It’s not just Palestinians and Israelis that have conveniently selective memories.
Rick Perry can’t remember which one of the three government agencies he wants to eliminate, which isn’t surprising because he is, after all, the man who also seems to have forgotten that he once raised the idea of Texas seceding from the country he now wants to lead.
Herman Cain can’t remember who he supports in Libya or some of the women he allegedly tried to provide with free physicals, Cain’s personal version of “Obamacare.”
Newt Gingrich can no longer remember how much he was paid for his consulting contracts with discredited mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac. However, he does know that “every American should be interested in expanding housing opportunities.” Except in 2008 he didn’t think one particular American should: He encouraged presidential nominee John McCain to “ask Senator Obama, ‘Are you prepared to give back all the money that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae gave you?’ ”
Then we have the stars of the Middle East’s longest running two state play, featuring the reliably myopic Israeli and Palestinian leadership-amnesiacs and their supportive minions. Always willing to remember what hasn’t worked and forget what has. Always willing to choose to wallow in a known appalling past rather than imagine and then act to lay the groundwork for a more hopeful future.
Forty four years of off and on Israeli and Palestinian negotiations, surrounded by 63 years of battles with (and within) neighboring countries and the militant wings of various Palestinian groups, have contributed to inelastic memories and perceptions. Changes are seen as illusory or unsustainable.
So even in the West Bank, where stronger and more moderate Palestinian political leaders have emerged, where those same leaders have clearly and repeatedly rejected violence as an instrument of policy, where the infrastructure is now seen by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations as capable of supporting a nascent Palestinian state, many Israeli leaders and supporters still cling to their corroded memory chips.
Present day reality, to them, isn’t a much more effective Palestinian police force. It’s not a more thriving West Bank economy, in spite of all of the obvious impediments imposed by Israel’s security measures. It’s not Palestinian leaders that have acknowledged Israel’s fundamental right to exist. (Instead,ersatz Israeli leaders, particularly within the Likud coalition, choose to mislead their public and Diaspora supporters by failing to acknowledge Palestinian leaders’ statements accepting Israel’s legitimate right to exist. The focus is instead misdirected to the broad, and arguably logical, Palestinian refusal to accept the characterization of Israel as a Jewish state while still in negotiations for their own state and some limited right of return to Israel.)
Reality, for these Israeli leaders, is their memory of the spin cycle of all of the years of fighting and security countermeasures to try to stop the fighting. Their reality is one where they seek proof to support their belief that peace is impossible, or at least highly improbable. So they point to the Hamas-led government in Gaza as a reason to delay reaching a peace agreement with the Fatah-led government in the West Bank, even while political analysts and leaders like Tzipi Livni point out that peace in the West Bank would isolate and pressure Hamas and create the conditions to eventually have peace in Gaza — a peace that would require Hamas to accept the territorial borders of Israel and reject further acts of violence.
Then when Hamas-Fatah reconciliation negotiations occur, and when senior Hamas representative Ahmed Yusef speaks of aligning with Fatah on an agreement to negotiate based on 1967 lines, that’s not to be trusted — there’s the Hamas Charter, their history of violence, the countless statements of Hamas leaders preaching that total victory over Israel is the only Hamas platform.
Why ever risk trusting these guys or adding new memory chips when the old ones seem to have worked just fine?
It’s a risk, no doubt. Except it’s also a geopolitical risk for Israel to continue down its present path. Peace won’t come overnight. The implementation process will also likely be a gradual one, the normative process following peace agreements.
There are countless modern and historical examples of vicious enemies putting aside their differences to coexist. Why should there be a presumption that an ultimate peace agreement with Hamas, endorsed by the Arab League, has to be the exception?
When progressive Israeli leaders emerge or when existing leaders modify their positions and add their more modern (and moderate) memory chips, they get attacked as naive. When progressive pro-Israel organizations or N.G.O.’s advocate for changes in Israel’s policies, efforts are made to marginalize them by questioning their pro-Israel bona fides or, more recently, trying to pass anti-funding legislation that the United States and European Union, as well as Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, have called anti-democratic.
So sclerotic Israeli political decision making continues. And it is too often aided and abetted by sclerotic Palestinian decision making.
Settlement expansion is a supreme annoyance, and it is not in Israel’s own interest to create new border issues. But settlements only become a peace negotiation impediment if Palestinian leaders allow them to be.
Gaining a state is the critical Palestinian vital interest. Palestinians now have most of the world, including the vast majority of Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora, aligned with them in reaching that goal. So what is the strategic wisdom in dropping out of peace negotiations and continuing to pursue a United Nations’ approval path that is far more likely to lead to losing U.S. funds than gaining a Palestinian state?
And for Palestinians’ inelastic memories to cause them to lose sight of the road traveled to this stop sign — a decision by Arab countries in 1948 to attack Israel — makes the path forward more difficult than it needs to be.
It hinders an eventual Middle East rapprochement between Israel, Palestinians and the Arab League for Palestinian supporters to perpetuate the myth that the only reason Israeli security procedures and actions are taken is because Israel’s leaders don’t respect or care about Palestinian lives. The Palestinian leadership’s past sanctioning of violence against Israeli civilians, including rocket attacks, suicide bombings and kidnappings, has created an equal and opposite reaction from the Israelis. One can certainly argue about proportionality and methodology, and whether Israeli and Palestinian leaders too often think tactically and not strategically (they do); however, inelastic memories on both sides have made peacemaking extraordinarily difficult.
To get to the two state solution both sides want will require stronger leadership. Leadership that must be capable of looking past the memory of what has been and understanding that while there are risks in moving forward, they are far less than the risks of remaining in a dangerous status quo. Leadership that must be capable of recognizing that while unanticipated challenges are sure to occur, those challenges can’t be used as an excuse to veer off the path that offers the most hope and opportunity to both sides.
The plague of Israel’s right-wing coalition government, where minor parties have impeded peace negotiation progress and proposed anti-democratic legislation, and the plague of the Palestinians’ divided governments in Gaza and the West Bank, with their competing visions and often vision-less tactics, have negatively impacted peacemaking efforts. But inelastic memories, and the perceptions they have created, have fundamentally affected the process even more.
Hearts and minds must change first. That requires Palestinian and Israel leaders to make the sometimes tough choice to reinforce the other side’s basic humanity and acknowledge their mutually shared goals. This is an especially critical choice to make when a significant provocation or act of violence occurs.
Inelastic memories have too frequently formed an Iron Dome defense around peacemaking progress — progress that will require both Palestinians and Israelis to remember that achieving real peace tomorrow will require them to forget all of the many yesterdays.
