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Israel-Palestine-Jordan
Michael Totten Interview: The Real Quagmire in the Middle East
2009-07-08
The Middle East is a hard place for idealists, especially for the Western liberal variety. My feelings of optimism for the region have been ground down over time like rocks under slow-moving glacial ice.

Last time I visited Israel, at the end of the Gaza war this past January, I met Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh. He sounded no less despondent than the Israelis I spoke to. "Listen," he said. "We must stop dreaming about the New Middle East and coexistence and harmony and turning this area into Hong Kong and Singapore...I don't see a real peace emerging over here. We should stop talking about it."

That's what I hear from almost everyone I speak to over there now, whether they're Muslims, Christians, Jews, or whatever. Arabs, Israelis, Kurds -- most seem to have a dim view of the future. Optimists, for the most part, parachute in for a brief time and leave. I hate it. It depresses me. But that's how it is.

Some writers and analysts are slightly less gloomy, and I frequently ask them to cheer me up and hope their relative optimism isn't fantasy. Jeffrey Goldberg's work at The Atlantic occasionally qualifies as less pessimistic than mine. His outstanding book Prisoners strikes just the right balance between world-weary pessimism and hope. He's an American Jew weaned on Socialist Zionism who became an idealistic Israeli as a young adult. He sought out friendships with individual Palestinians with whom he could forge his own separate peace, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that peace was possible. It was much harder than he expected. But he managed, with some difficultly, when he worked as an IDF prison guard at Ketziot during the first intifada to kindle a rocky but enduring friendship with his prisoner Rafiq Hijazi.

I spoke with him a few weeks ago in Washington D.C.
Go to the link to read the interview. Interesting stuff, although much is the same as its been since Zionism began. Little details pop out though, like Mr. Goldberg's comment, "Jews are floating around in the Persian Gulf with nuclear weapons in German subs that are aimed at the new Hitler. If you step away from your personal feelings about it, it's just fascinating." They also mention Israeli nuke-armed subs in the Mediterranean, which is interesting to know... and should give pause to any anti-Zionists who happened to poke their heads into Rantburg today.
Posted by:trailing wife

#1  I read this yesterday. Great interview. He makes the point that the Paleos take a very long view ("sacrificing generations"). Peace isn't something that can be imposed; both parties have to want it. And that isn't the case now and likely won't be for a long time. Irresistible force, meet immovable object.
Posted by: Spot   2009-07-08 09:06  

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