Moderates? In the Mideast?
The 40th anniversary of the first Arab-Israeli War (the Six-Day War) has NPR and the BBC, at least, airing retrospectives. When these retrospectives first started, I rolled my eyes, prepared for a long sequence of partisan harangues. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a lot of considered judgment. Where the news services found Arabs willing to blame the various Arab states for creating in Israel a siege mentality, and Israelis willing to call a continuing siege mentality madness, I don’t know, but it was a pleasant and striking change of pace.
I have no real way to know how representative such voices of moderation are. We don’t hear them much on the news, but that might be due to the way news services seek the sensational. Dialogue doesn’t sell as well as invective. Certainly moderates aren’t well represented in the upper echelons of mideast governments, but all too many governments (cough) got where they are by embracing a vocal wing of the electorate. The general public may be a little less ideologically committed.
Hearing nonpartisans speak in the retrospectives gives me hope that my intuition is more than wishful thinking. Frankly, I think the bulk of Israelis, Palestinians, and Palestinian sympathizers throughout the region really would prefer everyone just to stop provoking one another, and that most people on all sides of the conflict have more in common with each other than with the fire-eaters on their own respective sides. For that matter, those who would like to polarize the conflict further have a lot more in common than they would ever admit.
If so, my belief offers hope for a much broader peace, although only a slim one. Champions of Israeli security will never be able to stamp out the murderous bastards of the Intifada; they’re too dug in, too hard to distinguish from the general Arab populace. Attempting to stamp them out breeds resentment as the methods hurt the innocent, as well, creating more resistance than it eliminates. Likewise, the revolutionaries will never be able to sweep Israel into the sea; the more vicious terrorist acts become, the firmer Israeli national unity grows, and the easier it is for land-grabbing nationalist bastards to push through programs to “pacify” territory by annexing it. The only path to peace is for the moderates on both sides to police themselves, and throw the bastards out, for Palestine to jail and execute its terrorists, and for Israel to hold its own officers accountable for war crimes, and to vote out the hard-liners.
That, of course, is only possible if the decent folk do indeed outnumber the bastards, and by a large margin, because the hard-liners are, inevitably, entrenched in the military organizations. They’ve got the guns, and have proven themselves more willing to kill a few civilians to keep tensions high than to allow serious questions about the use of force. So I hope the moderates outnumber the hard-line bastards by a lot, or find a way to get to that point, and that they find the extraordinary courage necessary to undermine the very people most needed to protect the moderates when tensions flare again, and to be willing to do it unilaterally, if need be.
Not many people have that kind of guts. I know I don’t. But it’s the only way out.