Glastongog

Introduction

2008-05-09T12:00:00.000+01:00

This geopolitical and conflict-transformation blog has largely been focused on the Middle East, but it has now moved into a more global phase, with a new tranche of articles I've been writing recently for The Bangladesh Today International in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The most recent posts come first - look at previous posts on the right to see earlier entries. Or print out this page to read the most recent articles on paper.

Here's a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye. Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes.

Thanks for being here, and I hope you get something beneficial from these articles - Palden

The Battle between Past and Future

2008-03-26T11:40:00.005Z

for The Bangladesh Today International
March 2008

This century we are faced with challenges which, if we fail to meet them, can cost us and our descendants highly. Costs and benefits are becoming increasingly relevant as deciding factors. Our capacity to waste, to support outmoded ways of doing things and to carry on with 'business as usual' is diminishing rapidly. Wider global issues are bearing down more heavily on us, imposing their own costs and exposing weaknesses in all human systems and societies.

When I was a student radical at LSE in London in the late 1960s, most people didn't know much about the issues we were bringing to the public domain – about human wrongs, human rights, the costs of war, pesticides and pollution, social and economic inequalities, resource depletion, political abuses, faceless societies and a host of other interrelated issues.

But in the decades since, this unawareness has changed. Today everyone, educated or illiterate, city-dwelling or living on the land, has a rough picture of what's going on, drawn from direct experience and commonsense. Everyone can see the smog, or has been hit by climatic extremes or visible changes affecting our daily lives and communities – the details vary, but the basic message is similar worldwide.

A sharp-eyed, questioning 17 year-old is hard-pressed to find good answers about the state of the world: it doesn't really make sense. It's a scary equation of what economists call 'diminishing returns', where the price of continuing doing something increasingly outstrips the benefits gained from it. Forty years ago, people like me harped on about the price our children's children would pay, and today the price-paying is advancing, and costs are rising. Not just financial, but human, social, ecological and spiritual costs.

At times it's all very discouraging. It's as if we're heading for a deadly shoot-out between the past and the future, and their respective priorities and game-plans. If we had started on these questions when they were first raised some forty years ago, there might have been more of a negotiation rather than a fight. But past and future speak different languages and see things in different ways.

The future brandishes weapons such as typhoons, market falls, toxic disasters, epidemics or the downfalls of the high-and-mighty, while the past engages in defensive rear-guard actions, fighting its ground to maintain 'normality' and 'stability'. Each works from a very different script. It's a global-scale conflict of the world against itself. The cost-curves, in loss of natural resources, size of cities, rising global temperatures, demographics, conflict, waste, nuclear proliferation and basic sanity, are still rising, and this is unlikely to stop.

Past and future agendas also get manipulated, obscured and complexified – an analysis-paralysis in which we risk losing track of what really needs to happen. Let's take an example from Afghanistan. Noble indeed is the aim of making peace in a troubled country such as this. But NATO and the West, seeing Afghanistan as a breeding-ground for terrorism and narcotics, have fallen into the age-old trap of believing that peace can be forged militarily, by beating the enemy.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and al Qa'eda have fallen into another trap, believing that anything that harms their enemy is good – this can include killing and scaring ordinary Afghans and letting the opium trade grow to enormous proportions, against their very own Muslim principles. Both sides assert that they have Afghans' interests at heart, but actions speak louder than words, and neither really behave like bringers of peace and justice, however these might be defined. Neither is really anxious to fulfil the needs of Afghans themselves.

This situation is bound up with the past. The position of the Taliban and al Qa'eda, who see Afghanistan as a bastion of resistance to the insidious historic influence of the West, is being overtaken by shifts of a larger kind. The 21st century world is not going to be Western-dominated, and fundamentalists might do well to look at Beijing or Dubai, not New York City, as targets for their disapproval and wrath.

Meanwhile, the West, still dominated by American thinking and preoccupation with endless wars on terror and drugs, fails to see how its position is also being overtaken by events. NATO invaded Afghanistan to give it democracy and modernity and to free the world of terrorists, yet the biggest single outcome achieved so far has been to stimulate the opium trade.

Western doctrine of recent decades advocates economic growth, business and free trade as the solution to all ills. So an Afghan farmer looks at ways of making money, does his calculations and plants opium. This helps his family and village – it's a product with a reliable market, high value and good returns. It makes him vulnerable to pressures from warlords and desperadoes but, if he grew other crops, he'd then get tax-collectors and government inspectors, so the difference is marginal.

Westerners believe in eliminating opium crops – ideally by spraying, a very blunt weapon. But the negative 'hearts and minds' effect of spraying and crop-destruction, at times poisoning villagers and ruining land, is counterproductive – NATO's need to get Afghans on its side outweighs its need to deal with drugs. Yet opium production feeds socially-destructive heroin addiction in the West and funds the very terrorists and warlords NATO is trying to control. So NATO's strategy in Afghanistan is fundamentally flawed.

Meanwhile, the Taliban's own battle includes permitting the drugs trade, making deals with drug barons and creaming off the rewards, undermining the very moral stance it originally grew strong on in the 1990s. The Taliban are no longer really viable as liberators from foreign oppression, and foreign troops are no longer viable as liberators from the warlords, the Taliban and Pashtun dominance in Afghan affairs. Both sides charge their price. All this makes ordinary villagers wonder who is on their side, or whether anything at all makes sense. So they keep their heads down, waiting to see who comes out on top, and which set of rules they are next to comply with.

Then, someone in the West thinks sensibly, for once. Westerners, rather addicted to healthcare and longevity, consume vast amounts of painkillers and anti-depressants, and there is a global shortage of opiates to supply this need. So why not legitimise opium-growers, buy up their crops, relieve pharmaceutical shortages, let Afghan farmers make some money and get them on the West's side? Sounds logical, but there's a problem.

This suggestion comes up against vested interests and old mindsets. The War against Drugs has been America's longest war – a war of disinformation, aggression, double-standards and prohibition. It has had the effect of stimulating organised crime and smuggling by creating a high-value black-market product such as heroin, when previously the product was legal, unrefined, less profitable and not much used in the West except in medicines or by artists, poets and bohemians. For the last 50 years heroin has become a socially-destructive element in Western society, brought about partially by its prohibition – heroin was first made in USA, around the time that opium was first made illegal around 1920. It also happens that the vast funds generated in smuggling heroin and other drugs can quietly be reaped for other uses – so there are now hidden financial interests who prefer the trade to continue.

The plan to buy Afghan opium thus exposes a Western cultural conflict between the Christian-based moral imperative to clean up society through eliminating drug-taking, and the amoral capitalist principle that anything that makes money is good. It reveals other nasty issues too. This policy has criminalised many young Westerners without resulting in a significant clean-up. It turned innocuous drug use before the 1960s into larger-scale drug abuse, carried out by everyone from streetwise teenagers smoking crack to top executives snorting cocaine. The most socially-destructive of all drugs, alcohol, has meanwhile remained legal and approved – there's money in it, and alcohol is a cultural prop helping drown out the heartless insensitivities of Western society.

Worse, setting up the cops-and-robbers game of prohibition has professionalised the drugs trade, concentrating power and riches in few hands and making billions available in unaccounted cash. The drugs trade has funded the weapons trade, corruption and organised crime, generating vast wealth for some. Organised crime conceals its billions in offshore banks, making massive, unaccounted black funds available in the banking system to anybody who trades in billions. Very useful. Organised crime indeed has a place in the ecology of capitalism, as long as it behaves itself.

In the early 1990s, Chechen crime-clans had amassed such massive financial reserves that they disturbed the delicate balance of global organised crime, thitherto the domain of mafias, Triads, Colombians and sundry freebooters. The Chechens got rich from crime during the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. By 1994 Boris Yeltsin was heavily and quietly leant upon by the West to cut the Chechens down to size – in return for favours he needed. Russia's war on the Chechens was unwinnable, but winning wasn't the point – the Chechens just needed reducing. Even Russia's own oligarch-mafiosi were threatened by turf-wars with the Chechens in Moscow. So the Chechen wars just had to happen. It kept a cosy set of international arrangements intact.

Back to Afghanistan. To preserve the status quo, a creative solution to the Afghan impasse cannot really be entertained. Besides, it suits all those who promote the mindset of international conflict to keep the conflict going. Nowadays, a key driving force behind conflict is the arms industry itself, which wins whichever side it supplies. It has a vested interest in keeping weapons consumption, arms races and the politics of war-readiness alive. Afghanistan is one of the world's great dumping-grounds, where hardship and despair are dropped on it from far away – in all honesty, to enable others elsewhere to avoid facing their own painful truths. Whether or not this dumping is intentional, it happens.

We could dig deeper, lifting other carpets. We could look at modern people's aversion to pain, giving Big Pharma the power to sell profitable medical products to captive markets – hospital clients – who unquestioningly pay billions for them. We could look at foreign policies which advocate eliminating perceived evils rather than healing their root-causes. We could look at the conflict industry, which strives to keep war high on the agenda, persuading people to permit high military spending and the influence of military-industrial interests in politics and society. We could look at the refusal of faiths and belief systems to accept and respect one another, as well as the habitual tendency of nations to look on other nations as a threat against which they must defend themselves. These are all old-think, part of the problem, not the solution.

So many of the world's major problems are stoked up by age-old assumptions, interests and beliefs which permit little or no movement or fundamental change, because change upsets vested interests. To an extent, we all play a part in this, as perpetrators, accomplices or victims – then we wring our hands at the regrettable fixity and insanity of it all.

This cannot continue, since reality itself is shifting its baseline. The costs of all this are rising. The world currently works on the basis that unrestrained economic growth is A Good and Necessary Thing – the 1980s 'Washington Agenda' – yet economic growth benefits the prosperous more than the poor, and it's not growth but distribution of resources and wealth that is the real issue.

Meanwhile, wider considerations are increasingly bearing down on us, in every department of life. Life on Earth, for rich and poor alike, is coming into question. Today, in 2008, we are already in a climatic, demographic, economic, social and spiritual crisis worldwide and, tragically, we still delude ourselves and deny that it's happening. But it is.

We habitually believe that the customary ways, situations and ideas of the past represent the only possible route to follow. But when we're forced to look ahead at the dangers of the coming decades – such as the disappearance under water of low-lying coastal areas, of which Bangladesh has more than a fair share – the future starts affecting the present far more strongly.

Increasingly, we're being forced to make the future the basis of our current calculations. We face a sharp-edged dilemma: the solutions needed for dealing with the future are heading for a collision with the ways of the past. The future demands a serious reassessment of what is deemed important and practical. If we don't make such reassessments, crises screech along to force the issue and expose systemic weaknesses.

Yes, chemical fertilisation of land, increasing crop yields and profits in the short term, makes sense in terms of the agenda of the past. But death of fish-stocks and ecosystems, decline in the land's natural water-absorption properties, pollution of water and the chemical degradation of food stocks, with the social and political implications of all these, start red lights flashing and alarm bells ringing.

This demands quite an objective cost-benefit analysis. From a purely selfish viewpoint, if businessmen wish to profit by selling to markets, they need to have people living decent lives to form such markets and consume their products. If governments wish to stay in power, ordinary people need to feel their interests are genuinely served – whether or not they have democracy.

But this isn't the biggest question. The biggest question concerns the sustainability and quality of human life in decades to come, and the global-scale rebuilding of the natural environment and of new social, economic and technological systems to work in greater harmony with it. Today, we're caught in a contradiction: it is in our interests to change, but we are not yet willing to change fundamentally. The consequences of this paradox fall not just on Afghans.

We're heading for something, some sort of crunch in which we all are asked a simple question. What is most important – short-term self-interest or the longterm collective good? This isn't a voting matter: when we vote, we usually vote for money-in-pockets and self-interest, not for wisdom and our grandchildren's welfare. It's a far more fundamental choice: it's para-political, overriding our former concepts of belonging to a culture, class, clan, faith, nationality, gender or allegiance, and bypassing former concepts of where our interests best lie.

It's an option-less referendum. We all know what self-interest does, while the 'collective good' option is yet to be properly tested. If existing systems worked well, we would have less of a planetary problem today. But they don't work well, in the context of the emergent future. This means systemic change is needed. Not like old-style socialism, or any other -ism: we're talking about care for and sensitivity to the needs of people and nature and the need to fit fruitfully within our planet's constraining parameters.

Perhaps we need to get those coins and banknotes out of our pockets, look hard at them, and decide how important they really are, since they don't actually represent the true and full costs and benefits we need to reckon into the future. If the past prevails over the future, even our deepest, most valued traditions are likely to be eliminated. Paradoxically, if we greet the future and its demands more openly, the past might be better preserved.

The International Community

2008-02-15T10:10:00.006Z

for The Bangladesh Today International
February 2008

The West – first Europe, then America – has dominated the world agenda for the last two to four centuries. In the 20th century, between the October Revolution and the Fall of the Wall, the world was polarised into two main blocs – the 'free' West and the (by implication) unfree Socialist bloc, and everyone else was obliged to align with one or the other. Then came the end of the Soviet Union and the conversion of China from Maoism to capitalism.

Something else started. In the 1990s, USA took charge as the 'global policeman', big investor and dominant power, without realising that it was running mainly on momentum and was already in historic decline. The main contribution of George Bush has been to make it a harder landing, but he has not caused, neither can he nor any US president stop, this inevitable decline. He is a symptom of it – and his successor will be too.

It is happening because the 'new idea' that makes a culture or nation great sooner or later becomes an old idea, and someone else overtakes on the outside with another 'new idea'. USA's peak was in the 1950s-70s, and by the 1990s its creativity was becoming formulaic and its energy was driven increasingly by addiction, not ambition. With that of America, the leadership, initiative and authority of the 'developed world' is deflating too. It was a carbon-based, resource-gulping, military and materialistic civilisation, and its time is passing.

Meanwhile the momentum and influence of new powers is growing. The cards are getting re-shuffled in international relations. This is leading to a tectonic shift in the power-geometry of the world, and we're in its early stages. We're faced with the decline of the West and of 'superpower geometry'. It is becoming 'multi-polar'. This is big. It leads us to a Very Big Question.

The issue is global governance. The logical step would be a single over-arching world organisation. But the history of colonialism, the Cold War and USA's recent dominance have, in a sense, blocked the prospect of establishing global governance in a centralised or unified way. The United Nations might have become the basis for such governance, but it has so much been the plaything of dominant powers, hamstrung by the precedence of national over global interests and tainted by earlier dilemmas and errors, that this possibility is pretty much lost. At best UN can coordinate nations, but it cannot act on its own behalf with full authority – nations are still able to disagree and do more or less what they want.

What is quietly taking shape instead is a pattern of roughly equal blocs or potential unions covering the main 'tectonic plates' of today's world. Already in existence are China, USA, EU and Russia, while Latin America, black Africa, the Arab world, South, Southeast and Central Asia are making tentative steps – and then there are gaps and border areas to sort out.

This is an awkward transition for which the European Union provides a model, founded as it was on a step-by-step basis over the decades. Yet the action is happening not in Europe, but in the so-called 'developing world'. There are many frictions, complications and growth-pains involved. What the developing world is taking on is far more than economic growth and development: it is taking on the big issues of the 21st century.

There's a lot of talk about the 'international community', but it's not clear what this means. There is nevertheless a pressing need for a fully functional international community, because the biggest challenges we face, from financial systems to resources to population to climate, are global, and no superpower names the game any more. Therefore, international agreement and cooperation are needed on a growing scale. It needs to deliver results – this is an urgent, practical need, increasing each year, driven by a succession of crises.

But also, everyone wants to be an exception. The world's nations like to be internationalist when it suits them, and they become detractors when things get tricky, demanding or costly, or when national sovereignty is felt to be challenged. So the 'international community' is rather dysfunctional, and tolerated as long as it doesn't dig too deep.

This is why we're surreptitiously shifting toward 'tectonic plates'. Around ten blocs who, between them, co-determine the global game, are theoretically more workable than a gaggle of nearly 200 varied and unequally-scaled nations. A multi-polar geometry is a kind of resolution of the dilemma between national and global priorities. If, that is, it succeeds.

Its success will lie in the overall balance of the multi-polar system, and of sensible relations between blocs. Also, each bloc will need the internal agreement of its own peoples. At present, Europeans have mixed feelings toward the EU: they love some aspects of it, dislike others, and the biggest issue is actually lack of public interest. To people worldwide, Europeans are Europeans, but Europeans think of themselves as French, Danes, Czechs and Greeks.

A multi-polar system will involve jostling and power struggles, intercultural grating, differences of principle and priority, crunch points and times of disarray. So this won't be easy, and the transition over the coming decades will have painful and even dangerous moments. But the transition has started. The process answers a real need: weather events, diseases, migration, money and the actions of people do not stop at borders. Sovereignty is already a questionable notion when Mitsubishis cover the world, but it is still an emotional and historic issue.

Are we serious about this 'international community'? If we are, we'd better get on with serious community-building. One thing about communities is that we all become neighbours, obliged to live and work with each other. This has a deep effect – we all start affecting and influencing one another much more. It involves getting along with people we might not like and people we have past history with. You know, it's Americans with Iranians, Vietnamese with Chinese, Israelis with Islamists, religious with secular people, townies with farmers, old with young – Us with Them.

This involves going through a process and coming to a settlement, a big arrangement to which all members can sufficiently agree. It needs to happen at the conference table and at street and forest level. If we are to succeed in the challenges ahead, it will be because basic agreement and cooperation will have been achieved, involving all of the world's people without exception – a kind of consensus and mobilisation.

The really knotty issue is that everyone must feel willing to be members, and understand why, in terms both of their own and wider interests. We need to be willing to set aside old conflicts and situations to prioritise overriding global issues. Otherwise, the global issues we face will be hamstrung, delayed or blocked, and the consequences will hit us all, equally. We'll all go down together.

Community-building is a difficult thing. It involves a truth-process, a clearing of past ills that block progress. Everyone has to join of their own free-will, otherwise there will be perpetual drag-factors at work – detractors, exceptionalists, nit-pickers, resisters and, of course, dominators who think they know best. If drag-factors prevail, the community becomes dysfunctional, locked in perpetual conflict, lost in disarray or stuck with a case of mutually-assured deterrence and inaction. Actually, there is little choice. In a community process, it's not permissible to walk out. Everyone must stay with the process and agree to do so because, with or without them, the process must continue, and they inevitably re-join.

It's not advisable for big guys – China, India, EU, USA – to dominate the agenda unless perhaps they genuinely understand and articulate the needs and priorities of the whole community. Unlikely. The West, having set in motion the 'development model' that is now giving us planet-wide climatic and environmental problems, now lectures the rest of the world about what should be done – and, in a sense, the world is right to push back, and the West is also right to argue its case. But there is a serious job to be done, using all means that are available, and it must be done somehow. The world cannot afford to delay.

Who will facilitate this community-building process? The UN? Some countries have legitimate distrust of the UN's impartiality and competence. But it's the only genuinely international body we have. Are we going to create another? Is there time? Would it make things different? Or do we need to give UN the necessary power, finance, people, transport planes and capacity to interfere, when necessary, in nations' private affairs? If we don't take such a step, then we will need to meet global needs by multilateral cooperation, country by country, which will bring up equally large questions, many weaknesses and lots of complexity.

What about the grievances of the past? Countries have been raped for their slaves, cocoa, oil and strategic placement. People have been marched over by foreign armies. The world is stacked with old arguments that go back centuries, even millennia. Plenty of countries have an axe to grind, and internal stresses too. Unfortunately, we cannot just shrug shoulders and set these things aside. Old resentments and social pain are passed through the generations on a deep level. So community-building involves a rather profound, delicate, emotional truth-process, even a catharsis. And this, of course, is tricky.

Catharsis – emotional release – involves bringing old issues up and out. Without it, they will lurk in hidden recesses, awaiting touchy moments when a situation arises to remind us of something that shouldn't have happened before. Then they can explode. When such touchy moments arise, they not only complicate or obstruct things, but they create new damage, with new generations of hurt people, new wrecked landscapes and new tangles arising from them. The Israeli bombing of South Lebanon in 2006 was a good example of an emotionally-charged situation where the Israeli response, for whatever reason, far exceeded need or wisdom – and this was not just an isolated case. We cannot afford this – time is too short. So we must be brave.

We have to bring out the old hurts and resentments without letting them go too far. Truths do have to be said. Not only the legitimate truths of victims – of Vietnamese toward Americans, Serbs toward Germans, Uighurs towards Chinese or indigenous peoples toward imperialists – but also the truths of victors, oppressors and accomplices. The British became oppressors partially because they themselves, way back, had been invaded four times. Han Chinese became overlords partially because of the ravages of Mongols that stirred them into action. Imperialism and power-projection are fight-back strategies staged, tragically, by former victims. So tragedy cuts all ways – we are all humans who suffer the predicament of being alive in the situation we find ourselves in.

This is the realisation that bonds a community: we're all in the same boat, and we'd better behave ourselves, otherwise the boat sinks and we all drown. Men and women, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, in the 21st century we share a predicament. We are all equally threatened with major global challenges, and the only way to get a grip on the situation is to act together. This requires self-discipline, mutual understanding, forgiveness and truth. If we fail apply such qualities to ourselves, expecting others to do it first, then we might as well stop talking about an international community.

So we'd better get on with the community-building process. Not just the mandarins at the international conferences, but you and me too. This concerns changing our attitudes and behaviour. Making friends with strangers, enemies and outsiders is necessary and sensible. Sharing and cooperation is the new economics. Redefining our personal, clan and national interests is necessary, because self-interest is increasingly costly and suicidal. The extremists of today are the moderates of tomorrow. The problems of today are the hidden blessings of the future, if we will but see them differently.

This involves bringing up awkward truths, to get them out of the way. Not conflict, but reconciliation. Declaring an end to the past and its arguments. Not an easy or simple thing. This happens by being willing to go through a process, with a far-sighted determination to come out the other side, to get somewhere. We need to speak our truths without blame or accusation, share our pain without hurting others afresh, and share our strengths without excluding the stranger at our door. This sounds idealistic and fancy, but it's pragmatic and realistic now and in coming decades. If we don't hang together, we simply hang separately.

Which is why the international community just has to happen. It's why North Koreans, Iranians, Israelis, Cubans and, yes, now Americans, have to be brought in from the cold. If we cannot join hands and work together as a global team of billions, we go down. We betray our grandchildren, we hurt Allah, we burn up our planetary home, and the shame will be ours, with no one else to blame.

So, united nations, here we come. If, that is, the world will permit it. My nation and sub-group, your nation and sub-group – still relevant, but now within a much wider context. We're all God's little children, however we describe it. We have a job to do, building a new culture and civilisation, a new humanity occupying one wee planet on the edge of a provincial galaxy. If we don't, all of human history could come to little or nothing. This is the importance of the international community, and the clock is ticking.

Peering into the Future

2008-01-04T20:54:00.002Z

An article for The Bangladesh Today
Late December 2007

The 20th Century didn’t really start until World War One broke out in 1914. The century was characterised by ‘developed world’ domination, the successor to 19th Century colonialism. We saw motor cars, planes, plastics, electronics, gizmos, radio, TV and film. There was a struggle between capitalism, fascism and socialism which fascism lost and capitalism eventually won – though it didn’t look like this at first. We saw globalisation, transnational corporations, vast population growth, over-consumption by some and overwork by most. Engines, rotors, pipes, wires and transmitters went everywhere. Vast wars and crises arose, killing people in millions. Mega-cities spread like fungus.

All of these tendencies developed from the 1880s onwards, but it took until the Great War for people to see what was happening. The Great War represented an enormous failure to accept the future: aristocratic ruling classes strove to hold power in the face of a rising tide of socialism, populism, mass culture, democracy and the new upstarts, America and Russia. The old order lost. Its time was done. A new, industrialised, totalitarian world replaced it, driven by a nomenklatura of bosses, politicians, shareholders, executives and experts, all dressed in suits.

Why this lecture in recent history? Well, we’re at it again. Some historians call the period 1914-1989 ‘the Short 20th Century’, recognising that a new agenda was starting in the 1990s. One historian even prematurely named 1989 ‘the end of history’, but he got it wrong. This was partially ideological and partially because, when standing on the edge of a threshold, it is difficult to visualise what comes next. Here we are, entering 2008 – in the Western dating system, at least – yet we haven’t entered the 21st Century. Really entered it. We’re still looking at life in past terms. If truth be known, we’re scared to look squarely at the future. It’s big.

We’re aware something else is kicking in, and we all know most of the issues, but we haven’t put them together into a Big Picture – what we could call a 21st Century Agenda. A century ago, we had a new Big Idea on the table, called socialism. But that was an ideology, conceived by a small number of individuals. Today, there are bazillions of ideas flying around, but the Big Picture hasn’t crystallised. But it is now revealing itself, thanks mainly to pretty tough ‘facts on the ground’. What the world is faced with today is not a Big Idea but a Big Dilemma.

Here we are, living out our lives, running a movie based in the past, as if rapid economic growth of the current kind had no consequences. The West is trying, at all costs, to maintain the status quo and keep its own best interests at the top of the world agenda. Enforced either by ‘shock and awe’, background manoeuvring or incentive, the rest of the world has tended thus far to fall into line, but this is disintegrating and we’re entering new territory.

The idea of a ‘developing world’, created by ‘developed’ nations, implies that development means following in their footsteps. Yes, buy our chainsaws, jeeps, tanks and burgers, and you too can be developed – and fat and unhappy, just like us! Few mention that, for one person to get rich, a hundred have to get poor. Besides, the idea that everyone can get rich and ‘developed’ is a recipe for planetary disaster.

Besides, it’s not the developing world – it’s the Majority World. The former third world is now increasingly setting the agenda. After colonialism and client-status, having adopted many aspects of the West’s provenance, something new is brewing. It’s not just a matter of copying and adoption, but one of getting to grips with issues the West cannot face, and which to a large extent, the West set in motion. The West is terribly stuck in its ways and feeling insecure.
The core difference between the majority world and the developed world is one of motivation.

For the majority world the agenda is, “Things just have to get better, and we’re going to make it so, whatever it takes”. For the developed world it is, “Things are fine as they are (with just a few problems), and change is welcome as long as nothing actually changes”. The first motivates action and progress, and the second looks backward and leads nowhere. The West has lost the plot – it is vision-less. It had an opportunity to change fundamentally in the 1960s-70s, and missed it.

This isn’t a simple transfer of power and wealth from one part of the world to another, or a re-balancing of global inequities. We stand at a juncture much bigger than this. Globalisation is digging deeper, and the Big Dilemma the world faces is global in extent. This changes sovereign states into interdependent world provinces, whether we like it or legislate for it, or not. The big issue is the international community, planetary ecosystems and climate, global intercultural relations, the living conditions of the world’s people, and a host of other related issues we all know of by now.

Resolving our planetary dilemma isn’t just a matter of tweaking, funding, regulating, developing and rearranging existing things, or even wind-farms and solar panels. It involves a completely new world-view anchored in the future. We need to visualise the far future and count back from there. Arguably, one hidden meaning of today’s major events is that the future is asserting an increasing influence on the present. We’re dealing with the consequences of the past, and the damage done to nature and humanity, but it concerns our future survival. If we don’t face this, life everywhere will become ever more unpleasant and intolerable in coming decades. Everyone is involved, without exception – especially the rich.

This planetary situation is very complex, and each country has its own version of it, with its own versions of the internal tensions and crises it brings up. The nub of the matter is global and can be resolved only through effective international decisions, action and mobilisation. All nations now have a more dramatic need for change than they acknowledge. No nation wishes to change first, and all nations must do it together. This is at least talked about but still not done – the recent Bali conference on climate change was woefully inadequate in outcome when compared with the scale of the problem and the lateness of the day.

Economic growth and activity as we do it today is incompatible with eco-sustainability, human welfare and survival. This hasn’t been accepted yet, but it’s coming. There are no Big Ideas to which all the world can agree, to sort us out. Even the dominant superpower and creative leader of the last fifty years, America, is itself lost, foundering, floundering and devoid of truly valuable strategies. We’re left with two main possibilities: the international community, such as it is, and the world’s people.

The international community is going through an anxious community-building process. This involves facing uncomfortable issues and dealing with new situations, while constrained by old institutions and mechanisms. Driven by necessity, the community-building process is approaching a critical point in which all nations must give up some of their independence. It’s not just a matter of shouting at America and the West, or them shouting back. It’s a matter of joining together to resolve differences and problems in utterly new ways. It requires entirely new thinking: not so much a new Big Idea as a new method for facing facts and resolving crises.

Scientists can crunch vast quantities of data to create climate models, but simple farmers in Uzbekistan and Bolivia understand a lot too. They see what is happening in some respects more clearly. Especially when it washes away your village and kills your family. One of the world’s big problems is that its governments and institutions have lost touch with real life quite significantly, and their legitimacy is in question. One of the big problems for ordinary people is that we are not practised in mass action without due leadership. But our leaderships are not really up to the task: when the USSR went through perestroika, the leaderships had created the problem and were part of it, not of the solution. Governments come to power to protect countries and their elites, pump economies and keep people’s narrower aims satisfied, not to save the planet or give power to foreigners.

What is shaping up is an enormous getting-real process. Globally, in a hundred years, we need to have resolved the 21st Century’s agenda points. We have to. What is this agenda? It is not an end in itself, but a means by which a new kind of planetary civilisation might come about. Sounds like sci-fi, this, but stay with it, for this is the way we are going. Here’s the agenda, roughly speaking, as far as I can describe it.

- By the end of the century our societies need to be significantly happier, safer, friendlier, more supportive and inclusive.

- We need to have created ecologically sustainable societies which not only avoid harming and depleting nature, but also engage in its enhancement and the building up of the world’s natural capital and resources.

- World ecosystems and climate need to achieve a new equilibrium under a proportioned human management which works on the basis of humans as guests, not owners.

- The world’s cultures, social and ethnic groups need to appreciate and enhance their distinctions while acting on a basis of partnership and commonality – we’re all in the same boat.

- The global economy needs to be sufficiently equitable and sustainable, regarding both human conditions and natural resources, to eliminate dire need, excesses of poverty and wealth and to give all people a fair chance.

- Our civilisation – our cities, technologies and life-means – needs much rebuilding, to accommodate and reflect the other priorities outlined here.

- Governance and social decision-making systems need to reflect not vested interests but the general and planetary good.

- Country and city need to coexist without urban needs and priorities overwhelming country ways, since simpler, rural societies are the keepers of secrets and life-ways important to all of us.

- Population-growth and demographics need at least to have stabilised.

- An emotional clearing- and healing-process of historic hurts, social guilt, dissonance and degeneration needs to be in progress – addressing the spirits and psychology of society.

- A process of spiritual, creative and cultural health needs to pervade our societies anew.

This list gives an idea of what we’re looking at. Before you say, “Well, fine, but I can’t see it happening”, just remember that, a century ago, computers, supermarkets and jumbo-jets weren’t imaginable either. In those days, folk from my country, Britain, ruled your country, Bangladesh, then part of the Raj. Now, three generations of folk from your country have lived in mine, most counting themselves as Brits and many serving in our great national institutions. Things change more than we can foresee. And necessity is the mother of invention.

Today we’re faced with a Big One, and the above-stated objectives are no longer wishful thinking or ideological. They are simply the likely results of what we will have gone through during this century, by necessity, since our welfare and survival are at stake. This hits everyone, rich and poor alike, with levelling implications. There are sufficient wealth and resources in the world, but they are badly distributed, wasted, utilised, exhausted and ruined.

At present, the critical factor seems to be climate change, bringing weather extremes, ecological and social changes. Other criticals hide behind this. The consequences and side-effects of our current way of life are enormous. Surmounting them is a bigger challenge than we prefer to acknowledge. It requires a social and economic mobilisation and quantum shift. In earlier times we have done this during wars. Yet such a mobilisation, this time, could render wars obsolete because, to win this battle, we need to work with, not against, each other. Besides, any victor in a 21st Century war is a loser anyway, because the problem is planetary.

In Britain, in 1940-42, our society and economy were transformed in just two years, from a capitalist to a command economy in which women and old people took over agriculture and production, children were shipped out of cities, men went abroad, everyone depended on each other, fairness of distribution of food and resources was paramount, people worked and played hard, and it worked. Today’s Brits look back on this time as one of national breakthrough and social triumph. Precedents such as this exist for us to refer to. But it required a big national decision, made at the top and the bottom of society, to pull through together. There was resistance at first. But when people saw the price of not doing it, things changed fast.

In our time, we approach a similar situation, but bigger. The price of not changing is overtaking the price of changing. It could be easier if we were faced with an alien invasion, because we’re used to facing external threats. But this threat comes from inside, from us, and only we can address it, through a radical change of behaviour in all areas of life everywhere.

And this is a strange Gift of God. Our Big Dilemma forces changes we needed to make anyway. We have failed to do it through wisdom and choice, so we’re now facing shock and awe of a kind that makes the American version look weak. Humans get activated and mobilised by crisis. We might have six billion mouths to feed, but we’ve got the same number of pairs of hands to do it with.

This is a taste of the 21st Century agenda. Our great-grandchildren will know the outcome, but the crunch period is in the next half-century. In a century from now, we could have a new, planet-wide civilisation of which none of us can conceive at present – though its principles are visible. To get there, we’ll need to prioritise the future over the past. The gift lies in the fact that we have no alternative but to work together and to face things we have needed to face for a long time. In a manner of speaking, this is the achievement of a new kind of umma or human community, yet far beyond the confines of the Muslim world, and for entirely practical reasons. The biggest challenge in the 21st Century is not ecological: it is for everyone to become friends – and this way, we’ll sort out the rest. That’s a quantum shift.

Legitimacy

2008-01-04T20:41:00.000Z

An article for The Bangladesh Today
November 2007

Legitimacy is one of the emergent big issues of our time. In business, it is called ‘confidence’. Although ‘legitimacy’ usually means legality and conformity with existing standards or tradition, the modern term has deeper and wider implications. It pertains to all people in positions of power, in governmental, corporate, social, NGO, international, cultural and religious arenas.

Nowadays, legitimacy is based increasingly on merit and results: an office-holder is widely accepted to be a deserving, competent, representative and supportable holder of power – or not, as the case may be – on the basis of what they do. On occasions, currents of public feeling can even bestow legitimacy, thus power, on people out of office, who act as a lightning-rod for public trust and confidence – Lech Walesa of Poland and Nelson Mandela of South Africa experienced this, both outsiders who became presidents.

The conferral of legitimacy arises from popular perception and the power of events and circumstance. The key issue is how well those in positions of responsibility handle events, especially during defining moments. Their capacity to unite people is also crucial – not by carrots and sticks but by earning support. They’re accountable to the judgement of history, to mysterious shifts of human discernment and the constraints of facts and events beyond their control.

Former French president Georges Pompidou once said: “A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of a nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service”. This sheds light on what imperial Chinese called the ‘Mandate of Heaven’. Chinese tradition saw the emperor as a middleman between the Ways of Heaven (or the Will of God) and the fortunes of the land and people. Confucius advised that, if the emperor no longer served the Mandate of Heaven, he should be obliged to change or be deposed. Heaven and Earth need to be in harmony and, without such resonance, disaster strikes – heaven, people or evolving facts force the necessary adjustments, and emperors become paper tigers.

This isn’t yet another incantation of the virtues of democracy or the need for all countries slavishly to adopt it. The world’s ‘mature democracies’ suffer problems of legitimacy too. Voters elect governments for strange reasons, including self-interest, short-termism, gullibility and clannish allegiances, with only periodic bursts of popular clarity or wisdom. Electoral systems and quirky constitutions frequently yield skewed results, influenced by media, spin-doctors, vested interests and money. Political parties often fail to represent people’s needs, resembling managerial teams more than ethical alternatives. The true, overall, longterm national interest and social contract is rarely discussed. Big issues are swept under the carpet and, “if democracy ever really changed anything, they’d make it illegal”.

Once a government enters office, it receives a quiet lecture about what it may or may not do. In truth, democratic nations’ evangelic claims about the rightness of democracy often conceal or betray its very weakness: it is a neat way of disguising where power really lies. Many people in democratic countries know by experience that elections don’t change much, but they keep on getting psyched up for the next election, continuing to hope the next government will be different. It rarely is, and short memories bury the deeper lesson to be learned from this.

So democracy is not necessarily the big answer. To quote Winston Churchill in 1947, “Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried”.

Jimmy Carter, now an elder, recently said that he had achieved far more as an ex-president than when he was in office. This says something about the nature of power, influence and legitimacy.

Nevertheless, democracy theoretically enshrines two important principles. First, when people need to express a view, their voice needs to be heard. Second, when the power-structure is perceived fundamentally to fail the needs of the people or the challenges of events, people need to be able to influence or change that power-structure. As Confucius advised.

Even here, democracies fail. In my own country, Britain, the biggest popular demonstrations in our history opposed invading Iraq in 2003. Not only did the government disagree with and ignore the message but also, later, the people voted to return that government to power. This was largely because the other party had a bad reputation and wasn’t a credible alternative. But is this democracy working well?

So we arrive at a key issue. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what power system exists in a country. What matters is the approach taken by those in power, their heart, their capacity to read the signals and interpret the spirit of the time. How good are their decisions and how much do they serve the nation? Nowadays this embraces the natural environment and wider world too. It’s a tall order, but it’s still what’s needed. The nub of the matter is motivation and integrity.

Legitimacy is strange, undefined, evasive and immeasurable. Largely perceptual, it feeds mysteriously on events handled and actions taken. It is intimately connected with the inherent sub-stratum of healthy, creative vibrancy in any society. When a society is unwell, everyone knows it, somewhere in their being, even when it is unarticulated. Things just don’t work out right, and a society becomes susceptible to challenge and duress. This can arise from nature (weather extremes, earthquakes, bad harvests), other countries and peoples (wars, trade imbalances or cultural infiltration) or from internal sources (power battles, economic conditions, social stresses or public feelings).

Here we come to the Ways of Heaven and the Will of God. A nation or people could be looked on as a psychological entity and, like an individual, its psyche is made up of a number of sub-personalities, each with their natures, preferences, issues and conflicts. These sub-personalities sometimes cooperate, sometimes accommodate and sometimes clash, pulling a nation this way or that. The nation’s ego, its power structure, tries to train and control the nation’s disparate elements. The salient question is whether the nation’s ego gets things sufficiently right.

Nations have a conscious mind: what they believe to be true about themselves, their reality and their country. It is a nation’s icons, official culture, capital and institutions. They also have an unconscious psyche: the hidden dreams, horrors and unconscious behaviour, the stuff that a nation doesn’t see, or want to see, about itself – its shanty-towns, brothels, waste tips, squalors and corruptions. All nations have their own unique varieties!

If pent-up unconscious feelings grow in potency and charge, especially as a result of social denial and repression, and if a society harbours many dishonesties and injustices, it renders itself vulnerable to challenge by the force of events. If a nation is relatively disunited, dysfunctional and ineffective, such challenges can rudely expose its unspoken agendas, rifts, ghosts, devils, obsolescences, imbalances and inadequacies.

These challenges are, in a sense, utterances of the ‘will of God’. It’s not that God seeks to punish us for our badnesses. It’s more that the universe seeks balance, and if things are out of balance, then events will expose this and pose the option of correction. Correction increases social trust, support, integrity, mutuality and transparency, helping redress rampant injustices and remove glitches. This is how the Mandate of Heaven restores itself. Human choices and actions are involved at all levels of society.

This is a sensitive matter in the 21st Century, because the world is slipping into crisis, not only from climate change and oil-dependency, the two current heavyweights, but from many other problems we all know about. This is becoming less national-scale and increasingly global: Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh specifically, though it highlighted a global issue, climate change. It wasn’t just Bangladesh’s problem.

The capacity of nations to play their part in the international community, and the world’s capacity to respond effectively to events and crises, is now a more critical issue than ever before. Crucial here is each nation’s domestic capacity to handle its own part in the global equation. International agreements are fine, but it’s people themselves who deal with the outcomes. And to resolve global issues, each nation needs to get its people behind its power-structure. And power-structures can do this by developing their legitimacy. Legitimacy comes under test during acute crises, and such crises are growing in number and intensity. We return to the Mandate of Heaven. The Great and The Small, as the Chinese called it, need to work together.

Here lies an even deeper question, about the social and cultural integrity of a nation or people. People can, to an extent, work around problems deriving from their power-structures, and where the people lead with clarity and resolve, the leaders do follow. But power-structures are a crucial bottleneck, since they sit at the centre of nations and play a key role in defining integrity. The pressure on power-structures is coming not just from below, but from other power-structures worldwide. An enormous renegotiation of international relations is coming into view.

Legitimacy cannot be controlled with troops, propaganda, patronage, bribery or fortune. It has to be earned. Few people expect perfection, but there are standards of public integrity, truth, self-correction and service which all organisations must develop to meet coming times. Otherwise corrective events come to pass. Their wildfire effect can be rapid and widespread, exposing strings of interrelated weaknesses. Hurricanes and floods in Central America can create an insurance crisis in Hong Kong, and air pollution from the Iraq war fell on the fields of Bangladesh and has duly been eaten by its people.

We live in turbulent and unstable times. Power-structures work when they respond well to changing circumstances and truly play their part in that organism called a nation. But when limited and vested interests, or rigidity, tradition, ideology or denial predominate, it’s not going to be easy. The agenda is fundamentally changing, by necessity, and the narrative of past decades and generations is turning inside out.

The fortunes of nations are increasingly determined by all nations together, whether by shared decision or failure to decide. The legitimacy of elites around the world is tied to this, in nations, regions and localities large and small. We are all too much affected by each other. We cannot progress significantly until we all sufficiently agree to act together. To make agreements that deliver results, power-structures need to work hard to increase their legitimacy. Legitimacy gets people behind them. Without it, the world will fail to tackle the big issues before it, and we’re all in trouble.

Legitimacy isn’t a formula, but you know it when you’ve got it, and you’d better be honest if you haven’t. Nowadays it is earned, not inherent or inherited. Ultimately – and this worries public figures a lot – it concerns how history remembers you. But today’s situation is too urgent to wait for history’s judgement – it concerns today, and soon.

Every society and culture has its own ways and solutions, and these must be pursued. But what matters also is the intermeshing of the world’s societies and cultures: we must develop enough global problem-solving capacity to face what is hitting us, worldwide. Each nation and people holds a piece of the jigsaw. It was legitimate for Bangladesh to offer assistance to USA after Hurricane Katrina: Bangladesh has specialist knowhow in such matters. Every country needs to be an aid donor in whatever it has plenty of.

We’re in a global community-forming process. If we don’t want the superpower domination of the late 20th Century, in which decisions have been made for us and enforced by threat, bribery or regulation, the ‘international community’ really has to work. Regarding this, I am reminded of an apposite quotation.

This story concerns four people: Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody. There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it but in the end Nobody did it. Somebody got very angry over this because it was really Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody would do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody had asked Anybody.

The Question of Israel

2008-01-01T11:25:00.001Z

for The Bangladesh Today International
April 2008
Article five in a series by Palden Jenkins looking at global issues and the 21st Century.

This concerns a small land with a big obstructing influence on the world. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has dragged on for sixty years, and previous ways of resolving it, either by the victory of one side or by peace process, have not worked. So we must do some new thinking. It’s fitting to look at some of the underlying longterm factors affecting this conflict. This is a global issue not just because Jerusalem is a holy place to three faiths: the ‘Holy Land’ is a microcosm of the world, into which many global issues are compressed.

In the 1990s I ran a peace conference in which a Nigerian Muslim said an interesting thing. People were agreeing that Nelson Mandela was a great man, for stopping a bloodbath in South Africa. But Mahmoud had an interesting insight. He said that the hero of the day was really President de Klerk, the white Afrikaner who prepared the way for Mandela and the ANC to gain power. Why was he a hero? Because Mandela had remained consistent throughout his life, while de Klerk had had the courage to change. This silenced everyone at the conference – most were whites, and here was a black man praising a right-wing, nationalist Afrikaner.

Some Israelis call me anti-Semitic because I work mainly with Palestinians. Some Palestinians get upset with me because I talk with Israelis, many of whom are fine people. Working with both is not easy – there’s a physical and psychological gulf between them that is difficult to bridge. Here comes the bit where I risk being misunderstood: I empathise with Israelis. Not because I support Israel, but because I support people, all people. Looking at the longterm, Israel is in trouble – ultimately, perhaps in deeper trouble than the Palestinians.

Israel’s momentum is sagging, and a difficult time of truth is coming. Palestinians are already accustomed to hard truth and tough times – things can only get better, and if they get do get worse, sad to say, it’s ‘more of the same’. But for Israelis, who have had a more comfortable and successful life, things could get a lot worse, and they would notice the difference, bigtime.

Certain factual issues can no longer be ignored or avoided in Israel and Palestine. The Israeli tendency to stave things off to make them go away, doesn’t make them go away. It’s a collection of issues.

First, aliyah, the migration of Jews to Israel, has slowed to a trickle. Israel is not the safe haven Jews initially sought, back in the shadow of WW2 and the Holocaust. The majority of Jews are happier outside Israel, and those who wished to move have already migrated there. In addition, some people are trickling away from Israel, to get a job, get a better life for their families, or alienated after doing military service. They’re not decisively emigrating, but they’re leaving until things get better – perhaps a vain hope. These are signs of deflation of Israel’s national project.

Second, Israelis are a disparate and argumentative lot. Many outsiders find difficulty figuring out how these people stick together as a nation. They are united by their nationalism but, beyond that, 'for every two Israelis there are three opinions', strongly held too, and national unity is a troublesome factor. This is partially ethnic – Israelis originate from so many countries. Disparities between rich and poor are amongst the world’s highest, and these cleave along ethnic lines, with European and American Ashkenazim at the top of the pile.

At the founding of the nation in 1948-49, the Israeli Knesset couldn't even agree on a constitution, so contradictory were the competing views. Today, though Israel is democratic, its governments are usually made up of coalitions in which small, diverse, fringe parties gain disproportionate influence. The nation’s prime ministers are frequently retired military men, as if defence, not social wellbeing, were the highest priority.

This political unclarity has long bugged the nation, allowing military and minority agendas and calculations to dominate. Anticipation of the threat of annihilation of the Jewish people causes the nation to lock step against its enemies and suppress its internal differences, at least while the heat is up. This belief has its foundation in history, but it also acts as a prophecy seeking fulfilment. It is growing outdated as the older generation dies off – and what would happen if peace actually came and the threat evaporated? The ‘iron wall’ mentality has become a comfort-zone, less threatening than dropping the idea that goyim, non-Jews, are anti-Semitic and not to be trusted. But it presents an enormous moral dilemma too – it causes Israelis to act against their own longterm interests.

In a context of peacemaking, the Zionist tendency, which has long influenced the national agenda, must give way to a more reasonable tendency, willing to make deals and concessions with the neighbours. This would be an historic, emotional shift, involving dropping an old historic fear and reformulating the nation’s purpose. Yet achieving genuine peace would give Israeli Jews the safety they seek – after a generation of calming and bridge-building, that is.

At least half of the Israeli public is conflict-weary. But the ‘iron wall’ mindset is strong as a national survival strategy and most toe the line when under pressure, close their eyes, stay ‘in the bubble’ and hope the problem of conflict will go away. Which repeatedly it doesn’t. Peace is inevitable – it’s simply a matter of how long it takes and what it involves. Israelis have to face this sometime, and facts on the ground are nowadays pushing things forward.

Third, Israelis pay an enormous price for war, military preparedness and the insecurity of conflict. This is psychological, multi-generational, and it harms society and the economy. West Bank settlements are claustrophic, the Israeli security wall isolates Israelis as well as Palestinians, domestic violence is escalating, and many Israeli adults are damaged by military service. Tourism and pilgrimage have collapsed, Israel is regarded by some as a pariah state, taxation is high, conflict and uncertainty keep returning, and poverty hits some people hard. This price cannot be borne indefinitely.

Fourth, USA is Israel’s only serious supporter. USA’s capacity to continue supporting Israel is decreasing, yet Israel depends on it. Without this support, Israel will need to fully acknowledge its position in the Middle East, by necessity making friends with its neighbours. Not only because Israel is surrounded, but also because time simply moves on, and new and different things need to happen. Time indeed is moving on – its defeat by Hezbollah in 2006, and USA’s failure in Iraq, show that the impassioned feelings of fighters can overwhelm mighty military machines.

Fifth, it’s those Palestinians. Despite losing their conflict with the Israelis again and again, the Palestinians have two factual advantages. One is their high birth rate. Whatever their status, they are becoming a majority of the joint population of Israel and Palestine – even the proportion of Arabs living in ‘Israel proper’ has increased, currently around 20% of the population. In the end, numbers count. The Palestinians haven’t gone away.

The other advantage is that, despite Palestinians’ misery, their society is in a strange way socially healthier than Israeli society. Palestinians have been so thoroughly deprived and have lived without proper governance for so long that they have adapted in ways that make their society quite resilient. A mixed blessing, this spirited accommodation to hardship and tragedy represents a valuable and rare community resource.

Despite the tendency of young Palestinian men to squabble and fight when they get worked up, and the recent schism between Fatah and Hamas, Palestinian social bonds are a strength. They’re economically poor and socially relatively rich – meanwhile developed countries are rich materially and poor socially. Israelis know little of this: most never meet Palestinians or see their living areas. When Israeli soldiers serve in the Palestinian Territories, it often takes them a year of national service to realise that what they have been taught about Palestinians does not reflect what they see – and many soldiers land up angry, disorientated or go into exile as a result.

There are further issues. One is environmental: Israel is a toxic mess, and Palestine too. Military and economic priorities in Israel have prevailed over the ‘luxury’ of environmental cleanup, except now it is no longer a luxury. Palestine’s hardships, shortages and weak infrastructure render it into a health and pollution risk for itself and for Israel – Palestinians are not in a position to attend to environmental and public health issues. There is a massive water resource problem for both countries, and paradoxically Palestinians, Syrians and Shi’ite Lebanese, ‘the enemy’, live on top of Israel’s main water-sources. Environmental issues are like a time-bomb waiting to go off, and they could be determining factors in the future.

Another matter is the wider world, where things are moving on, and to an extent Israel and Palestine are being left behind. In the longterm, this could benefit Palestine more than Israel. Palestine, especially Gaza, being walled off from the world, suffers great hardship, yet this insulates it from some of the development-related problems experienced in other countries. Martin Bell, a veteran BBC war correspondent, once wrote, “Peace and freedom can be defined as the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to be stuck in them”.

In the longterm, Palestinian sufferings could have some advantages. Hamas, despite the economic embargo imposed by Israel and the West after its election to government in early 2006, is still more popular than Fatah. If its project of building a society based on the principles of the umma eventually succeeds, its tough stance of resisting Israeli and foreign pressure might pay off in the longterm – though this is currently an open question. Palestine could become a seedbed for a new kind of society in a generation’s time, under different global conditions.

Meanwhile, Israel, rather self-preoccupied and defying the world on matters of international law and decent behaviour, is missing out on important developments. A small and crowded country, it cannot forever live within walls. The course Israel has followed since its founding sixty years ago is changing. This ‘whither next?’ feeling eats away at the Israeli heart. Israel was a land of hope and promise for Jews, and things have gone strangely sour.

As an immigrant land, the nation needs a clear sense of purpose to define itself, and Israel is faced with finding a new one. Currently it is reluctant, clueless and divided, stuck in a loop of blocking progress in peace, behaving badly and denying it. The fear is that if its defensive aggression stops, the nation will lose out and fall apart. Still, the wider agenda surrounding Israel is changing, in the Arab world and globally, the Israeli army is not as strong as it once was, and sooner or later Israel will need to square up with emergent facts. It’s a matter of how easy or painful this is to be.

This is scary for Israelis, perhaps more scary than the threat of Palestinians or Arabs. It involves building a new national consensus based not on a post-Holocaust mentality but on the demands of the future. Historically, Jews have had a legitimate fear of persecution and annihilation, but new generations are growing up for whom the Holocaust is their grandparents’ history. In the 21st Century Israelis are in a position to make peace with the world and to end this cycle.

The main problem is not the fact of being Jewish, or anti-Semitism, but the current behaviour and perceived behaviour of Israel. Its settlement- and wall-building, its oppression of Palestinians and Lebanese and its international intransigence are simply unsustainable, if Israel wants friends. Given time to cool down, many Arabs and Palestinians would be willing to accept a friendly, fair and neighbourly Israel: but first, crucial matters of justice and correction have to be worked out.

This involves Israelis and Arabs making a profound choice to get on with each other. Here lies the basis of Hamas’ proposal that a final peace settlement cannot be achieved in this generation. They propose making a longterm truce and interim agreement, allowing time to cool tempers, leaving a final settlement to a later generation. This is a mature viewpoint, recognising the depth of the damage done on both sides. But it rather confronts Israelis’ hidden fears too: Israel’s many ‘tribes’ will then have to come to an accommodation between themselves – the Ashkenazim and Sephardim, the seculars and the religious, the different nationalities and interest groups who jostle together for influence in Israel. For they have come to rely on having an enemy to keep them united.

Israelis yet need to clarify whether they wish to live in a state reserved for Jews, or a multi-ethnic state with significant Palestinian, Bedouin, Druze and foreign populations. Current Israeli delaying tactics are eroding the possibility of a two-state solution, so Israel will have to square with this question and the Palestinians in another way. This is emotionally and politically difficult for them. But it’s easier than the alternative – continued conflict.

Palestinians have already seen downfall and hardship. Israelis fear the worst – and this prospect eats at their belief in themselves. Though Palestinians suffer immensely, their agenda is relatively simple: they need a better life. How to get there divides them but, while significant, this is a manageable issue. Meanwhile Israelis are deeply confused, their government fails to represent their needs, and they resort to digging in, repeating past errors, for want of another strategy.

For them, a lot of soul-searching, social and emotional reorientation lies ahead. Israelis will ultimately gain from this. It leads toward the building of a safer, happier society, at peace with its neighbours, no longer surrounded by walls, watchtowers and barbed wire, openly playing a part in the wider Middle East and the world.

Meanwhile, the Middle East is moving surreptitiously toward a reuniting process – whether in the form of a common market as proposed by the sheikhs and magnates of the Gulf states, or a caliphate as proposed by Islamists. However this process unfolds, the Middle East is likely, within fifty years, to be relatively unified, very different from today. This would re-contextualise Israel’s position, especially since the Middle East might by that time be more central and in charge of its fate than it has been.

For millennia, Jews have been spread around the Middle East, integral to its societies. Returning to this might be anathema to some Muslims, but let’s remember that Jews and Muslims coexisted well enough for centuries until the arrival of Israel in the mid-20th Century. Events in Europe set the founding of Israel and its militant stance in motion, and many Middle Eastern Jews had grave reservations over it.

The reuniting of the Middle East implies a weakening of the national borders drawn by Britain and France in the 1920s and a gradual reintegration of its diverse societies. Whatever anyone’s feelings are today, the linking of ethnic security with territorial control is likely to be superseded by bigger regional and global priorities in the coming time. We’re all in this rather threatened world together, and we sink or swim together.

We can thus imagine a time when Jews form a grouping within a larger Middle East, in which the different peoples of the region define themselves not by territory but by their social niche and role. Over the centuries, Jews lived in Sumer, Babylon and Baghdad, in Damascus and Alexandria and from Spain to Central Asia. The future has a place for Jews, just as South Africa has remained a place for whites, living together with blacks. The big issue of the future is ecological survival and international cooperation, not narrow national interest or ethnic or religious strife. This massive shift of global priorities is coming.

But such a fundamental change requires an act of trust, a getting-real process in the Middle East. This is easier when it’s behind you than in front of you. Israelis have a big choice ahead. If they fail to make that choice, their nation might be doomed – not by being driven into the sea by Arabs, but because Israelis lose hope and a sense of future. For this reason, Israelis deserve some understanding. But to deserve it fully, the behaviour of the nation of Israel needs to change.

Perestroika in the West

2007-05-16T22:22:00.000+01:00

Around 1990 I did a series of talks called 'Perestroika in the West'. Perestroika (restructuring), with glasnost (openness or transparency) was a concept introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s to give philosophical underpinning to the reforms he was introducing at the time in USSR. My point in 1990 was that Gorbachev was announcing something not just for USSR but for the whole world. The global geometry did indeed change once the Cold War ended, though not as much as might have been.

One reason for this was denial in the West. To justify its massive investment in the Cold War, and the way it used the Cold War as a means of perpetrating Western hegemony over much of the world, and to reinforce its former projection on USSR as a malign global influence, the West claimed victory as it watched USSR scale itself back and eventually collapse. By doing this it justified the West's standpoint, blocked questioning of its own position and covered up its own inadequacies.

Psychologically this is a suppression technique which commits truths to the lurking realm of the unconscious - other such techniques are addiction and over-consumption, projection (soon to be applied to Muslims), elaborated control agendas, deflection through entertainment and glitz, and others - keeping everyone looking away from the core issues. Such suppression always comes back to haunt us.

The rule of the nomenklatura

At the time I predicted that the West would unconsciously inherit many of the ills of the late Soviet Union, as a result of this denial. Lo behold, we see nowadays the prevalence of the Western nomenklatura (its class of technocrats, experts, CEOs, investors and lawyers), of top-down regulation and micro-management, systemic inefficiencies and waste, military adventurism and many other characteristics which once we identified with the Russians. 'You become what you hate'.

The period around 1990 constituted a window of opportunity for global reform in international relations and, not only this, but a reform of capitalism and the Western system. This would be driven not by benign, idealistic intent, but by realistic calculations and strategic forethought. The West itself was due for restructuring but, during the 1990s, it overrode this need by engaging in a combination of technological change, amphetamine economics and talking up almost to cult proportions the virtues of the Western project and its get-rich-quick opportunities. The window of hope of around 1990 was shut by the Gulf War of 1991, which reasserted superpower politics in the new, post-Cold War period.

I touched on this subject of lost opportunities in a recent article on this blog called Hope I Die Before I Get Old, about 'extremist' Muslim social movements - Hezbollah and Hamas being the best-known. I likened many of the dynamics of these movements to those of the popular movements of the 1960s in the West, of which I had been a part. The 1960s represented a dawning from within Western society of a new vision and paradigm. It was based on new principles and priorities of social and ecological change, human rights, re-proportioned materialism, a new creativity and a psycho-spiritual awakening.

During the 1970s these were largely overridden and, during the 1980s, diverted into a new consumptive modernisation binge, with the overall effect of developing ever deeper and more sophisticated levels of cultural denial. It dangled the possibilities of freedom, democracy and prosperity before the world while in fact, for many in the non-Western 'rest of the world', the result was too often the opposite - only some became beneficiaries.

By 1990, Western vested interests, widening their embrace by making many ordinary people property-owning stakeholders in the status quo, were not about to yield to an altruistic epiphany and drop the Western perpetual-growth project, however much the system was riddled with systemic problems. Instead, they resorted to a pattern of steamrollering and out-running commonsense, foresight and realism, by offering ever-expanding inducements and sanctions to keep the West on track and the rest in place. New ideas and reform movements were headed off worldwide by branding them negative and threatening. Muslims have suffered this most in recent times.

Had it happened, perestroika in the West would not have been an import from the ailing USSR. It would have arisen from within the West, where many answers were already part-developed, largely outside the corridors of power in the NGO sector and the 'movement for change'. The troubles of the West had been pointed out in the 1960s by professors, pop musicians and protesters, many of whom came from relatively educated, not necessarily deprived, backgrounds. "Western civilisation? I think it would be a good idea", Gandhi had said - and this disarming statement still holds true.

Today, in 2007, the prospect of radical reformation, perestroika, again begins to rear its head, set in motion mainly by climate change and the 'clash of civilisations', with a constellation of other issues too. We are now in a phase of acknowledgement-with-avoidance. Climatic and environmental threats are now being taken reasonably seriously, though narrowed down to a preoccupation with carbon dioxide and answered with a barrage of quick fixes and superficial solutions. We may retain our lifestyles - we just need to pay some extra taxes, get some new gizmos, set some targets, do some carbon trading and hope we're dead before it gets ugly.

Meanwhile, with Muslims, a stream of answers is trotted out about what needs to happen in the Middle East - anything except listening to them and understanding their needs and perspective. This avoidance phase could last some years until evolving facts finally force the issue - a much more fundamental change. When that happens, we'll probably be offered the option of the threat of chaos or a new globalised order of top-down control to save us from our plight. Neither option will really be what is needed, so deep is the avoidance and so profound the tendency of governments to misjudge and re-package reality.

The war against error

Fundamental, root-and-branch changes are necessary, ultimately down as far as matters of the soul. Yes, it could hurt at first, until a majority of people see things in a new way and come to understand how much simpler things could be than they are now. And yes, I risk being regarded as a crank for suggesting this. A key ingredient is to prioritise collective interest - not just vested interest. 'Collective' doesn't mean only the social dimension, but the complete planetary dimension.

Such a transformation would shift the motivations, priorities and emotional needs of humans in such a way that its problems with over-consumption, social disintegration, ecological damage, cultural intolerance, identity and human purpose might become largely self-adjusting. At present, the world is scared of really facing this possibility and all that it implies. So we engage in elaborate displacement strategies - in the developed world it is called 'stability' (for which, read 'high-level consumption') and elsewhere it is called 'development' (for which read, 'aspiration to high-level consumption').

The questions raised in this article about the West are important since current problems in the Middle East are overshadowed by the priorities of the West. This concerns not just the oil trade, the arms trade or support of Israel, but also Western interventionism and economic hegemony and, behind this, the blocking of new developments and solutions. As I pointed out in Hope I Die Before I Get Old, the Middle East is spawning new movements, albeit imperfect, which could bring a quantum shift in global politics, social affairs and collective moral issues. (The title of that article was an allusion to a song called 'My Generation' by The Who, around 1970.)

The West has for decades been consistently dedicated to blocking these movements, ever since WW2. Currently examples are the financial embargo and arming of Palestine, USA's Iraq and Iran strategies, its bungling in Lebanon, the manipulation of the ruling elites of countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and its support of Israel.

Descendancy strikes again

All this said, Western obstructionism is arguably a manifestation of its underlying, gradual decline. Some historians assert that empires are at their most destructive when they are in decline, out of a concealed desperation to plug gaps in the dyke of a river which is overflowing its banks. The up-coming power in this world is not like the Western superpower configuration of the 20th Century: it involves an as yet unshaped architecture of continental-scale interests, and the current historic ascendancy of China, India, South America, with Africa and the Middle East following, are symptoms of this. The West is slipping from being a modernising to a conservative force, as reflected in the demographic contrast between the ageing West and the much younger 'majority world'.

Meanwhile, we live in times of 'asymmetrical warfare' in which a small, tight network of troublemakers or a 'rogue' nation can cause the world's self-appointed guardians - USA and Europe - to expend enormous sums and energies in ultimately unproductive activity, staving off a rising tide. Not only this but, to preserve its own cherished freedoms, the West is gradually limiting them 'for security reasons'. 9/11 sparked the expenditure of multi-billions in a quixotic war against terror. Yet one well-placed bomb can change things far more than democratic elections.

And a tight and lean militia such as Hezbollah can checkmate the armed might of Israel. This asymmetry is bad news for the West. It falls into the trap of believing that massive force and economic hegemony will overcome everything, and that reconciliation is unacceptable or anathema. Despite its vast and costly intelligence agencies, this is very unintelligent behaviour. The small guys in the Middle East draw inspiration from precedents such as the mujahedin in 1990s Afghanistan, who drained the USSR of its dwindling resources and hastened its downfall. They're doing it again in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Palestine and, in their own perception, they are simply defending their people.

All this Western effort and expenditure is aimed primarily at stopping not Muslims but perestroika in the West. The West believes it is preserving its interests but, in the longterm, the opposite is true. The West's continued survival demands infrastructural change and, to carry this out without resorting to a new totalitarianism, it involves a major social-psychological change too.

This is not as difficult as it sounds, because Westerners, despite relative freedom and prosperity, are not happy. By comparison to many of the world's peoples, Westerners are too busy for each other, dislocated, tense and rather lost. But it is unacceptable to the status quo. As a result, the West is losing energy by going against itself and, while oil and gas energy-sources can perhaps be replaced by wind, sun and ethanol, loss of vivacity and spark aren't so easily substituted.

Here we return to the strategic and holistic issues first clearly perceived in the 1960s: the West is a house of cards or, as Mao put it, a paper tiger. The Western system stands on a number of 'big ifs', such as market confidence, continued supply of oil and resources, Western military superiority, perpetuation of an unsettled international order, absence of major disasters, the continued complicity of masses of people and the continued capacity of vested interests to hold the reins. If one or several events or agencies knock away a few of the key chocks holding up the whole system, the whole lot risks subsidence or collapse.

Today USA is increasing its involvement in Iraq for reasons that many sensible people deem to be at best miscalculated, at worst dismaying. But the key issue behind this is the maintenance of the rather dishonest narrative that keeps the West ticking. This is partially public and partially secret - a symptom of the double standards Middle Eastern people talk about. The public picture, in Iraq, is that USA and UK seek to establish peace, democracy and prosperity, while the secret picture is that, by destabilising the Middle East and making it a cauldron of strife and disunity, it is stopped from finding solutions and breakthroughs of its own. How much this is intentional and how much 'the law of unintended consequences' is a matter of debate.

Whether or not you believe that something is going to crack in the system as a whole depends greatly on your disposition toward the Western narrative and your position in it. But this is vexing, because each of us variously knows both sides of the story. The future is disconcertingly unknown, and hard-and-fast forecasting is wisely avoided even by the most informed of analysts and commentators. But possibilities and probabilities are visible. The underlying global agenda is shifting from competing national interests to that of global environmental change. In the 1990s, business interests were the great globalisers, but now it is the environment.

Last Chance saloon

At risk of labouring my point, I wish to repeat mention of the two massive missed opportunities that the West, with all its thinktanks, professors, expertise and focus groups, has failed to take advantage of. The first was the visionary time of the 1960s, which could have been the start of a forward-thinking period of incremental change lasting from the 1970s onwards. The second was the time of profound change around 1990 and the Fall of the Wall, when many of the initiatives of the 1960s were working through into Western consciousness. Both offered the West an opportunity to undergo a sensible restructuring, clean up its covert agendas and double standards, and face the environmental and other global challenges by starting at the right time.

Restructuring in the West didn't happen, and now we are paying a rising price. We cannot just wring our hands and rue lost opportunities. But we do need to take note of what we in the West already know. And, like the visionaries of the 1960s, who were driven by a homegrown perception while co-opting ideas and methods from other cultures, times and peoples, we might do well to look at the essence of what the 'majority world' is saying and doing today.

That is, to generalise optimistically, the people of the Middle East are pointing at a new umma or community of shared belief and moral behaviour, a new social order; the political movements of Latin America are pointing to a new middle way characterised by greater social justice, fairness and consensus; the Asians are looking at technical and productive innovation which increasingly will knock spots off the West's technical predominance and prove applicable to far wider swathes of people than we have seen; and the Africans are likely one day to show humanity new elements of balance, proportion and integrity, born of the extremes they experienced in the 20th Century and offering what could be a key to the resolution of all of the above.

These assertions might sound sweeping and ridiculous, but let me remind you: at the beginning of the 'renaissance' and 'enlightenment' of Europe starting some 500 years ago, no one in their right minds, anywhere in the world, would have guessed that those uncultured, smelly, barbarian Europeans and their successor Americans would come to dominate the world. They did. Something else is now developing. Such is the way that things turn. Twenty-first Century, here we come. We still have an opportunity.

The Right of Return

2007-04-20T09:43:00.001+01:00

The question of the Palestinian Right of Return is big and crucial. But the discussion is predicated on factors and notions which do not really help the debate or a solution. This issue needs to be looked at, to some extent separately, in two different ways: the first concerns deep emotional-historical issues and principles, which are being discussed, and the second concerns planning, sustainability and real-life viability issues, which largely are obscured.

Emotional-historical issues are rooted in a number of big assumptions. First up is the notion that most or all refugees are likely to return. Yet, once the principles of justice are sorted out (compensation, residency rights in other countries and other practicalities), how many Palestinian exiles, and their descendants, are likely to see return as a real-life advantage economically and in terms of their life-prospects and those of their families? It is neither safe nor realistic to assume that return will actually be advantageous for large numbers, with or without the presence of conflict or today's conditions in Palestine or Israel.

Second comes the well-hardened assumption that Palestinians and Israelis cannot trust one another and will always have a conflict of interest - with or without security walls, checkpoints and current restrictions. Yet many outsiders are correct to observe that the potential for symbiosis between Palestinians and Israelis is significant, and their mirroring of each other in so many details does not automatically imply conflict - equally, in time, it can imply complementarity and mutual advantage.

Third come two major under-discussed issues. These are, first, environmental sustainability - possibly, in the coming fifty years, a bigger issue than the existing context of conflict itself. Israel and Palestine are very built-up and urbanised, with serious water-supply, space and toxicity issues, and the convenient forgetting of this, between two peoples who assert that they love their land so much, does not get rid of the massive minefield that is yet to be identified and cleared. This clearance can be done only through collaboration. Water-flows, species propagation and climatic variables don't recognise security walls, green lines or classes of people.

Then there's that thorny question of national boundaries and sovereign states, established less than a century ago by, amongst others, my own country, Britain. Lost in arguments over one-state or two-state solutions, we lose sight of a bigger eventual possibility, a no-state solution - some sort of Middle Eastern union.

Before rejecting this possibility, please remember that one model, the European Union, was founded to bind previously warring states into a system where conflict would be eliminated. This has succeeded (nowadays we just shuffle feet and bicker, but we don't fight, and we haven't lost our national identities). Crucial ingredients were the free movement of people and resources, free trade and investment and collective, continental-scale legislation.

The EU is by no means ideal, but it is far better than what my father's generation once had. In his twenties he lived and fought under the belief that 'the only good German is a dead German', while in his seventies his favourite car became the Volkswagen. In his nineties he wishes well toward Germans. Things change, bigtime, over the decades, especially when they look as if they never will.

The scenario of a regional union cannot be ruled out in the debate on return and a 'final settlement', and it might even be the only viable option. This also embraces the possible return of Jews to Baghdad, Alexandria and Tehran, the freeing of nomadic Bedouin to follow their goats wherever they roam, and the freedom of Christians and Druze to spread around as they will. It embraces the fact that, before the West interfered, the ethnic groups of the Middle East defined their identities not territorially but through their social roles, while territorially they were substantially integrated and interrelated. It was Western border-drawing interference that laid the foundation for the current tragedy.

There is a big challenge here. The challenge is to inform the argument on right of return with genuine research into and storyboarding of the genuine issues, factors and full range of options before us. It is necessary to free up the argument and suspend old assumptions and fixities.

One is the Israeli assumption that they cannot trust and make friends with their neighbours, who will always have the stated or covert intention of eliminating them. It's time to revise and re-proportion this assumption, with generations in mind - generations who care more about their kids than what their parents thought.

Another assumption is that Palestinians are narrowly and solely Palestinian, when historically they are interrelated with people across the Middle East and elsewhere - today, as exiles, they are substantially internationalised, like Jews. This means we need to separate the emotional principle of return from its possible demographic realities because, in the fullness of time, it's the demography that matters.

In the next fifty years, and in the context of enormous global-scale change from which Israelis and Palestinians are not exempted, only a proportion of Palestinians will choose to return - arguably 10-50%. Of these, some will make a complete move, while others will prefer the right to visit, invest or take up partial residence (like many Israelis in Israel).

Some Palestinians and Israelis will leave too - in Britain, we have sizeable immigration but also significant emigration, especially since we are reasonably free to do so. Those who do not return are due some sort of just settlement, concerning compensation for past losses and guarantees of full rights in those countries where they now reside. The highest priority here, especially in terms of resource limitations, is not the principle of restitution, important though this is, but the restoration of full and proper life-chances for all of those who are disadvantaged and trapped in their situation. Equal rights.

Then there is viability and sustainability, economic and ecological - the big unmentioned factor. Israel has prospered in the past on subsidy from USA and international Jews, and from military and political muscle and international acquiescence, but this is not reliable in future. Many Israeli settlements are environmentally unsustainable, and they suffer many of the ills of new towns elsewhere - domestic breakdown and violence, health and psychological problems, employment and facilities problems, and others. The problem of settlements could be self-adjusting in the long term.

Many Palestinian towns are infrastructurally creaky and, while Palestinians are right to hope for better than they now have, it is important to remember Martin Bell's pertinent statement from his book Through Gates of Fire, 2003: "Peace and freedom can be defined as the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to be stuck in them".

It is not safe for Palestinians to assume that all will be well whenever peace and a final settlement comes, that the economy will thrive and that returning to Palestine will be viable and advantageous to everyone. It will be advantageous to some, and this depends greatly on the style of development Palestinians choose, and the very real limitations in terms of water, space and practicalities that are present in 'historic Palestine'.

Since the resource-hungry Western lifestyle is now under threat, Israelis might be forced to choose between a reduction of living standards or residency in Israel - with or without Palestinian return. And Palestinians might have to develop a greater equity, clean-up and collaboration between themselves than even Hamas talks about.

So, to carry out this debate properly, serious research and investigation of a variety of scenarios is necessary, without the corrupting influence of current prejudice, assumption and predication. For peace to work, all people of all kinds need to feel they are receiving an acceptable deal - and this will involve sacrifices and hidden benefits for all parties. Nothing is going to be easy and no one will get their own way.

Collaboration, normalisation, the opening of borders, the establishment of appropriate development and large-scale ecological efforts will bring many benefits but, to get there, the whole narrative needs to change. So an inventorising of resources, limitations and potentials needs to be done, based on significant future possibilities embracing climate change, political and technological developments and, not least, a variety of social-psychological variables. A seat-of-the-pants approach could work too, but part of this 'contract' involves the willingness to encounter and deal well with decisive, unavoidable crises.

It could be that Israeli population is outsized by Palestinian population, or even that the Israeli population declines - but is this truly a mortal threat to Israelis? It could be that many or few Palestinians actually choose to return, with a variety of possible consequences, but we cannot assume that most or all Palestinians shall do so or make a successful realistic transition.

It could be that, by dint of disease, toxicity or resource shortage, Palestine and Israel become less attractive. Alternatively, that with an arrival of peace and normalisation, living conditions could improve - this won't mean golf-courses and endless road-building, but it could mean a society which becomes something socially very attractive, even if materially relatively lean and economical.

We do not know until the spectrum of options is properly visualised and researched. We cannot know unless movement toward the future is permitted, unlocked from the fixed mess it now is in. We cannot know until evolving circumstances worldwide are permitted to evolve further. But we can clarify the terms of the debate and the argument by proportioning it to likely realistic scenarios and suspending fears and anticipations based on an obsolete 20th Century agenda.

Continuing along the current trajectory does no one any good, and it could be that, in future, the costs and consequences for Israelis and Palestinians rise steeply, not from threat and conflict - the old picture - but from failure to adapt to the new picture - enormously changing world circumstances.

Hope I die before I get old - Muslim extremism

2007-01-04T13:02:00.000Z

There's something many people don't understand about what's happening in the Middle East. It concerns generation gaps and the way that history changes because old people die and young people grow up. We hear a lot about Middle East 'extremism', but this is the language of paunchy authoritarians indicating that Middle East popular movements do not agree with their values and profit margins. Meanwhile, there's more.

Speaking as an aged hippy extremist who went through a spiritual and political awakening in the 1960s, boldly going where few had been before, seeking to change the world and finding that 'working within the system' was less productive than 'dropping out', I see many parallels between the cultural movement of which I was a part and the young end of the Muslim movements of today. They're not just Muslim, they're social movements, and they could equally be socialist, nationalist, rights-based or just 'cool'.

While such movements are often led or inspired by older people (men), they are populated to a great extent by young people, with not a few women. Across the Middle East, a majority of the population is younger than thirty. This matters because today's youths are tomorrow's policymakers, 'the street' is a crucible of new ideas and, democracy or not, majorities matter.

In the West, we see things in terms of a 20th Century picture: the 'developed world' as the fount of wealth, ideas, initiative and power. But we're now in a new century, and many seem oblivious to the full implications of this. Since 2000 the geopolitical agenda has been dominated by the noisy 'Project for the New American Century', an attempt to stamp American hegemony on the future, specifically on hapless Afghanistan and Iraq. It hasn't worked, and many sensible people now know this. But they have little idea of what comes next.

In the 1960s-70s my generation envisioned a new age and civilisation. Raucous and colourful it was, yet it was also the germination-point for many issues now dominating the public arena: bio-sustainability, gender, minority and race issues, global networking and culture, holistic or 'joined up' thinking and more. Another key element, spirituality, is not mentioned so much in the mainstream, but it lurks beneath the surface, perhaps waiting until people's waistlines shrink and their insecurities rise. Inner transformation has been subsumed in a tide of makeovers and fixes which address appearances, not core realities. The world is now faced with mammoth issues and a need for quantum solutions. And the Middle East is one of the nexus-points for this.

Love is still all we need

To Westerners preoccupied with terrorism and insurgency - that is, assaults on our sense of order and control - what is not seen is the revival of love, humanity and spirituality lying behind Middle Eastern movements. Westerners see violence, mayhem and insurgency, not the potential dawning of a new paradigm of human behaviour - and they're both right and wrong. Central to emergent street-level thinking in the Middle East is the notion of the umma, the 'community of believers'. Taken a level deeper, the umma is what French enlightenment philosophers called 'the social contract' - an implicit consensus of mutual good behaviour, respect, integrity and support between all people and social institutions.

In the Sixties, a key element of the 'new paradigm' was community - transformed personal, social and global relations. Those who like to denigrate the 'alternative movement' of that time quote this as an example of its failed, lofty idealism. But the times they are a-changing, and what once was an ideal is now looking suspiciously like the basis for a pragmatic solution.

Faced as we are with drastic climatic, eco-sustainability, resource, development and conflict issues worldwide, we're heading either for terrible downfall or enormous breakthrough. And collective choice is involved. At present, talking about reconciliation, peace, cooperation and, dare I say it, love, is studiously avoided. But this doesn't mean it's irrelevant as a realistic geopolitical mechanism. Visionary and pragmatic solutions surreptitiously converge in a vacuum of fundamental answers, and we're obliged to face such notions cooperation, fairness and cross-cultural respect. Love is not only what we need: in future decades it might well constitute a macroeconomic and geopolitical survival agenda.

As a young hippy, I saw no purpose in war, competition, ego, materialism and exploitation. I set about building alternatives, with a minority of kindred spirits. We didn't set out to oppose 'the system' - we sincerely set out to bring new light, love and solutions to our fellow humans. We ate macrobiotic, toked chillums, sat cross-legged and thought geodesic thoughts. Soon it became clear this was not welcome, and the heavy hand of repression came down - for our own good, of course. Our fathers had fought for freedom, and we should be grateful. Yet the 'free world' we lived in was totalitarian, and it still is today - all that has changed from Stalin's and Hitler's time is the use of carrots instead of sticks. If truth be known.

Had the West openly investigated the possibilities revealed in the Sixties, starting a programme of incremental change over the decades that followed, we might now have no war on terror, no clash of civilisations, neither the same degree of social degeneration, hypergovernment, devastation, nuclear proliferation, climate change or even drug addiction. Heaven wouldn't have dawned on Earth, but we would have made significant progress in tackling issues that were visible 30-40 years ago and now constitute a pending crisis.

Today, we're seeing a parallel nascent movement in the Middle East. Young people are again struggling for new answers - partly thrashing around, partly inspired and innovative. Teenagers have a sharpness of seeing that their jaded, experienced elders don't. The paradoxes they face are enormous, yet they also see possibilities where older generations see none or have given up. As in the Sixties, the picture is formative, not yet clarified, a mishmash of ideas and beliefs within which something simple and clear hides. It is generated from deep feelings of pain over the state of the world, out of a struggle to find a new identity, a future to hope for.

The key movers are those who have grown up straddled between Western and Muslim values, whose position and identity are most unclear. To the surprise of staid Westerners, many terrorists are educated, with families and prospects, not the deranged losers they would like them to be. Similarly, the visions and principles of the Sixties grew up amongst young, educated, privileged middle class youngsters, not amongst the workers and the downtrodden. 'The revolution' didn't reach the workers, who by then were the old guard. Similarly, what goes on in the text messages of young folks in Basra, Isfahan, Beirut and Ramallah is hardly comprehended by the oldsters who look on from across the street. They just don't know.

The manic mujahedin

It all started with 'fundamentalism' in the 1970s-90s - an ethic wrung out of aversion to what the Middle East had become and reaction to the influence of amoral Western modernism. The idea was that, by cleaving to a categorical rendering of orthodox Muslim values, society could be weeded of its degenerative ills. Foreign powers didn't like this - dependent as they are on Middle Eastern oil - so we saw a succession of wars for control, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the American invasion of Iraq. Fundamentalism became tied to gunfire, with mujahedin as its foot-soldiers. Westerners failed to recognise that, though confused and militant, this movement's roots lay in a sincere quest for new human relations. It referenced back to a lost golden age, a caliphate, from the time before the foreign infidel Crusaders came along - a romantic perception, yes, but with some basis to it.

This was just a start, and things have moved on. As the ayatollahs of Iran have proven, old men with religious authority are not necessarily the fount of all wisdom, and they didn't share the full range of perceptions of the upcoming young. Many of the young began to feel the weight of the old guard. But the same is also the case for many of the young disaffected in the West who, given a choice between a tab of ecstasy or the right to vote, might well choose the ecstasy.

Though anti-Western feeling pervaded fundamentalism, Western technology played a crucial role in taking things on to the next stage. The Ayatollah's Iranian revolution was facilitated by the smuggling and circulation of cassette tapes and, by the 1990s, networking moved on to mobile phones and Internet. These have helped create a new, buzzy fermentation and reality for young people. Also, these gizmos are no longer Western - the hardware comes from China and the software increasingly from India and Brazil. This fermentation tends to turn against the West, especially when it customarily misbehaves itself. Longer-term, it will outpace the West.

Behind this networking phenomenon lies a moral questing, a soul-searching before Allah in the face of social disintegration, violence and oppression. For folks like me 3-4 decades ago, such questing was fulfilled through LSD and lifestyle transformation. For many younger Muslims, a new understanding of Allah, of social goals and community standards is emerging from between a rock and a hard place, and Gaza, Beirut and Baghdad are the nexus of their concerns.

For young Arabs or Iranians the Q'uran provides many useful spiritual and behavioural answers - but a new, self-defined interpretation is emerging. There's an anxious sense of "What did we do wrong to incur all the suffering we get?". Allah, help me become whole again. What went wrong was two main things: a loss of progressive impetus in Muslim society, and its insidious corruption by Western ways. The key element here was the breakdown of the social contract and the rise of individualism. It gave some the freedom to explore life as they felt best, yet it isolated people, killing off families, communities and inter-generational connections. It killed the umma, that consensus of mutually-supportive values, understanding and cooperation that should, by rights, be common in the world. Though it was already weak.

The Umma

Western intervention in the Middle East has had two counterproductive effects: it corrupted and obstructed the process of natural, self-generated renewal in the Islamic world, and Western behaviour over the years has alienated many Muslims or driven them further into Islam seeking homegrown answers. The more it has imposed its values, economics and military might, the more it has driven younger Muslims against it.

The struggle to revive the umma is not just an anti-Western jihad. It is primarily a struggle against what is 'not right' in Islamic society and culture - though definitions vary as to what this means. It's a movement for solidarity, peace, social welfare and community, seeking a new future, not a return to a golden past. To young people, many of the older generation have also come to constitute the problem, having fallen into a compromised, corrupt or tainted condition. This is a different perspective from that of fundamentalism - it's heterodox and psychological rather than orthodox and ideological.

At root it is peaceable. But too many young have watched family being killed or jailed, or witnessed American or Israeli missiles slamming into neighbours' houses. The older generation tried negotiation, and look what they got: current generations want no more of it. Hence, in Palestine, the gentlemanly Abu Mazen and the Fatah establishment, who made deals with the Israelis, only to watch them bulldoze and enclose even more Palestinian land, have lost support, while Hamas, who refuse to deal with the Israelis until they behave themselves and until some time has passed, have gained it. Because they have a philosophy based on the umma. And they are noticeably lacking in corruption - that's a big factor.

So 'resistance' is a moot term: does it mean fighting back, or does it mean preserving one's culture quietly while the tanks roll by outside? In the end it means neither: movements like Hamas and Hezbollah recognise that a society becomes strong when it has justice, welfare and relative equity - a reconstituted umma. To foreign visitors, this is already somewhat visible today in Palestine: despite 60 years of pressure and hardship, the surprising strength of Palestinian society, and its tangible human and community values, are impressive. A Palestinian street is safer to walk down than a Western street on Friday night. You don't hear about this in the media.

But Western governments and media have decided the Muslim world is fundamentally violent and chaotic, harbouring terrorism and resisting progress. The Western approach, demonstrated by USA in Iraq and by Israel in Lebanon, nowadays defeats its purpose: by bombing hell out of ordinary people, the lesson many Muslims learn is that resistance is even more necessary. And it turns cultural resistance into fighting back. Hezbollah beat the Israelis in 2006 because of resolve, passion and sheer effectiveness, not military superiority - their hearts were in it.

But the Middle East is caught in a loop of violence. To quote a friend, Ibrahim Issa, co-director of Hope Flowers, a peace and democracy school in Bethlehem on the West Bank, "Every act of violence is the result of an unhealed wound". This school teaches kids how to handle difficult situations, speak their truth well and work together with others. It uses counselling, therapy and creativity to help kids and their parents heal their pain and slip out of the loop. This is the language of feelings, vulnerability, faith and reconciliation in the new umma - though Ibrahim would not count himself as a Muslim activist or extremist. The urge for umma, for social intimacy, trust and community, is not unique to Muslims - it's inherently human, but Muslims are placing this issue centre-stage. The big Western visionary reformers of a century ago, socialists, failed to create an umma because they lost their hearts in the rubble of politics.

The West's failure to recognise the validity of Muslim social movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah puts the West itself in danger. There are many parallels between these and the Western labour movements of the early 20th Century - a joining together of people at the bottom of the pile, generating new ideas and morphing into a new order. Social reformers of a century ago were troublemakers and extremists too, but now they are historic figures. If the West were wiser, it would listen to the modern Muslim movements, for they play a key part in the future.

Quantum shifts

There is more to this. The movements of the Sixties - not just flower power, people power, black power, feminism and eco-warriors, but also new ideas in science, technology, media and social thinking - were not just a logical extension of what went on before. The full, historic story is yet to be fulfilled, and the ideals and visions sketched out then are becoming more solid now. That decade represented a quantum shift, the prequel to a new time and a new global order. Huh, weird talk - but if humanity ends up in good shape at the end of the 21st Century, it indeed will be living in a new civilisation. You may call me a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

Toynbee observed that, when a civilisation reaches its zenith, it needs a new guiding vision to give it a future - otherwise it lapses into repeating its successful formulae, losing creative initiative, becoming irrelevant and eventually dying out or being superseded. In the 1960s, such a zenith-vision emerged in places like San Francisco and Liverpool, crazy as it seemed. But the price the West now pays for shoving it to the side, is that it is now losing the plot. Its finger has lost the pulse, it's talking mainly to itself, and it's miscalculating badly.

Not that the rest of the world knows the answers, but something else is happening. The future lies in the hands of those who once were the victims, clients and subjects of the West and the Soviet bloc - once the third world, now the majority world. The West is gradually being overtaken. For better or worse, this is their century - like the last few centuries were ours.

Young Muslim movements suggest a quantum shift resembling that of the Sixties. They represent a new computation of the issues and solutions, starting from a new starting-point and seeking a new horizon. They might be led by forty-something figures such as Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah or Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, but even these leaders struggle to stay abreast of developments on the street, which has a collective mind of its own. Osama bin Laden is outdated - a hero to some, but good only at humbling the West, not at building a new umma.

The street has a new perception, facilitated by the community of the cellphone, the e-mail, the videoblog, satellite TV and the airplane. It's driven from below, it's youthful and it's half of the population. It's an organic network, not an organisation. It has language and laws, shared sentiments and perspectives. This is a form of texted, e-mailed hyperdemocracy. Like us pot-smokers of old, they have their ways of bypassing the authorities, and only a few get caught. And like the ecstasy-driven dance generation of the 1990s West, their community and feeling of togetherness, their umma, is the key.

In Palestine, broadly speaking, Hamas represents a newer generation while Fatah represents an older one. Both have their flaws and both need each other, yet they are polarised because Palestinian society has been under so much pressure for so long. They are currently conflicting over the future: to an extent, it's a generation gap issue, and it's a paradigm-shift issue too.

Israel and the West cannot deal with Hamas because they are oriented to maintaining the past while it is oriented to building a future. Hamas has new perspectives, but the world doesn't want to hear - also, it is not good at PR because it is averse to the simplistic glosses, artifices and personality cultism of the media, controlled as they are by owners with ulterior motives. Hamas proposes a 25-year hudna or cease-fire with Israel, leaving it to a future generation to achieve a final settlement. The grounds for a true settlement are far larger than can currently be seen, and it recognises a longterm process of quantum change is at work. Ultimately this involves the distillation of a new sense of togetherness and shared experience, a new umma on both sides. To achieve settlement with the Israelis, the Palestinians need time and space to clarify who and what they are to become. And Israelis have not just a few changes to go through too.

The world transformation ethic of the Sixties was suppressed in the 1970s, diverted into glitzy gizmo-fascination in the 1980s, and became a waste, proliferation and waistline problem in the 1990s. Arguably these displacement strategies are derailing in the early 2000s. The new movements of the Middle East might or might not themselves be successfully suppressed or diverted, and they might or might not get things right - this will emerge in the coming years. But something historic is nevertheless happening.

One lesson of our day is that chickens do come home to roost, and governments and security forces cannot really stop the tide of history - they can only complicate it. Today we have a crisis in energy, climate, oceans, species-survival, resources and population, predicted 40 years ago and then studiously ignored: this makes the clash of civilisations and the war on terror look rather small. Globally, we are faced with a challenge to get our priorities right and act on them.

A major key is the umma, the community of souls. Not just of Muslims, but everyone. The message of the 21st Century is simple: together we stand, divided we fall. What Westerners don't see is that 'Muslim extremists', in a strange and convoluted way, are pointing the way to a lot of answers, a new umma. This means a mutually-held choice of the heart, not a new treaty, agency or cooperation council. It's a statement of principle, of mutually-assured support and security. Thorough mass-psychological disarmament. A remote dream perhaps, but so was putting a man on the Moon.

The difficult bit for Westerners is that, having been top dogs, we have to re-join the human race on equitable terms before we can get our fingers back on the pulse. Our words - peace, freedom, democracy and human rights - sound good, but our actions smell badly. We continue to reserve the right to maintain our comfortable lifestyles and export our double standards, whatever the cost to others. So the world is bypassing us, and fighting to stop it is futile and to our own disadvantage. This is why we need to recognise that what's brewing in the Middle East is worth watching. Don't be deceived - it's not just bombs going off. There's much more.

America's decline

2006-12-17T14:12:00.000Z

This is an article I wrote in 2004 which is becoming increasingly pertinent now. USA influences the Middle East greatly and, while this article isn't focused on the Middle East, it's relevant. And it makes more sense now than in 2004 because, then, it clashed with many Americans' feelings - now, it's different. Also, a key point here is that America's current problems aren't just about Bush & Co - they go much deeper. - Palden

Written in September 2004

What goes up must come down. Every empire suffers an urge for posterity, and every powerful, well-to-do nation and class has sought to perpetuate its position. This tendency is unique to no particular country or time. But something larger inevitably overrides it. The ascendancy of the powerful can be painful for those who are conquered, enslaved, colonised, co-opted or just affected. But a nation's descendancy can be equally tricky, for it and for them.

There comes a time when the structures, values and assets by which a great nation is built simply become outmoded by other developments elsewhere. There is choice in the manner of a nation's decline, and a graceful decline starts with a recognition that the game is changing and we've lost the plot.

Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, written during WW2, noted that when a culture reaches a peak of creativity, vigour and 'florescence', it is faced with an identity crisis. Where to go next? He wrote that, at such a point, a culture may opt to reproduce its successful formula, leading to an incremental loss of vigour, creativity and leadership, or to follow a path of transformation and rebirth, re-engaging the energies of new generations. It may choose, at its time of wealth, power and fortune, to create an entirely new quest. Not just a series of glitch-fixes, but a fundamental change in the aims and rules of the game it has won.

America's zenith came in the 1940s-1970s. With the 1960s came a transformative burst, born within the heart of modern American culture. It came in many forms, in culture, science, social movements and forward thinking. You Americans reached for the Moon. The heart and soul of your nation brought forth music, films and ideas to which the world paid rapt attention. Its most visionary form came as 'flower power', an outpouring which indeed could have fuelled a transformation.

This transformation was not to be, and today we pay the price. During the 1970s, vested interests clawed back control through diversion, co-option, suppression and corruption. In the Reagan period, this take-back was consolidated - a surreptitious systemic coup d'etat of which the arranged election of George Bush in 2000 was but a consequence. The powers-that-be re-captured the agenda. They resorted to increasingly formulaic reiteration of the nation's strong points, appearing innovative and radical yet really largely a multiplying and replicating what went before. A cult of consumptive materialism and hyperactive public acquiescence came to pass, in which everyone tried to rake off their cut. This doesn't work longterm. The buzz wears off, and then there's a sluggish, heavy, day-after feeling. And self-interest gets too firmly rooted, weakening the solidarity that can otherwise pull a nation through a crisis.

After Vietnam, a new perception emerged worldwide, especially amongst its victims, questioning American hegemony. The murmuring grew in Reagan's time. It quietened during Clinton's watch: the causes had not gone away but we wanted to give America a chance. After 9/11 it erupted as a dismayed-to-angry world consensus of doubt in the American monolith.

The intense events following 9/11 turned the key: we saw a rapid transition from human pathos and family spirit in New York City to a state of accusing, hard-hearted, paranoiac warmongering. The wisdom and heart of the American people was quickly wrenched from it. The contrast was acute. The world's responses shifted rapidly. How could Americans indulge so much in the loss of their own people and security, when they didn't bat an eyelid to similar loss or devastation in Guatemala, Palestine or Bangladesh?

Salt was rubbed in when we were told that if we weren't for you, we were against you. This alienating declaration rested on an outward projection of badness on foreigners, an enemy out there. We had had enough of this in the Cold War, and here it was again. This projection was at best an exaggeration, at worst an attempted hostile takeover of the world agenda. It didn't hold water.

Over the decades, the world had looked on in horror, fascination and disbelief as we saw killers, lawyers, evangelists, executives, pornstars, rednecks, coke-sniffers and glitzy stars strutting their stuff in America. Perhaps they would come to their senses sometime. USA had wondrous aspects too, with its high ideals, its freedom ideology, technical wizardry and rags-to-riches success stories. But really, we were watching a nation ill at ease with itself, domestically and internationally violent, and we vainly hoped all this would go away.

Much of the world didn't concur with American claims that it had won the Cold War. The Soviets had had the courage to recognise something America could not. They initiated its end and became the heroes. Perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were relevant to the West as much as to the USSR. But the 'free' West had sufficient wealth and ingenuity to carry on as if it had won. A clock started ticking in the 1990s, and the West soon showed signs of Soviet sclerosis, increasingly ruled by a nomenklatura (a privileged class of well-dressed managers) whose control and interests became all-important.

We heard the same old riffs and special effects from America, amped up higher each time. Sure, box office takings grew, as did stock market values and the millionaire class, but these are not everything. The materialism-cult of USA made it sound as if they were everything: we all bowed to trickle-down development, the 'Washington Consensus'. American power, here to save us, would be extended by innovating and investing so hard that no one else could catch up. Failing that, armed power-projection would fix things, cleanly and surgically.

The sheer creativity of America was dwindling, and its lead was increasingly propped up with tech developments, financial leveraging, marketing ploys, legal twists and immigrant labour. But these were all extensions of the same old gargantuan story - and it eventually took a little outfit like al Qaeda to puncture the glittering balloon. Something had come seriously unstuck.

Bush and the neo-cons have made America's decline blatantly obvious, but all the signs were there beforehand. The capture of democracy and freedom since the arrival of George Bush has led to serious internal schism, worrying rest-of-the-worlders more than it seems to worry Americans. The greatest threat to the world and to itself had clearly become the United States.

Here we are, watching a nation split down the middle. Whoever wins the presidency will leave half the nation angry, left out and ready for a showdown. We don't want to see a second American Civil War. We don't want to receive its fall-out. We don't want such a potential nightmare to develop. Yet we see before us the division of a manic-depressive nation talking to itself, 'doing oppo', tragically forgetting that something else is going on across the world.

The future is not one of American hegemony. The more USA tries to assert this, the more hegemony evades it. This is an historic change, quickened by near-sighted politics in DC. The perception that America has 'lost it' is now widespread worldwide, aided by USA's alienation of its own very supporters.

Now it's not that America has become our bad guy and the rest of us are good guys. The world is not as black-and-white as that. It's relative. The sheer scale on which USA makes its assertions, errors and omissions is dangerous for the world. It has the biggest arsenal of weapons, its government has lost its sense of proportion, and its tentacular hold is such that an American advance or a retreat will have an enormous effect on the world, either way. We've lost our trust. We don't believe God likes you more than everyone else.

So be it. We've had enough. We badly need America to step back and listen. Its dramas threaten to drown out the other tunes and noises going on around the world. Some of these are more relevant and important than America's pet themes. The international community, such as it is, stands at a delicate stage in which it is facing up to its interdependence. Americans want exceptionalism, as well as to interfere and dominate. Please decide: in or out! This is important, because you Gringos are outnumbered, and you need to do the right thing. We won't fight or invade you - it's just that, well, we surround you.

It will all come right in the end. Though Americans might be in for a long haul. It's not just regime or policy change that will do it. The American way needs a fundamental revamp. There's just one choice: whether to de-construct it voluntarily and with foresight, or whether it horribly collapses or burns out. The worst of America needs winnowing out, and that small matter of over-consumption needs addressing. America has a future, but as a normal place. This has been done before, and my own country, Britain, is a case in point.

Britain the Great got cut down to size, and it wasn't just the Germans' fault. We went through a terrible downfall. We went from superpower to aid-recipient in 30 years (1914-1945), falling as you Americans rose up. Our country was devastated, our empire dissolved. But today we're still here, we gained something from it and life goes on. America is unlikely to be reduced by world war - it is caught in more of a 'virtual' corrosion from within, fed by obsessive self-preoccupation - with a little goading from Osama, Saddam and other global dramatists.

If we take 1989 as a starting point, rather like Britain's 1914, USA is now 15 years into its process of decline, though the shit is yet to fully hit the fan. The prosperous 1990s staved off the agony, but the can of worms writhed underneath. Today, the right is worried about loss of power, the left is worried about loss of rights and everyone is worried about loss of what is, frankly, a state of excess. It's a creeping fear of cold turkey and what the nation might do to itself while going through it.

This is potentially dangerous, though less dangerous than the addiction itself. Trouble is, affluence and consumption bury old, unresolved pain and, when decline and belt-tightening come, anger and irritation come up and out, followed by depression and disorientation. Public feelings of powerlessness amplify it. Schism and underlying dissension feed it. At present, things are held in place by a strangely complicit nation, afraid of what might happen if truth emerges and change comes. Not just truth about Bush, but truth about America - a country that permits phenomena like Bush to happen.

A recent German letter-writer to Newsweek observed that we can take Bush's first election to be an excusable accident, but re-election means American voters will be held responsible, and anti-Bush feelings abroad will become anti-American. Truth can have a redemptive effect. It just depends which way Americans as a whole choose to go, when the chips come down. America can do a managed retreat or have a big crisis. At present, it looks like a crisis is looming.

What astounds many non-Americans is that the nation is stacked with such intelligent, good-hearted people, yet it has fallen into such a dazed, sleepwalking nightmare. Right-wingers support it, liberals oppose it, democracy has become dysfunctional, and we all know that, in reality, USA is steered by a network of background interests. Yet even they are losing power.

We see a stung giant lumbering around, swatting mosquitoes and wasps, falling over things.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is getting on with its own realities. Some people and places have had such a hard time that the only direction left is up. There is hope. Lacking wealth or facing big problems, they are innovating, evolving new strategies, sometimes painfully. But they have a future. Even hapless Iraq will emerge into a new day: in twenty years the Middle East could be a happening place. Meanwhile, America is likely to take time to adjust to its subsidence.

Yet, while 20th Century Europe's decline made it a shadow of its former self, it nevertheless survived and reaped benefits from its reduced status. Let us hope USA doesn't rip itself apart as Europe did in its two world wars.

For America there is mainly a past, sugared with glory. Its sense of future is an extrapolation of it. The initiative has already been lost. To call the 21st Century 'America's Century' was, well, wishful thinking. Two centuries ago, when USA launched itself into its future, it didn't know what was to come, but it was driven to rise to it. Today, the losers of the 20th Century movie are stepping out, heading for their future in the 21st. Necessity - hunger, disaster, poverty, hardship - is mothering invention.

They know not where exactly they go, and the nature of change itself is changing. This is new. It has something to do with global justice, equity and sense of proportion, for humans and the natural environment. Civilisation in a truer sense. The solution is a reminder of the vision first identified in 1960s America, but it is pragmatic, not idealistic. It might be a bumpy ride, but this is our trajectory.

All is not lost. Worldwide, we like Americans really. Most of you are a bunch of real nice guys. Saudis, French, Colombians and Chinese are okay too. What we like about Americans, on a good day, is their welcoming, generous, imaginative and hearty openness, and we miss it. We don't mourn your loss of greatness, but we do regret your loss of creativity, friendliness and verve.

Your humanness is becoming concealed behind a defensive barrier, sharing some characteristics with Russians' former concealment behind the Iron Curtain. We're losing contact with you. Brilliance still emerges, but it has lost its edge. Meanwhile, the stuff that lights people up now comes from elsewhere. Uzbekistan, Uganda and Uruguay are interesting places. Youngsters don't do pilgrimage to USA any more.

Some Americans say the world is ungrateful for the help you have given it. Well, it came at a price, so we have mixed feelings. Voicing mixed feelings is taken to be an expression of antipathy, so balanced views are difficult to utter. Many Americans at home feel ill-judged and misunderstood, yet exile and emigre Americans cringe at this angry defensiveness - they see more of the American impact on the world. Out here, we know you quite well: you have broadcast your lives and values to us for decades. But now our attention is elsewhere.

So we don't sound grateful. Nevertheless, we thank you for Thoreau, Startrek, Tamla Motown, Abe Lincoln, Coca Cola, Windows XP, Martin Luther King, Ginger Rogers, the Apollo mission, Disney, burgers and Jeeps. Now something else is happening - Bollywood, Daewoos, world music and fair trade. We know some Americans support these changes too, but your dominant culture is taking things the other way. This is making life difficult for us, acting as a drag factor - and there's a whole lot to do.

We'd prefer you to subside with grace, have a soft landing and rejoin the human race. Globalisation is now genuinely global, without a centre. Y'know, it's Vanuatu, Venezuela and Finland. This is the 21st Century, and the game is a world community game. We're all in it. In Americanese, we hang together or we hang separately. Ever shall it thus be so.

Climate Change - the tide turns in the Holy Land

2006-11-27T14:19:00.000Z

In the last few years, I have been predicting a change of fortunes for Israel. This was detailed in my blog entry 'Why I sympathise with Israelis' (July 2006). Quite a few people have put me in the 'daft', 'idealistic' or 'anti-Semitic' category for that. Well, I'm persevering because I now believe, after a pause for reflection after the Lebanon war, that the signs of this change of fortunes are even more apparent. Perhaps people and governments need to start looking at this.

We’re talking here about the 'law of paradoxes', not about logic or the facts and behaviour of the past. This is known more fashionably as 'the law of unintended consequences'. Or perhaps it's just the prevailing winds of the emergent 21st Century - the future asserting an increasing effect on the present.

The overriding factor determining this sea-change is wider world conditions. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on so long, and positions have become so fixed – delaying tactics and no-budge positions have become habitual - that it risks being swamped and overtaken by events and trends in the wider world.

Not least the risk of widespread civil war across the Middle East, as warned about by Abdullah, king of Jordan on 26th Nov 2006. Currently, things could not look bleaker in the Middle East, with rising heat in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. This is a definite risk, but I do not believe it will happen. There are elements definitely trying to ignite it, and plenty of trip-wires, but this is partially to settle old scores and block reconciliation, and partially because conflict has become an addiction - and some fear going through cold turkey.

But the Big One comes from a variety of sources:
1. a globalising imperative arising from planetary environmental and resource issues;
2. a re-balancing of world power away from the West and toward the 'majority world'; and,
3. an underlying shift of world values away from conflict, exploitation and insensitivity toward peace and increasing cooperation.

The stakes are so high, globally, that our priorities must shift, for pragmatic reasons. We're all in the same boat, and people who rock it risk being sacrificed for the survival of the majority.

It comes from more local factors too. They are outlined in previous blog-postings. On the Israeli side, weaknesses in its position, dating back to the nation’s founding and more recent behaviour, are coming home to roost. These include Israel's dependence on American support and on military might, its weak social cohesion (glued together mainly by shared Jewish victimhood in the past), rampant individualism and social militarisation, its inattention to the social welfare of its own people and to environmental issues, its geopolitical exceptionalism (flouting of international law and values) and its inherent confusion between democracy and control, liberalism and racism.

On the Palestinian side, prolonged hardship and loss has pushed the Palestinians through social and psychological experiences that have toughened their resistance, making them bizarrely stronger in the longterm. This is currently demonstrated in the new non-violent social resistance taking place right now in Gaza - to some extent a spontaneous revolt even against existing paramilitary groups. Living for decades without effective government, the social glue that governments customarily weaken or destroy has grown strong. Palestinian population growth, outstripping that of the Israelis and outstripping population loss as a result of emigration, lends an inevitable numbers formula to the longterm game. In a strange way, the Palestinians are coming out stronger at present - precisely when they never seemed so weak.

There is something else too. Potentially, it leads toward eventual peace. It's the greatest peacemaking force of all: weariness. There's a deep tiredness in both and all communities - in Lebanon and Iraq too. This brought de facto peace to Northern Ireland, regardless of what politicians and paramilitaries thought - and Northern Ireland is an uncanny model for what is unfolding in Israel and Palestine.

Then there’s that 'law of paradox'. It has a levelling effect. Things always, always, turn around, sooner or later. It happened for the British empire, and now it is visibly happening for USA - the price of greatness, especially when injustices, violence and dominance are involved, is the building up of forces which brings down that power. This is happening worldwide, but it is very apparent in Israel and Palestine. Here, many would disagree - and they might be right. But they might also be wrong, and in places riddled with certainties, right and wrong have strange ways of reversing. Especially when God is called upon on a regular basis.

We're not talking about a victory of Palestinians (or Arabs) over Israelis. We're talking of a levelling of differences which put both sides on a par, bringing about a necessary restitution of imbalances and a dawning of peace and realism. The idea of driving Israelis into the sea undoubtedly strengthens the hearts of some Arabs, but it is neither likely nor advisable for Arabs themselves. The Israelis have already demonstrated, tragically, that the sins brought to bear on them during the Nazi period and before, have become internalised and applied to Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

The same would happen if Arabs landed up as Israelis' oppressors - they would start oppressing one another too, in ways which could make today’s civil strife in Iraq look small. The only factor which would drive Israelis into the sea would be a mass disaffection and emigration amongst Israelis themselves, deeply disappointed in the capacity of their own state to provide safe haven for the Jewish people.

So, the tanks and shellings have now stopped on Israel's part (well, in truth, not quite). On the part of the Palestinians, Fatah and Hamas have committed to hudna or ceasefire - which Hamas have proposed all along - but the decisive factor will be their capacity to rein in their militants. This highlights a factor which holds for both sides: their societies are deeply damaged and hurt, and it’s difficult to let go of the pain of the past. It's a perverse comfort-zone, a known evil which looks easier than peace.

This is why hudna is currently so necessary - to give a chance for heated feelings to subside, and for normal life to take hold. When I was in the West Bank in 2005, I could sense a buildup of a relaxation amongst Palestinians, which now has been buried. But it’s still there - a deep desire for a normal, reasonable life.

The ceasefire might or might not hold, but this does not detract from the underlying trend currently emerging. It's to do with 'asymmetric warfare'. That is, all Palestinians need to do to achieve their objectives is simply to survive. Meanwhile, Israelis need outright victory to succeed. Some extreme Israelis regard that as possible only through a 'final solution' involving the 'transfer' of Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank, by force if necessary. In other words, the Palestinians can achieve their objectives easier than the Israelis. The conflict thus turns against the Israelis, because Israel has a case of 'mission impossible' - and a sinking capacity to achieve it. As was the case in its conflict with Hezbollah in summer 2006.

In this dark hour, I believe peace is potentially looming. This could be challenging. It means that Israelis must cultivate a new national attitude and make friends with their neighbours – only this will guarantee security. It means that Palestinians must drop the past, push for reasonable objectives to make their lives more liveable and workable, and drop some past objectives such as the repossession of the whole of the former Palestine and the right of all Palestinian refugees and exiles to return. Morally, return might be justified, by practically it is unlikely.

This means forgiveness - that teaching which Christians have advocated so long yet failed themselves to demonstrate. It means reconciliation - a reconciliation mainly with current hard facts.

I believe we shall see a big sea-change in Israel and Palestine in coming years. It will take time. It might or might not involve further conflict. But it is coming - and, to some extent, no one can stop it. It won’t be idealism that does it, but realism. Backed up by a new realism that the wider world, the 'international community', needs also to develop and apply. Since it is the international community which has permitted this conflict to go on for so long.

Me and My Shadow - behind the post-Lebanon mess

2006-08-30T21:06:00.000+01:00

The aftermath of the Lebanon war

In the relative quiet following the recent war in Lebanon and Palestine, a potent fermentation is bubbling up. In the war we saw an orgy of accusation and projection, in which inaccuracies, judgements and propaganda noise fatally obscured the picture. In the shock following the war, all parties – close-in and more distant – ringing ears are giving way restored hearing. Attention is curving back like a boomerang on all contributors to this devastation. We're back to Bertrand Russell's truism that war isn't about what is right, it's about what is left.

It was all too much, disproportionate, mad – the sledgehammer was far too big, and the nut could have been cracked by other means. The message was 'there is no other way', but there is another way. Problems existed, and now there are new ones. But this, this was the stuff of nightmares, of personal dramas fatefully dumped onto others.

Why do we project our fears, ambitions and nightmares on others? To avoid looking at our own sludge-heaps of unprocessed anxieties and unresolved questions. For the future, one message has emerged: this cannot go on – it leads not to resolution but to deepening consequences.

So, Israelis are now distraught over the failure of their military prowess. Their horrors, usually outwardly projected, are increasingly internalised, aimed at their political and military top brass but exposing a deep, dark, heaving morass underneath. Hezbollah can claim a kind of victory, and Nasrallah has said they had not anticipated such a strong Israeli response to its capturing of two soldiers – this might be sincere but it excuses nothing and exposes a confusion of sense and priorities. The people of Lebanon, cruelly reminded of the shadow of their 1980s civil war, are under extreme strain, their patience and perseverance sorely tested. Palestine faces collapse, contemplating yet also doubting the value of resorting to its repeated strategy of inviting punishment on itself in the hope of attracting the world's support.

USA faces hiatus, having again proven the futility of its ill-considered geostrategic impositions on other countries. Europe faces its sitting-on-hands tendency, trying to be the Good Samaritan while exposing itself as the one who passed by on the other side. Middle Eastern countries utter mixed messages, trying not to invoke the wrath of Israel and USA but possibly as guilty as the West of double standards. Iran puffs up its chest, worthy of greater respect than it gets but not as much as it believes it deserves.

What a mess. Will everyone learn and come clean? Or will this all be stuffed down yet again for another day? Are we heading for further conflict, or have we had sufficient lessons by now? This all depends on the extent to which all these parties, and the international community, are willing to lift the carpet and look underneath at their own dust and demons hiding there.

Here come some awkward truths. They illustrate how the war's consequences are greater than anyone would like them to be. We'll start with my own country.

Britain sits on a time-bomb. It thinks it's bigger than it is and that its wealth and comfort will go on forever. Its armed forces are tainted by Iraq, it stays dreadfully quiet about its enormous weapons industry, it has an affluence it doesn't know what to do with, and a profound lack of direction. Most of its European partners suffer a similarly hollow comfort, stability and quiet hypocrisy which they maintain at great cost, for want of anything better to do. Europeans have relatively fine and humane values, and genuinely get upset at seeing Lebanese bombed to bits, but our attachment to our comfortable status quo makes us seek change as long as nothing really changes. This will one day tip over and cause a landslide. Everyone quietly knows it, hoping it won't be soon, affecting our pensions and property values.

USA has had its time and passed its peak. It has developed enormous armed might and indebted, leveraged prosperity to protect its status, but these make it vulnerable too – it's Chairman Mao's classic 'paper tiger'. When Ayatollah Khomeini called it the 'Great Satan', Americans gave it a Christian interpretation (Satan as the Evil One) when the Muslim Satan that Khomeini referred to is a Great Deluder – a master of appearances and falsities. Addicted to an increasingly obsolete, oil-dependent technology, it resorts to superpower dominance to keep that oil flow guaranteed, against growing odds.

This is selfish and short-sighted, but there is a more genuine fear here too. The international community, such as it is, has not pulled together to make the necessary global decisions we're faced with today, so America feels obliged to lead, as if to save the world from itself. The problem is that this leadership tilts at windmills, over-fills its belly, favours false friends and tries to prove its point by creating diversionary crises like the 'war against terror', insisting it knows what to do. It doesn't. America is struggling to stay up.

The international community reluctantly plays along with USA while bluffing, furtively heading in other directions and hoping America won't notice. So busy is USA with its own movie-script that it hardly does notice. This co-dependent avoidance is gutless, though there's some wisdom to it: first, individual countries don't want to be singled out by America as the enemy and, second, the world fears plunging into a heated community-building and global squaring-up process which would be inevitable in the absence of superpower domination.

There are so many global questions to sort out that the international community doesn't know where to start. So it holds things back to a manageable, damage-limiting trickle, applying band-aid where possible and muttering about USA when things go wrong. But a gaping, hidden crevasse is close, and no one really wants to take the initiative or catch the blame for rocking the boat. So the UN, WTO and other transnational organisations hobble along, hoping nothing big will happen, while perhaps secretly wishing it would, just to loosen things up. It's a mutualised game of omission and commission, a false calm and an unwritten treaty of denial.

Arabic nations, meanwhile, keep their heads down. Their governments depend on maintaining a status quo, anticipating that Islamic social movements could bring chaos and bloodshed rather than a new order. Deeply regretting what Israel has done, they feel impotent against Israel's virulent sense of rightness and punishing rage. Arabic countries try to keep the temperature down, yet pressure builds for change – not just for a return to the good old days before the West started interfering, but for an entirely new formula. They're stuck: traditional Islam resists insidious Western amorality and domination, but it is itself a thing of the past, needing social and cultural re-evaluation. This is too long delayed, too held back and too large-scale, so, like Europeans but for different reasons, Muslim countries tend to want change as long as nothing really changes. Yet a tipping-point is close.

This is embodied in social movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, but they have a problem too. So embroiled are they in resisting Israel and the West that initiating and guiding a new social fermentation has become difficult, thanks to the risk of foreign interference. Hamas is intent on reforming Palestinian society but, refusing to recognise Israel or make concrete peace-building overtures, it has lost foreign funding, thereby hobbling itself. Hezbollah seeks to benefit Shi'a Lebanese, but it has inadvertently devastated them. The Islamic movements must carry their constituency of support with them, yet loud interests in their midst are stuck in an oppositional position, diverted by a notion of jihad that has gone rather wrong.

Jihad is a purificatory spiritual struggle to root out the demons and shadows in ourselves that create difficulty in the world, but an oppositional mentality leads people to see it as a struggle against the bad guys over there, a role amply filled by Israelis and Americans (but it could be anyone). Jihad is a self-correcting quest which brings us to the truth of our situation, in our own lives, societies and terms. It concerns our own behaviour – only secondarily that of others. This pinpoints the deep transformation Muslim society is yet to make. Instead of blaming Israel and the West, they need to outclass and overtake them through self-generated reform and effort. But Israel and the West must reciprocate, re-examining their part in the much-vaunted 'clash of civilisations', otherwise Muslim countries make themselves vulnerable to yet more foreign manipulation and intervention. It's a loop.

Then we come to Israel. The path it has followed since its founding around 1948 is ending, though many Israelis fail to see this. The recent war has, like a heart attack for a fiftysomething, rudely stopped it in its tracks. Israel has fallen upon a big truth: imposing its will on others gains little except the need to impose more. It's Macbeth's dilemma, and it leads to disaster. The possible collapse of Palestine after decades of hardship means that Israel might have to rescue it, killing the two-state solution, undermining Israeli democracy and society, costing vastly and reinforcing military dominance of Israeli life. This is a lose-lose situation.

Israelis are a hotchpotch of people from diverse origins. Jewish individualism and exceptionalism mean that national unity exists only when there is something to unite against, not necessarily because of durable, shared social love and consensus. National unity is therefore conditional and can turn ugly. Tribal tensions between Israel's different communities of faith, interest, politics and origin are complex and dissonant – and this small nation has only one third of the population of Cairo.

Without external conflict and victory, domestic conflicts tend to emerge. This is avoided by a kind of societal truce but, when things heat up, vehement mutual cross-fire can lead either to self-harming or to a paralysis in which too many questions are shelved. Israel has no constitution – at its founding, disagreement over national purpose meant that a constitution was set aside for another day that never came. Other issues – social welfare, settlement-building, the Palestinian occupation, international law and the nation's future – lie there festering. This is dangerous.

It leaves a heap of unattended issues which, at times like now, risk escalating into pyroclastic torrents, relentlessly burning everything in their path. This is Israel's domestic nightmare and, in the strange psychology of nations, the habit of fighting Palestinians and Arabs, or accusing gentiles of anti-semitism, takes over as a diversionary mechanism. This no longer really works – it has gone on sixty years. It demands a deep soul-searching for a new national spirit and attitude. Fear of Israel's demise drives this forward – a demise which cannot really be done by Israel's enemies, only by Israelis themselves.

The current bogey-man is Iran, dangling its threat of developing nuclear weapons. This threat is part genuine, part bluff and part misunderstanding. Iran is assertively Muslim. Jerusalem is one of Islam's holiest sites and the Palestinians' preferred capital. Israel is a small nuclear target, with millions of Muslims living in it or nearby. Would Iran nuke such a target? Doubtful, unless it breaks with its faith and reason. Iran knows that, if Israel went down, it might take down others with it, using its own nukes. Israel's massive response to Hezbollah's border provocation suggests this: in a fit of madness, we now know Israel can go wild.

So Iran probably isn't quite as dangerous to Israelis as they anticipate – except through proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Yet both of these would really prefer to concentrate on their social agendas and are stuck in a dilemma – they value Iranian support because no one else really seems to care, but this support charges its price and could also evaporate. Whatever is the case, Israel needs seriously to re-examine its approach to its neighbours, gradually developing its much longed-for security by making friends with them.

Then we have Lebanon. Roughly half of Lebanon's non-Shi'a population is critical of Hezbollah, but national unity rates higher. This is positive in general, but tricky. The Lebanese cannot force Hezbollah to scale down its armed militancy, so a resolution of national tensions will be slow and risky. But the Lebanese have developed some immunity to civil war – and Israel can no longer easily provoke domestic conflict in Lebanon to protect itself. The Lebanese have had enough of foreign interference. Lebanon is thus paralysed by its national consensus for peace and also blessed by it. Depending as it does on international visitors and business, it is caught in a fix. But its future chances are more promising than those of most of its neighbours.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has emerged victorious yet troubled. Is it a social welfare party or an armed militia, a proxy for Iran and Syria or a guardian of its long-suffering people? Has it gained or lost respect? To resolve these questions it must now be socially and democratically minded, yet it relishes its military power and the options this offers. It enjoys getting back at Israel, and many Arabs, hurt by the past, rather enjoy it too. But this is like a gall-stone, manageable perhaps for now, but potentially deadly. Irrespective of pressures from outside, for its own sake Hezbollah must resolve its inherent contradictions – or stumble and die.

Palestine has gained nothing. Humbled Israel is less willing to talk than before. The international economic blockade is crippling Palestinians, and the relative merits of resisting and outlasting all presented hardships are wearing thin. The Palestinian Authority could collapse, inviting either Israeli re-occupation or foreign intervention, and neither option is rosy. The prospect of a third intifada is uninviting – Palestinians just want a decent life and to work out their future, in their own way. They have the skills and people but no funds and materials. Israelis take Palestinians' hapless fate to constitute proof that they cannot manage their own affairs, but this is untrue since Palestinians have never had a fair chance to do so.

A reconciliation of the old order, Fatah, with the newer order, Hamas, has been set aside yet again thanks to recent Israeli bombardment. Fatah holds many of the business and diplomatic strings that keep the nation ticking – but with this come the preferential inequalities and corruptions of the past. Meanwhile, Israel's recent incursions into Gaza and the West Bank have strengthened Hamas' position and the logic of its programme of resistance to Israel, social reform and elimination of corruption. Yet Hamas' resistance is judged abroad to be terrorism – whatever happened to freedom fighters? Reform is much needed, but this means loss for some people, systemic change and the end of old habits. So Palestine is stranded, unsupported. Lebanon can rebuild itself, but Palestine cannot. It's tragic, and it is everyone's fault.

So it's all a big mess. The easy option is for everyone to continue as before. But this isn't an easy option: it means hardship for Palestinians, pariah status for Israelis, continued conflict and delay for Arabic neighbours, and the uneasy sound of ticking detonators for the rest of the world. This mess, like a secret mass grave, cannot be buried once again: the 'easy' path of avoidance is really a difficult path with the highest costs and damages. Taking the 'difficult' path is not just a matter of moral principle: it's a pragmatic issue. But it involves a restoration of truth and integrity by everyone, and root-and-branch self-correction.

The poison has to come up and out, sooner or later – it won't go away. It will happen by choice or by accident. If by choice, it involves taking a pause to let the dust settle, then making a new start and engaging in a genuine peace-building process lasting a generation – each nation willingly raising the rug on its hidden agendas. Soul-searching is painful: it means all nations confronting their ghosts and ghouls. But it is less painful than the alternative. There is no choice, except on the timing and whether it is voluntary or forced by further doses of devastating truth.

What next? - after the Lebanon War

2006-08-26T19:48:00.000+01:00

What happens next in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine? Well, for now, probably nothing much, except in the social and humanitarian spheres - we're in post-earthquake phase.

Hezbollah has proved its point for now, so it has no offensive agenda to speak of at present. Its main focus will be to engage in social and democratic action to revive south Lebanon, its patch, and to improve its position in Lebanon. It gained a lot and lost some in Lebanese public opinion, and it needs to attend to the latter.

Israel is more preoccupied with internal than external battles for now. The difficulty for Israel is that it has punctured its own mythology of military invincibility, and now it has doubts. There's a deeper issue here too, examined in other entries on this blog, concerning the heart and soul of Israel. Is the 'iron wall' philosophy that has guided Israeli policy toward its neighbours to continue, despite recent losses, or is a new and more conciliatory, some would say realistic, approach to be taken? If the latter, this would be seen by some Israelis as a defeat which needs clawing back - though this is an inherent problem arising from defining life as a win-lose battle, which makes loss doubly difficult (USA suffers this too). Either way, Israel is politically and militarily unclear and rather leaderless at present, and this symbolises a deeper problem concerning Israel's purpose and future, prompted by Israel making itself unsafe as a home for Jews.

Palestine is deeply wounded yet, as usual, recent Israeli pressure and atrocity has united Palestinians just at a moment where Israel could actually have exploited divisions in Palestinian society, between the Hamas and Fatah and other camps. By reviving its incursions into Palestine and stopping its planned strategic withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, Israel has seriously weakened its position.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are focused mainly on doing their best with an extremely bad situation - economic and social conditions, especially in Gaza, make it difficult for Palestinians to function well, and a lot of damage has been done. However, Lebanese have taken the heat off Palestine somewhat, and Israelis' anxieties are now aimed toward Iran. This is both a small relief for Palestinians and an increasing danger. A conflict with Iran would happen over their heads, and one of Israel's biggest targets, its main nuclear facility, is on the West Bank, not far from Bethlehem and Hebron.

Israel is part of USA's geostrategic agenda, and both lock arms over Iran, the big bogeyman. There's a problem though. Israel has just proven that massive air attacks don't necessarily work, and that their intelligence assessments are poor. They tried busting Hezbollah's bunkers, but they just got more rocket attacks in return. When they engaged in open battles, they lost too many men and arms. Air attack is the mainstay of any US-Israeli assault on Iran. Iran has also proven that its proxies, such as Hezbollah, can do a good job - meaning for Israel that if it attacks Iran with USA, it must also face Hezbollah and possibly Palestinian fighters in its own backyard, and US and Israel could probably set Iraq alight in a new and lethal way, driving the majority Iraqi Shi'as against them. So, while an attack on Iran is not sensible, militarily or politically, the problem is that there is frustration and unrealism in Israel and USA, and it is possible that they will attack just because the world and the facts seem to be against them - to prove somehow that they are right in the end and know best. A very masculine problem, damaging for many victims, and ultimately fruitless.

So it looks as if there will be no fighting in Lebanon for perhaps a year. How things go thereafter depend on a few things:
1. whether squabbles arise accidentally - since this area is at present a tinderbox;
2. whether internal battles in Israel cause the military wing to try more bold moves, to redeem their pride and attempt to protect the military's standing in Israel and the world;
3. whether the Iran agenda is seriously pursued or whether it is simply not doable;
4. there could also be complexities arising either in Palestine or Lebanon, if different parties in each place, frustrated with their situation, lose their new-found unity and start squabbling or fighting one another. Trouble is, when people are hurt and rather desperate, things can run amok, and old niggles can surface to create mayhem.

Then there are the international forces entering south Lebanon. These can have both a settling and a stultifying effect - they bring many benefits, helping handle some infrastructural problems and separating warring parties, but they can be bureaucratic and not necessarily do the right thing to get people on their side. Occupying Hezbollah's political patch - Hezbollah is are after all the main provider of public welfare services there - things could get tricky between UNIFIL and Hezbollah, especially over Hezbollah's armaments. On the plus side, there is now quite a bit of experience amongst the UN troops and international diplomats, and on the minus side there are no clear agendas and rules of engagement, and this could get complicated - especially in an emergency.

Then there could be really awkward things, such as the UNIFIL troops being obliged to stand up militarily to the Israelis. This could be a powderkeg - an army against an army. Against Hezbollah, it would be a case of UNIFIL ruling the day and Hezbollah ruling the night. But UNIFIL against Israel would be a classic war situation in which many modern armies actually have little experience today - such wars were forgotten after 1989. Let's hope this won't happen - the implications could be large, in various directions.

But then there's the opportunity for peace too. It's quite big at present. To make peace, it's necessary to slow things down and normalise things sufficiently long that people get out of the habit of conflict. The guys polishing their guns get to fix more cars and spend more time at home with the family, their anger slowly subsiding. This is certainly possible on the Lebanese front, but on the Palestinian front, things are different.

In Palestine, the losses have gone on since 1948 (the Nakba or disaster) and 1967 (the Israeli occupation of Palestine) and, to build genuine peace, there does need to be significant restoration of justice and viability to Palestine, to allow Palestinians to have a decent life. Without this, there will always be trouble, and longterm peace will always be shaken by crises.

The Palestine question has not advanced in recent months. One of the greatest tragedies of continued conflict is that it prevents Palestinians from getting on with improving their lives. It also prevents proper dialogue within Palestine to resolve internal tensions - over power, corruption and contracts, the old guard and the angry young men, conciliation (Abu Mazen) or resistance (Hamas) toward Israel, and other uncertainties arising from the non-resolution of Palestine's future. Recent Israeli actions have united Palestinians, but not because they are discussing things and really working out their own questions - these are shoved to the side whenever the shelling starts.

But the Israel question has advanced - the nation is in shock, and this provokes re-thinking. It could also provoke a more militant feeling amongst the Israeli public or leadership - and this is dangerous because it would be neurotic and angst-filled, liable to explode and undertake more mad operations. But the re-thinking possibilities, rooted in a deep disappointment in Israel with itself and its future prospects, brings an opening of hope.

Israelis like to set the rules of the game, but they also fail to recognise that the Palestinians, Arabs and the rest of the world except for USA, is also waiting for it. Nothing can change in the Middle East until Israel changes - and in this Israel is not game-setting, but tends, when in doubt, just to dig in its heels and refuse to budge, missing big opportunities. This has happened time and again, especially with Syria, and settlements with Jordan and Egypt have necessitated exceptional proactive engagement from these countries to make them succeed. But the wider world is getting impatient - this could at some stage lead to a clinching, defining situation. The two main contenders here are Europe and the wider Muslim world.

Summary: it's unlikely that sparks will fly in the short term, but there are big outstanding questions, and things could go any way. My intuition is that an unforeseen factor could enter the equation soon, which precipitates more truth on all sides - the whole situation is vulnerable to 'factor x' events. We shall see.

Meanwhile, social and humanitarian work is now necessary, to ease the hardships of the people who have been impacted by the recent devastation. And with it, we need an end to the tendency in the wider world to take its attention off the Middle East when the blood stops flowing. The main need is to get those power stations going again in Gaza, to rebuild buildings and lives, re-open the schools, get supplies in and to get life in south Lebanon functioning again - and to digest and learn from recent events. There's a lot of learning needed.

A New Middle East - the region's future

2006-08-21T18:23:00.000+01:00

The talk is of a new Middle East. But what new Middle East? And whose new Middle East? A Middle East designed in Washington DC or, for that matter, Teheran, built to suit the needs of foreigners? Or a Middle East evolved by the locals, built to suit their needs?

Much of the thinking on the Middle East is predicated on the past, or on issues with more past than future, such as the oil and arms trades, the Holocaust, the holy books, foreign interests, who was here first or who has the right to return. But this is no new Middle East - it is a continuation of the old, ridden with problems we all know so well, or new complexities leading out of them.

If we're looking for a genuinely new Middle East, two things help. We need to look at what is nascent and new there. And we need to look realistically at the further future - 2050 or 2080 - and what the region and the world might look like at that time. We need to anchor our judgements to a future reference-point, counting back from there to see a way forward from here. Today's children will see it take shape in their lifetimes.

Peace and cooperation in the Middle East is inevitable. The big question is, how long will it take and what is involved? What is also likely longterm is some sort of reintegration of the region, perhaps as a union, federation or a consensus. Throughout history the region has been more unified than not - whether under Ottomans, Seljuqs, Abbasids, Umayyads, Byzantines, Romans, Greeks, Persians or Babylonians. Except these were empires or tributary suzerainties, and the trend of today is toward unions.

This points to one of the root causes of today's conflicts: the relatively recent past. Territorial division of the region by the British and French around 1920, after the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, led to the creation of states such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Palestine. Palestine was re-divided around 1948 into Israel and the West Bank, the latter coming under Jordan's administration until the Six Day War of 1967 and the West Bank's occupation by Israel. This territorial division reflected more the European need to model states in its own image than the needs of the people living in these areas. Part of the agenda was to create small states unable to challenge the hegemony of foreign powers - initially Britain and France, later USA.

This created a massive sociological and ethnic problem that lies behind today's conflicts. Originally the many ethnic groups of the region defined themselves not by territory but by social role - they lived and mixed with each other, or lived in different city quarters, villages or areas, and they all had a place in the scheme of things. As Arabs correctly point out, the Jews of Damascus, Baghdad, Alexandria and Jerusalem had few problems with neighbouring Arabs, Druze, Christians, Bedouin, Kurds or Turks, and everyone got on well enough under whatever dynasty that ruled at the time. Arabs' problems with Jews started in the mid-twentieth century. It was Europeans who traumatised the Jews, alienating them so thoroughly that many felt a need to migrate to what became Israel.

So, in this complex area - Lebanon alone has 16 ethnic groups - territorial division is fatal because, according to the European nation-state logic, each ethnic group should have its own independence or autonomy to feel safe. Except, of course, when Europeans or Americans decide otherwise, as was the case in Iraq, which once was made up of three Ottoman provinces roughly reflecting the ethnic makeup of the area.

We often forget the many people of mixed or no specific ethnicity or faith. In these religiously anxious days, in which much of the agenda is defined by fundamentalist minorities from Texas to Tajikistan, everyone is supposed to cleave to their faith or ethnic group - and if they don't have one, they'd better fake it or get out. This is a deep cultural insecurity, a fear of open questions and independent reasoning. After a century of modernisation and decades of Arab socialism in the 1950s-70s, many Middle Eastern people have no specific allegiance, or it doesn't matter greatly to them.

Tapestry

Longterm, a likely way to resolve the region's conflicts is to de-emphasise national boundaries, allowing an ethno-diverse social structure to form anew across the Middle East, united by the simple fact of living in the same boat and by the greatest peacemaker of all, conflict-weariness. And also by historic, inherent naturalness: multi-ethnicity is a key characteristic of the Middle East, the crossing-place of Eurasia.

Here lies a mechanism by which deep-rooted peace can arise. Oddly, Europeans, major creators of the Middle East problem, provide a model solution. The European Union was founded on a simple impetus generated in two world wars, called 'never again'. In 1920, had someone said that Europe was to unite, the sure-fire response would be 'Impossible' and 'Never'. Yet the first step in founding the EU took place just seven years after the end of WW2 and, fifty years later, there is no going back to bad old warring ways. The EU is imperfect, but it shows how disaster and polarisation can incrementally transform into a multicultural, multilingual union. In a big, wide world, Europeans from Spain to Finland are a minority with distinct commonalities.

This is important because, today, the world's biggest issues are global, and nation-states are losing relevance because climatic, environmental, technological, economic, demographic and cultural realities disregard borders and historic sensitivities. We need to get real about this.

Nearly 200 nations, of varying sizes and magnitudes, cannot handle the massive global issues now gathering strength. No nation can reasonably shelter a million refugees or, on its own, cut pollution output and its climatic effect, without the cooperation of all other nations, without exception. Patching together peacekeeping forces or disaster-assistance packages amongst sundry coalitions of nations is complex, inadequate and inefficient, and the world's aid-giving capacity is getting strained. Meanwhile, the UN and other transnational bodies such as the WTO have been dominated by one or a few powers, making them unrepresentative and unhelpful to the majority of nations and peoples.

This is now changing with the help of an unlikely alliance of China, India, South Africa and Brazil, and other nations ranged behind them. They are big enough between them to form a counterweight to the developed-world 'Washington consensus'. This suggests that the future lies in continental or cultural blocs. By mid-century, we could see the world sectioned into perhaps twelve large entities rather than a patchwork of 200 haphazard and varied ones. As a matter of realpolitik and urgency, precipitated probably by crisis more than foresight.

Not just this, but Western hegemony is waning. Gravity is shifting from Hollywood to Bollywood, from Detroit and Birmingham to Shanghai and Mumbai. The developed world busily seeks to perpetuate the twentieth century, as if its predominance will survive forever. But it has lost its way. It preaches democracy and freedom abroad while eroding them at home, and its concerns are more about waistlines, insurances, share prices, old age and terrorism than with a new vision for the future. As the BBC correspondent Martin Bell once wrote: "Peace and freedom can be defined as the peace that makes traffic jams possible and the freedom to be stuck in them".

Einstein said that problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them. For precisely this reason much of the world is gradually shifting from the status of 'Third World' to 'Majority World'. It thinks differently. The 'developed' world refuses to engage seriously with the future because it is held in thralldom to its own vested interests - oil, military, financial, industrial and media magnates, corporations and discrete power-networks, not to mention millions of petty stakeholders with pension funds and property-value concerns. Meanwhile, in the Majority World, things are simpler, and there is a distinct horizon to head for. This is simply 'anything except what we've had before' - in other words, a new future.

National and inter-ethnic conglomerates are therefore a likely longterm answer. Pegging our calculations to this idea, in the Middle East we're therefore talking in the shorter term about transitional arrangements moving in this direction. In other words, the recognition of the state of Israel or the Palestinian Territories, or a one-state or two-state solution, are transitory issues. The key issues are justice, inclusion, social welfare, trade and environmental repair, and the one factor overshadowing all these is peace. Real peace, with a willingness to do whatever is necessary to build and maintain it. Which can be achieved only when all parties genuinely feel they are getting a fair enough deal. It's this we really need to look at.

Mad Mullahs

Despite its current woes, the Middle East stands right at the centre of the new Majority World. The signs are already visible. The developed world, anxious to maintain its comfortably numb affluence and security, sees some of these signs as threatening. It calls them terrorists, insurgents and radical Islamists. Though their extremism seems incomprehensible to Westerners, 'terrorists' are but the top of an iceberg concealing a much deeper and wider movement for change which isn't violent. To label them terrorists, as if to demonise and despatch them, is a mistake of historic proportions - a re-run of the fateful meeting of the Titanic with the iceberg. It is a massive failure to recognise what's really happening.

Terrorism is a reaction to the enormous military and political force imposed on ordinary people who feel unable to argue their case by other means. But look deeper. Two organisations in the spotlight, Hamas and Hezbollah, are not just paramilitaries: they are social welfare movements delivering genuine results. They are not conservative Islamists resisting modernity - they're thoroughly up-to-date bodies answering real needs. Their historic equivalent in the West was the workers' movements of a century ago, which spoiled the show for the power-holders of the time. They had their militants and subversives, for sure, but they were made up mainly of trades unions, cooperative movements, educational networks and reform parties catering for majorities, for workers who, during the twentieth century, later became the social mainstream - the TV-watchers, car-owners, mortgage-payers and holiday-makers of recent decades. Here's a clue.

Hamas' and Hezbollah's supporters aren't just people who are easily hoodwinked by fork-tongued mullahs preaching hatred in the mosques - they are far more astute and mature than that. They support them because they answer the needs of real people living in apartment blocks in Palestine and Lebanon. They wheel their kids along in buggies and shop in supermarkets just like anyone from Omaha to Oslo to Osaka. They have weddings and funerals, worry about their kids, their jobs and the future, just like us. They see Hamas and Hezbollah delivering the goods, and they vote for them in democratic elections. Just as we would if we were they.

Remember, in the democratic West, many ordinary people are dissatisfied with their politicians and feel unrepresented by political parties. The biggest voting block is the abstainers who feel their vote makes little difference. The UK's biggest ever street-demo came in 2003, against government plans to join USA in the invasion of Iraq. In the 1980s, UK's biggest political organisation was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - today it is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Westerners' heart and conscience are nowadays expressed through non-governmental channels and single-issue campaigns that mean something to them.

Meanwhile, Hamas was elected with a 60% majority in a high-turnout election judged free and fair, and run by the side that lost. Today, as this article is being written, the Israelis announced that they had arrested the Hamas deputy prime minister for being a member of a terrorist organisation. This is hollow. So much for respect for democracy. The real pretext is that they fear Hamas as a symptom of a new Middle East. They point at Hamas' refusal to recognise Israel, while exploiting Hamas' poor international PR, which fails to bring home the point that forced seizure of Palestinian lands, the building of security walls and settlements on Palestinian territory and other outrages eat away at Palestinian viability, rights and welfare, making Israel a very difficult neighbour to respect and recognise.

Hamas would have little problem with Israel on a level playing-field where fairness and equity ruled, but Israel maintains an inherent sense of precedence and superiority over Palestinians which it expresses through force, appropriation, incarceration and demolition. Israelis keep alive the sweeping label of 'terrorist' to devalue any who stand for an alternative world-view. Yet the state of Israel was successfully founded by terrorists, some of whom became prime ministers. In such a climate, a Palestinian government recognising Israel would be a traitor to its people, and Israelis and Western governments know it. Would that things were otherwise.

Outside intervention

Two factors influence the Middle East's future: the impending decline of oil as a source of income and power for ruling elites, and the impending decline of the West, specifically USA. These are enormous in their implications, and the coming decades will see this unfolding. Denial of this lies behind USA's 'war on terror': an anxious attempt to hold the reins of the Middle East agenda as it slips out of its grasp. Oil and the West's fortunes are intimately connected - a strategic error made thirty years ago. Alternative, sustainable ideas and technologies were pioneered in the West in its potential cultural revolution in the 1960s-70s, but it chose to squash them because small-scale, organic, low-consumption, home-grown, people-driven solutions do not equate with the power and dominance of the few over the many.

Since then the West has repeatedly miscalculated its position - and Israel is part of the West. The miscalculation is huge, demonstrating how much the West fails to perceive the unfolding agenda. USA invades Iraq on a false pretext, causing massive destruction and failing in its objectives. Israel bombards South Lebanon on a thin pretext, killing a thousand people and displacing a million to save two soldiers who shouldn't have been sitting where they were. They were beaten on points by a theocrat in a turban, with his volunteers, using relatively primitive equipment bought for it by a minor power. These are massive errors by two countries, USA and Israel, who nominally possess the world's best intelligence and military forces. Smacks of the Roman empire, beaten by mere barbarians - the Romans too lost their grip on reality, so dangerously accustomed were they to being top dog.

What makes 'barbarians' and 'terrorists' powerful? Their economy of action and lack of decadence, their power to improvise and survive, and their single-minded clarity of intent. Terror actions cost a thousand while anti-terror actions cost a billion. Terrorists are not just misguided, despicable criminals: they represent something relevant, and some have their fingers right on the pulse of things. Even for the many Arabs who dislike violence and mayhem, terrorists vent a body of unexpressed frustration, so there is a volatile mix of feeling both for and against them.

There will be no disarming of Hezbollah until Hezbollah feels the need no longer to bear arms. They will cease armed action when the odds are evened, and when the military madness of the Middle East, greatly fuelled by the West, subsides. Thus was the case with the IRA, who stopped only when their usefulness was exhausted - and also when the Old Guard grew too old and American funding for them dried up after 9/11.

The birth of a new Middle East rests on a key factor: the end of unquestioning American support for Israel. It enables Israel, with the size and population of Denmark, to assert itself on the whole region, as if a major power. As soon as American support dies down, Israel will be obliged to make friends with its neighbours, as a matter of necessity. USA is geopolitically changeable and it has its own problems - not least its indebtedness and reliance on Chinese and Arab money to prop it up. Israel might also one day gladly cease being a pawn in USA's geostrategic game.

Security

Arabs, however militant or strong, are unlikely to drive Israelis into the sea: Israelis are there. Many were born there, and Israel is a vibrant and lively country. Its disappearance would mean enormous loss to the Middle East. The loss of most of its Jews has left a shadow over Germany lasting generations: herein lies a lesson. Israelis brought much violence with them to the Middle East, acquired like a virus from the Nazis and stoked by Jewish despair after WW2 but, if Arabs were to eliminate Israelis, such a viral transmission would happen again, to the detriment of the Arab world. It has already partially happened. The cause of this viral infection - injustice toward Palestinians and Lebanese - needs dealing with quickly, before the virus starts galloping.

It's not Israelis who need to go away - it's their current behaviour toward their neighbours. Happy, safe, friendly, open, constructive, collaborative Israelis are undoubtedly welcome in a new Middle East, given a little time, and achieving this would be a key part of the region's transformation, and a potential miracle of our times.

The only people who can end the state of Israel are Israelis themselves, by repeating what they have done in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Massively attacking their neighbours, they increase rather than reduce Arabic resistance and frustration, also undermining the confidence and security of Israelis and causing them to lose heart or consider leaving. Winning is never a permanent condition, and historic tables are turning. Also, arguably, a 'new Middle East' is tugging at the present from the future, and we're walking backwards towards it.

Aliyah (the return of Jews to Israel) has ground to a trickle. Most of the world's Jews now feel safer outside Israel, their supposed safe haven. Meanwhile, young Israelis twiddle their thumbs in India or seek jobs in USA or Europe, hoping things will change back home but wondering whether they ever will. They're not emigrating, just away, getting a life. This is a sign of deep unease and disillusionment which can weaken or even eventually render Israel unviable.

Meanwhile, back home, Israelis wall themselves in behind a security fence, behind the walls of nightmarishly modern, concrete hilltop settlements - 'in the bubble'. Domestic violence and psychiatric disorders nibble at this rather militarised society. Preoccupied with conflict, Israel falls behind in dealing with the real issues of our day, the welfare of people and environment. Lacking cheap Palestinian labour, Israel imports foreign workers from the Philippines and Nigeria, creating a new problem: in a democratic Jewish state, its biggest-growing social groups are Israeli Palestinians and non-Jewish foreigners. Demographic change is critical: since 2005 the combined population of Israel and Palestine together is now less than 50% Jewish. The recent war on Lebanon suggests a possible unconscious diversionary wish not to face this.

It also represents a kind of coup by Israeli military interests, who have dominated the scene since the state's inception in 1948. Israeli society, for its own sake, needs peace, social improvement and normalisation, yet the military lobby, representing the deep Jewish belief that the world is fundamentally against it, is scared of losing its grip on the country. This belief is arguably historically justifiable - though not caused by Arabs - yet is has become more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a useful survival mechanism. It justifies dreadful behaviour towards Israel's neighbours and victims, it isolates Israelis and costs others terribly.

If we do support peace, we should understand Israelis because they are faced with an enormous, wrenching change that is difficult to face. It took two world wars for my own country, Britain, to accept that it wasn't top dog. Downturn is difficult, painful. Meanwhile, Palestinians, Lebanese and also Iraqis suffer immensely in real terms, deserving sympathy too. But for them the path ahead is clearer: they are already down, and the future direction for them is up - they just need a chance to get on with it. They have big questions of their own to face, but these are less momentous than those that Israelis face.

The big challenge for Israelis is a deep change in world-view and social culture, enabling them to respect and make friends with their neighbours. This requires a change of enormous depth and proportion, bringing some temporary loss until the payoffs work through. This change is likely to be brought about not by pressure from Arabs, but by loss of support from USA - a country facing several possible disasters of its own.

Force majeure

Before we sink into gloomy despair at the prospect of continued violence in the Middle East, let's pull back to see a wider picture. Peace is inevitable. It can take ten or sixty more years, but it is inevitable - not least because bigger global facts are likely eventually to overwhelm local tensions. This is our starting-point. The honourable solution, in line with all three faiths in the area, and following simple humanistic logic, would be for Israel to survive and transform into an integral part of the new Middle East. This looks unlikely at present, but reconciliation between Britain and Germany after WW2 was unlikely too - and it happened.

Bridge-building and normalisation are an easier option than continued conflict. They are better options than continued isolation and insecurity in Israel and ongoing loss of life and everyday normality in Palestine and Lebanon. It is a sensible option, already running perhaps 25ish years late. It was predicted even by early Zionist thinkers like Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who laid the ideological tracks for the founding of the state of Israel.

A new Middle East is already dawning. It is being germinated in the ashes and rubble of destroyed communities. In strife-torn localities where loss is overwhelming, society transforms into a mutually-supportive survival unit where the ills of much of the rest of the world - drugs, prostitution, crime, family breakup and other degenerative ailments - hardly happen. In Britain we call this 'World War Two Spirit'. People are strangely happy and alive, in a tragedy-ridden way - and in this crucible, new things happen and new generations grow up with new ideas.

Why is the new being born in amongst the rubble? Because in the hard soil of devastation and pain, priorities become clearer and straighter. This is what Hamas and Hezbollah are dealing with: how to rebuild homes, families, communities and lives, decimated by injustice and violence imposed frequently (but not totally) from outside.

This is the beginning of a new Middle East - a place which, in 30, 50 or 70 years, could be a world leader in social-cultural values and welfare. A place no longer clamped by the oil trade and its geostrategic priorities. A place where the people are so fed up with the past that they will have no more of it. That leaves the future.

Such a society is likely to have its fair share of Jews. They're gifted, industrious, committed and knowledgeable, and they're needed. After recent events, many Arabs understandably disown any kinship with Jews. But Jews and Arabs are made for each other. They're family. Sorry to say that, but it's true. Family arguments are perhaps the worst and most vicious arguments of all, because moving away doesn't stop a person being your brother or sister. But family reunions are one of the most wonderful of human experiences - and this is yet to come.

Never again

To get there, sadly, the concerned parties have to reach the 'never again' point - that point of utter weariness where the previous story is finally laid to rest. Would that they had reached that point by now, or that human wisdom had prevailed. After this recent war, it doesn't quite feel we have reached that 'never again' point - but we're close.

It's a long, slow, wrenching natural birth, and induced or caesarean births are not possible in this game if the next chapter is to be sustainable and legitimate. Birth is happening, nevertheless. War seems to accelerate it by laying the cards flat on the table. But warfare doesn't make peace, and war is not about who's right but who's left. Sometimes, as in pre-birth labour, success is possible by deliberately relaxing, dropping anxieties and focusing on steady breathing. Consider Northern Ireland - a conflict also stretching back to territorial divisions in the 1920s. The people got fed up and stopped fighting around 1995. The paramilitaries have packed up - or, more accurately, converted into crime organisations. Belfast is now a popular, lively, reviving city, but the old guard of politicians and fighters are still arguing - and marginalising themselves. Society carries on, and peace has come. Sometimes birth succeeds in spite of doctors.

This suggests something for the Middle East. This isn't really a war between Israelis and Arabs. It's a battle between militant/military interests and ordinary civilians, on all sides. It is a fight to maintain polarisation and dehumanisation, by a minority seeking to dominate the agenda by precipitating perpetual crises. It is done over pretexts such as the kidnapping of soldiers. It's a loud game played out to prevent other things happening - the re-enchantment of the Holy Land, care for the environment, cooperation and cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic societies. Powerful interests seek to keep the old agenda going.

A new agenda is nevertheless dawning, and this is scary for everyone. It leaves a wide-open space where the answers aren't clear-cut. Conflict is an addiction, leading to strong withdrawal symptoms. Re-humanising the enemy means living without closure, without categorical judgements, without polarisation. It means attending to other things. This same debate is simmering within Israeli politics, Hamas and Hezbollah: the age-old argument between militants and moderates. It's the Bolsheviks (revolutionaries) and Mensheviks (social democrats) of Russia 90 years ago. These domestic conflicts make people touchy, irritable, engaging in avoidance strategies. Since it's habitually easier to blame and defend oneself against others rather than examine oneself, this easily becomes war. We've seen it all before. It's relentlessly repetitive.

These are tragic birth-pangs. But the good news is that a new Middle East indeed is coming. It is historically inescapable. Let's just pray and work for the possibility that it can be achieved easier. Rockets, bombs and drones perpetuate the past. Hamas and Hezbollah are social reform movements, struggling to establish a new reality in the Middle East. Israelis are transitioning from a post-Holocaust era to a new dawn, a new relationship with God, nature and humanity. It's a terrible struggle. It could be done otherwise.

Thanks for naming the New Middle East, George and Condi, but you are merely dangerous, marginal commentators. The new Middle East is being founded by the people who live there, on terms that pertain to their evolving situation. They don't really know what they're heading for - it's a seat-of-the-pants thing, a jostling and fermentation. In'sh'allah. It concerns a simple homegrown, cross-cultural truism: treat others as you would have them treat you.

Sulha - reconciliation through social process. Hudna - truce, long enough to forget to return to fighting. Salaam-Shalom - the Arabic and Hebrew words for peace are so similar.

Peace is Inevitable - Is-Pal in the longterm

2006-08-21T09:45:00.000+01:00

An anonymous commentator has asked me why and how I believe peace is inevitable.

First, a comment on Anon's statement that conflict is constant. No it isn't - it's just that it is highlighted in the history books, and it is a very definitive event which makes a lot of noise and change, so conflict is naturally noticed, while the historic gaps between conflicts are passed over. So five years' war makes more noise in history than forty years' peace.

But here's the main point. War is a diversion from living life and working out our relationships by other means. The big issues of the 21st Century are connected with planetary survival, not with the petty interests of nations or even their voracious need for oil, uranium or water. If we carry on warring through this century, we've had it - we'll be overtaken by other issues much larger than tsunamis or hurricanes.

So we can either exercise a choice to end war - a pragmatic, not an idealistic choice. Or we can carry on and get overwhelmed by other things - some of which can be precipitated by war. Examples: global economic collapse, toxic and environmental crises, mass migration, nuclear assaults or accidents, and social and demographic atrocities so large that they can hit humanity's fundamental faith in living.

So my assumption is that peace is a realistic, economic, environmentally-friendly, diplomatic, socially-desirable, practical solution to war, and that humanity indeed is on the edge of a historic shift by achieving a fundamental peace, for totally sensible, even rather boring, statistical reasons!

The other alternative is that we all go down, leaving planet Earth in the good care of the other remaining species.

That's why I say peace is inevitable. It's just a matter of how long and how much it will take.

Thanks for your comment, Anon, and nice to meet you.

The Lebanon War

2006-08-05T20:58:00.000+01:00

This is a reply to an e-mail from a friend in northern Israel, customarily a peace-freak, who is under attack from the Hezbollah rockets. His e-mail is below this entry.

The position I'm coming from is summed up in a quote from the philosopher Bertrand Russell: "War is not about who is right, it's about who is left". Very profound, and it relates to warfare being a breakdown of relationship by other means.

Trouble is, in our world, conflict has become too habitual - my own country, Britain, has played a disproportionate part in that. War is an expression of limited and powerful interests: it's rare that ordinary people and their genuine needs and feelings are really represented - they just suffer, lose and die, on all sides, in uniform or out of it.

You probably accept this in general but, in our day, it needs re-stating repeatedly as a baseline to start from. Especially today, because global issues facing us are becoming much bigger than the national interest of nations, and warfare is becoming obsolete as a way of solving problems. The evolving agenda of this century is about interrelatedness, living together 'in the same boat' - and if we don't, the boat sinks. Some interests - those in power and those who depend on them - try to keep things the same, a 20th Century agenda.

In the 21st Century it is highly likely that the dominant influence of the West will be levelled downwards, and the influence of the 'Majority World' is likely to rise, and it is already doing so. But the biggest issues are global. This is a tectonic shift.

Now we get to the current conflict involving your country (Israel). It concerns folks like me, because Israel is not isolated in a bubble - it is part of the world. Israel is also a microcosm or nexus-point, so what happens there affects the world greatly, whether it's in a harmful or a healing direction. I do not agree with those in Europe who tend to take sides in this conflict - it's all sides that need understanding and supporting. The polarisation and projection of viewpoints and realities in conflicts makes such a balancing act very difficult. But it is necessary since, in the fullness of time, the whole story, not just one side's story, is most relevant. What is left is what ultimately matters, not what is seen by different sides to be right.

For me, there is no question that Israel should continue to exist and thrive. I have close contact with much of the thinking that goes on in the Muslim world, and the majority of Muslims are indeed closer to a Western viewpoint than they are to extremists and takfiri (radical anti-Western) elements. A majority of Muslims would accept or support the principle of recognising Israel and making fair deals with it, as long as the terms are fair and doable.

The key issue is the willingness to talk, negotiate and go through a bridge-building process. That is, the majority of Israel's neighbours, including Palestinians in the streets, are (or at least, were) in favour of reaching agreement with Israel and moving on from here - or they were moving that way. Because they are tired of all that has happened before. And war-weariness is the greatest of peacemakers.

But the trouble is, when Israel is seen from outside to be aggressive and 'disproportionate' in its superior firepower, and unjust against Palestinians, opinion ranges against Israel, rightly or wrongly, and regardless of what Israelis claim. Israel is not doing well in the battle for hearts and minds. It might or might not win the current battle, but at present it is unlikely win the war. This is ominous.

I won't argue about the rightness or wrongness of the commonly-debated issues and details in this conflict. What concerns me instead is that I believe Israel is acting against its own best interests, on many fronts. Here's an incomplete list:

1. Loss of international support for and acquiescence to Israel, on the basis of its current behaviour. Many implicit supporters of Israel, including former visitors, some international Jews, and others, have felt themselves morally pushed by Israeli actions to stop supporting Israel or acquiescing in its actions. This is dangerous for Israel.

2. Israel has taken on a tricky enemy, Hezbollah, a very well organised, trained army - they're not just terrorists. Hezbollah is not at present losing this battle, as Israel hoped. Even if Israel knocks out Hezbollah's current operational capability, this will not stop the problem in the longterm. Hezbollah as a social movement is here to stay - Isreal needs to act to pacify it, not to make it more militant. They have the persistence and commitment of the Vietcong, with or without Iranian support. Paradoxically, though the Communists won the Vietnam war, within twenty years they had become capitalists.

3. Then there is '10 - 6 = 25'. There are ten terrorists, six of them are killed by military action, and the result is twenty-five new ones. Israel has activated a galloping virus of ill feeling toward it. Hezbollah doesn't need to recruit new fighters - Israel now does it for them. Amongst troublemakers in Palestine, the problem for Israel is that so many Palestinians are young, so they tend not to learn from the past but instead from current experience. They see what's happening, and their testosterone jerks into action. Older Palestinians have learned that intifada gains them nothing, so they tend toward supporting peace and recognition of Israel, as Abu Mazen wants, but younger Palestinians don't have that experience or position. Israeli action thus accentuates inherent divisions within Muslim societies, giving focus and heat to otherwise latent frustrations, firing up opposition to itself.

4. Then there is a risk that Israel's current bold actions can also draw terrorists and troublemakers toward it from elsewhere in the Muslim world, because they see the possibility of enhanced heroic action which might be more productive than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya or elsewhere - in their way of seeing things. This mad and destructive element is despicable, but it's a real thing which cannot just be stamped out. It has to be smoothed out through 'soft power'. Poverty and lack of opportunity fuel extremism - and the best way to pacify Palestinians is to enable them to have a decent life with a decent future. This takes time - but it's likely to be quicker than another 60 years of conflict.

5. Israel was founded to become a safe place for Jewish people to live. But it has not really created security for itself, after nearly six decades. Other wars end, but this continues. This ongoing insecurity leads to consequences such as reduction of aliyah (the return of Jews to Israel), the quiet emigration of Israelis, a loss of business, visitors and interchange, and loss of a sense of future and hope amongst resident Israelis. This is serious and insidious. The basic happiness of a nation makes it a good place to live and, to restore true national growth and strength, Israel needs to focus on this (as do many countries). During a conflict, everyone locks arms in unity against the enemy, but this does not last longterm when conflict dies down again, and people start looking at the facts of their lives and the welfare of their children. Continued conflict weakens Israelis and Israel's true longterm interests.

6. Israel is a developed country, yet the West has a chronic crisis too: it is nowadays geared to preserving the past more than creating a future. The West has become apathetic, comfortably numb, poorly motivated and directionless, more interested in chocolate, obesity, entertainment and pensions than 'real life'. Meanwhile, across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the future is clearer: people want a definite improvement, no more of the past, and they're working hard for it. The world is changing rapidly. The West doesn't really see this happening - it thinks its cultural and economic hegemony will continue forever.

This wider issue affects Israel greatly, because it is located on the boundary, in the Middle East - and domestically, the 'security fence' marks that boundary. Israel depends on its connections with America and Europe - specifically on US financial, military and political support. It is to some extent a pawn in an American game, just as Lebanon is a pawn in an Iranian game - and this doesn't match the image of Israel as a proudly independent country. Meanwhile USA is heading for troubled times, and it does what it wants, not always wisely (for example, the 'special relationship' between USA and UK has gone very wrong since 2001). Mighty arguments are already afoot in Washington DC over the aims and outcomes of US foreign policy. This heralds an eventual change.

Israel's problem is that American support cannot be relied on longterm, and the current apathy of the international community can change too. This could leave Israel isolated and urgently needing friendly neighbours, with a need to build mutually-assured security, trade and interchange. Longterm, the eventual disarming of Hezbollah is just a beginning, leading to the demilitarisation of the whole Middle East, including Israeli and Iranian nukes. Israel needs to start a befriending process as soon as possible, for its own security and national interest, since it will take time. The current war goes in the opposite direction.

7. The aims of war. Problem is, a key aim of Hezbollah in this war is simply to shock Israelis, to make them feel insecure. It has already succeeded. It has no need to invade the country or destroy large areas, only to destabilise it and introduce doubt into the minds of Israelis. Meanwhile, Israel's military aims seem not really to be working. Weeks of military action to knock out Hezbollah positions has led to a recent increase of Hezbollah rocket assaults, and renewed support from Iran and elsewhere. Even if Hezbollah is disabled, there are no promises for the longterm. Israel's intention of turning Lebanese against Hezbollah has failed: Hezbollah is gaining sympathy and fighters. Before the war, Iran was discussing reducing funding to Hezbollah, since the party was moving toward a more democratic focus, but this funding is now being increased. The military wing of Hezbollah has managed to get its way, and Russian arms dealers are happy to sell Katyushas to them.

8. Reactivity. When London was attacked by suicide bombers last year, nothing much changed - the British just kept on going. We've seen it before (IRA and WW2). A key objective of terrorists, to disrupt normal life and divide society, just didn't work. Not a big incentive to try again. When Hezbollah took two soldiers (who were sitting ducks, sitting in a vulnerable place in two Humvees, without cover), Israel exploded. In other words, Israel has proved that only small actions are needed to send it crazy. This is a strategic vulnerability.

9. Military interests on all sides. In my observation Israel, Palestine and Lebanon were more ready for peace and a settlement than they had been for a long time - or they were slowly moving that way. Confidence-building takes time, and it includes screw-ups. Most people are tired of conflict and want a decent life. This worries military interests - vested and political interests, and those who have had a long military history - since peace is a new paradigm, and it involves re-humanising the enemy, de-polarising extremes, un-projecting from the enemy and giving less energy to military priorities. But there were unresolved issues on all sides.

The new Israeli government was down in popularity, needing a boost, and some elements in the IDF were itching to get going.

In Hezbollah the democratic wing was in the ascendancy and the military wing was itching too.

Hamas had internal political tensions, it was facing pressures to recognise Israel, and it had great difficulty keeping control of militants in Gaza.

On all sides this gave military interests an opportunity to hijack the agenda. It was a confluence of shared interest on three sides. From this perspective, the current conflict is a war of militant-military interests against ordinary people on all sides. The shared interests of ordinary people on all three sides have been successfully hijacked.

10. Last point. Israel's recent military response is consistent with its responses in previous decades. But the policy of bold defence, with assassinations, massive force, punishment strikes and incursions into Palestine and Lebanon cannot be judged to be successful. And: "if you do what you always do, you'll get what you've already got". If Israel's customary strategy had been successful, there would be no war now, and little or no trouble in Gaza, Nablus and south Lebanon. If just one man, Sheikh Yassin, had been alive today, things might now be different.

The evidence of recent decades is sufficient to prove that the 'iron wall' strategy creates at least as many problems as it solves. If Israelis want security and a good, normal life, another strategy is needed.

This involves coming to terms with your neighbours and making friends, working together - the big issues concern water, pollution, climate, demographics. Many people say "Impossible" to the idea of making friends. Well, it takes a few decades, but the English and the Germans prove that it is possible - we are now in the same EU because our interests are similar, and our national differences are encompassed within the union. We squabble occasionally (and the English are useless at football!), but my old dad, 90, who once believed that the only good German was a dead German, found out in the 1980s that his favourite car was a Volkswagen. Things change.

This will happen for Israel, sometime. It is inevitable, whether it takes 20 or 100 years. Israel is in the Middle East, a small country in a big world, and its neighbours are its local community. On every level of society, the state of Israel and the Jewish people face a reorientation from a tragic and traumatic past to a potentially hopeful and reconciled future. This reorientation will not be easy, but in the longterm it is easier than recurring conflict and insecurity. Even Jabotinsky predicted this.

While I understand many Israelis' logic in supporting and justifying the actions of their armed forces and government, I do not believe it will benefit the Israeli people. The oft-repeated assertion that 'there is no other way' limits Israel's possibilities and future. It holds your nation down, perpetuating a growing, creeping feeling that Israel is not safe for Jews or confident in itself, and that Jews are not safe anywhere. It even raises a terrible ghost of possibility that Israel's attitude toward its neighbours becomes the cause of its own downfall - not by invasion or destruction from outside, but by internal spoiling of Israel's potential to achieve what it was founded to achieve.

In reading this, you will certainly find issues you disagree with, and my understanding of the situation might not be right. But the key message here is 'think about your future' and 'make friends with your neighbours'. Any party in any conflict is, whether it likes or accepts it or not, at least 50% responsible - it always takes two to tango, and blaming the other side for starting a conflict resolves nothing.

I suggest it is time for a fundamental change of strategy and approach. There are far more important things to do in the 21st Century. I am critical of my own nation too, and Britain also needs to change strategy and approach. But wars with lots of deaths attract global attention, and you've got it, right now. We goyim will express our views, because the bloodletting makes it our problem as well as yours.

I believe also that, unconsciously, many people around the world sense that the Middle East is potentially a seed-place for a new kind of future society and culture, born out of the ashes of the old. Just as Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses within 30 years of WW2, so can Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq (at least) become cultural powerhouses in the mid-to-late 21st Century. But they can also miss that opportunity, depending on choices made today.

All this is why I believe Israel is right now acting against its own best interests. I accept the kind of reasoning you wrote, Jonathan, to be valid for you, in your situation. But try to stand back a little, to see how it looks from further back, and all round. I am glad I am not where you are and, whatever happens, I sincerely wish you and your country well. If I beg to differ, it's not because I am against you. Strength is a cultural, social and spiritual thing - in the long run, military strength only leaves bomb-craters, monuments to the dead and piles of junk and rubble. Israel has a place in the Middle East. The traditional strength of Jews has for centuries been in business, knowledge, innovation, specialist skills and human gifts, not in military action.

But then, I might be wrong, and I'm willing to meet you again sometime in future and to talk through how well we did in assessing the situation. The main thing is to keep lines open. I thank you for all that you wrote in your comments on Rabbi Lerner's missive, since it's really important for us all to hear where others are coming from, and between us all the future is built.

Disarming the militias

2006-07-21T16:31:00.000+01:00

During the current war, there has been a lot of talk about disarming the militias - Hezbollah and the splintery militant groups of Gaza. It is incanted by quite sensible people who ought to know better and think a little further - including the foreign secretary of UK and the secretary general of the UN. It's part of the pious hypocrisy that characterises the response of the West and many other countries to the recent violence - as if to demonstrate that we know what's best and we care. Yet, my own country, Britain, has been party to the unrequested invasion of two countries in the last five years, and is the second-biggest arms supplier in the world.

Then there's the pious calling for a cease-fire. Excuse me, but this is fatuous hot air. Once a war has started, it will not end until the winning side has reached at least a satisfactory outcome, according to its objectives. So a cease-fire is not on the cards, and to call for one is head-in-the-clouds stuff. The issue is that wars should never start - they represent an enormous failure of relationship. Once they have started, they must unfortunately drag on to some sort of conclusion, and it is naive to think otherwise.

So what's this about disarming militias? Do you honestly believe that the weaker side in a conflict will surrender its arms, giving the stronger side the capacity to walk all over them? If Israel wishes to invade Lebanon again, are the Lebanese, whether or not they support Hezbollah, supposed to lie down and accept them? Israel has been at war regularly since the 1940s, and it shows few signs of stopping this habit. Its economy, society and international relations depend on it. So recommending that militias be disarmed is a hypocrisy. It will not happen.

Only one kind of disarmament is possible: complete, comprehensive, global disarmament. Owing to the dominance of the strongest and the vulnerability of the weakest, the strongest countries need to take the initiative - ratchet down first, to convince the small guys that they can be trusted not to take advantage. All nuclear powers should disarm - not just Iran, and not excepting anyone, for any reason.

Since states as well as militias terrorise, both should disarm. Both should scale down the industry, social structure, funding, armed forces and psychology that support and encourage military force. This is the only form of disarmament that is possible and viable. It's a long haul, given the state of things today, but it's possible in thirty years - starting now. If not, starting when?

Pie in the sky? This is less crazy than the statement repeated over and over, that militias should disarm. They never will. But there is never a mention of Israel, USA, UK or others disarming. Israel's need to defend itself is repeatedly supported. Well, that's acceptable if the same rule is applied to any threatened people - except that we then get an arms race, and arms are manufactured to be used.

There is some legitimacy to militias possessing arms, in the current context. This has been demonstrated in Palestine: the Palestinian people and Hamas declared hudna or cease-fire in 2004, stating an intention to move toward peace with Israel by creating a quieter space in which mutual confidence may be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, the Israelis continued to use their troops to harass, block travel and trade, take possession of Palestinian land, build The Wall and impose their will. This was one of the main causes of the current conflict: bombed nightly, Gazans were faced with a choice to take their losses lying down or to fight back. This is where the current nightmare started. Look at the picture here (more to be seen here): this was a house-demolition outside Bethlehem to which I was a witness, taking place in July 2005 during the cease-fire, backed up by Israeli troops (you can see them, plus Palestinian and European protesters). The demolitions took place to clear the way for the building of the security wall. The residents had been given two months' leave to appeal in the Israeli courts, and the demolition squad arrived after one week. That's called 'facts on the ground'.

It's time to end this hot air about disarming. It's time to get real. If we're to have disarmament - I am all in favour - then it needs to be on all sides. Otherwise, forget it.

To quote Bertrand Russell: "War is not about who is right - it's about who is left".

Some thoughts on the new war in Lebanon

2006-07-18T00:15:00.000+01:00

In my view, Israelis are shooting themselves in the feet, as yet another war breaks out. They haven't thought this through sufficiently.

Palestinians are shooting themselves in the feet too. And this is the tragedy of the Holy Land.

The Palestinians aren't fault-free. But they have less choice available than Israelis and, penned up in what in effect are enormous prison camps, it's easy to see how elements amongst them blow up and wreck everything for everyone else - it would take a supreme effort of patience and forbearance to do otherwise.

Yet the Israelis are penned up too - inside a growing wall they have constructed. Inside a national isolation. They are penned up in a nation which was supposed to be a safe haven for Jews. They're caught in a poison embrace with their subject neighbours.

Palestine and its borders are Israeli controlled. All imported supplies come through Israeli monopoly suppliers, traded through Palestinian monopoly wholesalers. Palestine is thus subject to any supply, price, tax or legal control Israelis choose to assert. All this favours corruption, placing enormous power and wealth in the hands of approved Palestinian importers.

The media are careful not to mention that endemic Palestinian corruption is to a large extent caused by this - there is no free market. Palestinians' currency is Israeli - shekels - and their customs duties are collected and currently withheld by Israelis. If the same were to happen to Israelis, they'd feel humiliated, and they would fight like hell to end such a situation.

However, it's easy to blame Israelis for everything. Their actions and insensitivities tend to reinforce the idea that they are the cause of most problems. This loses them a lot of friends. They seem unaware that they need to cultivate friends right now.

Proportion

What alienates many reasonable-thinking people worldwide is Israel's visible over-reaction to its circumstances, and its tendency to punish civilian bystanders. In Lebanon their rationale is that massive retaliation and punishment will teach the Lebanese a lesson, causing them to pressurise militias such as Hezbollah to stop what they are doing - Hezbollah is bombing northern Israel.

But most innocent by-standing Lebanese are as much in fear of Hezbollah as they are of Israel, and they don't see things the way Israelis want. Trouble is, Hezbollah has a mixture of sincere motivations - to improve the lot of ordinary people - and shady motivations involving the power-agendas of influential lobbies in Iran and elsewhere, including even secret Western interests who want to perpetuate mayhem and collective disempowerment in the Middle East.

A problem has also arisen in Gaza, with renegade activists lobbing rockets over nearby Israeli settlements. This is deliberate provocation. Most Palestinians favour peace and know from experience that conflict has brought them no advantage, only pain and loss. But when Israel brings out its tanks and F16s to root out terrorists, while killing ordinary people and children, giving flimsy explanations, denying responsibility and giving only the occasional apology, many Palestinians naturally feel support for anyone who gives the Israelis a bit of trouble. Because, in Palestinians' experience, Israelis only take things - land, resources and liberties - giving back little of actual value. So there is a feeling of need for some get-back, to join in the teaching business too.

Polarisation

Now, many Israelis, reading this, will think "he's anti-Semitic", but this is incorrect. I support the best longterm interests of Jews, resident and international. I support the best longterm interests of Arabs too - and this isn't a contradiction. These two are the same thing.

The most disturbing thing for many international onlookers is that Israel seems now to have gone quite mad, firing wildly at weak and helpless people, none of whom have any defence against Israeli might. Isn't there a danger this will be seen as an ill-judged punishment of the weak in order to get at the strong?

My own country, Britain, lays its iron hand on people like Iraqis and Afghans, telling them it is for their own benefit, and I don't support that either. Yes, Britain's poor management of the Palestinian situation in the 1920s-40s, when Jews themselves were terrorists, left a large shadow on the future, and we're seeing the results today. But British faults do not permit others to commit crimes.

Real peace-building

Israel needs to make friends. Not fairweather friends like the Americans, who have a geopolitical agenda which, in the end, cares more about oil prices, geostrategic control and weird biblical interpretations than about Israelis and their welfare. Israelis are proxies in a declining superpower's game. A proud, independent, lively people, reduced to this.

If Israelis wish to guarantee their future, which they have every need and right to do, the last thing they should do is alienate others. To gain true friends, you give, listen, exchange and stand by friends and neighbours through good times and bad - you understand their situation and, if there's something difficult to point out, you do it in a supportive way. Friends are never gained by telling people they ought to be friends.

If anyone disagrees with Israeli policy, they are seen to be wrong and must be taught a lesson. In response, people either go quiet and turn away, or they reinforce Israelis' insecurities by fighting back - formerly, with suicide bombers, now with kidnapping of soldiers, plus rockets. This is tragic, this silencing, and the international sitting on hands that accompanies it. "For the triumph of evil, it is necessary only that good people do nothing" (Edmund Burke, 18th Century).

Historic tragedy

What's worse is that Israel is heaping upon itself a debt - a debt to those who suffer at their hands - just as Germans did toward Jews in the 1930s-40s, for which they still pay a price of guilt. This time, it's Palestinians and at times Arabic neighbours. Yes, Palestinians and Arabs screw up too, but every time an Israeli dies, ten Palestinians die, and this is disproportionate and no recipe for future security.

Jews were once victims, and Israelis have now become rather cruel masters. It didn't have to be this way. It isn't good for Jews themselves.

I have a Druze friend from the Golan Heights. His family are sheep-farmers. His younger brother is in an Israeli jail for terrorism, for 17 years. A teenage shepherd, this brother had tired of seeing the family's sheep blown up by Israeli landmines on their farm. So he read the books, learned how to defuse landmines and went about doing so. He harmed no one, and risked his life for his sheep. He was caught. Naively, his family trusted in the capacity of the court to see sense - they thought he would just have a rap over the knuckles. And they couldn't choose their own Israeli lawyer. He got seventeen years.

My friend went into a deep, angry depression, tempted to resort to troublemaking. But, walking on the hills, he had a revelation: he had to choose for good, for forgiveness, because violence would achieve nothing. Now, I've met many amazing people, and he comes out high on the list. For the choice he has made. He has dedicated his life to peacemaking. The Druze are longstanding dissenting Muslims, and they serve in the Israeli army, so they are in a strong position to bridge gulfs, and my friend does so with great gusto.

Peacemaking

Peacemaking is an assertive act. Not violent or against people, but against a destructive logic and momentum which is repeatedly reinforced by warmongers. This is what we see today in the Middle East. It's not a case of 'bad Israelis against poor Palestinians and Lebanese'. It's a case of a powerful, small minority on both sides who desperately want to keep an old agenda running.

It's not just about armies, militias and violence. It's an agenda of polarisation and demonisation on both sides. "You're either with us or against us" - and there is no room for further discussion. Discussion - a key ingredient in the much-hyped notion of 'democracy' - doesn't therefore happen. It means "obey, or jail/death for you or your family". It means the dominance of small factions who are more feared than loved. It means outright lies, covering up of deep-seated domestic issues that need sorting out. It means manufacturing an enemy 'out there' in order to give us the feeling we're good and right, and there's nothing left for us to learn. We cannot change. It is they who are the problem.

World-view

Here comes the bit where many anti-Israelis need to do some thinking. Because what is at stake in Israel is an enormous social change. It's a necessary change in the post-Holocaust 21st Century. It's about recognising we're all in the same boat - not just us, but them too - and working together with planetary issues. This is a painful, shocking and fundamental change for Israelis, and they need support.

This change involves three difficult things for Israelis:
1. genuinely declaring peace and ratcheting down Israel's military and the extent the military pervades Israeli society,
2. looking at Israel's internal problems and realising that they are not fundamentally caused by outsiders, and
3. choosing to trust goyim or non-Jews - including Arabs. This needs to be matched by goyim, but in the case of transgressions by Palestinians and other perceived threats, Israelis need to be very patient, to hold back on retaliation - if, that is, they truly want to build peace.

This involves a deep change of heart and mindset that goes back specifically to the formative decades before the founding of Israel, and it possibly goes back even as far as Joshua.

In the current war, Israelis are shooting themselves in the foot like this:
1. ordinary Israelis permit military-nationalist lobbies to dominate their society
2. since Israel is in changing times, its electors are unsure where to head, so they voted in a weak government
3. this government seeks to prove its worth, in the wake of grand master Arik Sharon
4. so it buckles under pressure from the military-nationalist wing, which pushes an aggressive agenda stronger than ever it could have done under Sharon
5. 'disproportionate response' on the part of the Israel Defence Force, and loss of friends, business, support and trust internationally
6. an increased and justified feeling of embattlement and real suffering on the part of ordinary Israelis
7. who then support or acquiesce to the military-nationalist lobbies, to fight back on their behalf.

Consequently, Israel loses democracy, creativity, security and initiative. It damages its future, reinforcing the idea that its future is militarily-guaranteed and the nation is surrounded by enemies. What Israelis fail to understand is that Arabs generally tend not to hold onto their memories and hurts as long as Jews, so a little saving grace would bring a new atmosphere in the Middle East, bringing with it the security Israelis so deeply crave. But to achieve this, Israelis will have to yield on many issues, to enable Palestinians to become viable as a people and to right some of the crazy wrongs that have happened. This is difficult, but the payoffs are far larger.

Palestine

This isn't one-sided. Palestinian militarists are guilty of perpetuating their own hegemony too - and here they interlock psychologically with Israeli generals and are on their side. Palestinian society is also on the edge of enormous change: they have had so much knocked out of them that reconstruction in Palestine will start from a very basic starting point. This could be exciting, if only people could get on with it.

This highlights the current appropriateness of Hamas - a social reforming party with a plan and a method and, while they're not perfect, they're the best chance Palestinians have to improve their lot. What matters is schools, hospitals, public services and getting the economy going. (In British history, the accession of Hamas to government is parallel to the first Labour government in the 1920s - a new movement with teething troubles, but representing an historic shift.)

But Hamas is a former militia organisation, with militant terms built into its constitution worded in the 1980s - the elimination of Israel. It's too simple for foreign governments to insist that this constitutional clause be removed forthwith and that Israel be instantly recognised because, to carry the change with their grass-roots, Hamas must be given time. Israel too needs to prove itself to be a sound negotiating partner with which Hamas might make a sustainable agreement. What Israel should Palestinians recognise - the pre-1967 'Green Line' Israel or the enlarged Israel enclosed by today's security wall?

This pressure to recognise Israel puts Hamas at the mercy of renegade elements, because Hamas cannot do it quickly, and this gives restless renegades persuasion power. Renegades offer answers now, while Hamas must hack through years of party-political process with no promise of success. Just like Abu Mazen did - and look where it got him.

This suits some international interests - American, European, Middle Eastern, even Chinese. It is important to them that a reforming party such as Hamas doesn't succeed because, if it succeeds, it sets an example and model for the people of other Middle Eastern countries. Naturally, many regimes don't want that. So it suits them to lock quietly into step with USA and the West, uttering perhaps the odd message of concern, to keep appearances going.

The Loop

Palestinians' problem is that, to convince Israelis they mean peace, they need to give Israelis a prolonged period of peace.

But Palestinians' living conditions and lack of freedom mean that the required patience is difficult. It works only if conditions are experienced to be improving, if the future looks brighter. Some Israeli and Palestinian elements exploit this hypersensitivity. How do you restrain 17 year-olds with a promise that, if they wait a decade or more, something might perhaps improve - but then it might not?

All the Israelis need to do is bomb Gaza, capture some Palestinian public figures or close the roadblocks, and a squad of angry young men comes out on the streets of Gaza - like English soccer-hooligans spoiling for some trouble, to vent their frustrations. Along comes a former 'Tunisian' (an old PLO fighter who spent the 1980s exiled in Tunisia) with a few cheap rockets for sale - some fixed even through Israeli sources - and bingo, we have terrorism.

Then we have reprisals and assassinations by Israelis, in which innocents get killed, then we have rising anger and frustration, and then we have intifada - uprising or 'casting off'. Then we have a full justification for Israeli generals to let rip. Blair and Bush call for restraint while turning a blind eye, muttering about Iran and Syria - and they quietly fulfill all military replenishment contracts without question. After all, that's business in a free market.

The cycle goes on. It's nice and safe - no one has to think. Nothing changes. The twentieth century is perpetuated. And the Palestinians' big weakness is that they fall into the trap of reinforcing this cycle. They do what's expected of them - geting fired up, lobbing some rockets and falling into the trap laid for them.

End game

This continues until a Big One comes. A catastrophe, whether or not directly caused by the conflict. It's already happening chronically - social and domestic trauma and violence, environmental damage, toxicity and pollution, trans-generational pain, loss of opportunity - on both sides. But something much worse, something acute could happen - at best drought, at worst, nuclear disaster. Pessimistically, it could even be that someone finds an excuse to fight over that too. No, someone please press STOP and change the program! There is another way. There is choice.

Historically, the big question in the 'Holy' Land is this: will conflict go on to the bitter end, or will wisdom prevail before a Big One happens? For peace activists, this is a moot point, and for us mainly a question of perseverance and maintaining our own sanity and clarity of action. How much and how long are we prepared to keep on working for peace, and how far are we willing to go? This is a personal and a collective question. Since the default pattern is the tendency to re-create conflict, overcoming the default pattern implies an effort, an epiphany, a turn-around which often looks impossible. Or it requires a twist of fate, skill or mercy which cuts the spiral - worth praying for but not expecting. Many are the peacemakers' hopes that have been dashed on the rocks of the Holy Land.

We just gotta make friends, in all possible ways. There's no choice in the matter - except when and how, and whether we're going to make the process easier or more difficult. That's the only choice. This needs to come from people themselves, because peace established over people's heads doesn't really bring healing.

Jeff Goldstein, a healer and peacemaker I know in Jerusalem, says "Israel is already at peace - it's just that a lot of people don't get it yet".

Israel in Gaza; Israel in Lebanon

2006-07-14T18:17:00.000+01:00

This is a pretty good analysis of the situation today in and around Israel-Palestine. It is written by Rabbi Lerner in California, a solid campaigner for peace and understanding in the Middle East. - Palden

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July 17, 2006
By Rabbi Michael Lerner

The people of the Middle East are suffering again as militarists on all sides, and cheerleading journalists, send forth missiles, bombs and endless words of self-justification for yet another pointless round of violence between Israel and her neighbors. For those of us who care deeply about human suffering, this most recent episode in irrationality evokes tears of sadness, incredulity at the lack of empathy on all sides, anger at how little anyone seems to have learned from the past, and moments of despair as we once again see the religious and democratic ideals subordinated to the cynical realism of militarism.

Meanwhile, the partisans on each side, content to ignore the humanity of “the Other,” rush to assure their constituencies that the enemy is always to blame. Each such effort is pointless. We have a struggle that has been going on for over a hundred years. Who tosses the latest match into the tinder box matters little. What matters is how to repair the situation. The blame game only succeeds in diverting attention from that central issue.

Within the context of blame, there’s enough to go around. It all depends on where you start the story. Counting on lack of historical memory, the partisans on all sides choose the place that best fits them into a narrative in which they are the “righteous victims” and the others are the evil aggressors. Palestinians like to start the story in 1948 with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during the war on Israel proclaimed by neighboring Arab states, and the refusal of the Israeli government to allow these people to return to once the hostilities ceased. Israelis prefer to start the story when Jews were desperately seeking to escape from the genocide they faced in Europe, and a cynical Arab leadership convinced the British military to side with local Palestinians who sought to prevent those Jewish refugees from joining their fellow Jews living in Palestine at the time. I tell the story, and how to understand both sides, in my book Healing Israel/Palestine.

Or one can start more recently, with this summer’s escalation of violence. But where exactly did that start? Please go to the website of Israeli Human Rights Organization B’tselem www.btselem.org to see that each side can point to outrageous acts on the part of the other.

Since the death of Yasir Arafat and the assumption of power by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestine’s major political factions – Fatah and Hamas – observed a hudna, or ceasfire. Yet Israel, pointing to the fact that Abbas’ police force (decimated by Israeli bombings during the 2nd Intifada of 2001-2003) was unable to fully restrain the violence of Hamas, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade and Islamic Jihad—and used that weakness as its reason to claim that there was “nobody to talk to” when the peace forces in Israel pleaded with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and later with current PM Ehud Olmert that the Palestinian request for negotiations should be accepted. Instead, Israel announced a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank (implemented in 2005) and from forthcoming sections of the West Bank (to have begun with the removal of illegal outposts this summer) that would de facto create new borders which would incorporate into Israel large parts of the West Bank that Israel had agreed to leave during the 1990s. Tikkun magazine and Israeli peace forces warned that the unilateral withdrawal, opposed by the Palestinian Authority, would add credibility to Hamas’ claim that all the Palestinian Authority’s efforts at non-violence had produced nothing more than Israel refusing to talk, whereas acts of violence by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza had led to the IDF withdrawing to protect its soldiers.

It wouldn’t be hard to see why Sharon went ahead with the unilateral withdrawal. If his intention was, as stated, to hold on to as much of the West Bank as possible, it would be far easier to convince the world that “there is nobody to talk to” if Hamas would win the coming election, since Hamas was universally recognized to be a terrorist group. When the Palestinian people complied by falling for this trick and establishing a government run by people who refused to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, it was easy for Olmert to affirm the Sharon unilateralism and announce plans to withdraw from the West Bank that would be the political cover for Israel annexing significant parts of the Occupied Territory. Hamas played its expected role by lobbing Qassam rockets at Israeli population centers, thereby “proving” for the Israeli right that any withdrawal would only intensify Israeli vulnerability and give Israeli hard-liners reason to oppose Olmert’s partial withdrawal as appeasement that had already failed to bring peace in Gaza.

Of course, from the standpoint of Hamas, this was only part of an ongoing struggle to free thousands of Palestinians who continue to be “arrested” (or, from the Palestinian perspective, “kidnapped”) by the IDF, incarcerated without charges or trial for six months in huge prison camps, often subject to torture. Yet Hamas, faced with an economic boycott (including the withholding to Hamas of taxes Israel collected from Palestinians that Israel had previously promised it would give back to the Palestinian Authority) that was preventing it from being able to function as a government, made statements that indicated that it was exploring the idea of de facto recognition in response to the Prisoners document, which threatened to undercut everyone because it was signed by members of every major faction of Palestinians sitting in Israeli jails).

For Israeli militarists and the settlers, Hamas recognition of Israel, however partial, would have been a dramatic propaganda defeat. Within days Israelis began shelling inside Gaza (allegedly to stop Hamas’ firing of Qassam rockets against Israeli population centers). One such shell landed on a Gaza beach, killing a family of eight who were simply enjoying the sun and water. A few days later, a Hamas group captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and Israel used this as its excuse to implement a plan it had developed months before to re-enter Gaza and destroy the Hamas infrastructure.

At this point a huge escalation took place. Instead of narrowly focusing on Hamas’ capacity to make war, the Israelis chose the path of collective punishment, a frequently ineffective counterinsurgency policy used to eliminate public support for resistance movements. In the height of the oppressive summer heat, Israel bombed the electricity grid, effectively cutting off Gaza’s water and the electricity needed to keep refrigeration working, thereby guaranteeing a dramatic decrease in food for the area’s already destitute, million plus population. This act was yet another violation of international law that include the arrests of thousands by Israelis and the shooting of Qassams at population centers by Hamas.

In response, Hezbollah fighters who had occupied the land abandoned by Israel when Israel terminated its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, launched an attack on Israeli troops inside Israel in clear violation of the understandings that peace would be maintained on that border—understandings that made it politically possible for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon without fear that its northern citizens would once again be subject to rocket fire that had put many Israelis into bomb shelters off-and-on for years since Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982.

From the standpoint of some in the Arab world, the attack on Israeli troops in northern Israel was an act of Islamic solidarity in face of the huge escalation taken by Israel against the entire population of Gaza. They argue that what really needs to be explained is not why they acted, but why the rest of the world did not act to demand that Israel end its outrageous punishment of a million people for the acts of a few (when the U.N. tried to act, the right-wing government of the U.S. vetoed a resolution supported by the Security Council majority).

Yet from the standpoint of Israel, the attacks by Hezbollah were a blatant violation of the understanding that had kept Israel out of Lebanon for the past seven years. And in fact, it was also a violation of international law and human rights, subjecting a civilian population to random bombings aimed at terrorizing the population. Hezbollah had shown itself to be the vicious terrorist force that Israel always claimed it to be. People living in Haifa or Tsfat or dozens of other locations in Israel are at this very moment living in the same kind of fear that rekindles the fears of earlier experiences in their lives (some, remember, are Holocaust survivors, others the children of survivors, and many have lived through wars that were explicitly aimed at the annihilation of Israel). Those fears are unfortunately likely to be played on by right wing politicians in the coming years.

Nor should we underestimate the malevolence of Iran and Syria in attempting to stimulate unrest and destabilization. While there are some in both of these countries who genuinely feel outrage at Israeli behavior toward Muslim co-religionists, the record of indifference to the plight of the Palestinians in their own countries and failure to provide material support for Palestine to build up its own economic infrastructure when it was needed suggests that their assistance to Hezbollah comes more from seeking political advantage and domination in the Middle East than from genuine moral solidarity with the Palestinian people. And the fear of Iran, a country whose president out and out denies that there ever was a Holocaust and who explicitly affirms the goal of destroying the State of Israel gives Israelis real reason to worry when his proxies in Hezbollah or Hamas develop the capacity to shoot rockets into Israeli population centers.

What was Israel to do?

Well, had Ariel Sharon been in power, having learned his lesson in Lebanon, he likely would have done the exact same thing he did two years ago when an Israeli businessman was captured by “the enemy”—namely, a prisoner exchange in which hundreds of prisoners are released for a single Israeli. That exchange had been asked for by Hamas and pleaded for by the family of POW Gilad Shalit, but was been rejected by the Israeli government. Please read the analysis of this error, and other articles analyzing the current situation at the daily updates of “Current Thinking” at www.tikkun.org .

The consensus among Israeli peaceniks is that both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Labor Party Defense Minister Amir Peretz feel the political need to show that they are “strong” and hence the invasion and attack on Lebanon is their only politically possible strategy. For the sake of their egos and their future political viability, they “must” proceed with the wild escalation of the struggle against the Lebanese people, most of whom had exercised their democratic rights by rejecting Hezbollah’s electoral appeals, voting in a government that had only a small minority of Hezbollah within it.

What could Israel still do? It could redefine these issues as minor border irritants, exchange POWS, and unilaterally announce that it will no longer hold arrestees for more than 3 days without filing formal criminal charges against those who had acted with violence and releasing everyone else, giving speedy and public trials, and punishing any soldier or Shin Bet or Aman officer who engages in torture (or, as they call it, “moderate pressure”) on detainees. It could then immediately announce its intentions to strengthen the position of Palestinian Authority President Abbas by giving to him the tax monies withheld from Hamas, and opening “final status” negotiations within two months. Meanwhile, Israel could begin dismantling the Separation Wall, and promise to rebuild it only on the lines of an international border agreed to by both sides. And Israel could unilaterally censor anti-Palestinian incitement within government-controlled media and instead begin to build a culture of non-violence and educate Israelis about the need for reparations to Palestinian refugees.

What could Palestinians do?

President Abbas could announce that he is inviting Israel to form a joint Israeli/Palestinian border force to ensure that there are no more violent attacks on Israeli civilians, in exchange for the immediate opening of “final status” negotiations with Israel before any further West Bank withdrawals are created. There were joint patrols and security coordination until Sept. 2,000 and they contributed to the low level of violence on both sides until Ariel Sharon made his famous provocative trip to the Temple Mount. Abbas could further announce that the Palestinian people who elected him are committed to a non-violent (not passive) struggle for ending the Occupation, but that anyone engaged in violence against Israel or against fellow Palestinians would be tried and, if convicted, would lose their Palestinian citizenship. Abbas could tour the West Bank and Gaza preaching non-violence, implement an immediate end to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric in the Palestinian press and in their schools, and could announce that he is determined to build a culture of non-violence inside Palestine.

What could the U.S. and other Western states do?

They could immediately establish an international conference representing all the nations of the world who were willing to accept the right of Israel to exist within the 1967 boundaries and the right of Palestine to exist within Gaza and the West Bank, and let those countries impose on both sides a settlement that is fair to both sides and enforce such a settlement, guaranteeing peace and security to both sides. Each participant country in this international conference would be allowed in after it had given to a neutral international bank a deposit equal to .01% of its GDP for the purpose of creating the beginning of an inernational fund for reparations as described below.

As the Tikkun Community has outlined in the past, the terms of that settlement should include:

1. Permanent boundaries for both states that roughly resemble the pre-67 borders, with some border adjustments mutually agreed to along lines developed in the Geneva Accord (Israel incorporating some of the border settlements into Israel, in exchange for Israel giving equal amounts and quality of land to the Palestinian State).

2. Sharing of Jerusalem and its holy sites, with each side entitled to establish their national capital in Jerusalem, Israel to have control over the Jewish and Armenian quarters plus the Wall and adjacent territory, and Palestine to have control over the Temple Mount with its mosques.

3. All states participating in the International Conference would dedicate at least .1% of their GDP toward an international fund for reparations for Palestinians who lost property, employment or homes in the period 1947-1967, and to Jews who fled from Arab states in the same period (however, reparations will not be paid to any Arab or Jewish family with current gross assets of more than $5 million dollars).

4. A joint Israel/Palestine/International Community police force will be set up to enforce border security for both sides. The U.S. and Nato will enter into a mutual security pact for both parties guaranteeing that each side will be protected by the U.S. and Nato from any assault by the other or by any assault from any other country in the world.

5. Creation of an Atonement and Reconciliation Commission which will unveil all records of both sides, bring to light all violations of human rights on both sides, bring formal charges against those who do not confess their involvement in those violations and testify to the details, and supervise a newly created peace curriculum for all schools and universities aimed at teaching reconciliation and non-violence in action and communication. The explicit goal of this Commission will be to foster the conditions for a reconciliation of the heart and a new understanding on the part of both peoples that each side has been cruel and insensitive, and need to repent, and that both sides have a legitimate natrrative that needs to be understood and accepted as a legitimate viewpoint by the other side.

Who are Israel’s friends and the friends of the Jewish people?

Those who support this path toward peace and reconciliation.

Who are its enemies?

Those who encourage it to persist in the fantasy that it can “win” militarily or politically. Just as the objective enemies of America in the 1960s were those who egged it on to persist in the Vietnam war, and those who were its objective friends were those of its citizens who actively opposed that war, so similarly today the friends of the Jewish people are those who are doing everything possible to restrain it from cheerleadng for Israel’s militarist adventures and refusal to treat the Palestinians as equally entitled to freedom and self-determination as the Jewish people.

Who are Palestine’s friends?

Those who encourage a path of non-violence and abandoning the fantasy that armed struggle combined with political isolation of Israel will lead to a good outcome for Palestinians.

Who are its enemies?

Those who preach ideas like “one state solution” or global economic boycott without offering the Jewish people a secure state in Palestine--paths that will never produce anything positive but continued resistance by Israel and world Jewry.

As for us in the Tikkun Community who are friends of both sides, our orientation is clear. Our goal is to speak truth to both the powerful in Israel and the powerless in Palestine, to tell them that their goals cannot be achieved without a radical reversal in the strategic directions they have been following. This truth will eventually be heard—the only question is whether it will be heard without another generation of Arabs and Israelis losing their lives. Because we care very much about the human suffering on both sides, we pray that this truth will be heard, and our strateges for a solution will be implemented. And we will do more than pray—we will also demonstrate against the governments of the U.S., Israel and Palestine till they all change their directions in the ways suggested here, we will organize and educate, and will take other non-violent stepts to get our message heard.

You can join us. Join the Tikkun Community as a dues paying member at www.tikkun.org or help us get our message printed in media or broadcast on public radio and television.

You can take this message and shorten it, write its message as op-eds or letters to the editor. You can ask elected officials or candidates to endorse it. You can create a local demonstration around this analysis. You can create a study group using Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and The Geneva Accord and other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004). You can demand of the other peace groups that they work together. And you can write letters to the governments of Israel and Palestine sharing this perspective, using my words or your own. So don’t just sit there despairing—there is much that can be done, and lives that can be saved.

But let's not abandon prayer, meditation, song and celebration either. We need moments to come together, to nourish our souls, to rekindle our hopefulness, and to joyfully recall all the goodness in the human race, including the goodness of the majority of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and everyone else on the planet!

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Rabbi Michael Lerner is author of Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (Harper, 1995), Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003), most recently The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) and seven other books. He is the editor of Tikkun Magazine in Berkeley (510-644 1200) and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue which meets in both San Francisco and Berkeley.

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A Way out of the Gaza Crisis

2006-07-13T15:46:00.000+01:00

[This is an article about Rabbi Froman, a friend and a member of Jerusalem Peacemakers (I currently run the site). See his site at www.jerusalempeacemakers.org/froman]

by Arthur Neslen
Tuesday 04 July 2006 6:32 PM GMT

Out of sight of the international press pack, a bid to resolve the Gaza crisis, involving a dialogue between a Jewish religious leader and Hamas representatives, continues and is well advanced.

"I'm talking to Hamas representatives every day," a weary sounding Menachem Froman told me by telephone from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where he lives and works as a rabbi. "We have had a lot of meetings and I have just spoken to an aide of my prime minister about this."

But Tel Aviv's interest in a negotiated end to the standoff is far from assured.

The day before the tanks rolled into Gaza, Froman had been due to launch an extraordinary peace initiative at a news conference in Jerusalem with Muhamed Abu Tir, the Hamas MP, Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, and three Israeli rabbis.

The panel was to have made a collective call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the beginning of a process to release all Palestinian prisoners and the immediate start of negotiations with Hamas on the framework for a peace deal based on 1967 borders.

They would also have announced that Jewish and Muslim religious leaders could achieve peace where Israel's politicians had failed.

But the response from Israel's security establishment was crushing.

Stymied

Hours before the meeting was due to start, the Shin Bet detained Abu Tir and Abu Arafa and warned them not to attend the meeting. The news conference's organisers were forced to contact the other rabbis - who were already on the road to Jerusalem - and tell them not to come.

Instead of a triumphant statement of mutual respect and dialogue, a subdued and gently defiant three-man panel fended off aggressive questioning from an unruly Israeli press pack.

As Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was killed by Hamas in 1994, said that the Palestinians had been pushed into the kidnapping by an inhuman occupation, one journalist jumped up and down shouting: "Should someone who murdered your son be freed?"

Frankenthal responded with dignity: "It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say that they are terrorists and we must fight them.

"But in the eyes of the Palestinians, they are liberators. We need to understand that it is the obligation of the Palestinians, as it is the obligation of every other nation, to fight for their liberation. The time has come for reconciliation, and the only way to achieve that is to talk."

Talking, however, requires a partner.

Kidnapped

Two days after the news conference, Abu Tir and Abu Arafa were kidnapped by Israeli forces, along with a third of the Hamas cabinet. Four days later, Israel revoked both men's citizenship and residency rights in Jerusalem. As the Jerusalem Post headline put it: Shin Bet foils Hamas-Jewish meeting.

An even more accurate headline might have been the one Israel National Radio's Arutz Sheva website ran a few days later, pertaining to another story: The peace process is a bigger danger than Hamas.

In this opinion piece, Ted Belman said that "the threat of rockets raining down on Israel from Gaza isn't nearly the threat that the peace process was and is" because peace talks would require Israeli concessions.

"To avoid this fate, the violence in the territories would have to continue at tolerable levels, but that doesn't solve the problem," he said. Belman concluded that the Palestinians needed to be provoked.

Some argue that Israel's re-invasion of Gaza was a similar provocation aimed at bringing down the Hamas government and preventing a unified Palestinian negotiating stance based on the prisoners' document.

Sharon's path

Having ruled out the only possible solutions that could have bought a temporary peace, Olmert and Peretz are now the proud owners of a Sharonist policy which, almost by definition, strengthens Hamas in the occupied territories and far-right forces at home. American and British support for it traps them further within a dynamic that heats the pot of bloodshed, even as they dishonestly promise their people disengagement, convergence and peace.

Could Froman's efforts offer them a way out of the strings with which the Palestinian fighters have so daringly bound them?

The rabbi is currently "neither eating nor sleeping" as he talks with Hamas representatives, building on his meetings with Mahmoud al-Zahar earlier this year. Froman may be an eccentric, but he has a formidable track record.

A co-founder of the messianic Gush Khatif settlers movement, Froman split from the group after Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre.

He became a religious adviser to the Knesset and brokered the release from prison of Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He also brokered Yassin's subsequent announcement of a ceasefire, which Israel refused to accept and Yassin subsequently withdrew.

Yasser Arafat considered him a brother.

Indeed, a peace plan the two men were working on was reaching a culmination point in Arafat's final days. It involved Arafat signing off on an independent Palestinian state and permanent religious ceasefire, the latter with the support of key Israeli civic and religious leaders.

It was scuppered by an inconvenient phone call from the then-interior minister, Gideon Ezra, and a deterioration in Arafat's health which, by the following day, had rendered him unable to take visitors.

Ironies abound in the history of Froman's peace efforts. His uncle was killed in the 1930s by Ezzedine al-Qassam, the militant Palestinian cleric whose name was later adopted by Hamas's armed wing. Yet Froman is on record as saying he has more in common with "my brothers and sisters in Hamas" than with secular Israelis.

His motivations stem from a deep commitment to the once-integral universal tradition in Jewish thought, best summarised by Rabbi Hillel's "do unto others" maxim. He believes that while the land of Israel is holy, sovereignty over it is not and so aspires to live as a Palestinian Jew in a Palestinian state. For the past two years, however, he has been living under police protection because of death threats from other settlers.

Should his peace efforts bear fruit, perhaps his national-religious neighbours will be reminded that in the messianic age, according to Isaiah, the wolf is supposed to lie down with the lamb.

Arthur Neslen is a journalist working in Tel Aviv. His first book, Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, was recently published by Pluto Press.

Aljazeera
By Arthur Neslen

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6B63C28-F631-4DA5-A76F-9014523ABCD6.htm

Why I sympathise with Israelis

2006-06-18T21:43:00.000+01:00

People often think I'm pro-Palestinian. But I'm pro-people. It's just that, of the people of the Holy Land, those I can be most of service to at present are Palestinians. This could change.

I sympathise greatly with Israelis. I'm speaking from an historian's longterm perspective. The momentum is running out of Israel's development, as it has been to date, and I think a difficult time of truth is coming for Israelis. This arises from certain very factual issues which cannot now be ignored or avoided. The Israeli tendency is to stave things off long enough to make them go away, but I don't think these will go away.

It's a collection of issues.

First, aliyah, the return or immigration of Jews to Israel, has ground to a virtual halt. This is partially because Israel has not turned out as safe as Jews initially sought, way back in the shadow of WW2. Also, Jews in other countries seem to feel happy enough where they are, and significant numbers no longer need to come - all those who felt the need have moved to Israel. This means that the expansion of Israel is stopping, and in fact it might have overextended itself - as evidenced by the need to build a wall around itself to protect itself. Not just this, but people are leaving - often to get jobs or just 'get a life', or after doing military service. They're not decisively emigrating, but they're going until things get decidedly better. This means loss of people.

Second, Israelis are a disparate and argumentative lot, and it's difficult for many foreigners to figure out how these people stick together as a nation. Israelis are very nationalistic but, beyond that, for every two Israelis there are three fervent opinions, and national unity is a troublesome factor. This question tends to be suppressed by having the threat of the Palestinians on the doorstep and in Israelis' midst. It unites the people and creates a state of ongoing truce and solidarity between Israelis - and with international Jews. But this is a parlous situation: what happens if there is to be peace? It is even arguable that powerful elements in Israeli society want to keep conflict going for this reason - though it is true that the majority of Israelis are conflict-weary and seek some sort of peace and security. And peace is inevitable sometime - conflict cannot be kept going forever.

Third, Israelis pay an enormous price for conflict and insecurity. This is psychological, becoming multi-generational, and it is factual too - in terms of the social effects of militarisation, the claustrophobic nature of many settlements, rising domestic and civil violence across society, harm to the economy (such as the collapse of tourism, loss of international popularity, taxation and poverty) and many other factors. This price cannot be borne indefinitely.

Fourth, USA is now Israel's only supporter and, during the second intifada (1999-2004), Israel lost much favour. USA's capacity and willingness to continue supporting Israel politically, militarily and financially is not indefinite and everlasting, and Israel depends on it highly unless something is to change. What lies behind this is a need for Israel to fully acknowledge its position in the Middle East. This means making friends with its neighbours - not only for security, but for economic, environmental and social-cultural reasons. This is inevitable, not only because Israel's neighbours constitute a majority. It's because time moves on, and new and different things need to happen.

Fifth, it's those Palestinians. Despite losing their conflict with the Israelis, the Palestinians have two quite factual advantages over Israelis. One is their high birth rate, which means that, whatever their status, they are becoming a majority of the joint population of the Holy Land (Israel and the Occupied or Palestinian Territories). Democracy or not, a majority still counts in the fullness of time. The second is that, despite their misery, their society is in a funny way healthier than Israeli society. It is as if they have been so thoroughly beaten for so long that something has changed in them - they experience what British people call 'World War Two Spirit'. This is a mixed blessing, a tragic happiness, but it represents a social and community wealth which many richer and more favoured countries, Israel amongst them, do not have. In other words, despite the proclivity of the young men in Gaza to squabble and fight when worked up, there is more togetherness and humanness in Palestinian society than you'd expect. They're dirt poor in one sense and rich in another - while developed countries are rich materially and poor socially. Israelis know little of this, because they are walled off from it by a physical and psychological apartheid and many of them don't even meet Palestinians or see their living areas.

There are more issues too. One is environmental: Israel is a toxic mess, and Palestine too - and Palestine's shortages render it into a health and pollution risk for Israel, since Palestinians are not in a position to attend to environmental and public health issues. There is a massive water resource problem for both countries.

Another is the wider world, where things are moving on from the past, and the world is accelerating into a globalised, regionalised situation, to an extent leaving Israel behind - since its preoccupation with its own situation makes Israel a strangely insular country. USA is large enough to kid itself it can be isolationist, but Israel is small, with restricted travel outside. Dutch can go to Germany for a party or football match, but Israelis cannot drop in on Damascus for shopping and restaurants.

So, all in all, the outlook doesn't look rosy. The course the nation of Israel has followed since its founding nearly sixty years ago is changing. Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky spoke for their day. This 'whither next?' threshold is deeply threatening to some, and welcome to others. Israel was a land of hope and promise, and things have gone strangely sour. As an immigrant land, the nation must have a clear sense of purpose to survive, and it is faced with finding a new one - and currently reluctant to do so. This change will happen, but it's a matter of how easy or painful it is to be.

This is scary. In a way, it is more scary than the threat of Palestinians or Arabs. It involves building a new consensus amongst Jews based not on the Holocaust but on the future. Historically, Jews have had a legitimate fear of persecution and annihilation, but in the 21st Century they are in a position to make peace with the world and end this cycle. Because, in our day, longterm prejudices toward Jews are outweighed by feelings deriving from Israel's current and recent behaviour. If this changed, and if Israel became a more compliant and cooperative nation in the world order, much of what Jews experience as anti-Semitism would dwindle, and in a generation or two it would be mostly forgotten. Because too much else is going on in the world, and arguments of the past are becoming irrelevant. Given time to cool down, Arabs and Palestinians are willing to accept Israel: they just need certain crucial things to be worked out with it. In the Middle East, different peoples have lived together for many millennia - it's the region's natural condition.

This faces Israelis with themselves. The Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, the seculars and religious, the settlers and 'Israel proper', the different nationalities, the many different tribes and interest groups who jostle together in that small space called Israel. They need to clarify whether they wish to live in a state reserved for Jews, or a multinational state with a significant Palestinian, Bedouin, Druze and foreign population. They need to build an incremental peace with their neighbours. And this is difficult for them right now.

Palestinians have another advantage over Israelis. They have already seen the worst and adjusted to it. Israelis haven't - and this makes things more difficult for them internally. Palestinians sure do have a lot to work out too, but it's not really as fundamental as the questions Israelis are yet to face. (I'll write on this another time).

In the last election, the Israeli vote divided to create a very undecided situation. The current government is running on a post-Sharon momentum, which is a new version of an old approach. But this is not about a national sense of purpose, or a regeneration of Israel. So the question of Israeli identity, purpose and true priorities is left pending for another day.

There is a truth-process approaching for the wider world. Its impact on the developed world and the West is bigger than most would care to think. It concerns wealth and power in the world. And Israel, being a developed country, is part of that question. The West is losing its dominance in world affairs - its time is passing. Something different is happening.

The agenda for Palestinians is relatively simple: they just want a better life. This is a relatively unified goal - how to get there is what divides them. For Israelis, there is much more soul-searching and reorientation ahead - over coming years and decades. For they have a bitter-sweet life, and mixed feelings around it. Israel and its people will ultimately gain a lot from soul-searching - and some Israelis already know the shape it needs to take. It is simply the building of a safe, fertile, peaceful, happy land of Israel. One which is not surrounded by walls and fences, but which openly plays its unique and focal part in a wider Middle East and world. For Israel is a special little country, with a unique offering. And it cannot do without its neighbours and surrounding environment.

And the rest of the world has its own soul-searching to do too.

Bizarrely, to outsiders, Arabs and Israelis complement each other down to details. They are, according to their own beliefs, both children of Abraham - they're family. If they weren't, perhaps the argument would have been resolved by now. Imagine a time when Jews are a distinct grouping within a larger Middle East, in which the different peoples of the region define themselves as before, for millennia, not so much by territory but by social niche and role. Remember, through much of history, one of the greatest centres for Jews was Sumer, Babylon and then Baghdad, and Jews have played a prominent contributory role in many parts of the Middle East - in Damascus and Cairo and from Spain to Central Asia. As well as, today, in Europe, America and elsewhere. The future has a place for Jews. And everybody. By necessity.

But it requires an act of trust, and a getting-real. And this is easier when it's behind you than in front of you.

Hamas and terrorism

2006-06-06T11:51:00.000+01:00

The purpose of this weblog is to talk about what's 'on top' for me. And what's on top for me right now is Palestine, where I have worked for some time.

For me, and other 'freelance' humanitarians who work there, we suddenly find ourselves in a position where we can be accused of 'supporting terrorism'. This is very disturbing, not only because of the personal risks this can involve, but also because it is based on a combination of a big lie and a large amount of public indifference and ignorance. The public accepts the term 'terrorist' without question.

The result is that many countries, with my own in the lead, have set an embargo on Palestine, on the basis that they refuse to talk to terrorists. But there is a hidden agenda here, and few people see it.

Despite the concern expressed on Palestine's behalf, and the ritual admonitions of Israel for breaking international law and fair practice, there's an inherent bias here. Not against Palestinians exactly, although the de facto effect of the payments embargo is to punish all Palestinians.

It's against two related things: 'Islamist' movements and the autonomous development of the Middle East and its own way of sorting out its problems. There are massive vested interests, both in the West and in the ruling elites of the Middle East, to maintain the status quo, keep the oil and big-money flows going, and to disable any attempts by the people of the region to determine their own affairs in their own way. On a deeper level, it is to block an enormous cultural revival in the Middle East, which is coming, and which will make the Middle East a major centre of cultural innovation by mid-century.

Who are these vested interests? It would be disproportionate to lay it all on Jews and Israelis, though this is a component. Jews and Israelis are deeply confused between pursuing their legitimate best interests and the historically reactive position they have taken in asserting their power over Palestinians and in the region as a whole. In a sense they are also being used by much larger interests - the interests of the West, which depends on oil and the business and financial issues that this entails. I shall write about Jewish interests another time.

But there is something deeply sinister going on, unbeknownst to many ordinary Western people. They prop it up by continuing to 'democratically' pursue a lifestyle which depends on oil and maintaining the status quo - as if it is the only way to live a civilised life - but they know not what they do, and what price others pay for the maintenance of their/our lifestyle. This permits more sinister forces to do their work.

It's probably Masonic in basis, but this doesn't matter - background power operates along lines embedded in Western culture along Masonic lines, whether or not it is Masonic. There are background interests who want to hold the Middle East in thralldom and maintain the current power arrangements of the West. It is called 'democracy', but don't be fooled - every democratic government that comes to power remains in power by compromising with those forces who would remove them if they don't.

And this is what is happening for Hamas in Palestine. Of all the democratic electoral results of recent years, the Hamas victory was more marked than any other - netting around 70% of the vote in a clearly free and fair election. Yet the world, or the West, has negated this democratic choice by labelling Hamas 'terrorist'.

Truth is, they're not terrorists, but they were, and they're faced by what in UK, in the early 1990s, was called a 'Clause Four situation'. That is, they still have an ideological position which favoured suicide bombing and terror, but they cannot abandon it quickly because, if they did, they would lose much of their grass-roots support. This was the situation in UK, where a reforming Labour Party could not abandon the key policy of nationalisation without losing much of its grass-roots support. So, before a moderate such as Tony Blair could take power, the party had to go through a long and painful transition, losing its more militant wing and gaining middle-ground support instead. This takes time, and Hamas is in a similar situation.

Besides, if they 'renounce terror', they lose the one weapon they have - mainly a psychological one, since Palestinian terrorism has largely ground to a halt. Meanwhile, their adversaries, the Israelis, have an occupying army, weaponry, bulldozers and the acquiescence and complicity of the international community on its side. Israel is armed largely by USA, and its settlement-building, nuclear programme, wall-building and other acts of incursion on Palestinians is both implicitly and financially supported by USA and the West. So, if Hamas abandons terror, it abandons its last means of making an impression on Israelis. This can only happen if Israelis step back, make significant concessions, and guarantee that they will not exploit the situation to take more land and increase their stranglehold on Palestine. Which they won't.

But Hamas are not terrorists. The vast majority of Palestinians are clear that terror and strife with the Israelis has not paid off and gains nothing except increased oppression. Yet Palestinians voted for Hamas not for terror reasons, but because of their social works, their commitment to ending corruption and because they felt a stronger line needed taking. And, like any party that is new to power, it takes time for them to settle in and make their way.

Meanwhile, the terror goes on. Each week, Palestinians are killed, many of them young, either by nervous, trigger-happy, equally young Israeli soldiers or by bombing raids. Apologies or denials are made, but it goes on, and the Palestinians are helpless. It's almost as if Israelis, intentionally or not, want to prolong conflict, perhaps because it is the only means they know to further their interests and keep their disparate little nation intact. They make life hard for Palestinians as if to prevent moderate, reasonable, peaceable values from growing stronger amongst Palestinians. It's as if Israel is addicted to the threat of annihilation as a way of preserving itself - a throwback to the Holocaust.

This is a most terrible mistake. The damage being done is immense.

And, to deal with the almost inevitable accusation of being anti-Semitic, I shall soon write about why I feel great sympathy for Israelis. But today I feel great sympathy for Palestinians, who are being deprived a fair chance to build a future. Perhaps, to deal with the demographic problem in the Holy Land - the growth of Palestinian population and the beginning of a decline in Israeli population as a result of the subsidence of Jewish immigration and the quiet departure of young Israelis to other countries - by stimulating Palestinian emigration. Perhaps it's a soft form of 'transfer' - a way of causing Palestinians to migrate of their own choice. Except, of course, it isn't really their choice.

Enough for now. More later.

For the triumph of evil it is necessary only that good people do nothing

2006-05-30T18:34:00.000+01:00

Burke's quote from the seventeenth century has been a motto for many years, and much of my life has been dedicated to dealing with it.

And that's what this blog is all about. The greatest evil of our time isn't necessarily 'bad guys', whoever one deems them to be - and to some, I'm one!

It's indifference.

It's not even that the world is terribly hard-hearted - though there are plenty such people around. Indifference is brought about by a combination of manic busyness, plus a need to filter the constant stream of issues coming at us, because we feel overloaded.

Paradoxically, indifference is partially a symptom of insensitivity, and partially a symptom of sensitivity. There are people who just don't care, or whose awareness is too small to bother about Palestinians or Timorese. And there are people who care or are susceptible to caring, but who find the calls on their attention, feelings and empathy more than they can handle.

More later. This is just the start.