In 1984, my teacher announced that our grade-six class at Winnipeg’s Talmud Torah would be marking February 14 as Friendship Day, a more religiously-palatable holiday than the Christian-inspired St. Valentine’s Day that our non-Jewish neighbors were celebrating with red cinnamon hearts and white doilies. Out came folded squares of white paper on which we were instructed to scribble benign messages of amity to our classmates. Occasional was the precocious student who managed a surreptitious XOXO after his signature, but overall the holiday proved more about recess than romance.
This month’s Valentine’s Day coincides with the apparent revival of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation in the form of the Sharon-Abbas summit at the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheik. Couple this with the dose of recent research arguing that Valentine’s Day – by historical record as well as by contemporary reality – is not about propagating romantic love but about controlling lustful urges, and you have an apt metaphor for the current dynamic characterizing the Middle East, and a sober reminder of what we can realistically expect from peacemaking representatives in a protracted conflict. Both in terms of Israel’s renewed diplomatic connection with the Palestinians, and of Sharon’s relationship with the settlers, it’s not about discovering your true love, but perhaps finding a decent companion.
Since the Oslo agreement was signed in 1993, Israel’s diplomatic relationship with the Palestinian Authority has been tenuous at best. Israel has seen the tenure of no less than five prime ministers representing a veritable ideological see-saw of left-wing doves, security centrists and right-wing nationalists: all against the multi-decade rule of Yasser Arafat. Israel’s five premiers varied widely in their desire to negotiate with the contemporary founder of Palestinian nationalism, beginning with Rabin’s measured – if hesitant – 1993 handshake on the White House Lawn, and culminating in Ariel Sharon’s wholesale dismissal of Arafat as a worthy interlocutor. Yet now that Mahmoud Abbas has taken Arafat’s place, Sharon is virtually required to negotiate quickly and enthusiastically with Abu Mazen, as Abbas is known, if only to attempt to lend credence to Israel’s claim that it was Arafat, and his inability to reign in terrorism, that had been the obstacle to peace. In other words, Israelis were willing to be faithful to a negotiating partner, but were simply waiting for the right one to come along.
The idea of friendship over romance can also be used to understand the limits of this current phase of negotiations against a background of over five decades of Israeli-Palestinian enmity. Critics of Israeli-Palestinian peace overtures – on both sides – have long accused the other side of being “untrustworthy.” What the Palestinians really crave, goes the right-wing Israeli argument, is the annihilation of the Jewish State. Conversely, many Palestinians retort that Sharon’s Gaza First plan is just a smokescreen for Gaza Last, with a Palestinian state rendered a fiction and his truly beloved Greater Israel remaining a reality. This unwillingness to trust the other side has contributed to the deadlock of the post-Oslo period.
Yet it is worth considering that uncovering the true feelings of each side is simply not relevant to eking out an ultimate peace agreement. Except for rare historical cases of autocrats boasting formidable military forces and propitious structures of international polarity, foreign policy does not directly result from the private hopes and dreams of individual leaders or even of collective populations. Recall that it was Rabin – popularly known as “Mr. Security” – who perhaps unwisely mused that he wished that Gaza would “sink into the sea,” yet it was also under Rabin that Israel and the Palestinians came to their most far-reaching agreement to date, in the form of Oslo. Certainly deep down, Sharon wishes there were no Palestinian refugees peeking into Israel’s windows, and no doubt Abu Mazen’s heart breaks over the current attempt by Israel’s Ministry of Tourism to invest in the city of Safed at the expense of facilitating a return to his own childhood home there. Yet for explaining and predicting the outcome of this round of negotiations, it is simply not relevant what each man desires. As we have seen in recent history, the dance of Middle East peacemaking is more bouncy sock-hop than steamy tango.
Finally, Sharon’s current policies illustrate a not insignificant dampening of right-wing nationalist lust. Many commentators have stressed the importance of what has come to be known as Israel’s Triangle Dilemma: between holding on to all the settlements, remaining a Jewish state and retaining Israel’s democratic character, Israel can have any two, but not all three. This quandary has faced Israel’s leaders since the country’s acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 Six Day War. But with the Palestinian – as well as settler – population rising, the increased compression of international society wrought by globalization and in particular the worldwide media, as well as the continuing psychic costs imposed by an enduring occupation, the Israeli government is increasingly coming to realize that a tough choice must be made between the paramour of ideology and the steady date of diplomacy. Sharon’s gambit of uprooting the Gaza settlements along with this week’s reversal of the longstanding Israeli policy of demolishing the houses of Palestinian suicide bombers and those of their families illustrates the possibility of leaving the fatal passion of Romeo and Juliet for the ho-hum stability of the Brady Brunch.
So happy Valentine’s Day…or Friendship Day. And if this round of “summit dating” doesn’t lead directly to the altar; hopefully it can at least elicit a walk around the block.
