RE-THINK THE MIDDLE EAST

[Note: The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of Re-Think the Middle East.]

Michael Lame, posted July 27, 2009

Israeli settlements have been much in the news lately. The Obama administration has seriously clashed with the Netanyahu government over the question of a “settlement freeze”.

How Americans view this debate is largely conditioned by our sympathies with the parties. If we are pro-Hamas or pro-Fatah or simply pro-Palestinian, then we no doubt oppose settlement activity in the West Bank. If we support the Israeli left, then we also oppose settlements, while supporters of the Israeli right defend Israeli settlers.

But our sympathies are also shaped by the language used to describe the situation. The philosopher Wittgenstein famously wrote that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If language does indeed shape our view of the world, then the loaded language of Middle East debate may determine our thinking on the subject more than we consciously know.

Let’s examine just a few words which are constantly used in discussions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict: refugee, camp, settlement, occupation. None of these words is value-neutral when placed in the context of the hundred years’ war waged between Jews and Arabs over the land between the river and the sea.

Who is a refugee?
According to the dictionary, a refugee is “one that flees; especially a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/refugee). The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were evicted from their homes in 1947-49 and in 1967 were refugees at the time of their flight, by anyone’s definition.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean once a refugee, always a refugee. I infer from the term something else not found in the dictionary, not only that one sought refuge in the past but also that one’s current status or living situation is unresolved and temporary.

If a Palestinian husband and wife fled from Jaffa in 1948, eventually resettled in New Jersey, purchased a house and became U.S. citizens, should they still be considered refugees? They fled and sought refuge. By the dictionary definition they certainly were refugees. But their status is no longer temporary. They have, in some permanent sense, escaped from the danger or persecution. Are they refugees or were they refugees? It’s not merely a semantic difference. It’s a psychological one and possibly financial as well.

When we hear of the millions of Palestinian refugees spread across the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, this number does not refer only to those who lost their homes in ’48 and ’67. The number includes all of their descendants.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) serves the Palestinian refugee community in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Here is how UNRWA answers the definitional question:

Who is a Palestine Refugee? Under UNRWA’s operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA’s services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. The descendants of the original Palestine Refugees are also eligible for registration. When the agency became operational in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, 4.6 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services. (http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html)

This official definition is used as the basis for providing food, shelter, health care, and education to millions of Palestinians. The definition serves people. But it also shapes or perhaps even distorts the way people normally think of refugees. According to UNRWA, the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of refugees are themselves refugees, even though they never fled and never sought refuge. They are eligible to be considered refugees whether they live in refugee camps or not, whether they have resettled or not, whether they have become citizens of other countries or not.

When, if ever, does a refugee cease being a refugee? One view is that refugee status is permanent, regardless of whether one eventually resettles somewhere. That is, Palestinians refugees are refugees forever unless and until they return to their original homes in Palestine.

Years ago I led a workshop in Houston for Arabs and Jews. In a discussion about identity, one participant said to the group: “I am Palestinian. My son is Texan.” His son did not think of himself as a refugee. Should anyone else think of him as a refugee or count him as one?

Who gets counted as a refugee has political significance. Everyone plays a numbers game. Ethnic and religious groups usually want to show that they are numerically strong, giving them an incentive to inflate their population figures. But occasionally groups benefit more – in terms of public sympathy and financial support – by showing the opposite, that they are “endangered species”. In that case they have an incentive to deflate their numbers. And given that it’s always a tricky business (and often a judgment call) to determine who exactly is or isn’t a member of a particular ethnic or religious group, the range can be very wide indeed for estimates of the worldwide numbers of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians.

The larger the number of Palestinian refugees, the greater the political and economic leverage wielded by those who lead them and by those who advocate on their behalf.

I suppose anyone can define any term any way they like. Webster did. So did Humpty Dumpty:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” . . .
“When I make a word do a lot of work . . . ,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”
[The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, p. 269]

It doesn’t change the deplorable living conditions in Palestinian refugee camps to question whether the residents are really refugees or descendants of refugees. No matter what their designation, no one should have to live like that. But it might make a difference in how we look at possible solutions. Even if we believe that those who lost everything in 1948 should be repatriated or compensated, that doesn’t necessarily mean that their descendants are entitled to the same.

[Next blog postings: Camps, Settlements, Occupation.]

Michael Lame, posted July 17, 2009

William Goldman, the legendary screenwriter of such classic Hollywood films as Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President’s Men, wrote a terrific book, Adventures in the Screen Trade: a personal view of Hollywood and Screenwriting, telling what he had learned from decades in the motion picture business. On page 39 he imparts to his readers the key lesson of making successful movies, which he identifies as

“. . . the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry:

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess . . .”

This same principle of humility can be applied to policy formulations and peace-making efforts in the Middle East. For all the books and op-ed pieces, position papers and peace plans, speeches and symposia, conferences and conference calls, summits and retreats, nobody really knows how to resolve Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict or how to bring a peaceful conclusion to Iran’s stand-off with the West regarding its nuclear program.

Some pundits (and presidents) claim to know which side history is on. They don’t. No one knows – no one can know – the future. Fifteen years ago, in the heyday of the Oslo era, activists claimed that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was inevitable and the peace process was irreversible. Those claims turned out not to be true. Many experts now say that there are no good options for the U.S. regarding Iran, for Israel regarding Hamas, for the Palestinians trapped in Gaza. But such conclusions are based on what we see now, and we see through a glass, darkly. Tomorrow some new possibilities may emerge; a new option could become viable.

So, given that NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING and that, according to most commentators and analysts, the current prospects for peace in the Middle East are not encouraging, where can we find leverage? What actions can be taken that may cause one or more key Middle East players to get off the dime? What provocative declarations or initiatives could shake up the status quo in a positive manner and open some new pathways to the future?

Asking these questions and finding answers to them is really what Re-Think the Middle East is all about. Too much of the thinking about the future of the region has been narrowed down to a short set of options – we keep rounding up the usual suspects – and that set of options tends to focus on peace plans and pressuring parties to move towards negotiations.

The U.S. government threatens Israel with unspecified dire consequences if it doesn’t halt settlement activities. Our government refuses to talk directly to Hamas until it meets the conditions set by the Quartet. The Obama administration reaches out a hand to the rulers in Tehran but also hints at tougher sanctions. Sticks and carrots. Carrots and sticks. They work on mules. Surely they must also work on mulish leaders. But perhaps not.

The idea of settling the land of Israel lies at the heart of the Zionist vision. So it has been for more than a hundred years. If that animating idea is to be changed, modified, or replaced with a new vision, it will not happen quickly or easily. And while that sort of shift is not impossible, George Mitchell is unlikely to be the catalyst for such a momentous occurrence. As crucial as the relationship with the United States is to Israel, external threats and promises will only go so far in moving Israelis to re-examine their basic identity and their connection to the land.

One particular Palestinian vision is of that same land, but completely free of Zionism. Hamas’s opposition to the existence of the State of Israel is principled, deep-seated, and frequently reiterated. It would be difficult, possibly even fatal to the movement itself, to step away from that opposition. It could happen, but even with massive pressure being exerted on the Hamas leadership, from multiple sources, to modify its stance regarding Fatah, the PLO, and Israel, Hamas seems to move at its own pace in a direction of its own choosing.

Iran has been committed to the development of nuclear power since the days of the Shah.
Its nuclear program has continued to move forward regardless of domestic politics or presidential elections. Iran’s nuclear capabilities progressed during the days of the pragmatist Rafsanjani, during the two terms of the liberal reformer Khatemi, and during the last four years of the confrontational Ahmadinejad. Personality has not mattered to this national project. To curb this nuclear ambition, especially if it is seen as a result of U.S. “encouragement”, would be gut-wrenching, maybe even humiliating, for millions of Iranians.

Carrots and sticks are blunt instruments, and we talk about them bluntly. In each of the instances listed above – and there are others in the region, including Fatah, Syria, Hezbollah – where the United States would like to see “behavior modification” take hold, it is essential that we appreciate the difficulties the parties face in making the changes we deem desirable. Those difficulties include the parties’ potential loss of credibility with their own constituents if fundamental principles are seen as compromised in order to receive American largesse or avoid America’s wrath.

Do we imagine that America’s fundamental interests reflected in its foreign policy can be reshaped by other countries offering to feed us carrots or hit us with sticks? Perhaps on peripheral matters, less critical concerns, and dollars and cents issues such gross inducements will have a decisive effect. But will they change the basic direction in which our country moves? I’m not so sure.

There must be options other than carrots and sticks. Surely there are deeper conversations worth having with the peoples of the Middle East. Where aren’t we looking? What don’t we hear? What haven’t we said? Remember: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

by Michael Lame, posted July 10, 2009

In his fascinating autobiography, Once upon a Country, Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari Nusseibeh writes of a heated exchange he once had with Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas):

“You have to level with us,” I demanded. “What is it you want, a state or the right of return?”

“Because that’s what it boils down to. Either you want an independent state or a policy aimed at returning all the refugees to Israel. You can’t have it both ways.” [p. 466]

Earlier this year, a poll commissioned by an organization committed to a two-state solution revealed that for 92% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza their first choice for dealing with the refugee problem was the “right of return AND compensation”. 77% of Israelis considered this option “unacceptable”. Even the more moderate option of “an Israeli recognition of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, while most refugees return to the West Bank or Gaza and some return to Israel” garnered a 60% “unacceptable” response from Israelis. (http://onevoicemovement.org/programs/polling_contents.php)

As the Israeli pollster, Mina Zemach, acknowledged in an appearance on Capitol Hill last month, these numbers reflect a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum in firm opposition to recognizing a Palestinian refugee “right of return” or to any sizeable number of Palestinians moving (back) to what is now Israel.

So what is to be done? Either the Palestinians demand justice as they see it – and fight for it – or they settle for peace with Israel. As Nusseibeh wrote, it is an either/or proposition.

In March, two occurrences caused me to revisit my own views of justice in the Middle East.

At the beginning of March, three months before President Obama’s trip to Egypt, I received a copy of an interesting article written by Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Alterman, a Middle East expert formerly a member of the policy planning staff at the State Department, entitled his piece “Justice is a Virtue”. (http://csis.org/publication/middle-east-notes-and-comment-justice-virtue)

“Justice is one of the most prominent themes in Islam,” Alterman asserts. “To Muslim audiences, the core aspect of justice is not that it is redistributive or even-handed, but that it is ethical.” He goes on to recommend that Obama use the occasion of his upcoming speech to promote a U.S. alignment with the world’s Muslim community in the search for justice.

I have now reached the opposite conclusion about the usefulness of justice as a principle for addressing Middle East conflict. What is, after all, the real relationship between justice and conflict? Is injustice the source of conflict or its result, or both? Martin Luther King reportedly said that “without justice there can be no peace.” Whether that statement is true or not, it sounds good; it sounds right. At demonstrations, many of us have heard if not also uttered the repeated refrain “no justice, no peace.”

But I’ve come to believe that, at least with regards to Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “a just peace” is an oxymoron. In a perfect world, justice and peace would reinforce each other, but in our world, when conflict rages, justice and peace pull in opposite directions.

Everyone I’ve ever met in the Middle East wants peace . . . on their own terms. Peace is certainly valued by Arabs and Jews, but it is not necessarily their senior-most value. I believe that a primary reason why efforts over the last two decades to resolve Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed is that Arabs tend to place a higher value on justice than on peace. (One could also say that peace-making has failed because Israel has never made proposals to the Syrians and Palestinians that they viewed as just.) If a choice has to be made between peace without justice or justice without peace, the Arab world (and perhaps, more broadly, the Muslim world), will opt for the latter. Israelis, despite the long Jewish tradition of seeking justice, tend to put a premium on peace, but they place an even higher premium on preserving their national existence.

Both of these preferences or principled stands, for peace and for justice, are also explainable on a material level. When you already have what you want – e.g., land or power – making peace can lock-in your gains. The Israelis already possess the entire land of Israel/Palestine as well as the Golan Heights. Holding on to as much of that land as possible while achieving peace makes perfect sense to Israelis, and if their offers are rejected, it must be because “the other side doesn’t really want peace”. The Palestinians, in contrast, control nothing. The cause of justice, as Palestinians see it, is consistent with their interests in that it requires them to regain at least some part, if not all, of what they lost.

A real question, then, is whether justice in Arab terms must be ALL-OR-NOTHING. For the Syrian regime, justice necessitates the return of ALL the land conquered by Israel, right up to the June 4, 1967 line. ALL might be defined by Hamas as the entire land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, which includes the state of Israel. Fatah might define ALL as 100% of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem (or a land swap with Israel that would equal 100%).

But what if the Israelis are not willing to part with 100% of the lands captured in 1967 or their equivalent? Must the conflict go on until and unless the Israelis concede the point? Does the offered return of less than 100% constitute such an injustice that no peace on those terms could be accepted by any Palestinian patriot?

In the middle of March I attended an event in Washington which featured Ziad Abbas, a Palestinian born and raised in the Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem. He spoke from his personal experience about the life and aspirations of refugees, and he claimed that “the only possibility of justice is the right of return.”

That phrase, “right of return”, speaks volumes to Palestinians. It speaks of justice and homecoming, of wiping away a humiliation and righting a wrong. That phrase says something completely different to Israelis, as we saw earlier in reviewing the polling data. Israelis hear it as an existential threat to their state and an indirect way of undoing the outcomes of the UN vote in favor of partition in 1947 and of the ensuing war.

What possible justice can there be for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes in 1947-1949? Regardless of how they came to be refugees, monetary compensation does not make up for the destruction of a way of life, a community, or a centuries-old relationship to the land. Dollars cannot substitute for having a place of one’s own in which to raise a family. Most of the pre-1948 Palestinian villages in what became Israel are long gone. Many previously Palestinian-owned houses in Jaffa and Haifa and Acre, if they remain intact, are now occupied by Israeli families. Many formerly Arab-owned orange groves have been plowed under.

Palestinians can’t return to the world they knew before ’48. It no longer exists. There really is no possibility of justice for them. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, but I doubt that what can be done could be called justice.

Alterman concludes his article by claiming that “[t]he moral ground is occupied by those who strive for justice, not those who kill in the name of it.” But seeking justice is not necessarily a bloodless affair. The figure in history who I most closely associate with an absolute commitment to justice – a passion for justice – is Robespierre. And we all know how his efforts turned out. The Middle East has already seen too many wars and reigns of terror. Perhaps a new conversation is called for to examine what justice looks like in the 21st century.

Paul Scham, posted July 3, 2009
(Paul Scham is a visiting professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park and executive director of the University’s Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies.)

Dear Michael,
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. However, I’m afraid I agree with Obama and Bruce Riedel in this. In the current state of instability I think that announcing a policy is premature. No one knows what posture the Iranian government will take when it emerges from this, even though most of us assume that Ahmadinejad will prevail. Of course, I assume contingency planning is proceeding full speed, but this should not be announced.

Second, I think the probability, analytically, is that the world will have to live with a nuclear Iran. This does not mean not engaging it with both carrots and sticks to attempt to prevent it, including international sanctions. These cannot be imposed without the Russians and Chinese being aboard, which requires some deference to their views, hypocritical as we may regard them. Thus, both will be needed. It is a fact that previous American policies, including but not limited to the Bush administration, gave many Iranians, including many who despise Ahmadinejad, a strong feeling that the US was quite prepared to engage in regime change once again, and created a sizable internal consensus in favor of a nuclear capability. This will make it harder to deter Iran from this, no matter who governs it. The only possible deterrence will have to include American recognition of Iran’s place of importance in its region, a recognition that will go down very badly with the Arab world.

I agree with those who do not see a nuclear Iran as a fundamental mortal danger to Israel and the rest of the world. I see Iran as a rational country in the way the USSR was. Rational does not imply approval. But Khamenei is not Qadafi. There is absolutely no evidence I have ever seen suggesting credibly that any significant Iranian leader, including Ahmadinejad, is prepared to even contemplate national suicide in order to destroy Israel.

Conversely, the danger of attacking Iran is clear and probably much worse for all concerned. Iran would have no reason to impose any restraint on its affiliated organizations. For only one example, Hezbollah would likely launch a full-scale missile attack on Israel. Of course Israel could, and might, nearly obliterate southern Lebanon. But Israel would be hurt far worse than it was in 2006. And there would be large and small attacks launched through much of the world probably including the attempted, and likely temporarily successful, stopping of shipping through the Straits of Hormuz.

What really worries me are views like John Bolton’s in Thursday’s Post. I am comforted by the fact that we have a rational administration that does not believe it has all the answers. And, actually, Riedel’s candid answer, recognizing the limits of American power, does make me feel better.

I do not like the prospect of a nuclear Iran but, analytically, I do not see that it can necessarily be prevented though, of course, we should seriously attempt to do so.

All the best
Paul