Muddling forward in the Middle East

When then-President George W. Bush hosted then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at his ranch in April 2005, Sharon told Bush that he doubted Arabs would ever acknowledge the "birthright of the Jewish people to establish a Jewish state in their historic cradle" (Benn, 2005, p. 44).

This unmitigated arrogance is exactly why Israel and Palestine cannot resolve their problems. The founding of the state of Israel was done violently, by conquest, and only a bit more than 60 years ago. Living people remember it.


In my field, Peace and Conflict Studies, we engage conflict forensics to dissect, deconstruct, contextualize and attempt to understand conflict. Sharon, his Israeli heirs, and his natural Palestinian counterparts (those who join him in what is known as dissensual conflict, or conflict over worldviews and values, not merely a share of the pie) hold all their people hostage. Solutions cannot be based on mere problem-solving and dividing up resources or even land. We saw how that worked out with the failed Oslo Accords. Solutions need to address the emotional core of the problem.

What emotional blocks exist? The short list:

• Atrocities have been committed by both sides.
• Labeling and objectification mean that many members of both sides regard the other people as the problem.
• Collective memory defaults to the worst case assumed scenarios at every turn.
• Every family on both sides has a personal loss to account for, to satisfy, and to remind them of the inhumanity of the other side.
• Many on both sides are certain that the other side is existentially threatening, i.e., would like to commit complete genocide on them.

Of course, all this is compounded by the legacies of Europe and the Middle East, by the Crusades, by the northern conquests of Muslims during what Europeans call the Dark Ages, by the modern European invasions and colonial conquests of sections of the Middle East, by the European Holocaust, and by the Cold War. That ocean of negative stew is pressurized into a cauldron of land with scant resources and a burgeoning population who already consume more water than they have, more oil than they have, and more food than they can grow.

This adds up to what Edward Azar (Lebanese American conflict resolution theorist) called protracted social conflict. PSC is the toughest conflict nut to crack. It needs to go way past negotiations that have occurred to date. Just a couple of suggestions based upon our basic principles in Peace and Conflict Studies:

Engage in a thoroughgoing Truth and Reconciliation process that fully hears the people on basic traumatic issues, including all topics back to and preceding the 1948 creation of the nation-state of Israel. This is hard and messy. So is the ongoing conflict, which shows zero sign of abating.

Begin negotiations that include all parties who say they are stakeholders, no matter how radical and offensive, from the jihadis on the Palestinian side to the Greater Zionists (like Sharon was) on the Israeli side. Decide and abide by the decision on whether to include those in diaspora because those people affect the conflict (almost always destructively on all sides). My personal thought would be to argue to exclude them, because, for the most part, people in diaspora will listen to those 'back home' and those who are in Palestine Israel are the ones who should process and decide matters. Of course, it gets complicated when Palestinian refugees still in vast camps bordering Israel are considered. They certainly have more rights in this conflict than do Jews living in America who have never lived in Israel.

End US involvement. We are the largest supplier of arms to the region, pouring gasoline on the peat bog fire daily. We can never be an honest broker of peace there. We are literally representing AAI Corporation, Alliant Techsystems, BAE Systems Inc., Boeing, Bushmaster Firearms International, Colt's Manufacturing Company, General Atomics, General Electric (primarily through GEAE), General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Raytheon Corporation, THOR Global Defense Group, United Technologies (primarily through Pratt and Whitney, Smith and Wesson Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation) and all the other war contractors who profit from bloodshed and who lose money to successful peace processes. The US must not be a part of this as they are owned by the lobbyists from the war system.

Is any of this easy? No, of course not. If it were easy, all the certified smart people on both sides would have wrapped this up long ago. But at the least we need to move past the superficials.

References
Benn, A. (2005). Israel and Arab Democracy. National Interest, (80), 44-48. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Binary logic

To political ideologues, everything is ones and zeros. You're with us or you're with the terrorists. You're with us or you're a communist. You're with us or you're a tool of the US. It's the same, left or right. They use the Manichean cataloging approach. Yes or no. Up or down. Good or evil. Favored or attacked.

Joe McCarthy had his day in the smearing spotlight, tarring dissidents as communist fifth columnists. Stalin was so paranoid he was susceptible to a little plot to plant rumors by Hitler about the loyalty of Stalin's officials and military leaders, which resulted in Stalin's campaign to root out anyone who might betray him, with a long string of killings as a result. When we opposed the war in Vietnam we were branded as commies or commie dupes. Same thing when we wanted nuclear disarmament. When Ahmadinijad was confronted by civil society rising up in the Green Revolution he claimed that it was a velvet revolution engineered by the West. When Marcos was confronted by the same he called them communist or Muslim extremist (Stephan & Chenoweth, 2008). All opponents of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are labeled as traitors and useful idiots of racist colonialists. Civil society, rising up against the corruption of the royals in Bahrain, are traduced as instruments of Ahmadinijad. An increasingly diverse civil society opposition to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela are lumped together as counter-revolutionary agents of the US.

The examples are endless of course, including the famous analysis from Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring, offered in a jail cell interview with Gustave Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials in 1946:

Interview in Göring's cell (3 January 1946)

* Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Binary logic of denouncing all opponents as a hated category--and that category is ultimately The Traitors, no matter what other label is slapped on--is stock and trade of the conflict industry. The conflict industry are the elites who profit from conflict in wealth, status or power, or some combination of the three (Daniels & Walker, 2001).

Learning to deconstruct false charges is as important an analytical skill as is learning to recognize actual conspiracy. Leaping to conclusions will be done by those who see monolithic forces at work everywhere. Unless we can learn to see the diversity and rainbow nature of humankind we will be susceptible to the manipulations of the Görings, the Bushs, the Ahmadinijads, the Chavezes, the Mugabes and the Marcoses. History shows that it sometimes catches up with them, but they cause lots of damage until they are caught, and some never are, which is a pity.

References
Daniels, Steve E., & Walker, Greg B. (2001). Working through environmental conflict: The collaborative learning approach. Westport CT: Praeger.

Stephan, Maria J.; Chenoweth, Erica (2008). Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. International Security, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 7–44. http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/images/stories/pdfs/stephan_chenoweth.pdf

Who do you think you're foolin'?

Robert M. Gates, Bush's Secretary of Defense after the disgraced Donald Rumsfeld was moved out to his greater reward, let us know why we should now pour massive amounts of money earned by US workers (or their descendants) and lives into the occupation of Afghanistan.
"With the invasion of Iraq our attention- and resources- were diverted," Gates told an audience at an American Legion national convention in Milwaukee. "Afghanistan became a second tier priority for troops, equipment and security and development assistance."
The American Legion--now there is a critical audience likely to ask penetrating questions of our Secretary of Defense. Some of these guys are still fighting the Vietnam War ('If we woulda just listened to Rocky we coulda won'). Gates probably could have said that we need to stay in Iraq until they are out of oil and found a friendly reception there. Cybermatch on the big screen: Rocky Balboa v Iraqi al-Biya, 110 rounds! I wonder if Gates carpooled there with House Republican leader Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who snarked to the Legionnaires, “Some leaders who opposed, criticized, and fought tooth-and-nail to stop the surge strategy now proudly claim credit for the results.”
This is a familiar tactic. Gates learned it from Bush, who spent most of the first few years of his presidency speaking on military bases, avoiding Helen Thomas, and steering wildly clear of any crowd that wasn't under direct orders to love him. Really. As he pumps up deluded support for the invasion of Iraq in January 2003 he goes to Fort Hood.
Here he is at Fort Bragg in 2005.
And just to show he hates the Muslims too, he dropped by Fort Hood again (all of 30 miles from his Crawford ranch) after the 2009 shootings by the insane Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 and wounded several more on the base.
We could go on. His people cherrypicked the easiest crowds possible for him and the media studiously avoided noticing. Now we hear from Gates at the American Legion and that is also just taken in stride.
Well, I guess that's fair. My academic association isn't exactly bidding to hear from these warmongers, so they have to talk to friendlies. If I were destroying the American economy and sending Americans to kill and die for nothing more than the profiteering of the elites, I'd probably try to stick to the audiences where the propaganda had landed on fertile soil, where the commitment to war was unquestioned, and where anything other than slavish devotion to war rhetoric would be seen as treason.
So, who do they think they're foolin'? Sigh. Too many, sadly.

References
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/world/01military.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/08/defense_secretary_gates_hails.html?wprss=federal-eye