Middle East realities.

AuthorJones, David T.
PositionReport

There are two juxtaposed realities for understanding the Middle East:

* The regional Arab/Islamic/Muslim states, either publicly or privately, desire to eliminate Israel; and

* Israel rejects being eliminated.

Given that these realities have persisted for the past 70 years, the likelihood of a solution is minimal. As former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan is quoted as saying, the Middle East is not a "problem" because "a problem is something with a solution."

Not that it is impossible to conceive of a solution to the complex interlock of territories, borders, populations, refugees, and intersecting religions, let alone to the ostensibly more simple Gaza issue. If not Political Science 101, neither is it beyond the conceptual grasp and creative analytic drafting of a group of advanced graduate students/Middle East scholars. Nor has it been a question of U.S. indifference, as some of the finer and most motivated minds in multiple U.S. administrations have wrestled with the dilemmas. And we have struggled to find that most elusive of prey--a valid interlocutor (or rather multiple such interlocutors who do not die or become incapacitated before reaching agreement). The most obvious efforts were those made throughout the Clinton Administration; their failures resulted in a wide variety of lamentations, learned articles, and reflective memoirs (the most recent being Innocent Abroad--a much delayed recount by twice U.S. ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk). All of them recount defeat; if victory has a thousand fathers, defeat, albeit an orphan, has a thousand explanations.

But there is another possible explanation for defeat, i.e., failure to come to an agreement satisfactory to both Israel and its enemies. Bluntly, there has been insufficient suffering.

It may be a truism that in war, truth is the first casualty, but perspective is an MIA.

In the calculus of human tragedy in the last half of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first century, the loss of life associated with fighting and privation in the Arab-Israel conflict is marginal. Just how does it compare, simply to name a few, to the slaughter on the Korean peninsula, the deaths from fighting in Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia, the mutual atrocity between Iran and Iraq, the massacres in Rwanda, and the ongoing catastrophe in Darfur? Quite literally millions died during these events; the Middle East makes the news--other geography fills cemeteries.

Nor are the...

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