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JERUSALEM - The incident was a microcosm of the macropolitical situation. Although watching keenly, I could not see where it started and as it went on I did not know what it was about but the Israeli official charged with escorting me to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was having a dispute with a Palestinian as sudden, brutal and disproportionate as can only occur on the fault line between two uncomprehending cultures.
I was frightened. The murderousness of each was barely contained. This was not, of course, a Semitic phenomenon. To study for an hour in the Church which claims to stand on the site of the Resurrection of Christ is to learn - through territorial disputes between Christian denominations lasting centuries over a handful of cubic centimetres no larger than a child's bag of candy - that in reducing the divine to human comprehension we mire it with our own imperfections. Robert Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation; so, divinity is what gets lost in religion.
I paint in this background simply because it is too easy in the narrow columns of the New York Times to see Arab/Israeli affairs as somehow different from the general run of human failure. Somehow, the temptation will be to see the breakdown, or at least the break-off, of the latest peace talks at Camp David as a major diplomatic disaster but the central questions are so rarely asked that to pose them now seems like an act of self indulgent radicalism.
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Why can't America, with all its economic and military aid leverage, force the Israelis to amend their Constitution to marginalise fringe, extremist parties by brokering an agreement between Labour and Likud on a representational floor of 10%?
If they are as theocratic as they each claim, why cannot Jerusalem be administered under trust as a religious city with Palestine and Israel running their respective political operations elsewhere? It is the theocrats on both sides who want politics to be run from Jerusalem even though, by their own terms, such matters are subservient to matters appertaining to the almighty.
It is time to remind ourselves of some simple points.
- First, Israel has never had boundaries recognised under international law or treaty, so the Palestinian insistence on its reverting to the boundaries it held against hostile forces up until the outbreak of the 1967 War is not a matter of principle but simply of sound positioning.
- Secondly, most Arab States do not want a mutually agreed peace between Israel and its neighbours because, no matter what the terms, Israel in peacetime would be far more dominant in the region than it has been able to be in an uneasy state between peace and war.
- Thirdly, neither Arafat nor Barak have much to gain from a peace treaty which would bring down on each the wrath of their respective extremists without guaranteeing any compensating support from moderates.
- Fourthly, peace would force each side into new methods of managing domestic politics and neither is prepared for that.
With so much against it, who can be surprised that the effort failed?
Who, after all, wanted a final settlement in the Middle East this year? Arafat, certainly not; he would not survive a peace with its accompanying militancy. Barak, certainly not; as long as the Constitution is so perverse all Israeli Prime Ministers, in spite of their campaigning promises, are better off in hostility than peace.
Which, as you cross them off on your fingers, leaves William Jefferson Clinton; ah, there's a man with a mission, pushing to the head of the line to make an appointment with history.
Clinton, for sure, wanted a comprehensive peace and who were Arafat the spiv and Barak the beggar to refuse? Apart from their internal political concerns, neither could be seen to reject peace, neither could be seen to take the blame for breakdown, and neither could live without American support and largesse.
When I was, still very frightened, waiting to get into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, still with my pugnacious official escort, he was taunted by the spokesman for a knot of Palestinians who told him what the Russians would do to his crumbling power base; this was precisely eight months after the Berlin Wall came down. For a practitioner of political education he was sadly wanting; and that is the long-term problem for both sides.
There is no superpower for the Palestinians and if I am right neither Bush nor Gore will care much for Israeli causes; the country has, after all, survived reasonably well and will continue to do so with discreet assistance. But the Camp David process is dead because a permanent, signed, monitored peace would be more trouble than what we have now for the key players in the region. Even as a component in American domestic politics the days of Middle Eastern obsession must surely be over.
We should not mourn. Better to recognise the end of an old illusion than fall victims to the birth of a new one.
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RDR RECOMMENDED SITE OF THE DAY: Of course if we gave space to Al Gore last week, we have to be even-handed and give you a look at Bush, too. Eee-yew!
