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Intrinsic to the popularity of the recent “two-state solution” movement in Israel and Palestine is the relatively contemporary assumption that any political partnership between Jews and Arabs would be morally – and therefore physically – beneficial to either population.
When Israel became a country in 1948, the Arab League promptly declared war on the fledgling state: “Extermination and momentous massacre” had begun, proclaimed a prominent Egyptian general. The road towards modernity for Israel and its neighbors has been only, at times, been publicly less pointed. Without attempting a full-scale dissection of the tangled web that is Middle Eastern policy, it is suffice to say that this modernity has come at an atrocious cost; where peace seems possible, it is always erased by radical Palestinian terrorism and the suppression of the “occupied territories” at the hands of the IDF. Where bad blood boils, war has emerged as inevitable.
The recent American answer – typified by President George W. Bush’s groundbreaking sponsorship of an independent Palestinian state – is to stamp out this inevitability with a generality: We are all human, and we can all get along. It is an almost wholly American sentiment that democracy is the stuffing of “goodness.” Bush’s administration has implied what is fundamentally “wrong” with the current Palestinian “government” is the absence of a functioning, and powerful, republic, as if Western-style government was a coat that could be stretched to fit the whole world. This large-scale assumption also, subliminally, encompasses a religiously based edict: We believe in God, God believes in every human – regardless of country of origin – and anyone can eventually live together with a little prayer and an able enough negotiator. The unsaid fear, of course, is what if they can’t?
Israeli forces killed two Palestinian militants Tuesday night, and arrested 16 others in response to a bombing inside Israeli borders earlier this week. The events, which unfolded in the shadow of a new wall that Israel is building to separate its citizens from the Palestinian population, were an apogee of sorts for the disintegration of Bush’s “road map for peace.” In a two month period that has seen a promising young Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas resign in a furor over his inability to reign in militants, Israel has resumed work on its settlement program, and violence – dimly quelled while the hopeful eyes of the world were trained on the region – reignited. It seemed, for a moment, as if Ariel Sharon and Abbas had never met, under Western guidance, and pledged their commitment to peace.
America has long stood like the tall school teacher over the recess brawl between Israel and Palestine. It is our pet project, and Bush’s political investment, to make it work. By inference, then, we are telling the world that it can work, or perhaps more appropriately, that it can be made to work. But if fifty years of a jerking, bloody reach towards peace is any indication, it cannot be made to work under this assumption: That the onus is on us to make it happen.
If America is the teacher, then Israel and the Palestinians are two bratty children, unable to admit their fight is anything less than the right fight. Under these pretenses, a two-state solution is impossible, and should be dropped as a possibility by the Western world. Until then, the United States must consider alternate solutions or withdraw, politically, from the situation forever.
Matt Shaer is a senior English major.
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