth that was shown to be a wayward truth has been forgiven and resurrected as a convenient truth.
The secular Arab view - and yes it does exist - is that their religion52 doesn’t stand up to much intellectual examination either. It sounds patron- izing but it’s true that secular Muslims are nearly always the better-off and better educated, frequently it has to be said educated in the West. For them to live in Islamic countries is no hardship: they can ignore its restrictions in private with their own kind, and enjoy its benefits in public. Benefits there are aplenty: to live at the top of a respectful, traditional, reverential patriarchy is clearly agreeable, and Islam accordingly delivers a society that is most certainly agreeable to its elite. If the elite by birth happen not to be the elite by brains they can take comfort in the reverence53 their birth ensures.
For the masses - not the maniacs but the masses - Islam provides a code for living that informs every aspect of their life, and none in a way harmful to them or others, in fact quite the opposite. It makes sense of the inexplicable capriciousness of life, provides succor for the unfortunate and constancy when all around is unpredictable. Its society is built around families, extended families, tribes and anyone else of Muslim belief in that order; politics are religious and religion political; only recently has the Western idea of an nation state taken hold and even then only as subset of a greater Islamic nation.
Neither the religious nor secular anywhere in the Middle East there- fore has any wish to abandon religion - and of course they couldn’t even if they wanted to. It suits them all. We have then to accept that if the religions cannot get along, then the societies, having been made by these religions, also cannot get along. One is a democracy and there is every reason to suppose the other may become a theocracy - and not a very pleasant one at that. The demographics between Jew and Arab are now finely poised but even if they tried to live together, given the far greater Arab birth rate the Jews would soon be in a minority. You could say that Israelis are frightened that they would be ethnically cleansed out of any new Palestine, just as they ethnically cleansed the Palestinians out of the new Israel.
Two states are needed. The first problem is that there is no obvious geographic feature around which one can fashion a border. However, if one dusts down Oslo and Camp David accords there are possibilities around Israel keeping its 1948 territorial gains but sacrificing its 1967 gains, especially if Israel wants to avoid the Palestinian demographic time bomb and remain a majority Jewish democracy. The settlements beyond the 1967 line are, in the opinion of non-Israeli international lawyers, quite simply illegal. But here there’s a deal to be done, one accepted in principle before: Israel keeps the settlements immediately adjacent to the 1967 border and gives up the rest.
Palestine is compensated for the adjacent settlements on an acre-for-acre basis with land currently within Israel’s southern borders.
However queasy some Israelis feel about sacrificing land, most realize that with Iranian missiles on the way Israel will no longer need territorial buffers along its borders for its protection but the diplomatic buffer of non-aggressive neighbors. These neighbors may well have let the Palestinians down repeatedly, shamefully, over the years but politically they know they can only open up to Israel once the Palestine question has been settled; and the Palestinians know this too.
A further advantage of giving up the far-flung settlements, as has already happened in Gaza, is that it neutralizes the Arab claim of the right to return of the 1948 refugees to what is now Israel. Having new Arabs living in Israel and new Israelis living in Palestine flies in the face of the logic of a Two-State solution. There have to be sacrifices made in a best worst-option solution and these are some of them.
So, given God’s will and good will, and leaving Gaza and Jerusalem to one side for a moment there may be a map to be drawn. Here the problems really start. The map may be acceptable to Israel but it certainly won’t be to Palestine, again for reasons of justice and demographics. The injustice will be that of the Mandatory Palestine it is now proposed that 79 per cent will go to Israel and 21 per cent to Palestine. Why should they accept that? Would you? Geographically, it’s easy to forget how very small is the land area to be divided. From the Mediterranean to Jordan is only fifty miles and the Two-State solution proposes that both states squeeze into this space. What we are now calling Palestine already holds four million souls. It is not unreasonable to expect that once the restrictions are lifted, most of the Palestinians in Gaza would want to move to the West Bank - in many cases back to the West Bank. It is also not unreasonable to suppose that many or most of the four million Palestinian refugees and/or guest workers scattered around the Middle East would also want to return once they have their own homeland. Palestine as defined by the 1967 +/- borders simply isn’t big enough to hold them and without contiguous access to the sea is simply not viable economically and politically.
The obvious solution to this is to create more land. How so? Well, the informed opinion goes, by absorbing the West Bank into a greater Jordan and Gaza into a greater Egypt. On the face of it there are obvious attractions. Both Jordan and Egypt have space to spare. Both have functioning economies, an infrastructure and political credibility, all lacking in a nascent Palestine. Jordan already has a Palestinian majority and has even had a Palestinian prime minister; many Jordanians already live in the West Bank, which Jordan ran from 1948 to 1967. Many West Bank Palestinians already have Jordanian passports - the only ones they are allowed. An influx of Palestinians would boost the Jordanian economy. An absorption of Gaza into Egypt would be less seamless but Gaza is tiny and it is unlikely that many would choose to stay there if they could join other Palestinians elsewhere. Not that it probably matters that much to them but absorbing Gaza would go some way to assuaging Egypt’s dismal treatment of the Palestinian refugees there, a refugee crisis they not only c
reated but refused to ameliorate.
Of course, there are problems galore. Firstly the majority of Palestinians may not want to become Jordanian. The hope of informed opinion is that over the course of the negotiations they will come to see this is the least worst option; it is in fact their only realistic option. For Palestinians there would be autonomy; there would be citizenship; they would be a majority; there is every chance of prosperity; there would at last be peace. They would live in Palestine but it is called Jordan, a country the vast majority of whose citizens are also Palestinian. How the rulers of Hashemite kingdom and their Bedouin constituency would view this influx is a different matter. It was only in 1951 that the young King Hussein saw a lone Palestinian gunman assassinate his grandfather King Abdullah54. The Black September war against the PLO only ended in 1971.
The monarchy can at least console itself that it cannot be outvoted or voted out. It could be - and no doubt will make sure it would be - compensated from international funds, ostensibly for the cost of absorption. But if the British are quite happy with a German royal family why should the Palestinians not be happy with a Jordanian one? After all the years of strife and poverty, surely the Palestinians’ first priority would be peace and prosperity, not nominal tribal supremacy?
And lastly to the big one, Jerusalem. There are two Jerusalems, the sprawling new town and the Old City. A slice of the former could be carved out in settlement of a bigger picture but it’s the latter that remains the problem. No claim of sovereignty is acceptable to all sides, therefore why not try to have no sovereignty? An exemplum for this already exists right in the center of Jerusalem: the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and its Status Quo. Why not the Status Quo writ large? There is a good chance that as people become more sophisticated the passions arising from the Temple Mount will lessen. The hope is that the Status Quo in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher shows that this will happen; Christians of all faiths visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher now no longer out of fervor but out of interest. Is it not unreasonable to hope that in two or three generations people will look on monotheism as today we look on superstition55?
Innocence and War Page 31