Part 4 (1/2)

Second, there have been many calls and meetings to address the whole matter of military action, which, according to a recent poll, 92 percent of the American people seem to want. Because, however, the administration hasn't exactly specified what the aims of this war are (”eradicating terrorism” is more metaphysical than it is actual), nor the means, nor the plan, there is considerable uncertainty as to where we may be going militarily. But generally speaking, the rhetoric has become less apocalyptic and religious-the idea of a crusade has disappeared almost completely- and more focused on what might be necessary beyond general words like ”sacrifice” and ”a long war, unlike any others.” In universities, colleges, churches, and meeting houses there are a great many debates on what the country should be doing in response; I have even heard that families of the innocent victims have said in public that they do not believe that military revenge is an appropriate response. The point is that there is considerable reflection at large as to what the United States should be doing, but I am sorry to report that the time for a critical examination of U.S. policies in the Middle East and Islamic worlds has not yet arrived. I hope that it will.

If only more Americans and others can grasp that the main long-range hope for the world is this community of conscience and understanding, that whether in protecting const.i.tutional rights, or in reaching out to the innocent victims of American power (as in Iraq), or in relying on understanding and rational a.n.a.lysis, ”we” can do a great deal better than we have so far. Of course, this won't lead directly to changed policies on Palestine, or to a less skewed defense budget, or to more enlightened environmental and energy att.i.tudes: but where else but in this sort of decent backtracking is there room for hope? Perhaps this const.i.tuency may grow in the United States, but speaking as a Palestinian, I must also hope that a similar const.i.tuency should be emerging in the Arab and Muslim world. We must start thinking about ourselves as responsible for the poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, and repression that have come to dominate our societies, evils that we have allowed to grow despite our complaints about Zionism and imperialism. How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? How many of us have denounced all suicidal missions as immoral and wrong, even though we have suffered the ravages of colonial settlers and inhuman collective punishment? We can no longer hide behind the injustices done to us, any more than we can pa.s.sively bewail the American support for our unpopular leaders. A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score.

I have been arguing for years that our main weapons as Arabs today are not military but moral, and that one reason why, unlike the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian struggle for self-determination against Israeli oppression has not caught the world's imagination is that we cannot seem to be clear about our goals and our methods, and we have not stated unambiguously enough that our purpose is coexistence and inclusion, not exclusivism and a return to some idyllic and mythical past. The time has come for us to be forthright and to start immediately to examine, reexamine, and reflect on our own policies as so many Americans and Europeans are now doing. We should expect no less of ourselves than we should of others. Would that all people took the time to try to see where our leaders seem to be taking us, and for what reason. Skepticism and reevaluation are necessities, not luxuries.

Al-Ahram, September 27October 6, 2001.

Al-Hayat, October 10, 2001.

London Review of Books, October 4, 2001.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Adrift in Similarity.

Samuel Huntington's article ”The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis about ”the new phase” in world politics after the end of the cold war, Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-making ranks, theorists such as Francis f.u.kuyama and his ”end of history” ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset of globalism, tribalism, and the dissipation of the state. But they, he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He was about to announce the ”crucial, indeed a central aspect” of what ”global politics is likely to be in the coming years.” Unhesitatingly he pressed on: ”It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the princ.i.p.al conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate world politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”(22) Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called ”civilization ident.i.ty,” and ”the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations,” of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in the t.i.tle ”The Roots of Muslim Rage.” In both articles, the personification of enormous ent.i.ties called ”the West” and ”Islam” is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like ident.i.ty and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam. The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam in particular.

More troubling is Huntington's a.s.sumption that his perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an ideologist, someone who wants to make ”civilizations” and ”ident.i.ties” into what they are not, shut-down, sealed-off ent.i.ties that have been purged of the myriad currents and countercurrents that animate human history and that over centuries have made it possible for that history to contain not only wars of religion and imperial conquest but also exchange, cross-fertilization, and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted warfare that ”The Clash of Civilizations?” argues is the reality. When he published his book by the same t.i.tle in 1996, he tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many more footnotes; all he did, however, was to confuse himself and demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he is. The basic paradigm of the West vs. the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted, often insidiously and implicitly, in discussions since the terrible events of September 11.

The carefully planned ma.s.s slaughter and horrendous, pathologically motivated suicide bombing by a small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is, the capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of crazed fanatics for criminal purposes, international luminaries from former Pakistani prime minister Ben.a.z.ir Bhutto to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles, and the latter has used Huntington to rant on about the West's superiority, how ”we” have Mozart and Michelangelo and they don't. (He has since made a half-hearted apology for his insult to ”Islam.”) But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in their destructiveness, for Usama bin Laden and his followers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of Reverend Jim Jones at Guyana or the j.a.panese Aum s.h.i.+nrikyo? Even the normally sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 2228, can't resist reaching for the vast generalization and praises Huntington extravagantly for his ”cruel and sweeping, but nonetheless acute” observations about Islam. ”Today,” the journal says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that ”the world's billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'” Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians, 50 Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant pa.s.sion as a member of the ”West” and to instruct what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers, and destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such reductiveness and that have seeped from one territory into another, in the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West: they mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that. I remember a man who rose from the audience after a lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1992 and started to attack my ideas as ”Western,” as opposed to the strict Islamic ones he espoused. I interrupted him: ”Why are you wearing a suit and tie?” was the first simpleminded retort that came to mind. ”They're Western, too.” He sat down with an embarra.s.sed smile on his face, but I recalled the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started to come in, how they had mastered all the technical details required to do their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw the line between ”Western” technology and, as Berlusconi declared, ”Islam's” inability to be a part of ”modernity”?

One cannot easily do so, of course, but how finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations, cultural a.s.sertions. At some level, for instance, primitive pa.s.sions and sophisticated knowhow converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between ”West” and ”Islam” but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of ident.i.ty and nationality about which there is literally unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism, and in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilist vocabulary, to end nations entirely doesn't make the supposed ent.i.ties any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective pa.s.sions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, ”ours” as well as ”theirs.”

In a remarkable series of three articles published between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, a.n.a.lyzed what he called the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes ”an Islamic order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion.” And this ”entails an absolute a.s.sertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds.” As a timely instance of this debas.e.m.e.nt, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the word jihad, then goes on to show that, in the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against presumed enemies, it is impossible ”to recognize . . . Islamic religion, society, culture, history or politics as lived and experienced by Muslims through the ages.” The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are ”concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time bound agenda.” What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and zealotry occur in the ”Jewish” and ”Christian” universes of discourse.

It was Joseph Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the distinctions between civilized London and ”the heart of darkness” quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of European civilization could instantaneously reverse into the most barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was Conrad also in The Secret Agent (1907) who described terrorism's affinity for abstractions like ”pure science” (and by extension for ”Islam” or ”the West”), as well as the terrorist's ultimate moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe, and as both Freud and Nietzsche showed, the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with often-terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for situations such as the one we face now; hence the altogether more rea.s.suring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's opposition between Islam and the West, from which in the first days official discourse drew its vocabulary. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law enforcement efforts, directed against Arabs, Muslims, and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, America, and even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests that began in the seventh century and that, as the celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis, and gave rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and Carolingian France), whose mission, he seemed to be saying, was to resume defense of the ”West” against its historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, was that in the creation of this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science, philosophy, sociology, and historiography of Islam, which had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and cla.s.sical antiquity. Islam was inside from the start, as even Dante, great enemy of Muhammad, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamanic religions, as Louis Ma.s.signon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before: for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers-not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp-of the most jealous of all G.o.ds, even though the b.l.o.o.d.y modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, ”is very rea.s.suring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle . . . between the deep waters of tradition and modernity.”

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed a.n.a.lysis. The ”clash of civilizations” thesis is a gimmick like The War of the Worlds, better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.

Al-Ahram, October 1117, 2001.

Al-Hayat, October 12, 2001.

The Nation, October 22, 2001.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

A Vision to Lift the Spirit.

With the bombs and missiles falling on Afghanistan in the high-alt.i.tude U.S. destruction wrought by Operation Enduring Freedom, the Palestine question may seem tangential to the altogether more urgent events in Central Asia. But it would be a mistake to think so, and not just because Usama bin Laden and his followers (no one knows how many there are in theory or in practice) have tried to capture Palestine as a rhetorical part of their unconscionable campaign of terror. But so too has Israel, for its own purposes. With the killing of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi on October 17 as retaliation by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine for the a.s.sa.s.sination of its leader by Israel last August, General Sharon's sustained campaign against the Palestinian Authority as Israel's Bin Laden has risen to a new, semihysterical pitch. Israel has been a.s.sa.s.sinating Palestinian leaders and militants (more than sixty of them to date) for the past several months and couldn't have been surprised that its illegal methods would sooner or later prompt Palestinian retaliation in kind. But why one set of killings should be acceptable and others not is a question Israel and its supporters are unable to answer. And so the violence goes on, with Israel's occupation the more deadly and the vastly more destructive, causing huge civilian suffering: in the period between October 18 and 21, six Palestinian towns were reoccupied by Israeli forces; five more Palestinian activists were a.s.sa.s.sinated, plus twenty-one civilians killed and 160 injured; curfews were imposed everywhere, and all this Israel has the gall to compare with the U.S. war against Afghanistan and terrorism.

Thus the frustration and subsequent impa.s.se in pressing the claims of a people dispossessed for fifty-three years and militarily occupied for thirty-four years have definitively gone beyond the main arena of struggle and are w.i.l.l.y-nilly tied in all sorts of ways to the global war against terrorism. Israel and its supporters worry that the United States will sell them out, all the while protesting contradictorily that Israel isn't the issue in the new war. Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims generally have either felt uneasiness or a creeping guilt by a.s.sociation that attaches to them in the public realm, despite efforts by political leaders to keep dissociating Bin Laden from Islam and the Arabs: but they, too, keep referring to Palestine as the great symbolic nexus of their disaffection.

In official Was.h.i.+ngton, George W. Bush and Colin Powell have more than once revealed unambiguously that Palestinian self-determination is an important, perhaps even a central, issue. The turbulence of war and its unknown dimensions and complications (its consequences in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are likely to be dramatic, if as yet unknown) have stirred up the whole Middle East in striking ways, so that the need for some genuinely positive change in the status of the 7 million stateless Palestinians is sure to grow in importance, even though a number of quite dispiriting things about the present impa.s.se are evident enough now. The main problem is whether or not the United States and the parties are going to resort only to the stopgap measures that brought us the disastrous Oslo agreement.

The immediate experience of the Al-Aqsa Intifada has universalized Arab and Muslim powerlessness and exasperation to a degree never before as magnified as it is now. The Western media hasn't at all conveyed the crus.h.i.+ng pain and humiliation imposed on Palestinians by Israel's collective punishment, its house demolitions, its invasions of Palestinian areas, its air bombings and killings, as have the nightly broadcasts by Al-Jazeera satellite television, or admirable daily reporting in Ha'aretz by the Israeli journalist Amira Ha.s.s and commentators like her. At the same time, I think, there is widespread understanding among Arabs that the Palestinians (and, by extension, the other Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by their leaders. An abyss visibly separates nattily suited negotiators who make declarations in luxurious surroundings and the dusty h.e.l.l of the streets of Nablus, Jenin, Hebron, and elsewhere. Schooling is inadequate; unemployment and poverty rates have climbed to alarming heights; anxiety and insecurity fill the atmosphere, with governments either incapable of stopping or unwilling to stop the rise of Islamic extremism or an astonis.h.i.+ngly flagrant corruption at the very top. Above all, the brave secularists who protest at human rights abuses, fight clerical tyranny, and try to speak and act on behalf of a new modern democratic Arab order are pretty much left alone in their fight, una.s.sisted by the official culture, their books and careers sometimes thrown as a sop to mounting Islamic fury. A huge dank cloud of mediocrity and incompetence hangs over everyone, and this in turn has given rise to magical thinking and/or a cult of death that is more prevalent than ever.

I know it is often argued that suicide bombings are the result either of frustration and desperation or of the criminal pathology of deranged religious fanatics. But these are inadequate explanations. The New York and Was.h.i.+ngton suicide terrorists were middle-cla.s.s, far-from-illiterate men, perfectly capable of modern planning of audacious as well as terrifyingly deliberate destruction. The young men sent out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad do what they are told with a conviction that suggests clarity of purpose, if not of much else. The real culprit is a system of primary education that is woefully piecemeal, cobbled together from the Koran, rote exercises based on outdated fifty-year-old textbooks, hopelessly large cla.s.ses, woefully ill-equipped teachers, and a nearly total inability to think critically. Along with the oversized Arab armies-all of them burdened with unusable military hardware and no record of any positive achievement- this antiquated educational apparatus has produced the bizarre failures in logic and moral reasoning, as well as the insufficient appreciation of human life, that lead either to leaps of religious enthusiasm of the worst kind or to a servile wors.h.i.+p of power.

Similar failures in vision and logic operate on the Israeli side. How it has come to seem morally possible, or even justifiable, for Israel to maintain and defend its thirty-four-year-old occupation fairly boggles the mind, but even Israeli ”peace” intellectuals remain fixated on the supposed absence of a Palestinian peace camp, forgetting that a people under occupation doesn't have the same luxury as the occupier to decide whether or not an interlocutor exists. In the process, military occupation is taken as an acceptable given and is scarcely mentioned; Palestinian terrorism becomes the cause, not the effect, of violence, even though one side possesses a modern military a.r.s.enal (unconditionally supplied by the United States), the other is stateless, virtually defenseless, savagely persecuted at will, and herded inside 160 little cantons, schools closed, life made impossible. Worst of all, the daily killing and wounding of Palestinians is accompanied by the growth of Israeli settlements and by the 400,000 settlers who dot the Palestinian landscape without respite.

A recent report issued by Peace Now in Israel states the following: At the end of June 2001 there were 6593 housing units in different stages of active construction in settlements.

During the Barak administration 6045 housing units were begun in settlements. In fact settlement building in the year 2000 reached the highest since 1992, with 4499 starts.

When the Oslo agreements were signed there were 32,750 housing units in the settlements. Since the signing of the Oslo agreements 20,371 housing units have been constructed, representing an increase of 62% in settlement units.

The essence of the Israeli position is its total irreconcilability with what the Jewish state wantspeace and security, even though everything it does a.s.sures neither one nor the other.

The United States has underwritten Israel's intransigence and brutality: there are no two ways about it-$92 billion and unending political support, all for the world to see. Ironically, this was far truer during, rather than either before or after, the Oslo process. The plain truth of the matter is that anti-Americanism in the Arab and Muslim worlds is tied directly to the United States' behavior, lecturing the world on democracy and justice while openly supporting their exact opposites. There also is an undoubted ignorance about the United States in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and there has been far too great a tendency to use rhetorical tirades and sweeping general condemnation instead of rational a.n.a.lysis and critical understanding of America. The same is true of Arab att.i.tudes toward Israel.

Both the Arab governments and the intellectuals have failed in important ways on this matter. Governments have failed to devote any time or resources to an aggressive cultural policy that puts across an adequate representation of Arab and Muslim culture, tradition, and contemporary society, with the result that these things are unknown in the West, leaving unchallenged pictures of Arabs and Muslims as violent, overs.e.xed fanatics. The intellectual failure is no less great. It is simply inadequate to keep repeating cliches about struggle and resistance that imply a military program of action when none is either possible or really desirable. Our defense against unjust policies is a moral one, and we must first occupy the moral high ground and then promote understanding of that position in Israel and the United States, something we have never done. We have refused interaction and debate, disparagingly calling them only normalization and collaboration. Refusing to compromise in putting forth our just position (which is what I am calling for) cannot possibly be construed as a concession, especially when it is made directly and forcefully to the occupier or the author of unjust policies of occupation and reprisal. Why do we fear confronting our oppressors directly, humanely, persuasively, and why do we keep believing in precisely the vague ideological promises of redemptive violence that are little different from the poison spewed by Bin Laden and the Islamists? The answer to our needs lies in principled resistance, well-organized civil disobedience against military occupation and illegal settlement, and an educational program that promotes coexistence, citizens.h.i.+p, and the worth of human life.

But we are now in an intolerable impa.s.se, requiring more than ever a genuine return to the all-but-abandoned bases of peace that were proclaimed at Madrid in 1991, UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, land for peace. There can be no peace without pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, including Jerusalem, and-as the Mitch.e.l.l report affirmed-to dismantle its settlements. This can obviously be done in a phased way, with some sort of immediate emergency protection for undefended Palestinians, but the great failing of Oslo must be remedied now at the start: a clearly articulated end to occupation, the establishment of a viable, genuinely independent Palestinian state, and the existence of peace through mutual recognition. These goals have to be stated as the objective of negotiations, a beacon s.h.i.+ning at the end of the tunnel. Palestinian negotiators have to be firm about this and not use the reopening of talks-if any should now begin, in this atmosphere of harsh Israeli war on the Palestinian people-as an excuse simply to return to Oslo. In the end, though, only the United States can restore negotiations, with European, Islamic, Arab, and African support, but it must be done through the United Nations, which must be the essential sponsor of the effort.

And since the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has been so humanly impoveris.h.i.+ng, I would suggest that important symbolic gestures of recognition and responsibility, undertaken perhaps under the auspices of a Mandela or a panel of impeccably credentialed peacemakers, should try to establish justice and compa.s.sion as crucial elements in the proceedings. Unfortunately, it is perhaps true that neither Arafat nor Sharon is suited to so high an enterprise. The Palestinian political scene must absolutely be overhauled to represent seamlessly what every Palestinian longs for-peace with dignity and justice and, most important, decent, equal coexistence with Israeli Jews. We need to move beyond the undignified shenanigans, the disgraceful backing and filling of a leader who hasn't in a long time come anywhere near experiencing the sacrifices of his long-suffering people. The same is true of Israelis who are led abysmally by the likes of General Sharon. What we need is a vision that can lift the much-abused spirit beyond the sordid present, something that will not fail when presented unwaveringly as what people need to aspire to.