More Pessimism for the Middle East
I don’t need to be the ten millionth person to comment on the hopelessness of peace in the Middle East, but there were a couple of pieces I read recently that dampened my feelings on the subject a little more than usual. That’s because they came from Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens, a two men who have made careers out of finding creative ways to point out reasons for optimism and reform in the Middle East.
Friedman’s latest Op-ed is a sobering column on the increasingly volatile relationship between Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama. Friedman’s column was primarily influenced by this NYT news story on Karzai’s repeated claims that he is the only thing that stands in the way of US hegemony in the region.
And then there’s Hitchens’ essay on Kai Bird’s new memoir. Hitchens concludes with what amounts to a very cold shower.
Everybody has to play a version of the counterfactual game at one point or another, but the more this book rehearses the dropped catches and untaken roads and other metaphorical mixtures, the more it succeeds in showing that the pursuit has hit abruptly diminishing returns. Almost no “concession” made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it. What is authentic and innate in moral individuals like young Kai or young Dani can almost never become true of states or nationalist parties, and is certainly never going to become true of clerical movements, the rise of which among Arabs and Jews is not something that was foreseen in the years under review… There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past, which is where historians like Bird are at their best. The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure.
