When governments make promises they can't keep . . .
individual people suffer.
It has always difficult to watch the situation in the Middle East detachedly; the suffering of the people is universal and apolitical. And it is difficult to write or speak about the situation without stepping on the deeply-held beliefs of sincere people. But as I watch the forced evacuations of Israeli Jews from the Gaza Strip, and trying to consider it in an historic context, I am struck by how short-sighted nationalist leaders can be, and how long the mistakes of government rulers outlive them, and cause suffering well into the second and third and fourth generations (and beyond)
I used to think about this a lot when I was much younger, when the Arab states still believed they could "push Israel into the Sea." It always seemed to me that, just as the roots of WWII can be found in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI, the last 60 years of pain and death in the Middle East flow directly from decisions made by those in power at the end of the 1948. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, between 520,000 and 900,000 Palestinians became refugees, some expelled, some leaving the newly created State of Israel voluntarily, expecting that, in short order, the combined Arab nations would overcome the fledgling Israel Defenses Forces, and they could return home. (In fact, Field Marshall Montgomery, the British hero of El Alamein) predicted that Israel would be defeated within two weeks.) They were wrong. The War dragged on and ultimately, the Arab States had to accept that they had failed to destroy Israel. Ralph Bunche negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements, officially ending a War that actually continues to this day.
During the Lausanne Conferences which led to that Armistice:
Israel proposed to allow 100,000 refugees to return, this number including an alleged 25,000 who had returned already surreptitiously and 10,000 projected family-reunion cases. The offer was conditional on a full peace treaty that allowed Israel to keep all the territory it had captured and on the Arab states agreeing to absorb the remaining refugees. The offer was rejected by the Arab states. Wikipedia, "The Palestinian Exodus"
These people -- and their decendants -- have remained refugees for more than 50 years, because, with the exception of Jordan, the Arab states refused to absorbed them, convinced that Israel could be forced to accept them, even after the Six Day War which was really the last time it was viable for an Arab leader to pretend that Israel could be destroyed.
That's half the equation. The other half is the belief of Israeli leaders that Israel could truly become the home for all the world's Jews, and once more occupy and control "Eretz Israel" -- the geographic biblical homeland of the Jews. As pointed out in this article in last week's New York Times Week in Review, Why 'Greater Israel' Never Came to Be, (free registration required) similar unfulfilled assumptions about the likelihood that Israel would become the center of the world's Jewish population have led to the suffering we see on the news today.
David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted: "The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on 'the two banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about 'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve."
The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of the early Zionists, . . . most of the world's Jews have not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world's 13 million to 14 million Jews, a minority - 5.26 million - make their home in Israel, and immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.
Old dreams die hard, and the cost is paid in the misery and pain of individual people's lies. For more than 50 years, Palestinians have lived in camps, because the Arab leaders led them to believe that Israel would vanish and they could go home in triumph. Today, Israel settlers are losing their homes, being carried onto buses by Israel settlers, because Israeli leaders encouraged them to settle in occupied areas.
And (with due respect to Spider Robinson) "God is an iron, which is why irony is the ruling principle of the Universe": It is not Shimon Peres, or some other Labour Party liberal who orders the evacuations. It is unwavering hawk Ariel Sharon. It may be that this is part of a bid to keep more of the West Bank (part of Eretz Israel) by giving up Gaza (which is not). BeliefNet presents an interesting discussion of this perspective by "an Orthodox Jew, [who believes] God gave [the Jews] the land of Israel" and says, "That's why I know we must pull out of the occupied territories."
Still, it was sobering to hear an Israeli woman saying that Sharon's actions will be written into the lamentations of Tisha Bav, the three weeks during which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the "resultant physical and spiritual displacement" of the Jewish people.
[Wikipedia is a good starting point for reading more on the history of the conflict in the Middle East, with references to external sources reflecting varying views.]