A Blast from the Past

 It was nearly twenty-four years ago that I published this piece in the Boston Globe.  I think it has held up pretty well.

MIDEAST

Utterly at odds

As a new generation of leaders takes charge, the pragmatic lessons of the past are being lost, replaced by visions of a dogmatic future

By David Kaiser, 4/28/2002

From 1820 to 1860, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other children of the early American Republic kept the slavery controversy under control and preserved the Union. Why their offspring failed to do so is not easily answered.

At 140 years' distance, neither the Southern states' determination to secede in 1860-61 nor the Northerners' decision to bring them forcibly back into the Union seems entirely logical. Newly elected President Abraham Lincoln opposed any further extension of slavery but denied any intention to disturb it where it existed. Why, therefore, should the Southern leadership have abandoned the Union? Why, on the other hand, should the North, which included only a minority of real abolitionists, have tried to preserve it?

In the same way, outsiders today assume that both Israelis and Palestinians have nothing to gain and much to lose from prolonging and deepening their armed conflict. This supposedly logical view, however, misses the point. Like the Civil War in 1861, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle does not relate to the present. IT, too, is about two parties' utterly irreconcilable ideas of the future and reflects the rise of new generations of leaders who have no commitment to or faith in the arrangements under which they have grown up. They are willing to risk their future and their children's lives to try to turn their ideas into reality.

By 1860, the white Southern leadership - composed exclusively of men far too young to have any memories of the American Revolution or the adoption of the Constitution - believed in slavery as a positive good, one that needed not only to be maintained, but extended - first into the Southwest, and later into Mexico and around the Caribbean (where it had already been abolished). (The postwar myth that states' rights, rather than slavery, caused the war grew naturally from the bad conscience of a defeated elite, but the secessionists themselves made it very clear at the same time that they fought the war for the sake of slavery.) Lincoln and the Republicans, meanwhile, argued that slavery would die out if it could be kept roughly within its original limits, as some of the Founding Fathers had hoped, but they also decided that slavery threatened the expansion and survival of free labor and free institutions.

When the South seceded, Lincoln initially defined the unrest as a test of democratic institutions, of whether a freely elected government could defeat a rebellion. After 18 months of indecisive conflict he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and turned the war into an all-out moral crusade. No foreign intervention could have dissuaded either side from fighting the war to the finish.

The goals of the Israelis and Palestinians are equally irreconcilable. In 2000, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians now living in the West Bank and Gaza the right to manage their own affairs - hedged by a vastly restricted but continuing Israeli presence - but insisted that they accept this as the maximum that they would ever receive. Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister, who fought briefly in Israel's war of independence, might have offered them a smaller state under similar conditions.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who is old enough to remember the initial Palestinian expulsion from what is now Israel and who has spent his whole adult life dealing with its consequences, might have wanted to accept some such deal, but the increasingly influential generation of middle-aged Palestinians who have spent their whole lives under foreign rule and their adulthood under Israeli occupation will not. Whatever their ultimate goal - and for many it remains the destruction of Israel itself - they now insist upon a complete and irrevocable withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the territory occupied in 1967, and the right completely to control their own state. This includes the right to readmit millions of refugees, to build their own military power, and eventually perhaps to engage Israel in a new conflict.

Three generations of Palestinians have now been born in exile, and the third generation displays nearly every day its willingness to die for its parents' ideals. The Palestinian leadership will not stop terror until it is promised a full and irrevocable Israeli withdrawal from the territories. There is not the slightest indication that any successor to Arafat would be more moderate than he.

Israelis of all political persuasions now understand these goals and are revising their own views accordingly. This is why Sharon is going to insist - as he told New York Times columnist William Safire recently - not merely on keeping some of the territory occupied in 1967, but on controlling the border between Palestine and Jordan. Sharon's most likely successor is Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who was born after the war of independence and who has shown even less interest in the rights of the Palestinians. And a majority of Israelis now regard the creation of an armed Palestinian authority as a serious mistake.

Recently the Israeli historian Benny Morris - author of ''Righteous Victims,'' an extraordinarily evenhanded treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 20th century and previously a critic of the occupation of the West Bank - declared publicly that compromise has become impossible. Either Palestine will become an Arab state with a rapidly diminishing Jewish minority, he wrote, or Greater Israel will become a Jewish state with a very small Arab minority. A recent poll found 40 percent of Israelis surveyed favoring expulsion of the Palestinians.

Some historians are beginning to focus upon 80-year cycles in American and world history, and to understand how the outcome of one cycle - the crisis that creates a new political order - ultimately creates the basis for new conflicts that come to a head when a postwar generation has grown up. In the United States the founding of a Republic divided by the issue of slavery in 1788 eventually made the Civil War inevitable. The outcome of that war, in which the North reestablished the Union but eventually allowed the ex-Confederates to maintain white supremacy, laid the foundation for the civil rights struggles that began in the 1950s.

On another front, for the last 20 years a new generation of Republicans and corporations has been waging an increasingly strident and effective campaign against most of the achievements of Roosevelt's New Deal, including labor unions, limits on economic inequality, and even Social Security. In the same way, the struggle in the 1930s and '40s to create Israel - which succeeded partly because of the Holocaust in World War II - has created the conflict with the Palestinians.

In the last 10 years, we witnessed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union - all creations of the First World War that had lasted 75-80 years. The next 20 years will see the disintegration - or at least the transformation - of many of the national and international beliefs and institutions that the Depression and the Second World War created in the United States, Western Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.

The prestige the United States secured as the victor in the Second World War and the founder of the post-1945 world order will mean very little in a world in which no one any longer remembers those events. The baby boom generation - which in the late 1960s first mounted an intellectual challenge to their parents' world - will have to build a new one to put in its place, and history does not guarantee that it will be a better one.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, alas, the last one of the post-1945 era to be resolved. Instead, it is the first great conflict of a new era that will discard many of the beliefs of the second half of the 20th century and leave behind the stable, comfortable, and equitable world that our grandparents and parents created in which middle-aged Americans have spent their entire lives.