Across the street from me in the Bronx a young Palestinian Muslim guy runs a Deli. We often talk politics because I trained as a doctor in Israel, and consider myself somewhat of an Israeli in exile. We don't agree about all that much, but on the other hand, at least we keep it real. Few things make me more irritated than people who have never and will never set foot in the Levant making all kinds of proclamations and generalizations about people they presume to understand. In general Americans do not understand the middle east. Their best and brightest led us into an endless quagmire in Iraq...and indirectly caused ISIS to get a state. ISIS, as far as we can tell, are the people who make Al Qaeda look like a bunch of kindergarten teachers. So, given what the political class here has been able to cook up as solutions to middle east conflicts, I consider the ideas of me and my Palestinian neighbor at least equally valid and likely to succeed.
My neighbor and I both want to go home: me to Haifa, him to Ramallah. We have both concluded that the Bronx and the US in general is a crazy, crazy place. Neither one of us has any delusions about the benevolence of the US. The US is running on it's own imperial fantasies in spite of the obvious: it's over. Something about civilization here has gone wrong, and people have stopped being fully human. They became much too concerned about money, which is ironic considering how few of them have any real amount of it.
Both of us agree that what makes life better over there is the people. Most people who live near you have your back. People watch out for the neighborhood kids. And, on a day to day basis, people have surprisingly few problems with each other.
I always thought I was living in some kind of bizarre co-existence bubble only blow over Haifa. My neighbor lived in Gaza before the pull out- he says in a lot of cases the environment was nearly the same. On a day to day basis people had surprisingly few problems with each other. The interesting contrast is the US of course, where on a day to day basis people of different racial ethnicities have surprisingly few real interactions with each other. I remember sitting in my Muslim neighbor's house on Ramadan. I remember an Arab friend of mine buying toys for some of out neighborhood kids who's Jewish mother had a substance abuse problem. "These kids belong to the neighborhood. Everyone is raising them so the situation isn't that bad..." she said to me, explaining everyone's relaxed attitude about their horrible mother. This incident and thousands of others over the years are ones I doubt I would ever witness between white Americans and black Americans.
A lot of what drives the conflict over Israel's borders does not boil down to an inherent conflict between peoples who can not live together. The conflict boils down to a big fight over who gets to be in charge of what. The vortex that spews out militarism is a distorted Israeli economy: highly unequal, highly military, and highly export oriented. At the bottom of the economic order are a lot people without a lot of hope of making what they consider a decent living in any normal peaceful way. To make things worse now many television channels are around to ever inflate what they consider normal.
My neighbor says the solution to the conflict is violence. He understands I disagree, but thinks I'm going to end up dead. "The way things are going, only the violent end up surviving." he says. I think there are other solutions to the conflict. Already through our conversations we have come up with one idea we can agree on: ignore the governments as much as possible; the governments are mostly a problem. On some level this gets down to the kind of creepy people who run governments in the region. Corruption in middle eastern governments is so totally endemic, we might be better of ignoring governments entirely. So then comes the obvious question: what replaces government, and is that not just some new corrupt government.
What seems to be emerging all over the world to replace corrupt governments out of touch with their peoples is civil society. If you add certain processes, like open discussion, open participation, transparency, voting and direct action to civil society you can get organizations that replace governments with something more democratic. Such processes are obviously challenging when you have different peoples with two different languages, but this is merely a technical issue. Canada has two linguistic groups able to exist democratically and so does the party membership of Hadash ( the Israeli communist party). Twenty first century technology can make the world smaller not just on a global scale, but a local one. It is now nearly free to run meetings with simultaneous translation via special headphone sets. I have worn such headphones myself.
Right now conflict rages, and there will be no people to people meetings that can bypass the governments. When the conflict stops for a while, there might be no productive meetings either. Too many people are committed to their own delusions of supremacy. On the other hand, quite a few people have realized no one has any more children to spare for war...so perhaps it is time to build peace for the people from the ground up.
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