TWO STATES
COMMENT / The New Yorker
Issue of 2002-04-22 and 2002-04-29
Posted 2002-04-15
Like any great tragedy, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is full of smaller sadnesses. One of these is that, as the Israeli tanks have rolled through the West Bank, discussion of the conflict has begun to take the form of horror stories about whichever side is the enemy: the orders placed for explosives, the crushed houses and cars, the baby stillborn at a checkpoint, the bombers blown up on the way to kill more people. This is not yet an all-out war—in all-out wars, we should remind ourselves before completely giving in to despair, many more people die than have died in Israel and Palestine since the second Intifada began—but it is close enough to produce the pattern of thinking that leads to wars, the mutual conviction that the other side has moved morally beyond the pale.
It is difficult for Americans to imagine their way into the Middle East: it feels as if we were being presented with two competing stories of a people's absolute righteousness (in both the grand historical sense and the day-to-day atrocity sense) and asked to choose which one to believe. Americans aren't used to making choices like that. But it may be useful to contemplate some similarities—historically inexact but emotionally resonant—with a dismal period in our own history: post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South.
In 1865, the United States won a crushing victory over the Confederate States of America, just as Israel won the Six-Day War, in 1967. Then the government commenced a military occupation of the land it had conquered. Just as the Civil War had two intertwined rationales, union and the abolition of slavery, the occupation during Reconstruction had two rationales, national security and guaranteeing the citizenship rights of the former slaves. (One upside-down aspect of the comparison is that, if the South was America's West Bank, the conquering power's settler equivalents, the carpetbaggers, represented the political left, not the right. Another is that the most obviously oppressed people in the American story, the former slaves, were much more concerned with establishing political and economic rights than with claiming a homeland.) The former Confederates, having lost their recourse to conventional military power as a result of having lost the war, turned to terrorism as the means to their political ends. All through Reconstruction, and particularly toward the end, the South went through cycles of terrorist violence—by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the White League and similar organizations, against the carpetbaggers and politically active African-Americans—followed by military crackdowns.
For most of this period, the United States was led by a politically unsophisticated career military man who had personally conquered much of the occupied territory and was sympathetic to the goals of the settlers, Ulysses S. Grant. The occupation proceeded in a heartbreaking fashion: the longer it went on, the bolder the terrorists became, and the less general support there was for it. In the fall of 1875, Grant declined the entreaties of Adelbert Ames, Mississippi's carpetbagger governor, to send troops to monitor an election campaign. Less than two years later, as part of a deal struck to resolve the disputed Presidential election of 1876, all federal troops were withdrawn from the South, not to return (for civil-rights purposes) until the Little Rock school crisis of 1957. The Jim Crow system was the inexorable outcome. The United States decided, in effect, to let the South undo one result of the Civil War, black citizenship, in exchange for keeping the other results, union and abolition. The collapse of Reconstruction was clearly an example of the terrorists winning.
Reinforcing this political victory was a narrative victory, with the South's preferred version of the Reconstruction story prevailing in American culture and intellectual life (political correctness in those days ran in the opposite direction from now) well past the midpoint of the twentieth century: white freedom fighters had overthrown an illegitimate regime and reëstablished the sacred principle of self-determination. As late as 1956—after Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s Montgomery bus boycott had begun—John F. Kennedy, by way of making himself a national figure, devoted a chapter in "Profiles in Courage" to the mastermind of Reconstruction's demise in Mississippi, Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar.
What the story of our long-running version of the two-state solution demonstrates about the United States is that our history has been consistently more difficult than we like to remember. What it demonstrates about the wider world is that if you've got what the white South had—a passionate ethno-nationalist claim to a homeland, a willingness to resort to terrorist violence, and a story line that the world finds persuasive, in part because it plays into existing ethnic prejudices—then you've probably got a winning hand, whether or not the interests you are seeking to advance are noble.
In the Middle East, because we are already deep into the realm of having to contemplate imperfect measures that might forestall disaster, rather than solutions that anybody would find morally satisfying, the American example offers a hope, though a distant one. The occupation forces in the South withdrew because remaining had become politically unsustainable. The result was that the South became almost a separate country again, and then, slowly, its main project changed, from promoting violence and revenge to rebuilding social and economic structures. Over a very long haul, that made it possible, when the civil-rights movement came along, for white Southerners to begin to acknowledge the humanity of their enemies, as they would not during Reconstruction. Withdrawing Israeli troops and settlers and recognizing Palestinian statehood may also seem a reward for terrorism, but there aren't any clean choices right now. At least then the Palestinian government would have a lot more to lose, and such a stake has a salutary—if not, alas, swift—effect on behavior.
— Nicholas Lemann
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