Egyptian playwright Ali Salem visited Israel in 1994 to "rid himself
of hatred," as he put it, and he wrote a slim volume about his
experience called A Drive to Israel
The Middle East Media Research Institute just translated an interview with him in Kuwait's daily An Nahar newspaper that makes for depressing reading. His interlocutor harangues him throughout and comes across only somewhat more reasonable than the intellectual colleagues who shunned him.
"My trip posed a serious challenge to the Egyptian intellectuals and the entire Egyptian society," Salem said. "How are we to treat this small society next to us [i.e., Israeli society]? Reality forced us to embark upon a peace campaign with the society that defeated us ruthlessly in 1967. My generation cannot overcome the hurt of 1967. All the attacks on me were because I forced them to face the truth."
It's difficult to even imagine a Western intellectual getting in this kind of trouble for writing a sympathetic portrait of former enemies decades after peace has been made. When our wars are over, they're over whether we win or lose.
No one in the United States wants to reignite conflicts with Germany, Japan, Vietnam, or any other country we're no longer at war with. While we argue among ourselves about whether it's a good idea to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, no one in the U.S. prefers war in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else if peace and normal relations are viable options.
Americans from one end of the political spectrum to the other would be thrilled to see Iraq and Afghanistan as stable, prosperous countries at peace with themselves, their neighbors, and us. We don't even have a marginalized fringe group unhappy with the fact that Germany and Japan emerged as they did from World War II. The U.S. lost the war in Vietnam in the 1970s, as Egypt lost its last war with Israel in the 1970s, but no one among us wants to fight it all over again or wishes that we were still slugging it out.
We Westerners aren't unique in our ability to forgive, forget, and move on. I have never visited Vietnam, but everyone I know who has says even Vietnamese who supported the Communist side seem to hold no grudges against Americans.
My grandfather fought in both Europe and the Pacific as a United States Army officer during World War II. He visited Tokyo many years later and purged some of his demons there just as Ali Salem did in Israel. My mother has a picture of him smiling with his arms around a former Kamikaze pilot. I don't know what these two former enemies said to each other, but my mother who traveled to Japan with him said it was a transformative experience for both of them.
Though my grandfather was not a public intellectual, if he had been, and if he had written about his own personal reconciliation, there is no chance his American colleagues would have shunned him or revoked his memberships from the institutions he worked with. Many Israeli writers, intellectuals, academics, and activists likewise have visited the Palestinian territories and other Arab countries with Ali Salem's spirit. None have been ostracized by their peers. On the contrary, they're usually lauded.
It's easy, for those so inclined, to prefer war to peace with Israel while living in places like Damascus and Cairo. Everyone killed recently in the Arab-Israeli conflict lived in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. No one is shooting at Cairenes or the residents of Damascus. Egyptians, Syrians, and most other Arabs can enjoy, if that is the word, the emotional satisfaction of hostility with the hated "Zionist Entity" without suffering any consequences.
"It is strange that some people [still] say, 'What good did the peace [agreement] do us?'" Ali Salem said. "My answer to them is this: 'You refuse to recognize [the value] of peace, [and] therefore you are unable to understand what peace has created. . . . The [mere] fact that you return to your home safely and are not hit by a sniper's bullet or by a missile falling from the sky, that you do not [have to] darken your windows and fortify your door with sandbags, or check the list of the fallen every morning -- all that, or [at least] some of it, is thanks to peace."
Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.
I know it's bad to reply to my own comment, but it's worth pointing out that the referenced quote is simply bogus chronologically. The draft ended in 1973. (The rest of it is bogus, too, but that's more of an opinion than a trivially-verified fact.)
Well, a piece criticizing Arabs that can't rouse AJL to his normal attacks on "Zionism". Impressive.
Andrew, that quote doesn't describe "wimpy liberal hippies", it's talking about stalwart warriors for Communism. Your intellectual comrades, who saved the day for North Vietnam. Good catch, though, on the mendacity of describing the end of the draft as happening contemporaneously with a process that lasted from 1972 to 1974, when any fool knows it really ended in 1973.
For the record there is a difference between those discussing how we might have won a previous war compared to advising reigniting it 40 years later.
Notice how nobody ever asks, "What good did Russian tanks ever do us?"
I don't have a lot of experience in the middle eastern world, (and I don't overtly disagree with you) but I think some of this can be explained away with more than just a Arab mindset.
If you look at cultures divides that result in violent histories, you tend to see that if one country feels there is a sense of loss or injustice that escalates into violence. More often than not, it's a dispute over who owns land.
If you look at Ireland/England, Chechnya/Russia, the Iraq/Iran war, Turkey/Kurdish rebellion you see a long term dislike of their opponents (and continual call to war) based on the viewed injustice of their opponents. Generally, these conflicts are over 'home'
If you look at American history, 'home' is rarely an issue. We had no interest in owning Japan, Germany or Vietnam, and at not time was America ever occupied. And at the end, we returned land to our enemies to set up a peaceful coexistence. Notice that this is fundamentally different from the end of WWI, where Europe punished Germany, set up that feeling of injustice and WWII became inevitable. Or look at the Civil war, in which different groups are still proud/angered by the confederate flag 150 years later.
Now, I'm not going to argue that the ME is right or wrong in being angry over the land lost to Israel. Nor am I saying Israel should conceded that land. Really, the sense of injustice is more important than whether or not an injustice actually exists. But the ME will continue to be a hotbed until that sense of injustice is lifted.
But it's also not surprising that Israel isn't an angry country... they got what they wanted. They own 'home'. However, if you go back before the Isreal state existed, you see terrorist groups using anger to gain what they owed (and those acts are still celebrated today). Also, if you look at the Israeli settlements trying to take land "owed to them by God", again you see similar levels of anger and violence.