September 01, 2006 (2): Hope Needs More than Help

There was interesting discrepancy today between what one saw on BBC World Service Television News and what appeared on the BBC NEWS Web site. The headline on the Web site was "Donors pledge Palestinians $500m." On the television the story began with a clip of Jan Egeland addressing a gathering of donors in Stockholm, trying eloquently to get across the message that "the Palestinians need hope." The BBC announcer cut it at this point saying, "and they got help" following through with most of the Web site story on the impressive amount of money raised.

With my passion for analyzing text, I found this an interesting shift of priorities that seems to have gotten swept under the carpet. Neither A9 (Microsoft search) nor Google was any help in recovering Egeland's words. I really do not think I imagined them. Quite the contrary, my guess is that Egeland appropriated them from a speech given by the late King Hussein of Jordan in May of 1985:

The Lebanese tragedy has caused both Israelis and Palestinians to reassess the validity of their previous policies. Both are now considering, simultaneously, the need for a negotiated peace. Each is skeptical. The Palestinians need hope. The Israelis need trust. It is important for all of us to provide hope and trust they need. If we fail to do so, hope will surely turn to deeper despair and trust to invincible suspicion. The dangers for all of us, including them, will be much worse than before.

It is, to say the least, to see how little progress has been made in Lebanon since 1985; but it is equally depressing to think that, as far as the news media is concerned, the plight of the Palestinians will be solved by donors from around the world opening their checkbooks. This is not to say that the Palestinians do not need that $500 million (and we have to hope with all sincerity that every donor who made a pledge will make good on that pledge "with all deliberate speed"); but it is still important to recognize that, to paraphrase the Beatles, "money can't buy me hope." In this case the reconstruction of Gaza is ultimately only as good as the hope that it will not get blown up again (a very weak hope to anyone with a historical sense of what has happened in Lebanon).

So whence hope? By coincidence, this morning, while I was doing my weekly backup, I happened to be reading the original Foreign Affairs edition of the essay "Has Democracy a Future?," by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (This essay is now Chapter 6 of Schlesinger's book, War and the American Presidency. That is definitely the right place for it today. The original article was published in 1997, but Schlesinger predicted the unfolding of events in the first five years of the current decade with frightening accuracy.) Schlesinger is perhaps the perfect stick for bashing Thomas Friedman. He takes all of the exuberant cheerleading for globalization that has become Friedman's stock-in-trade and dismantles it down to the claptrap it really is, and does so with an eloquence that is probably far beyond Friedman's capacity to dream. However, the aggravation of global tensions by "unbridled capitalism" is only part of his story; the other key part is the problem of race relations that still lingers on American soil.

Tension will be mitigated even more by intermarriage. Sex—and love—between people of different creeds and colors can probably be counted on to arrest the disuniting of America.

This must have raised eyebrows when it first appears and probably continues to do so. However, Schlesinger may have been thinking about Romeo and Juliet, who united first in marriage and then in death and whose acts ultimately let to the reconciliation of the Montague and Capulet families. Is it such an absurd modest proposal to consider that intermarriage could address the respective needs of Palestinians for hope and Israelis for trust or the irreconcilable differences between Shiite and Sunni or [fill in your own favorite examples here]?

It may not be absurd, but it is pretty damned unlikely. Unfortunately, I would suggest that it is unlikely for a rather depressing reason. It has struck me that one thing that fundamentalists have in common, regardless of what they happen to view so "fundamentally," is a set of extremely strong (violent?) opinions about "correct sex." We see it in the United States, not only over issues such as same-sex marriage but even over contraception. Presumably Islamic fundamentalism is equally rigid over rules that amount to "keeping it in the clan." So, while Schlesinger may have hit on one way to get at hope in the Middle East that goes beyond financial aid, I doubt that he or anyone who sees the point he has been trying to make will get taken very seriously.