By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars
There are people who have only one idea, and they never talk of anything else. The person of one idea is like a child with a string. The child can toy with it crumple it up, twist it, make it into strange shapes and even stamp on it in frustration, but it will remain the same, dreary old string. You may be bubbling over with a sense of events or your impressions of life but your attempt to introduce, discuss, or dilate about your enthusiasms will not get a fair hearing To a person of one idea, your concerns are nothing but a rude intrusion, an upstart interruption, of their own fascinated absorption in their one idea.
We have all had some experience with a person of one idea. “Save the Whales,” or “Free South Africa,” or “Abortion,” or “Women’s Rights,” “Gay Pride,” or “The Middle East Peace Process” – there are any number of examples of those who became captive of a single issue. We also know that the person comfortably enounced in a single idea has the advocate’s temperament, and everything they think provides a pretext for their recital of that one, singular interest. Advocates are, above all things, debaters. They are single-track embodiment of will. They don’t really talk, but rather, like Luther, put up a thesis. Any diversion from that and, like a restive animal, they will sniff and stomp until they return to what really matters.
The Middle East Peace Process
The history of the Middle East Peace Process appears to closely resemble in its working the Myth of Sisyphus. Each day in the Middle East, earnest, honest, clear-headed people straggle horribly to push, heft, lift or drag the enormous stone up to the summit only to find it in their laps the next morning. The disputing parties of the Arabs and Israelis, the Arabs and the Jews, appear to lack any sound knowledge of the other’s institutions, traditions, history, and their sacred principles. They appear to forget that, in every dispute, there as to be a system of conciliation. Fair-dealing and straight-talking has to occur or there will be no durable progress. Things cannot be one-sided or any movement will freeze like ice.
Historically, the cause of the dispute began in 1948 when Israel’s victory established Israel as a sovereign state. This resulted in the expulsions of many Palestinians from their Muslim homes. The loss of Muslim sacred lands rubbed the Palestinians where they were very raw, but for Israel, the heart of the dispute was centered, not on 1948, but on the war of 1967, Israel’s third war, when a victorious Israel acquired and occupied the West Bank of Jordan along with East Jerusalem and other territories. The final status of the West Bank became the chief issue and remains so today.
There was a tiny inkling of a solution back then. In 1967, Israeli legal officials took the view that Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank had been illegal.Yet they maintained that it was not illegal for Israel to settle its citizens there, and there was a further refinement. Israeli legal experts said that although Israel’s settlements were allowed in the West Bank, the claims of Jordan to the ownership of the land were valid. Then, after more discussion, Israeli legal specialists then went further, saying that settling by Israel of the occupied land was a violation of internal law, especially the Fourth Geneva Convention. Of course, over time, the occupation still stood, with Israel and America pretending that Israel had defined the borders of the West Bank when in fact nothing like that had occurred.
As the years passed, the respect for standards of negotiating that were impartial, permanent and universal, were swept away as both sides quarreled about the national character, traditions, and cultural requirements of each other, while underneath it all lay the unspoken conviction of both that the other was lacking in virtue.
Recent Comments