Reference no: EM13244194

What do you think regarding the critiques made by Carlo Strenger? Would the peace process be better served by a decisive settlement rather than by prolonged negotiations? February 26, 2010 Op-Ed Contributor Talking-Cure Diplomacy By CARLO STRENGER (Tel Aviv) LAST month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton caused a stir with remarks that at first glance seemed a restatement of the obvious - namely, that the 1967 borders between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, along with some land swaps, should be the focus of peace negotiations. In fact, since 1993, when the Oslo agreements were signed, the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been clear: a return to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and, most likely, some form of international involvement in Jerusalem's Old City. Why the stir? Because to Mrs. Clinton and the Obama administration, this all seems like a matter of a few simple steps. The American envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has said as much, asserting that a final agreement must - and can - be reached within two years. Bill Clinton made the same assumption with the Camp David and Taba summit meetings of 2000 and 2001, which he seemed to think could end the conflict quickly. Needless to say, he failed. The basic problem is that, like Bill Clinton, the Obama administration believes that the two sides are essentially rational, acting in their own best interests, and that to get the process unstuck the mediator must simply bridge their differences. Rather, it is clear to me as a psychologist that the two sides are steeped in collective trauma, for which the only prescription is diplomatic therapy. The trauma is mutual and multilayered. The Palestinians have never been able to mourn what they call the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Their ethos of national liberation was based on the idea that all refugees would be able to return to their homes in Jaffa, Ramle and Lod. Letting go of this dream, a condition for the two-state solution, requires a process of mourning that has been made almost impossible by the humiliation of the occupation and the force of Israeli retaliation, culminating in the Gaza war last year. Trauma is not the Palestinians' alone: Israeli Jews live under a fear of annihilation that overshadows any consideration of compromise. Many critics of Israel believe that such a statement is a cheap ploy to justify colonial ambitions, but right or wrong this is the reality of the country's collective psyche. Israelis still look back at the attacks by Arab armies in 1948, 1967 and 1973 as moments when they could have been wiped out, and this fear is revived today by the possibility of Iran's acquiring nuclear weapons. Hope for peace was dealt further blows by the suicide bombings of the 1990s, during the heyday of the Oslo process; the second intifada; and the rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel's withdrawal from the territory in 2005. Behind all this lies the memory of the Holocaust. Worse, the Middle East's cultural unconscious is structured by the history of monotheistic religions, with Jerusalem at the center. The city has been conquered countless times, always in the name of the eternal rightness of one religion or another. These same forces are present today in Israel's ideological right and in Islamic extremist groups like Hamas. The region's collective traumas may easily lead one to conclude that the situation is hopeless. But the peace process stands a chance if it is seen not as a rational intervention but as a course of therapy that will allow both sides to work through emotional aspects of their traumas, dreams and shattered hopes. First, instead of a timetable, negotiators need to leave the process open-ended. As in Northern Ireland, the sponsoring parties, presumably the members of the so-called quartet - the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States - should maintain a permanent peace conference that will convene until an agreement is reached. And the quartet needs to find ways to engage all parties in the region, most of all the Arab League, but also Hamas and possibly, at some point, Iran. Second, the process must give room to emotions, which are likely to run high. Too often these are repressed by diplomatic protocol, assumed to be irrelevant or even counterproductive. On the contrary, such repression undercuts the possibility of forward movement. It won't be easy. Accusations will run from the latest cease-fire breach to the massacres of Palestinians in Deir Yassin in 1948 and the Coastal Road Massacre of Israelis in 1978. At times, theological claims over Jerusalem's Old City will return on both sides. Still, it is essential that emotions finally be given vent. An open-ended process would allow Palestinians to voice their rage and pain about what they have gone through and to express their need for Israel to recognize its part in the Nakba. In the same way patients progress by talking about their traumas, a therapeutic process may lead the Palestinians to realize that they have not just been passive victims, that they have made decisions, ranging from rejection of the American partition plan in 1947 to the use of suicide bombers since the 1990s, that have driven back the possibility of peace. Likewise, Israel's Jews need to be able to voice their fear that Arabs will never accept the existence of Israel, and that the two-state solution is just a step toward its destruction. Therapeutic diplomacy will help them gradually accept their share of the responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. In this way both parties can come to realize that accepting the other's narrative and point of view does not mean annihilation. Mr. Mitchell knows this type of process well from his time in Northern Ireland. The question is whether the administration is willing to take on this challenge for the long haul. If it isn't, we are in for another series of failed negotiations and the inevitable bloodshed that follows.