In Perpetuity

As an undergrad in the late eighties, I spent a couple of years working at a late-night greasy spoon called Hector's. For Chapel Hill locals, this was when it was on the ground floor, before it burned and was rebuilt upstairs. The restaurant was owned by three brothers from Greece - Steve, Mike, and . . . Mike (no, I'm not making that up - they were Americanizations of Sevastros, Nomikos, and Mikhael) - and about 3/4 of the employees were Arab.

I was closest to a fellow named Ali, who had recently arrived in the US from Morocco and had just begun learning English, though he picked it up with nearly superhuman speed. The first Palestinian intifada was in full swing and I was enrolled in a couple of Middle Eastern polisci classes, so I asked Ali what he thought it would take for peace to take root there.

He looked at me as though I were making a joke, then replied, "Russ, there is no solution. For the rest of your life, there will be blood in that sand. If God himself came down to make peace, he would be shot at by both sides. Holy lands make people crazy." He then laid out his three reasons:

1. There would never be a two-state solution that both sides could accept and the current situation could never bring peace.

2. If the Israelis pushed all the Palestinians out, they would never have peace with the rest of the Middle East.

3. The Palestinians would never be strong enough to expel the Israelis and if they somehow did, they would then just turn their guns on each other.

I understood his argument, but my idealistic 20-year-old brain simply could not accept such a glum appraisal. There just had to be a workable solution. Fifteen years later, I may reluctantly be joining his camp. Neither side can oust the other, and peaceful co-existence seems unachievable. Bush's road map is deader than a doornail, because Sharon knows Karl Rove intends to wrap up the pro-Israel vote and therefore will not enforce any concessions. Peacekeeping troops only make sense when there is some measure of peace to be kept and the zealots on both sides don't want peace in any event.

The web is filled with nasty, name-calling arguments over this where both sides consider the other nearly sub-human. Atrocities on one side are countered with atrocities on the other, and the looniest factions from both sides are regularly trotted out as evidence of the moral inadequacy of an entire people. Somehow, the Palestinian cause has become equated with leftism and the Israeli cause with rightism, though the associations are barely tenable at best. Regardless of the accuracy of the labels, unsubtle streaks of racism are beginning to invade the words of both.

All the attempts to claim a moral high ground for either side are absurd - the extreme military disadvantage of the Palestinians does not equate to a moral advantage and the Israelis cannot honestly claim that the other side is alone in terrorizing civilians. Two nations are at war, they are each using what means they have available, neither shows any real restraint in exercising them, and innocent people from both sides bear the brunt of it all. The Israeli demand that the PA control violence is ludicrous after the IDF has destroyed their ability to do so. The Palestinian demands for Israel to return to indefensible borders amidst the violence make just as little sense.

Sometimes problems have a null solution set. Unfortunately, this seems to be one of them. The majority of Israelis and Arabs are good, decent people who just want to be left alone to live their lives and raise their children, and yet, year after year, decade after decade, they are consistently trumped by the zealots. And with every death, the zealots on each side grow stronger.

Overly pessimistic? Well, I sure hope so. My imagination has certainly failed me before (for example, I thought I would never see a president worse than Reagan). I want to believe, but the level of discourse about the whole situation has sunk to such levels of bile and venom that I just want to turn away from the entire thing. And that's here - halfway around the world from the conflict.

Holy lands make people crazy.