O
JERUSALEM
I’ll warn you ahead of time: the column’s
not all that funny this week. It’s hard to find anything amusing to write about
when every story you read is about the Middle East, one of the world’s least
funny places.
Things don’t look good for the prospect of
peace. After two weeks of violence and over 100 deaths (most of them
Palestinian), President Clinton finally got Israeli Prime Minister Barak and
PLO chief Yasser Arafat to at least try to reign in their people. As of this
writing, it remains to be seen whether these leaders actually have any control,
or whether the Holy Land has turned into a locomotive with no one at the wheel.
In the meantime, 17 U.S. sailors were
killed and several others are missing after a water-borne version of a car bomb
blew a hole in the side of the destroyer U.S.S. Cole, further exacerbating
tensions in a region whose nerves are already stretched like banjo strings.
It’s all particularly disheartening because
it looked for awhile like there might actually be some hope of a lasting peace.
The Barak administration even put the seemingly untouchable issue of the status
of Jerusalem on the table. But then the
violence began to escalate, driven by the extremists on both sides, culminating
last week in the murder of two Israeli soldiers by a Palestinian mob, followed
by an attack by rocket-firing Israeli helicopters on Arafat’s compound.
Usually, peace prospects are pretty shaky so long as one side is strafing the leader of the other side’s office.
At street level, this has gone beyond a
war over territory or religion. At this point, it‘s personal. The Israeli
settler is out there with his Uzi because Uncle Mordecai got blown up by a
Hamas car-bomb, and the Palestinian rock-thrower is out there because cousin
Yusuf got his face bashed in by Israeli police. It’s a grudge match, and it’s
been going on for a thousand years, with each new day adding new grudges. There
are sizable factions on both sides for whom peace, any peace, is a betrayal of
the memory of their honored dead. These
extremists are making war, not so much on each other, but on the very idea of
peace.
Despite the loud insistence by both sides
that it was the other side that started it, neither group has exactly covered
itself with honor in this sorry mess. Questions of who’s wearing the white hat,
however, should take a back seat until the parties both agree to stop the
violence. When both patients are
bleeding out on the operating table, it profits no one to stand around arguing
about who shot who first.
Some voices, Israeli, Palestinian, and
even some American, have called on the warring factions to “admit that the
peace process is dead.” But none of them then proceeds to address the question:
and then what? If the Israelis and Palestinians do not continue to work towards
peace, then there will be only two choices for Israel: (1) live in a constant
state of war within its own borders, or (2) exterminate every Palestinian on
the face of the Earth. The first is impossible to sustain, the second is
impossible to imagine. But the alternative that the Israelis seem to hope for,
that the Palestinians are just going to sit down and start living quietly, is
not going to happen.
One of the most thoughtful passages I’ve
read on the subject is from Israeli activist Amos Oz: "Neither the Jews
nor the Palestinians are going anywhere," Oz wrote. "They cannot live
together like one happy family, because they are not one, because they are not
happy and because they are hardly a family. The best that can be hoped for is a
partition that will let Palestinians and Israelis live together, not as
brothers or sisters, just civilized neighbors." While the peace process
seems to be in dire straits, the two sides can’t give up now or the extremists
will have won. If they don’t start talking again, the status of Jerusalem may
end up being that of Great Big Smoking Hole In the Ground.
Dusty Rhoades
is a lawyer practicing in Aberdeen, and all he’s saying is give peace a chance.
OUR GRACIOUS
HOST (BOOKS-N-BYTES)
COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.