COVER -> DAY ONE
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You may recall the incident in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat where the eponymous gentlemen got themselves lost in Hampton Court Maze. During the early enjoyment of the novelty they saw a baby eating a bun but as their disenchantment grew with their entrapment they repeatedly found themselves back at a spot where the baby had cast off the remains of the bun. This, expressed at the most trivial level, is my experience of the Middle East. Escaping at Cambridge as far as possible from my normal historical studies in political theory and historiography, I chose the lectures of Stephen Runciman on the Crusades as a welcome contrast.
No sooner had I arrived in Harvard in September 1973 than I forecast and then as a journalist became caught up in the Yom Kippur War and its oil crisis aftermath. I found myself in St. Mark's Venice, that crucible of European/Levantine mediaeval politics as the allied tanks rolled into Iraq; and in 1993 I was in Cordoba, that Spanish city which is a peculiar memorial to Jewish/Muslim understanding, when the famous Begin/Arafat handshake took place.
Last week this gnarled, irregularly recursive, serendipity took another turn.
As the Israel/Palestinian patch-up of a cease-fire crumbled I saw the UK premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's opera, The Last Supper. Those unfamiliar with the Christian New Testament may refer to Matthew XXVII for the full account but the essential background is that Jesus Christ was betrayed into the hands of the Jewish authorities in exchange for money by one of his followers, Judas Iscariot, who then hanged himself.
In the Birtwistle reinterpretation the Last Supper is re-enacted now and Jesus forgives Judas, characterised in this production (and surely no accident) as an Arab, who then shows every sign of betraying him again only then to be forgiven again, and so on. Jesus is, of course, a Jew and what he most deplores two millennia after his birth is what has been done in his name: serial anti Semitism culminating in the Holocaust.
The obvious intention is to laud the virtue of forgiveness but what struck me deepest was the circularity of sin and forgiveness; it was the intractability of our human condition of weakness that left the greatest impression.
For this reason, if for no other, we should have modest expectations of human institutions and modest censure for their custodians when they perform badly. Nowhere is this now more important than in the Middle East where the vilification is out of all proportion to the autonomy of action of the protagonists.
Barak, Sharon and Arafat are, each in their different, hobbled ways, prisoners of faction and their factions are prisoners of a particular and partial reading of history which we might usefully call prejudice. There is no more a Hebraic scriptural justification for the modern revival of Israel than there is a Koranic justification for a Jihad to secure Jerusalem's Temple Mount for Islam.
Anyone who has worked in a developing country will recognise the fragile and transitory nature of human achievement. Human resources, ingenuity and persistence are applied; a health service is built; outreach vehicles are bought; health centres are built.
A coup takes place and the buildings rot; the vehicles are commandeered; a downpour wipes out a stretch of arterial highway. We are back to square one.
Even in our own, supposedly secure bastions of development, things are hardly more stable. Why must we marvel every time a politician is forced to tack or retreat? The only difference between the G8 and developing countries is that we are better protected from the extremities of the political weather, we have better warning systems, we have time to adjust. As the price of oil rockets we dip into our stores while our poorer neighbours plunge into catastrophic shortage; our ploughs plough, their ploughs rust.
Nowhere outside the Middle East is one more conscious of fragility than in Northern Ireland. The two sides, with assistance from the UK, Eire and United States Governments, have put together a fragile peace. This is not a structure of high principle and robust prospect; it is the best that could be done with the materials and everyone must hope that it is not subject to the destructive gales of frustrated populism that have wrecked the fragile peace in the Middle East.
Politicians may plug a gap, balance another piece atop the tottering edifice but it is the peace and quiet, the passing of boring days, which best guarantee survival; it is the gathering dust of passing, minor events, the cobweb of quiet, which binds fragile elements together, turning novelty into conservatism.
That and a degree of magnanimity. Charisma is never enough and it can often be too much, over-stressing optimism, tempting disappointment, prompting jealousy, but a modicum of quiet magnanimity and altruism are always welcome. One remembers the roll call of Nobel Peace laureates, many of whom have been killed for their courage, who gave temporary hope and had the patience as well as the vision to build untidy peace. It is easy to mock their efforts as their houses of cards and glue slide into the morass.
Inasmuch as most of us read any history at all we generally read shallow, jingoistic accounts which post facto transform the doubtful into the inevitable; in xenophobic fastnesses there is no room for accidental achievement.
We are right, our triumph is inevitable; God, for the religious, history, for the secular, is on our side.
Nowhere on this earth are there longer surviving histories (as far as we know) than in the Middle East and nowhere has human historical imposition wrought such havoc with theological and ethical first principles. The Gods of the Abramic traditions and their prophets would be appalled but not surprised. What is true in a heightened sense for the Middle East is, to a lesser extent, true for all of us. So, although it is vital to vote in elections we should not forget the limits of human endeavour. For some the end of human life will be heaven or hell, for others a monument, an achievement, half a century of family recollection before we fade altogether, or immediate obscurity.
But all of us are weak and in waiting.
