James P. Pinkerton
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IS there any hope for peace in the Middle East? Maybe not, if the
political and cultural equation stays the same. Maybe yes, if
technology can change the facts on that bloody ground. Just as the
telegraph, radio, television and, now, the Internet have brought
profound change to the West, so the same changes will come, eventually,
to the Arab Middle East. History suggests that telecommunications will
push the Arabs, too, in a more prosperous and peaceable direction.
To be sure, not all the changes associated with the Information Age are positive, but from Israel's point of view, even the negative cultural impact of the Net - - for instance, a narrow and inward preoccupation with the private consumption of everything from pornography to irresponsible journalism - - would be a plus, as it would lessen Arab political zeal. So the question for Israel is whether such Net-driven shifts will come fast enough to save the Jewish state from decades of chronic violence. And the challenge to friends of Israel in the West is whether far-sighted philanthropy can accelerate that shift. That's where a "Rosetta University" comes in.
The disastrous events of the last few months indicate that neither prime minister Ehud Barak's diplomacy nor prime minister-elect Ariel Sharon's deterrence will bring an end to violence. Put simply, the issue in the Middle East isn't the behavior of the Jews, it's the behavior of the Arabs. Meanwhile, another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was in Washington two weeks ago, predicting that Iran and Iraq will soon have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which will make "what we've experienced for the last few decades child's play."
In November, Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in The Washington Post, "Many Israelis even wonder whether it was mad to try to normalize Jewish existence...in a region that despises democracy and diversity." Halevi quoted a friend saying, "Maybe the Arabs are right and we'll turn out to be like the Crusader kingdom, a passing phase in the Middle East."
Of course, in the age of weapons of mass destruction, Israel may be hard-pressed to remain intact for even as long as the Crusaders held the Holy Land. Armies dispatched by Pope Urban II captured Jerusalem in 1099; Christians occupied the sacred city until 1187 and held on to Acre, their last coastal fortress, until 1291. Today, the state of Israel is in its 53rd year; if present trends continue, how can anyone be confident about a flourishing Israel in the 22nd century?
In the meantime, some Israelis maintain that the greatest danger to Israel is internal, not external. Yoram Hazony, author of The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul, published last year, argues that his country is rotting from within. "Israeli culture has become a carnival of self-loathing," he writes, tracing the influence of Israeli scholars who have rewritten their country's history, converting a "Zionist narrative" into a "universal narrative" and turning Jews into aggressors and Palestinians into victims. If this revisionism continues, Hazony fears, the self-confidence that made Israel victorious in the battlefield will leave it defeated on its own homefront. Hazony's book is no right-wing screed; it was blurbed by everyone from Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel to Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky to New Republic publisher Martin Peretz; Charles Krauthammer, writing in The Weekly Standard, wondered if the demoralization Hazony described could result in "a world without Israel."
To be sure, Hazony's thesis has not gone unchallenged by critics. But if the tectonics among Western opinion-leaders and taste-makers in recent decades offer any sort of leading indicator, then Hazony is on to something. One needn't be Bill Bennett to notice that traditional nationalistic, even militaristic, patriotic devotion - - parades, flag display, grave-decorating - - is on the decline in the US. And while many would see this as a constructive development, bespeaking as it does a new commitment to internationalism and multilateralism, others would note that it's easy for an American to say.
Israel, by contrast, has no geographic remove and no territorial margin of safety; if its 5 million Jews lose their collective nerve, they will be no match for 150 million Arabs, plus the larger Islamic world. Indeed, anti-Israel feeling is spreading beyond the Middle East region to the entire Dar El Islam; at the recent Cairo meeting of the Arab League, Somali president Abdiqasim Salad Hassan announced, "Liberating the Palestinian lands...is a national, Arab, and Islamic duty." As far away as Indonesia, a spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front declared to The New York Times, "If we find any Israelis, we will first try to persuade them to leave, but if they refuse, we will slaughter them."
Israel faces a dilemma. On the one hand, market-driven economic growth is needed to provide a rising standard of living, even though it erodes the spartan sense of social solidarity that makes for combat courage; on the other hand, capitalistic surplus produces, just as Joseph Schumpeter predicted 60 years ago, a "new class," alienated from the cultural as well as economic means of production. This is trouble: Israel becomes more cosmopolitan, even as some of its neighbors grow stronger and more threatening.
So what's the answer? If the Jews are irreversibly sliding from confident modernity to doubtful post-modernism, is there any hope? Sure there is. But only if the Arabs begin the same slide. That is, if Hazony is right, and Israel's moral core of confidence is decaying, then two solutions present themselves. First, try to rebuild Israeli morale. But even Hazony offers few solutions for his country, and if the West is any guide, it might not be possible at all.
The second approach is based on a different idea: if you're getting weaker, you don't have to worry about it, provided that your enemies get weaker, too. That is, if the Arabs start slip-sliding toward economic selfishness and political revisionism, then their martial and martyr- fervor will fade, too.
And so the trick is getting the Arabs moving down that slippery slope. How? Start with education. Modern universities are superb at two tasks; they train students to get rich, and they teach them to mock, or at least question, traditional verities. If young Arab men and women received a Western-style education, it's more likely they would become either yuppie materialists who didn't want to join the military and take time away from their careers, or they become eco-feminists who didn't want war on behalf of earth-plundering patriarchy.
To get this avalanche started, imagine if some rich American visionary announced a plan to create a free Internet university for the Middle East. Its educational curriculum, created by a politically balanced academic committee and translated into Hebrew, Arabic - - and, for good measure, English - - would be instantly available online to anyone with access to a computer. The instruction and the degrees would be real, as legitimate as the amount of money put into the institution. Repressive governments could try and block it, of course, but information always wiggles loose.
But aren't there plenty of universities in the Arab world? And aren't they mostly anti-Israeli propaganda mills? Sure, but that's because they're all controlled by their own governments. The answer is to establish an online campus that's free-floatingly independent of state power, so that the Arabs, too, can have their own countercultural Harvard or Berkeley.
But are Arabs online? A study last year by Internet Arab World magazine estimated that there were just 1.9 million online users last year, although the number is expected to increase to 12 million in 2002 and continue to grow rapidly thereafter. And of course, Israel is one of the most wired nations on earth.
But isn't the Internet already being used for bridge-building? Yes, sites such as The Jewish Palestinian Encounter (www.salam-shalom.net) attempt to connect in cyberspace, and yet they have negligible impact. Still, a prestigiously big-budgeted effort, conferring real academic honors, would attract more than just a few stray peace-geeks.
But are the Arabs seduceable? One indicator that telecommunications is slowly making a dent in Arab anti-modernity is Al-Jazeera, a 24-hour TV news station run out of Qatar; the station is not popular with Arab governments, but that’s not to say that Al-Jazeera, which has put enormous resources into covering the recent violence in the West Bank and Gaza, is necessarily a force for moderation and conciliation toward Israel.
Indeed, as with universities, any institution controlled from within the Arab world is subject to being shaped by Arab governments. Which is why more subtle forces of Westernization - - some might call it "decadence" could prove more effective; to wit, a recent Washington Post headline which reads, "Bahrain Bridge Links Saudis to Banned Pleasures." Reporter Howard Schneider notes that every year, 2.5 million Saudis drive the 15-mile King Fahd Causeway that connects puritanical Saudi Arabia to the fleshier, alkier pleasures of the island nation of Bahrain. In other words, if portals to a different, softer life exist, Arabs will seek to pass through them. The challenge, therefore, is to make as many portals available. And the hope would be that what’s true in terms of access to the simplest of physical pleasure can be extended up the technological "food chain," all the way to cutting-edgiest online education.
How much would such a Virtual U cost? One good estimate is $100 million. That was the dollar total put forth last March by dotcom mogul Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy of Vienna, Va., when he announced plans to give away "Ivy League-quality" education on the Net. Saylor's big idea has been undercut by a subsequent 90 percent drop in his net worth, but there's still plenty of philanthropic money; charitable giving in US totaled $190 billion in 1999.
Maybe some magnate, mindful of the limitations of armed force, frustrated by the failure of traditional diplomacy, excited by the transformational power of new technology - - and slyly aware that even if common education doesn't make Jews and Arabs into brothers and sisters, it could still make Arabs less interested in Jihad - - will endow such an online institution for the Middle East. And why not? Even if this exercise in "soft power" is a long shot, it's readily apparent that more traditional approaches to peace-making and war-deterring aren't working very well. He or she could name this university after the Rosetta Stone, the ancient dictionary that helped scholars read Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time.
And while results would not be visible overnight, if, in the course of many years, it worked to precipitate the angst-y Woody Allen-ification of the Arab world, that would do more to guarantee Israeli security than another wing of fighter-bombers. Whether or not there's a Nobel Prize to be won for such ironic and counter-intuitive peacemaking would remain to be seen, but for ironic peace-making vision, a Rosetta benefactor would rank with Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who wanted an end to destruction.
Israel is going to require more help to get through the next few
decades. Israel will always need warriors and war machines, but as Sun
Tzu said, the greatest victories occur when the battle is never fought.
Diplomacy averts some conflicts, but not all. But if Yoram Hazony's
diagnosis of Israel's patriotic malaise is at all correct, then another
way to help the Jewish state is to infect - - er, educate - - the Arabs
with the same post-patriotic
JewishWorldReview.com's James P. Pinkerton, a former White House aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is a columnist for Newsday, a contributor to the Fox News Channel, and an Adjunct Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
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