New York Times 1 Oct 2011
A Conflict Marked by blindness
Roger Cohen
In 1907, Yitzhak Epstein, a Zionist educator, published an article called “The Hidden Question,” which focused on the national conflict taking form in the Holy Land between Zionism and the Arabs. “We have forgotten one small matter,” he noted. “There is in our beloved land an entire nation, which has occupied it for hundreds of years and has never thought to leave it.” He added that “the Arab, like every man, is tied to his native land with strong bonds.”
At the time, Palestinian Arab nationalism was but a sketchy thing; it was forged in the crucible of conflict first with a growing number of Jewish immigrants and then with the state of Israel. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, recently indulged in some poetic license before the United Nations General Assembly when he described the land Israel emerged on in 1948 as a “vibrant and cohesive society” contributing to the “cultural, educational and economic renaissance of the Arab Middle East.”
No, it was a backward, divided, tenuous society battered by long imperial rule and by its confrontation with Zionism. Still, as Epstein had pointed out, the Palestinians were there, some 1.3 million of them by 1948, and 63 years later the puzzle of how to forge a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel endures. Abbas’s formal request that the U.N. Security Council recognize a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders — a request that will, if necessary, be vetoed by the United States — is but the latest twist to the story.
That story has been marked by blindness — of Jews to the Palestinian presence, of Palestinians to the millennial attachment of the Jewish people to the land of their birth, of well-meaning mediators to the passions of the confrontation. If the conflict is to be solved, it will only be on the basis of the overcoming of blindness and a clear-eyed commitment to a shared future. After so much bloodshed, that may well be too much to ask.
I said Abbas embellished the Holy Land of 1948. But there was much in his speech to admire: the commitment to “cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring states — Palestine and Israel”; the summary of the remarkable reforms in the West Bank that have brought new accountability and transparency and led several international institutions to say Palestinian statehood is now feasible; the accurate description of how expansion of Israeli settlements undermines those efforts; the firm embrace of peaceful methods; the undertaking that “our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it”; and the linking of the Arab Spring to Palestinian aspirations for democracy and dignity.
By contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was playing games. He came back again and again to his obsession: that Palestinians recognize the “Jewish state” of Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organization, in 1993, recognized “the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security,” a recognition that was not reciprocated in kind. (Israel recognized the P.L.O. as the “representative of the Palestinian people.”) States get recognized, not their nature — and in any event this is an issue that can wait.
He had reams to say about militant Islam but almost nothing to say about how millions of Arabs have risen up for the very democracy and rule of law militant Islam denies. He attempted a grotesque caricature of Lebanon, a very imperfect democracy but still a democracy, by suggesting that because Lebanon presides over the Security Council “a terror organization” — Hezbollah — “presides over the body entrusted with guaranteeing the world’s security.” He had nothing to say about Palestinian reform. He suggested the settlements were a sideshow. In short, he undermined his own solid arguments for Israel’s security needs and indulged in the kind of blindness Epstein addressed more than a century ago.
As for Barack Obama, he made the speech of a United States president going into an election year, mentioning the Holocaust and the anguish of Israeli citizens under rocket attack but finding not a word for Palestinian suffering, humiliation and loss of life under Israeli occupation. The disparity between his fulsome lauding of the Arab Spring and his pale evocation of the very same aspirations among Palestinians was flagrant — a painful political contortion. I don’t believe Obama was blind to that. He played to the audience that mattered most to him.
Meanwhile, the facts remain: the expanding settlements, Hamas, overwhelming Israeli military power, credible Palestinian institutions in the West Bank, Arab democratic aspirations.
Brave leaders need to speak the truth about them to move forward.
