Tuesday, March 18, 2008

It perches in the soul...

The other day I got an email from a dear friend who cooed, “Oh I just loved the blog entries of the last week. There was so much variety. I loved that it was about politics and travel and your students. Do that variety more often,” she implored.

Of course the nature of a blog is that you write kina how the mood, or the day, strikes you. But I will keep that desire for variety in mind.

Over the weekend I got caught up with some issues of The Jordan Times of the last week. I had scanned the paper every day, but had not gotten to sit down and read many stories, especially the stories covering His Majesty’s recent visit to the United States.

The King visited New York and Washington ostensibly to remind everyone to keep the goals of the Annapolis Conference firmly in mind. If you remember, Israeli and Palestinian leaders pledged at a U.S. sponsored summit in Annapolis in late November to begin negotiating a possible peace agreement that would finally create a Palestinian state. After an opening 24-hour round of intense negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert agreed to a framework for talks, with both sides promising to meet every two weeks and hammer out a detailed settlement by the end of 2008. Leaders of 16 Arab League nations attended the summit—indicating broad Arab support for the first major attempt to broker a Mideast peace deal since talks collapsed in 2000.

Of course the sticking points that have always stood in the way of a final deal remain the sticking points: Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the status of Jerusalem, and the rights of Palestinian refugees whose families once had homes in Israel.

Shouldn’t peace talks make people happy? One night I did a little website surfing and discovered that these talks do not make as many enthusiastic as I would have imagined. Indeed, several chat rooms seethed with outright hatred as to what was happening in these talks. Why are so many people unhappy at the prospect of these talks? Could the talks damage already bad relations? As I looked on-line at some of the political blogs, the answer is decidedly yes. Some of the talking heads (do we call bloggers, “typing heads”??) believe that Olmert and Abbas are so beset with problems and scandals that these already weak leaders might bolster extremists on both sides.

However, from my vantage point—a teacher very interested in seeing how Jordan plays a part in all of this—something real is coming out of Annapolis. The United States has pledged to make the two sides accountable for resolving the outstanding issues. Both sides have agreed to the ongoing meetings every two weeks for a year. A peace process is in motion that didn’t exist six months ago. And Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas will have to deal with it.

As I have read Thomas Friedman’s editorials over the last 16 or so years, I have come away with such respect for his ability to frame these complicated issues in a user-friendly clarity. He wrote in The New York Times that “isolating those extremists is crucial. It was fear of spreading Iranian influence that prompted the Arab states to show up in Annapolis.” Friedman went on to say, “Moderates [meaning both Olmert and Abbas] who are not willing to risk political suicide to achieve their ends are never going to defeat extremists who are willing to commit physical suicide.”

As I looked on-line, there were many Arab columnists who condemned Annapolis. One writer said, “By agreeing to attend the Annapolis conference even though all the preconditions they had set were unmet, the Arab leaders caved into the Americans and the Zionists. The Arab foreign ministers simply abandoned two longstanding positions: first that no negotiations could take place until Israel stopped building Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, and second, that negotiations would have to address the rights of Palestinian refugees to reclaim their ancestral homes in Israel.” The writer saw the rush to attend “the ill-advised” conference was a setback for the cause of Palestinian statehood.

A Palestinian writer believed the point of the conference was to show that they could all come together and sit down in a kind of “normalizing” of relations. It was easy to see the venom coming out of the bloggers’ fingers with comments like, “the conference is simply a success for the Jewish state,” and “Arab countries cannot afford the luxury of refusal, because they know the American master is preparing to attack their worst enemy: Iran.” “Arabs don’t care about Palestinians,” argued an Iranian writer. “They just want to make money doing deals with the Jews.” That writer went on to say, “Egypt was the first to breach the united Arab line against Israel,” and now they have substantial trade with Israel.

Maybe, in this age of instant news, and universal photo ops, each delegate showed up at the conference to show himself in front of the cameras as the hero of compromise and coexistence. Then each delegate can look enlightened and moderate in the eyes of the Americans. But the problem, as I have learned in my eight months here among Palestinian refugees, is what about the Palestinians left to starve, and the ones forever exiled from their homeland?

The fratricide between the two Palestinian factions—Hamas and Fatah—is a huge threat to the Palestinian cause. By showing up at Annapolis, the Arabs were hoping to stand united, and thus rekindle Arab nationalism at the root of the Palestinian movement. I don’t know if it was about appeasing America—from all my conversations and observations and reading of the papers here, the agenda was the salvation of the Palestinian cause.


Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune—without the words,
And never stops at all…

As I look through the editorials of the last two weeks of The Jordan Times it comes as no surprise that the word ‘hope’ is used at least every other day. With this month’s carnage in Gaza and Jerusalem, the peace process has been given another ugly twist. I saw a feature story on CNN that intrigued me, suggesting the news reports in the United States are all slanted towards Israel, and the news reports in Europe are all slanted towards the Palestinians. This much is clear—Palestinians are physically and ideologically divided, encapsulated by a strangling occupation. Moreover, Israel’s Defense Minister last week threatened Palestinians with a holocaust.

As a historian that use of the word shoah (the Hebrew word for “holocaust”) is jaw-dropping. Israel has never permitted the word holocaust to be applied to any tragedy except that of the attempted annihilation of the Jews in Europe. Immediately after Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians, Israel began a series of massacres, killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, as well as resistance fighters defending their beleaguered communities in the Israeli-occupied Gaza strip.

It seems to me that if Israel continues along the path of death and blood it will eliminate any chance of peaceful reconciliation. What was a huge constituency of peace-supporting individuals is steadily shrinking and may soon be invisible.

One columnist, James Zogby, wrote that the “stakes have never been higher,” and comments the importance of this issue outside of the Middle East, and very much so in the United States. Zogby wonders, “How will we effectively use American diplomacy to advance and complete a peace process that brings about the security of Israel and justice for the Palestinians?”

Zogby is singing the tune, and as I look at lesson plans for teaching my 9th graders, it seems clear what a history teacher can do. We can dig into the contextual histories of the societies we study. We can challenge our students to better understand the regions of the world, to embrace thoughtful solutions and reject failed formulas. Zogby refracts the truth so clearly for us: we must “complete a peace process that brings about the security of Israel and justice for the Palestinians.” Security and Justice. Security and Justice are perching there, nuzzling up against hope, right on the precipice of the soul. As more than one editorial in my paper starts, “Hope is still alive.”

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