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CounterPunch
October
30, 2002
Beyond the Onion
of Blame
Parallel Sovereignty for Palestine/Israel
by
DEB REICH
If you are a decision-maker or opinion-molder
in a position to act on the creative idea presented here, you
are earnestly urged to read on. Nine million desperate Palestinians
and Israelis will thank you for taking the time. The paper introduces
a concept called "parallel sovereignty"--an innovative
ultramodern paradigm for resolving the longstanding sociopolitical
impasse in Israel/Palestine. Oslo advocates may find it attractive
because it could be termed a "post- quantum-physics two-state
solution," and Oslo opponents may find it attractive because
in this scenario, believe it or not, Greater Israel and Greater
Palestine both emerge intact.
* *
*
The conflict between Palestine and Israel,
between Arab and Jew, goes back a very long way--over a hundred
years in its present form (and a lot longer, if you go back to
Sarah, Hagar and Abraham).
In our time, at least, all the usual
approaches to resolving this conflict share one basic dynamic:
Let us call it "peeling the onion of blame." We take
the conflict in its most current incarnation and peel away a
layer, looking for who is to blame, and why and how--and as the
first layer of the onion is peeled away, we are all weeping,
because the facts are tragic, our situation is tragic, and the
history of this conflict is a history of tragedy.
When that first layer has been peeled
away, someone who doesn't like the answer that has just emerged,
and who feels that the finger of blame should be pointed elsewhere,
goes ahead and peels away another layer, and someone else peels
another, and so on. Some of the best minds on both sides of the
aisle are engaged full-time in this dead-end endeavor. Meanwhile,
more innocents have been killed and injured, more youngsters
turned into killing machines, more lives and more families blighted,
and there's no resolution in sight. And we continue to weep.
Indeed the end of each such exercise
is that, when all the layers are peeled away, and blame has been
cast in every direction, and an ocean of tears has been wept,
the conflict is still not resolved--but of the onion, and all
our efforts, all that remains is compost.
Only an entirely new approach that embraces
a new conceptual framework, a fundamentally different perspective,
can possibly bring a long-term resolution. Conceptually, the
new approach, if it is to be effective, cannot revolve around
apportioning blame. If we want to get anywhere worthwhile, we
have to let go of the onion of blame. Let us agree that we are
all to blame, or that none of us is really to blame, and move
on.
RELINQUISHING
THE CURRENT DYNAMIC
All rational Israelis and Palestinians
and outside observers decry the present situation (October 2002)
of mutual bloodshed, economic collapse, and the implosion of
both societies. Leaders are sticking stubbornly with their present
course because they don't know of any better option (or, in the
worst case, because the current brutal path suits their ultimate
objectives in some way). The people have stuck with their present
leaders only because they don't know where to find any better
ones. Nobody seems to have a clue how to get out of the impasse.
Most analyses simply rehash, with greater or lesser eloquence
and increasing desperation, the same tired old arguments that
have not proven effective in the past and are unlikely to do
so in the future. The familiar two-state (Oslo) solution has
become like the proverbial water to which the thirsty horse can
be led, but which he cannot be made to drink.
What's needed
right now
At a minimum, what's needed immediately
is either better leadership or a better plan (or both). A better
plan is the more urgent, because if there's a persuasive vision
of a better path to follow, leadership will galvanize around
its electoral value--whereas replacing the leadership will not
automatically produce better options.
A profile of
the dynamic of change required
Look to the essential unity among the
sane, rational majority on both sides. The moderate rational
public (both Palestinians and Israelis) are actually all on the
same side in this game--i.e., in favor of a rational, reasonable
solution and against winner-take-all, coercive non-solutions.
Many people already realize this, though the media tend to ignore
them; and the momentum will snowball, given the right catalyst.
Harness youthful energy. The process
of revisioning our future requires participation by young people
in as visible and massive a way as possible, because they can
make or break the process and they are now very radicalized and
confused and angry (on both sides). Let them help to fashion
a more constructive future for themselves by providing an option
that speaks in a language young people can embrace.
Provide a charismatic, marketable, intellectually
solid alternative. It's still not too late... if we can offer
an interesting new alternative that gets the ball rolling again,
an idea that stimulates discussion and gets people moving together
in a creative new direction. This new alternative should be simple,
vivid, and highly "marketable"; it should "re-brand"
the idea of peace, so to speak, yet be based on respectable intellectual
foundations.
Potential problems
(to be avoided)
Certain obvious pitfalls must be carefully
avoided:
A religious veto: Avoid a program that
religiously observant people cannot sign on for. Make sure the
basic conception is religiously acceptable, and bring religious
figures on board early.
Political brain death: Avoid a program
that blames a specific political party, sector, or constituency
for the current mess, or that deals them out of the solution.
We are all responsible for having got to where we are now. As
for the future, "peace" and "security" and
"national honor" are no one's exclusive property; they
belong to everyone.
Moral collapse: The program must unequivocally
put its foot down, once and for all: No more grabbing of what
belongs to others; no excuses. No more killing and mayhem; no
excuses. (Nearly everyone will agree to this if the process gets
cooking well enough; the tiny minority of true fanatics on both
sides will then be increasingly isolated.)
THE NEW ALTERNATIVE
Human beings are patterning organisms.
Cultures are collectively patterned entities. Hostilities like
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are complex, evolved, dysfunctional
patterns. Re-patterning on such a profound cultural level typically
takes a very long time. Arguably, however, the process can be
short-circuited; chaos theory, for example, supports this possibility.
Harnessing the dynamic for a sudden and
rapid repatterning requires (a) a visionary new idea which, by
definition, will be totally unfamiliar and which therefore, initially
at least, may be hard to grasp and may appear unworkable, and
(b) some way to help people plug the strange new idea into their
existing conceptual grasp of reality so as to make it less fearsome
and easier to get a grip on: one simple, persuasive analogy will
do.
The visionary
idea
The land of Israel/Palestine is actually
two parallel kingdoms, so to speak, in one territory. Instead
of repeatedly attempting to divide that territory in a way that
satisfies no one, why not multiply the territory into two simultaneous
parallel (virtual) sovereignties, both with precisely the same
boundaries, neither entity to be more legitimate than the other?
Let each side "win" what is dearest to its heart, but
not at the expense of the other side.
Greater Israel and Greater Palestine
will thus exist simultaneously, with identical boundaries, on
the identical territory--in parallel.
How to plug
the new idea into our present worldview
Take the Microsoft Windows TM environment
as an analogy: With many programs open at once on the same personal
computer, none of them is any more valid than any other, and
the one in the forefront at any given time is determined by what
the user desires to accomplish at that point. (The old transparent
overlay maps that some of us used in school half a century ago
were based on the same idea, with a simpler technology.)
Any psychologist will agree that quality
of life--our subjective, experiential reality--is determined
largely by a process of selective attention. Dr. Richard Merrill
Haney, a Canadian psychologist, has gone farther, positing a
holographic, multiple-realities conception of the human psyche
as a spectrum (in contrast to the relatively rigid, dichotomous
Freudian model of a conscious and an unconscious, period): While
the old model of the psyche is more like a typewriter (on/off),
Haney's conception is more like Windows on a PC, or a multiplex
theater. This same evolving impulse is animating new thinking
in many disciplines, and the old "my way, or not at all"
is giving ground before a much more flexible, postmodern approach.
What the new paradigm proposed herein seeks to do is to take
this evolving perspective and apply it in a field with unique
challenges: geopolitics.
Who says it
has to be the way it's always been?
Nowhere is it written that there must
necessarily be a 1:1 ratio between a given sovereign nation and
a given land area. It's a longstanding assumption, but it's not
a law of nature. If we so choose, we can dispense with "exclusive
sovereignty" in favor of "non-exclusive sovereignty"
or "parallel sovereignty." Physicists have speculated
for half a century about the existence of parallel universes
(the first published reference to the idea in the literature
of physics goes back to the 1950s); meanwhile, in terms of how
people subjectively view the world, parallel universes clearly
exist. (Ask any Israeli what this place is and be told: Israel;
ask any Palestinian and be told: Palestine.) Rather than struggling
to unify the two by force, or amputate various parts and expect
the people concerned to like it, let us simply acknowledge the
existence of the two realities. Let them exist in parallel, on
a basis of absolute formal equality, creating massive new synergies.
In this new paradigm, each of the parallel
nations of Israel/Palestine will have its own flag, anthem, government,
institutions, tax structure, membership in the United Nations,
etc. Military questions are in a class by themselves, and will
not be easy to resolve, but the first principle is that the armed
forces must be clearly subordinate to civil authority. Decisions
that affect foreign entities (treaty regimes, etc.) will be coordinated
between the two nations.
Consider the
advantages
One supreme advantage of the idea is
that, having adopted it, reasonable and moderate people from
each of the two warring nations can thereafter think of themselves
as being on the same side, in the framework of this novel and
creative solution. Another advantage is that the mirror-image
symmetry in legitimacy puts Palestinians and Israelis on a truly
equal footing for the first time: My stature is only as tall
as yours and vice versa; the incentive to score at the other's
expense is dramatically reduced. A further advantage is that
the claims of classical religious sources are not rudely contradicted,
but rather courteously and respectfully outflanked: Who would
dare imply that the prophets of old, had they been alive today
and given the opportunity to learn what contemporary physics
is learning about the world, would have failed to welcome the
great goodness that the parallel universes concept bestows on
all the people of this region?
All these advantages greatly simplify
the task of addressing the admittedly thorny practical problems
on the ground.
Use teamwork
to address all practical issues on the agenda
Concrete issues on the ground will be
resolved by multidisciplinary, mixed Jewish-Arab (perhaps multinational)
teams of professionals. Who will live in such-and-such a house
in Jaffa for which a Jewish family holds a registered deed while
a Palestinian family still has the key to the old front door
from 1948? How will refugee families be compensated? How will
unequal access to resources between Jewish and Arab citizens
of Palestine/Israel be redressed? How will manifestly illegal
land grabs be rolled back, and how far? Who will determine what
"manifestly illegal" is? How can a general amnesty
be organized and declared, enabling people to put down their
weapons once and for all, with the release of all political prisoners?
Should there be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the
South African model?
And finally, how will the new paradigm
affect the people who don't fit into the obvious major categories
(e.g., the 1.1 million Palestinian- Arab citizens of the present
State of Israel; other ethnic/linguistic/religious minority citizens
and residents seeking secure and equal status; Israelis currently
living in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza)? Some people
may prefer dual citizenship. Meanwhile, how can the very substantial
claims of the Palestinian Diaspora be addressed respectfully
and comprehensively, so as to build new and more positive outcomes?
How can the status of Jerusalem be addressed, not in terms of
who owns it or controls it (for a change), but rather in terms
of what's best for the city, its residents, its pilgrims, and
its many stakeholders around the world?
If you reread the foregoing paragraph,
you will notice a complete absence of incendiary buzzwords (Zionist,
right of return, racism, colonialism, terrorism, shaheed, etc.)
that long ago lost all utility except the power to strike fear
into the hearts of the listeners from the other camp. This should
be sufficient to prove that it is indeed possible to pursue a
constructive discussion about our future without reference to
the lexicon of instant mutual alienation and mistrust.
Why not try
it?
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis and
Palestinians are searching desperately for a way out of the present
bloody impasse. A parallel sovereignty model may offer one. Even
just a lively public discussion of the merits of the idea can
demonstrate that there is still an alternative to the terrible
suffering the two sides have been inflicting on themselves and
on one another for lack of a clear way out.
As an added bonus, the idea itself almost
mandates a certain profile of the leaders who would be fit to
implement it in practice. At a minimum, they should certainly
be cyber-literate. Senior military figures should probably be
disqualified, for many reasons. Those two criteria together would
eliminate most of the present leadership on both sides, which
would perhaps be no bad thing.
"If we want to solve a problem that
we have never solved before," wrote physicist and Nobel
laureate Richard P. Feynman, "we must leave the door to
the unknown ajar." Indeed, we must leave it open wide enough
for Palestinians and Israelis to walk through it together into
a better future. If we get started right away, commentaries like
this one that are written about us ten years hence will laud
our courage and imagination, and will employ the word "tragedy"
only in reference to the past.
Let whoever is brave enough to step over
this threshold together, kindly stand and be counted... now.
Deb Reich
is a creative thinker living in Israel/Palestine. Write to her
at debmail@alum.barnard.edu.
Copyright Deborah Reich 2002. .
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