Middle East
Letter from the Editor
Spring Ahead, Fall Back
Darkness comes early this time of year. Those who suffer when the nighttime hours outnumber those of daylight—what doctors call seasonal affective disorder—become noticeably morose and pessimistic. Doses of full-spectrum light supposedly correct the malady. Unfortunately, no one has found a scientific method to move nations into the light, or protect people on the collective level from the ugly effects of being drawn into darkness.
These images of darkness and light suggest themselves as we consider the dynamics unfolding in two chronically troubled regions, the Balkans and the Middle East. Exhausted and angry after 13 years of destructive, dictatorial rule by Slobodan Milosevic, the people of Yugoslavia—or more precisely, of Serbia—came together in September to oust the indicted war criminal from the presidency. Predictions had it that the opposition remained too fragmented and mired in petty rivalries to forge an effective challenge in the presidential election Milosevic had called prematurely to consolidate his power. But the Serbian people surprised the pundits by backing the main opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, at the polls and then rallying in the streets, bringing the country to a standstill until Milosevic had to concede he’d outsmarted himself with his rigged election.
Balkans experts have routinely pegged the Serbs as a gloomy lot, with a long tradition of glorying in martyrdom and the saintliness of being noble losers. But, as our Belgrade correspondent Katarina Subasic points out in this month’s cover story, her compatriots, for whatever combination of altruism and self-interest—and analysts will expend millions of words debating the variables in the equation—decided to move toward “justice, hope, and future over violence, hopelessness, and the dark past.” While, as she says, “nothing in this story looks like the happy ending of a movie yet,” her country has taken a giant step into the light.
In contrast, the Israelis and Palestinians have descended into a darkness all too familiar during their 52-year-old conflict. The sudden eclipse of the movement toward peace in late September catapulted both sides back to their opposing corners of mutual suspicion and demonization. Once again, the loudest voices in the region belong to those who tout force as essential to survival.
The agony of this fall backward is all the more intense for its precipitousness. Just a day before the Palestinian street ignited, Ehud Barak had given an extraordinary interview to The Jerusalem Post, in which he plainly stated what no Israeli prime minister had ever said publicly: He outlined the shape of the final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, containing two capitals in Jerusalem—Al-Quds and Yerushalaim, one Palestinian and one Israeli. But, as WPR’s Israel correspondent Elisa Ben-Rafael observes, this remarkable step into the light was all but erased by the violence in the following days. Instead of debating the contours of the new Jerusalem, the Israeli and Arabic presses reverberated with body counts and indelible stories of dead innocents.
After so much reciprocal outrage, and the searing images of newly minted Palestinian and Israeli martyrs beamed by satellite around the world, how to recoup the momentum toward peaceful coexistence? Beyond the precincts of statecraft, among ordinary Arabs and Jews, the view of the future is framed as much by anecdote, rumor, and emotion as by facts and pragmatism. In that atmosphere, evil actors all too readily stir up trouble. Hezbollah’s satellite television station and Web site exhort Palestinians to kill Jews. Mullahs in Egypt spread the canard that Jews have burned Islam’s holiest shrines in Jerusalem as a prelude to building a Third Temple in their place.
In a matter of weeks, Israelis have seen a Palestinian mob literally revel in Jewish blood on their hands, as happened in Ramallah. Palestinians have buried at least a score of their children, felled by Israeli bullets. Israeli Arabs fleeing Jewish attackers have been shot, rather than protected, by Israeli police. When this kind of darkness falls, even adroit, visionary leaders have trouble charting a course for their people to emerge from hatred’s shadows.
