Israel-Palestine: A sense of proportion
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): In eight months, the second intifada has gone from rocks to car bombs on the Palestinian side, and from "rubber" bullets to F-16s on the Israeli side. At this rate, we should reach nuclear weapons around the first anniversary of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the sacred precinct of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem last September.
Alright, I'm exaggerating, but the speed with which the confrontation has escalated has been very fast even for such a volatile area. How much worse is it going to get? If you talk to mainstream Israelis or Palestinians, the consensus is that it is very bad indeed, but the Samaritans have an interestingly different perspective.
There really are Samaritans, many of them still living around their sacred mountain overlooking Nablus in the West Bank. They are the very same people who got such high praise in the New Testament parable that bears their name. But the whole point about the "Good Samaritan" was that as a member of a despised outside group, his charity to a stranger confounded normal expectations.
The Samaritans are descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel and pray in ancient Hebrew, but orthodox Jews still see them as outsiders.
Most Palestinians see them as "Palestinian Jews", but fundamentalist Muslims view them with suspicion too. So the Samaritans watch their step -- especially since there are fewer than 1,000 of them -- and see the situation from squarely in the middle.
"Our political desire is to survive all the forces in the area," said Benyamin Tsedaka, editor of a bi-weekly Samaritan newspaper, in a recent interview with National Post. "We have to turn on the TV just to know how to act tomorrow. But it's better than Belfast, and a thousand times better than Bosnia."
Really? He presumably means better than Belfast at the height of the "Troubles" in the early 1970s, for there is a cease-fire in Northern Ireland today, but even so. Better than Belfast?
The death toll in Israel and the occupied territories in eight months is nearing 550. It never exceeded 500 even in the worst full year of clashes between the Irish Republican Army (who play the Palestinians in this analogy) and the British army (who would not enjoy being cast in the Israeli role).
However, there are only 1.5 million people in Northern Ireland, whereas there are 6 million Jews and almost 3 million Palestinian Arabs in the Israel-Palestine arena. So yes: it is considerably better than Belfast at its height.
And is it a thousand times better than Bosnia? In three years of genocide in Bosnia, around 200,000 people were killed and close to 2 million more were driven from their homes. Bosnia has only half the population of the Israel-Palestine area, so double the numbers to allow for the population difference. Then to suffer on the same scale as the Bosnians, the Palestinians and Israelis would have to lose around 10,000 dead a month, with another 100,000 a month becoming refugees.
Technically speaking, therefore, Tsedaka is wrong. The actual death toll in the second intifada is running at around seventy a month, so the situation is only around 150 times better than Bosnia. Still, it is a great deal better.
Could it get worse? Certainly. It is even possible that Sharon (who was elected to bash the Palestinians hard enough to "bring them to their senses") may at some point decide to re- occupy the territories that are now under the control of the Palestinian Authority, in which case people will look back with nostalgia upon the comparative tranquility of the present. But it still won't be as big a human tragedy as the news reports make it seem.
This is not to minimize the poverty, misery and near-despair in which most Palestinians live, or the loss of hundreds of Palestinian and dozens of Israeli lives. It is just to say that while it is more than a tempest in a teacup, it is a very long way from Armageddon.
Most Israelis have now convinced themselves that negotiating with the Palestinians is futile, because Israel allegedly offered them amazing concessions under the government of Ehud Barak, only to see them rejected by the Palestinians in favor of a violent campaign to extort further concessions.
That is untrue. The concessions Barak offered at Camp David last July were not all that generous, though they went far enough beyond previous Israeli offers to cause the collapse of his coalition government.
The bigger concessions he offered in October, when the intifada was already underway, came after his cabinet had already collapsed and he was heading into an election he was bound to lose. Barak could not deliver on them, and the Palestinians knew it.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has made huge blunders too, notably by raising the "right of return" of all Palestinian refugees as a pretext for rebuffing Barak's undeliverable last- minute proposals. But the real hope for a peace based on the 1993 Oslo accords probably died with assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin six years ago.
Yet there will be new peace talks eventually. Neither party to the quarrel can eliminate the other, so they have to find a way to live with each other. It will take a long time, and many ugly things will happen in the meantime, but it is far from being the bloodiest struggle in the world.
It is only the one that the cameras are watching.