New
Yorker Magazine Commentary:
COMMENT: TWO STATES by Nicholas Lemann
The New Yorker Magazine: Issue of 2002-04-22 and 2002-04-29
Posted
2002-04-15
Like any great tragedy, the conflict between the Israelis
and the Palestinians is full of smaller sadnesses. One of these is that, as the
Israeli tanks have rolled through the West Bank, discussion of the conflict has
begun to take the form of horror stories about whichever side is the enemy: the
orders placed for explosives, the crushed houses and cars, the baby stillborn
at a checkpoint, the bombers blown up on the way to kill more people. This is
not yet an all-out war—in all-out wars, we should remind ourselves before
completely giving in to despair, many more people die than have died in Israel
and Palestine since the second Intifada began—but it is close enough to
produce the pattern of thinking that leads to wars, the mutual conviction that
the other side has moved morally beyond the pale.
It is difficult for
Americans to imagine their way into the Middle East: it feels as if we were
being presented with two competing stories of a people's absolute righteousness
(in both the grand historical sense and the day-to-day atrocity sense) and
asked to choose which one to believe. Americans aren't used to making choices
like that. But it may be useful to contemplate some
similarities—historically inexact but emotionally resonant—with a
dismal period in our own history: post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South.
In 1865, the United States won a crushing victory over the Confederate States
of America, just as Israel won the Six-Day War, in 1967. Then the government
commenced a military occupation of the land it had conquered. Just as the Civil
War had two intertwined rationales, union and the abolition of slavery, the
occupation during Reconstruction had two rationales, national security and
guaranteeing the citizenship rights of the former slaves.
(One
upside-down aspect of the comparison is that, if the South was America's West
Bank, the conquering power's settler equivalents, the carpetbaggers,
represented the political left, not the right. Another is that the most
obviously oppressed people in the American story, the former slaves, were much
more concerned with establishing political and economic rights than with
claiming a homeland.) The former Confederates, having lost their recourse to
conventional military power as a result of having lost the war, turned to
terrorism as the means to their political ends. All through Reconstruction, and
particularly toward the end, the South went through cycles of terrorist
violence—by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the White League and similar
organizations, against the carpetbaggers and politically active
African-Americans—followed by military crackdowns.
For most of
this period, the United States was led by a politically unsophisticated career
military man who had personally conquered much of the occupied territory and
was sympathetic to the goals of the settlers, Ulysses S. Grant. The occupation
proceeded in a heartbreaking fashion: the longer it went on, the bolder the
terrorists became, and the less general support there was for it. In the fall
of 1875, Grant declined the entreaties of Adelbert Ames, Mississippi's
carpetbagger governor, to send troops to monitor an election campaign.
Less than two years later, as part of a deal struck to resolve the
disputed Presidential election of 1876, all federal troops were withdrawn from
the South, not to return (for civil-rights purposes) until the Little Rock
school crisis of 1957. The Jim Crow system was the inexorable outcome. The
United States decided, in effect, to let the South undo one result of the Civil
War, black citizenship, in exchange for keeping the other results, union and
abolition. The collapse of Reconstruction was clearly an example of the
terrorists winning.
Reinforcing this political victory was a narrative
victory, with the South's preferred version of the Reconstruction story
prevailing in American culture and intellectual life (political correctness in
those days ran in the opposite direction from now) well past the midpoint of
the twentieth century: white freedom fighters had overthrown an illegitimate
regime and reestablished the sacred principle of self-determination. As late as
1956—after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Montgomery bus boycott had
begun—John F. Kennedy, by way of making himself a national figure, devoted
a chapter in "Profiles in Courage" to the mastermind of Reconstruction's demise
in Mississippi, Senator Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar.
What the
story of our long-running version of the two-state solution demonstrates about
the United States is that our history has been consistently more difficult than
we like to remember. What it demonstrates about the wider world is that if
you've got what the white South had—a passionate ethno-nationalist claim
to a homeland, a willingness to resort to terrorist violence, and a story line
that the world finds persuasive, in part because it plays into existing ethnic
prejudices—then you've probably got a winning hand, whether or not the
interests you are seeking to advance are noble.
In the Middle East,
because we are already deep into the realm of having to contemplate imperfect
measures that might forestall disaster, rather than solutions that anybody
would find morally satisfying, the American example offers a hope, though a
distant one.
The occupation forces in the South withdrew because
remaining had become politically unsustainable. The result was that the South
became almost a separate country again, and then, slowly, its main project
changed, from promoting violence and revenge to rebuilding social and economic
structures. Over a very long haul, that made it possible, when the civil-rights
movement came along, for white Southerners to begin to acknowledge the humanity
of their enemies, as they would not during Reconstruction. Withdrawing Israeli
troops and settlers and recognizing Palestinian statehood may also seem a
reward for terrorism, but there aren't any clean choices right now. At least
then the Palestinian government would have a lot more to lose, and such a stake
has a salutary—if not, alas, swift—effect on behavior.
Copyright ©
2002 Temple B'nai Sholom.
All rights reserved.