Rebuilding bridges

.: May 8, 2008

Petra Marquardt-Bigman on the Guardian website says Israel has much to offer the Arab countries.

Israel is often portrayed as the dagger in the heart of the Arab world. But some Palestinians see its potential as a link to the rest of the world.

When Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni attended an international conference in Qatar last month, Simon Tisdall commented on Livni’s visit in an article that was published on Cif under the title "Two worlds collide", and the same piece appeared in the print edition under the title "Making contact with Middle East reality".

Tisdall noted that "Israel’s leaders rarely venture so far into the ’enemy camp’", and, given the reception of Livni’s speech in Doha as described by Tisdall, the term "enemy camp" might well be considered appropriate.

Both titles for Tisdall’s piece as well as his take on Livni’s visit in Qatar ultimately seemed to reflect the prevalent notion that Israel is somehow a foreign entity in the Middle East, that it doesn’t quite understand the region and still has to earn its rightful place there by placating Arab hostility to the Jewish state.

Arab hostility towards Israel is of course not only very real, but also widely regarded as entirely justified, as Palestinian writer and activist Ghada Karmi writes. However, it is revealing that in Karmi’s view, Israel deserves to be accused not only because it "dragged" its neighbours into wars, but also because it tried to make peace - for her, Israeli efforts to conclude peace agreements merely reflect the Jewish state’s "drive to disrupt the Arab front". Against this backdrop, Karmi described the Saudi peace initiative as "a giant step for the Arabs, reversing decades of hostility."

But while Arab hostility to Israel is often regarded as a quasi-natural reaction to the establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East, there are also voices that insist that the Arabs always had a choice and could have responded differently. The historical record indeed confirms that peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine seemed not always out of reach, and it is often overlooked that the uncompromising opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine that was advocated by Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem, was by no means a stance that was eagerly embraced by a majority of Palestinian Arabs.

After decades of hostility, there are few who have preserved the memory of the path not taken, and it is therefore hardly popular for a Palestinian to argue that "seeing Israel not in the sense that is normally depicted - namely, as a dagger in the heart of the Arab world - but as a bridge to the rest of the world is something the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab peoples are in need of. We need this bridge between ourselves and the rest of the world. This is something one should be aware of as one looks to the future." With such views, the philosophy professor, writer and university president Sari Nusseibeh enjoys celebrity status among Israeli doves, but has attracted much criticism and opposition among Palestinians.

While Nusseibeh’s vision of peaceful coexistence may be anything but mainstream, there are other Arab voices that echo his call for Israel’s acceptance as a legitimate part of the Middle East. The Egyptian-born writer Masri Feki has recently argued that "lasting peace will come the day Israel’s neighbours recognise that the Jewish people are on this land de jure, they are not just there de facto."

In Feki’s view, the two Middle Eastern ideologies that oppose such an unqualified acceptance of Israel, pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism, can not offer constructive solutions for the Middle East because they tend to suppress the region’s historic diversity. Feki advocates instead "Middle Easternism", and, similarly to Nusseibeh, he believes that Israel could serve as a bridge to a future that would respect and indeed revive the diversity that could make the Middle East once again a vibrant centre of culture, science and progress.

The idea that inspiration for the region’s revival could come from some of its ignored legacy was also the central theme of a piece written by Rami Khouri when the ancient Nabataean town of Petra in Jordan was listed among the seven wonders of the world in a global poll of 100 million people last year. Khouri, who knows the site intimately because he once spent months there to conduct research for a book, provocatively claimed that "there is nothing in the contemporary Arab world that would cause hundreds of millions of voters to acknowledge its achievements many centuries from now." In Khouri’s view, the ancient Nabataean site should therefore serve as a timely reminder "that values of cosmopolitanism, secular-sacred balance, peacemaking, good governance and environmental protection spectacularly generated wealth, respect and stability centuries ago, and there should be no reason why they could not do so again today."

As Robin Wright has documented in her recent book on the future of the Middle East, there are hopeful signs that the region is ready for a "nahda", which she translates as "awakening" or "renaissance". Obviously, such a process would not be easy or painless, and if it really got under way, it would likely take a long time before the values Rami Khouri ascribed to the ancient Nabataeans could once again prevail to change the lives of people in the Middle East for the better.

The aspiration to contribute to a Middle East in which equitable development would benefit a just society was originally an integral part of the Zionist vision, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the hope to be accepted as a "bridge" would have to give way to the realisation that Israel was instead regarded "as a dagger in the heart of the Arab world". But as much as hearts may have hardened in decades of conflict, it is all the more important to appreciate that there are still people like Sari Nusseibeh who are keeping alive an alternative vision. The challenge to hold on to this vision and to make every effort to allow it to come true is formidable, not least because it may indeed require a Middle Eastern renaissance before views like Nusseibeh’s gain broader acceptance in the region.

Petra MARQUARDT-BIGMAN © The Guardian