28 June - 4 July 2001
Issue No.540
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 June - 4 July 2001 Issue No.540 |
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Wishing squares were circles
How can Israel sustain the unsustainable? Roger Owen * wonders
A few decades ago, when Marxism was still an important intellectual force, one of its key analytical tools was the notion of the unsustainable political "contradiction." This was often applied in a mechanical way that belied its origins in the subtleties of the Hegelian dialectic. Nevertheless, it still remains a useful means of analysing certain political positions and the strategies which sustain them.
A good example would be President Bush's attempt to persuade the Europeans of the validity of two contradictory arguments about defence and the environment. The problems he faced were nicely revealed by a question asked him by a journalist at his recent Madrid press conference: "You say the scientific evidence isn't strong enough to go forward with Kyoto. So then how do you justify your missile defence plan when there is even less scientific evidence that it will work?" According to the New York Times, "Mr Bush avoided answering the question directly." Of course he did. Such contradictory positions are only sustainable by bluff, evasion or a deliberate myopia which sees one contradictory policy as so much more important than the other.
I was thinking about all this when trying to make sense of the Israeli position towards the present stage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. One obvious contradiction stems from the fact that, whereas Mr Sharon promised the Israeli people security in the last election, all that he has actually been able to deliver is revenge. This fact can be covered up for a while, by bluster and the often-repeated assumption that, whatever happens, it is always the Palestinians who start it. There is some evidence, however, that some Israelis at least are beginning to realise that they are involved in a cycle of mutual violence and that security cannot be based simply on more and more killing.
A second contradiction revealed by the present Intifada is that you cannot have both separation and settlements. Whereas it might once have been possible to consider separating the bulk of the Israeli and Palestinian populations by a huge security fence, the presence of Israeli settlements and security roads deep inside Palestinian territory no longer makes this an option. So, the only alternative is either to remove some of the settlements or to spend a huge amount of military effort trying to defend everyone. Here too the contradictory logic of the Israeli position is beginning to become more and more apparent.
For the time being, however, a more obvious contradiction is manifest in the Israeli position towards Mr Arafat. At one level it is demonstrated by the belief that, from an Israeli position, you can both vilify him and still demand that he remain your "partner in peace." At a second, the logic seems to be that you should use what the Israelis call force in order to persuade him not to use what they call Palestinian violence. Israelis may believe this. But it doesn't make sense even to some of the most pro- Israeli newspaper columnists in Europe and America.
The only way to defend such contradictory policies is to talk about something else. Hence a great deal of effort by Israeli spokesmen has to go into the justification of the rightness of their actions and the condemnation of those of their opponents. Settlements are justified not only by an appeal to religion and history but also by a twisted interpretation of international law. And so, hey presto, they must remain regardless of the political and military problems they create. Palestinians deliberately attack Israeli civilians, but Israelis only kill Palestinian citizens by mistake. A state, but particularly, it seems, the Israeli state, must do anything and everything in its power to protect the lives of its citizens. All these separate and implausible statements are chanted like mantras in the face of potential critics to create a kind of smoke screen designed to hide the underlying political contradictions, which are too embarrassing to talk about.
Then there is perhaps the greatest contradiction of all, which is that Israel, with the most powerful army in the Middle East and enjoying the almost unqualified support of the one and only superpower, still cannot force the Palestinians to accept a solution to the conflict that they feel to be unfair and unjust. There are many reasons why this should be so, of course, but one of the most important is certainly the continued Israeli assumption that the Palestinians are some sort of external enemy, not neighbours with whom it is necessary to coexist on more or less the same piece of land. It follows that a huge amount of effort then has to be put into trying to convince outsiders, and perhaps even themselves, that the Palestinians are in fact innately hostile, a wholly different type of people from the Israelis, more full of hate, less attached to the sanctity of human life.
Members of the Likud Party have a special reason for obfuscating the real issues. They want to be able to hold Mr Arafat accountable to the commitments he made toward the post-Oslo negotiations. But in their hearts, they dislike Oslo itself and would be quite happy to see it finally disappear. By the same token they feel extremely uncomfortable having to negotiate with Mr Arafat himself. And yet they cannot quite bring themselves to ditch him and face all the uncertain consequences. The only way to live with squares which you would rather were circles is to talk about something else.
The appeal of the notion of a contradiction has always been that it reveals an unsustainable set of circumstances that, sooner or later, will have to change. Something has to give. In the world of the Marxists the result is then a new state of political development. In the world of the Israelis it remains to be seen how long they can sustain the unsustainable.
* The writer is professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University.
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