The Deadlocked City nybooks.com
In that rather depressing vein, this article showed up in the current nyrb. A long one, I will leave the thread with the beginning and end. Quote:
Ariel Sharon knew what he was doing on September 28, 2000. In hot pursuit of the Israeli premiership, he marched onto Jerusalem's most contentious piece of real estate, the magnificent plateau, paved with pink and gray polished stone, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). Other than during the Friday prayers, the site often seems nearly empty. On this particular day, Sharon arrived guarded by almost a thousand armed policemen and soldiers.
He later claimed that his sole purpose had been to test "the freedom of access and of worship" on the Mount. His real motive was to win over the support of the extreme right and thus foil Benjamin Netanyahu's return to political power. He would attain his aim, though, only with some support from Yasser Arafat. At this time, Arafat also needed to improve his image as a hard-liner. Palestinians had been increasingly dissatisfied with him. They were demoralized by the abstractions of a "peace process" that never brought them any benefits but only increased their daily sufferings and humiliations. Israel, under Ehud Barak, continued to plant more settlers in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem than it had under Benjamin Netanyahu. It was as though during the recent peace talks in Northern Ireland the British government had continued to ship more Protestants from Scotland to Northern Ireland and settled them on land expropriated from Catholics in Londonderry. To protest Sharon's provocation and improve his own declining image, Arafat either launched a bloody Palestinian uprising or did nothing to prevent it: the worst outburst of violence by Palestinians in a hundred-year conflict that is now more intractable than ever before.
Ehud Barak, the then prime minister, also thought he knew what he was doing in permitting Sharon's expedition to this most sensitive Muslim shrine. Only a few days earlier, Arafat had been Barak's guest at a small dinner at Barak's private house. (In retrospect the setting seems hard to believe.) On this occasion, Arafat made a last-minute appeal to Barak to block Sharon's visit, just as similar political demonstrations on the Mount had been prohibited before. Barak turned him down. He, too, was badly slipping in the polls. His coalition had broken apart. He wanted Sharon to replace Netanyahu as the Likud candidate. Polls indicated that he had an outside chance to beat Sharon but not Netanyahu.
Barak is a highly intelligent but politically maladroit former general whose hobby is taking complicated watches apart and putting them together again; he is both the most decorated soldier in the Israeli army and an accomplished pianist. He should have known that on Jerusalem's Haram al-Sharif, the wars of religion continue under a different name. In Jerusalem, hatred has often been another form of prayer and never more so than when the knives are pulled and the bombs are thrown. The religious hatred called odium theologicum has long been an instrument for gaining power and property, whether in local politics or in real estate speculation. Myths of divine promise alternate with myths of Blood and Soil. "History" and "religion" are relentlessly and superstitiously evoked and nowhere more so than on the Haram, or Temple Mount, where Sharon staged his political coup.
Peace-making was never easy before and is now going to be infinitely more difficult. With Pavlovian regularity, unspeakable outrages against civilians now lead to murderous punitive raids that only provoke worse outrages. Even if the recent American-sponsored cease-fire should last, the end is nowhere in sight. So many futile "cease-fires" have preceded it. Is Arafat able to restrain the tiger he's been riding for almost a year? Can Sharon really be counted on to accommodate Arafat, whom he has been calling "our bin Laden"? There have been hundreds of dead so far and thousands of wounded, most of them Palestinians.
. . .
The power balance between Israelis and Palestinians was always so overwhelmingly in favor of the Israelis that any potential empathy among Palestinians for the people that vanquished them hardly ever emerged. If it did, it was eventually crushed when missiles from the latest-model jet planes, tanks, and helicopter gunships hit Palestinians, indiscriminately, in frequent, grossly excessive punitive raids for outrages committed by Palestinians in Israeli towns.
Nor have I ever found anyone in the Palestinian camp who was seriously concerned by the fact that the PLO was, as far as I know, the only national liberation movement in history willing to extend its ruthlessness anywhere in the world, to innocent citizens of third countries and to participants in the Olympic games. Palestinians on one occasion blew up a Swiss passenger plane in mid-flight, and they hijacked or blew up other foreign planes, killing Austrians, Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, Turks, and Spaniards. Nor, more recently, have we heard Arafat or any Palestinian human rights group criticize the brainwashing of impressionable teenagers by "holy men" who convince them that they would be revered as martyrs and entertained by beautiful women in paradise if they only blew themselves up in a discothèque full of other young people or in a crowded fast-food restaurant ten minutes from the Haram.
The political deadlock runs parallel to the mutual lack of human empathy. For all its newly found dovishness, an editorial cartoon in the liberal Ha'aretz recently depicted the current Intifada as the infestation of a human body by a pack of vicious vermin. I saw only one letter to the editor protesting this cartoon. It came from one Klement Messerschmidt, a German resident in Jerusalem. He protested the utter dehumanization of the Palestinians implied in the drawing, which was reminiscent of Nazi cartoons. "Has no one on Ha'aretz felt uncomfortable with the use of this loaded metaphor?" The only reaction that seems appropriate now is despair. |
