Here are ten themes distilled down from 50 years of reading bad news from the Middle East.
1. The Power of the Negative--In the Middle East, it takes only one act of terrorism (one of countless examples here) to undo extraordinary efforts made to forge peace. This is the power of the negative that sustains conflict around the world, whether between nations or between people. The power of the negative can be seen in many aspects of life. One bad act can undermine someone's legacy, no matter how much good that person has done in the world. In fact, the more good done, the more power one bad deed acquires, in much the same way that a small stain renders a white shirt useless. One assassin's bullet can fell a leader genuinely committed to peace. It takes so little to undo so much good. Trust is a fragile thing, slowly built and quickly erased.
2. When Good and Bad Become Intermixed--The crisis in Gaza has been so deeply depressing in part because it exemplifies entrenched problems that burden humanity far beyond the Middle East. One of those problems is the increasing difficulty we have in separating out good from bad in the world, victim from victimizer. In World War II, opposing armies wore uniforms that distinguished friend from foe. And it was easy to see Jews as the victims of unspeakable persecution by the Nazis. In Israel and Gaza, Israel has been both victim and victimizer, while Hamas has embedded itself among civilians, in tunnels under hospitals and schools, using innocence as a shield.
The inability to extricate good from bad in the Middle East is all the more painful because of what we might acknowledge about our own reality, if we dared. Far removed from the long-running animosities of the Middle East, good and bad are deeply intertwined in our own lives. Fossil fuels and the machines they power are the epitome of good and bad's tight embrace. Machines make our present possible, make many of our joys possible, but by steadily altering the climate, they sabotage our future.
3. Collateral Damage Takes Center Stage--The situation in Gaza demonstrates another theme found both in the Middle East and in our own lives. Unintentional destruction, known as collateral damage--is a part of all war, and yet the Israeli bombing of Gaza takes collateral damage to the extreme, as attacks supposedly aimed at a small subset of Palestinians leave tens of thousands dead in their wake. Meanwhile, as the threat of climate change becomes ever more apparent, we become more and more aware of the collateral damage embedded in our lifestyles. In the present, we are good people rightly seeking comfort and mobility, and yet the collateral damage, in the form of an overdose of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, continues to accumulate. Collateral damage has long been considered an afterthought, an unfortunate but acceptable byproduct, but in the bombings of Gaza, and in the increasing destruction wrought by collectively generated climate change, we see how unintentional collateral damage can ultimately move from the peripheral to center stage.
4. How Leaders are Sustained by Their Enemies--Each attack by hardliners on an enemy deepens the enemy's resentments and feelings of insecurity, which in turn feeds support for the enemy's hardliners. For leaders whose support is sustained by the presence of enemies, peace and coexistence become a threat to their hold on power. A Thomas Friedman column gets to this point, describing Hamas and Netanyahu factions as codependent, and giving examples of how each in turn has worked to sabotage peace initiatives.
5. How Terrorists Diminish Their Enemies Through Provocation--The al Qaeda attack in 2001 on the United States, and the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, can both be seen as primarily a tool for provocation. They were a means of provoking the U.S. after 9/11, and Israel after 10/7, to use their far superior strength to ultimately diminish themselves. In the case of the U.S., the 9/11 attacks provoked vast military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan that, combined with tax cuts, launched the nation on a trajectory of exploding government debt, increased polarization, and lasting trauma among veterans. In response to the Hamas attack, Israel in turn has launched a hugely destructive military attack whose vast collateral damage to civilians and property has eroded support for Israel around the world.
6. When the Middle East's Bad News Becomes Our Bad News--In the 1990s, the Middle East seemed a producer of bad news, as if bad news were a commodity to export for consumption in other less fractious regions of the world that were not producing sufficient bad news to fill their newspapers. The Middle East had all the right conditions for bad news production: take deep-seated, age old resentments, add religious fervor and oil revenue to amplify difference, import lots of weaponry, assassinate potential peace-makers. Viewed from afar, it was depressing to think that in one of the birthplaces of civilization, the trajectory has been towards conflict rather than peace. What does that say for a younger nation like ours? But in the 1990s it seemed relatively distant. Contrast that with the way Middle Eastern conflict has now seeped into the fabric of American political drama, from protests on campuses and elsewhere, to influencing the outcome of elections, and to punishments meted out by the Trump administration.
7. Reports on Conflicts Teach Us Little--News about conflicts doesn't help us to get to know Palestinians and Israelis as people and cultures. What is their relationship to the land that presumably somehow sustains them? Where do they get their food, their water? War reporting gives us only pictures of rubble, tallies of death and destruction, victims and victimizers.
8. Population's Role in Feeding Conflict -- Most opinion pieces about population sing the praises of more people in the world, the better to feed an economy. But population growth can also be a destabilizing force, leading to immigration pressures and housing shortages. Younger populations are associated with increased crime and war.
9. An unequal loss of life -- During the Vietnam War, there were weekly tallies of American dead and Vietcong dead. The numbers for American soldiers were in the hundreds, while Vietcong casualties numbered in the thousands. Thus far in the war between Israel and Hamas, there's a similar dichotomy.
10. Which to Feel: Grief or Anger?
The more the years pass by, the longer the trail of news I've trod, the longer problems have gone unsolved, the more my anger turns to grief. For each person I'm sure it's different, but for me when thinking about the Middle East, my deepest grief extends back to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, seemingly the only Israeli leader who combined a record of protecting the Israeli people with a driving desire to forge a just peace with the Palestinians. This is but one turning point in the region's very long history, but it was a powerful one.
Anger is often reactive, often taking the form of a right-back-at-ya, a tit-for-tat. If anger is like a food fight, then grief is more like digestion--a taking in--as in absorbing the world's pain as we might absorb a friend's feelings through empathy. Retaliation sustains and expands conflict. At least in personal relationships, and aspirationally among nations, better oftentimes to feel grief, to absorb and digest rather than raise the shield and retaliate. Maybe, if more people learned to process experience with grief rather than anger, we'd have a world where people seek solutions rather than revenge.
Afterthought: Peace Through Putting Climate Action Center Stage
Though even less likely than people learning to digest grief rather than seek revenge, a shared imperative to stop destabilizing the climate would serve as a deterrent to warfare. Nations would just say no to all of that gratuitous burning of fossil fuels to manufacture, transport and explode bombs. The need for enemies (see above) is one of the drivers of climate change. Collective action to slow climate change could be a tremendous unifying force in the world, which is why the risks of a destabilized climate are denied by those who need to maintain polarization.
