The National Interest
Fall 2001

The Asymmetry of Pity

by Yossi Klein Halevi

 

My most instructive conversation on the Middle East conflict was not with a politician or a journalist but with a soft-spoken Palestinian Anglican minister named Naim Ateek, whose group, Sabeel, promotes a Palestinian version of liberation theology. During a long and friendly talk about two years ago, we agreed on the need for a "dialogue of the heart" as opposed to a strictly functional approach to peace between our peoples. In that spirit, I acknowledged that we Israelis should formally concede the wrongs we had committed against the Palestinians. Then I asked him whether he was prepared to offer a reciprocal gesture, a confession of Palestinian moral flaws. Both sides, after all, had amply wronged each other during our hundred-year war. The Palestinian leadership had collaborated with the Nazis and rejected the 1947 UN partition plan, and then led the international campaign to delegitimize Israel that threatened our post-Holocaust reconstruction. What was Rev. Ateek prepared to do to reassure my people that it was safe to withdraw back to the narrow borders of pre-1967 Israel and voluntarily make ourselves vulnerable in one of the least stable and tolerant regions of the world?

"We don’t have to do anything at all to reassure you", he said. He offered this historical analogy: When David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer negotiated the German-Israeli reparations agreement in the early 1950s, the Israeli prime minister was hardly expected to offer the German chancellor concessions or psychological reassurances. The Germans had been the murderers, the Jews the victims, and all that remained to be negotiated was the extent of indemnity.

"So we are your Nazis?", I asked.

"Now you’ve understood", he replied, and smiled.

I have thought often of that conversation since the collapse last fall of any pretense of a mutual process of reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. With disarming sincerity, Rev. Ateek offered the most cogent explanation I had encountered for why the Oslo peace process never had a chance to succeed.

From the start, Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking was burdened by asymmetry. The gap between Israeli power and Palestinian powerlessness was translated into a political process that required tangible Israeli concessions—reversible only through war—in exchange for Palestinian promises of peace: In essence, land for words. But the deepest and most intractable asymmetry has been psychological: it has been an asymmetry of pity, or, more precisely, of self-pity. The Palestinians, as losers of the conflict, continue to see themselves solely as victims, without guilt for helping maintain the conflict or responsibility for helping to end it; indeed, for many Palestinians, the war is not over borders but absolute justice, a battle between good and evil. . .