September 14, 2006
Oslo Anniversary Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST The “Today in History” section of this website noted yesterday that it was the anniversary of the Oslo Accords, when Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat seemed to agree on the first steps toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a wonderful moment, of course, and it capped a period in which almost everyone who took an interest in the matter “knew” what had to be done: There would be a two-state solution. Most people also “knew” what that solution would look like: The states’ borders would look more or less like the 1967 borders, Jerusalem would be finessed, possibly by some sort of shared sovereignty, the Palestinians would renounce the right of return, and there would probably be limitations on the armaments of a Palestinian defense force. Only the Palestinians and the Israelis refused to see what was so obvious. At Oslo, what everyone “knew” seemed to come true. The inevitable compromise had come.
One nasty shock in the year 2000 was the discovery that Yasir Arafat, anyway, did not think that compromise was inevitable, or did not think he could survive the admission that compromise was inevitable. Which meant that peace was not, for now, possible, and that what everyone “knew” simply wasn’t true. This was so unpleasant a discovery that a very large number of observers denied it, and continue to deny it. The situation may change—the compromise may come, on the lines so long predicted—but for now, at least one of the actors is simply unwilling. The current Palestinian government is unwilling to make a peace. The most it will concede is a truce. It will not concede that the other state, the one that now exists, has any right to exist.
No one knows what to do about this. Some people, though, are willing to acknowledge the problem, others deny its existence, and the first group of people tend to be Americans, the other foreigners. Over the long run, the issue that may most sharply divide Americans and European elites is the fact that the bulk of American elites, and the majority of non-elite Americans, seem to be willing to face the fact that one of the two parties to the dispute is not presently willing to make that compromise. This difference between American and foreign opinion is not easy to explain, although many have tried, most recently by attributing American eccentricity to the malign power of the pro-Israel lobby.
Another explanation seems possible. A couple of days ago I had reason to look up a quotation. I wondered who had said, “Facts are stubborn things,” a line I had used all my life, ignorant of its origin. It turns out to be John Adams, in December 1770, in his Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trial: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
American political culture, often ridiculed for an inability to understand the limits of the possible, an alleged trait in turn blamed for sundry foreign policy disasters, turns out to be, at least on some occasions, a little less naive than that ridicule suggests. And other political cultures seem a bit more naive than we sometimes take them to be.
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