Between Rome and Jerusalem, By Yossi Klein Halevi
Last week I attended a conference in Rome about religion, media and "regions of conflict" - especially, of course, the Middle East.
I arrived a day after the massive anti-war demonstration which drew upwards of a million people. Peace flags still hung, like a victory celebration, from windows all over the city. At the conference, speakers invoked the demonstration in almost messianic terms, as a sign not merely of political but spiritual transformation. The notion of an "axis of evil" was ridiculed as primitive. In the streets around city hall, where the conference was held, graffiti proclaimed "Sharon-Bush-Blair" as the real axis of evil (with Sharon invariably listed first).
There are of course Italians, chief among them Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who think otherwise. Still, the pacifist atmosphere seems overwhelming. And so a visiting Israeli experiences acute reality distortion. Go explain that while we Israelis are likely to be the main recipients of Saddam's retaliation for an American attack, we still overwhelmingly support it. And that where Europeans see the return of the hope of the 1960s, we see the appeasement of the 1930s.
From Rome, the world looks very different than from Jerusalem. Rome believes that what happened to Western Europe after World War II can happen elsewhere, and imagines that the Middle East is ready for that transformation. Rome believes that there are solutions to every problem, if only people would overcome their fears and resentments and start talking. And so the Rome municipality, which sponsored the media conference, is gracefully trying to transform the city into an international center for dialogue and crisis resolution.
From Jerusalem, the Middle East also looks like Western Europe - after World War I. In Jerusalem we know that much of the Arab world is still dreaming of military glory and revenge rather than prosperity and reconciliation. And we sense that the Iraqi war could provide the psychological equivalent of World War II - the shock that frees the Arabs from the fantasies of aggression and the self-pity of victimization.
Rome doesn't understand that, in the past two years, both America and Israel have glimpsed the Islamist apocalypse. Rome thinks of September 11 as a criminal attack by a marginal group, rather than as part of a widespread anti-Western assault nurtured by key Middle Eastern regimes.
Rome views the collapse of the Oslo process as a technical failure which a bit of tinkering can repair. Rome doesn't understand that when former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak placed Jerusalem on the negotiating table - the first time in history that any nation offered to share sovereignty over its capital - and received suicide bombings as the counter-offer, the Oslo process was over.
Rome doesn't understand that, after the first intifada, the centrist Israeli majority accepted the legitimacy of Palestinian national claims, while no reciprocal shift occurred on the Palestinian side in accepting the legitimacy of Jewish national claims. Rome wants to believe that Sharon is the cause rather than the consequence of the Oslo breakdown.
Astonishingly, Rome has forgotten that this terrorist war was declared not against a government headed by Sharon but against the most peace-minded government in Israel's history. Rome doesn't understand that the second intifada, unlike the first, isn't a war of desperation against the occupation but a war of religiously-incited triumphalism against Israel's existence.
I TRIED to convey something of how the world looks from Jerusalem to the several hundred journalists, scholars and religious leaders at the conference. I explained that, as a fellow interfaith pilgrim, I felt spiritually at home among them. But as an Israeli, I was a heretic in Europe's religion of peace at any price.
I was fortunate: this was one European venue where an Israeli could still get a fair hearing. The organizers of the conference, after all, included the Anti-Defamation League as well as the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Just a few days earlier, Veltroni had cancelled a meeting with Tariq Aziz after the Iraqi foreign minister had refused, at a press conference, to answer a question from an Israeli journalist.
Still, the barrier between Rome and Jerusalem seems almost impenetrable. Rome sees how the world can be, but dangerously deludes itself into believing that that is how it actually is. Jerusalem sees the world as it is, but risks entrapment in despair.
Ironically, the two cities have reversed historic roles. Jerusalem, city of messianic possibility, has become the bearer of grim reality, the front line against surrender to terrorist blackmail. Rome, city of empire, now imagines a world without war. World War II made that role reversal inevitable. Hitler's Italian allies emerged from the war convinced they must renounce conflict; while Jews emerged from the war committed to learning how to defend themselves.
Still, there was at least one moment when I felt a convergence between realism and hope.
One afternoon I found myself on a veranda in city hall chatting with a Pakistani-born British Muslim theologian, Imam Sajid, a brave man who is leading the campaign against England's Islamist hate-mongers. As we argued about who was responsible for the collapse of the Oslo process, I noticed that we were overlooking the Arch of Titus, which commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple and Rome's victory over Jerusalem. I pointed to the arch and told the Imam that our fear is based on the fragileness of our national rebirth, threatened by new enemies. And I explained that for Jews, the third temple is the state of Israel.
The Imam, clearly moved, acknowledged that the Muslim world must accept the right of the Jews to at least part of the land.
"But you must also give the Palestinians their rights," he added.
"When the Muslim world accepts the legitimacy of our return home," I said, "the Palestinian problem will be solved."
Rome should be reminded of Jerusalem's sense of realism, and Jerusalem should be reminded of Rome's sense of possibility. Both are expressions of what the world urgently needs: resoluteness against evil, openness to good.
The writer is the Israel correspondent of the New Republic, and author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.
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