Three scenarios for the Middle East

From the

2004 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon

American Council for the United Nations University, 2004, Washington D.C.

Scenario 2. The Open City

The white smoke signaled the election of a new pope. He assumed the office with humility and fervor. His priority, he announced, was facilitating peace around the world, particularly in the Middle East. He began his mission by addressing the Jerusalem question. Although his advisors cautioned you can only blunt your authority, its unsolvable, he maintained that God had given him this mission and as far as he and the church were concerned this took priority over politics. The fact that it is a difficult mission, he said, only raises the stakes of the test. Is it more difficult than the tests that God gave Jesus, Moses, or Abraham? The cardinals were mute but whispered among themselves, the church will be in chaos

He personally called the leaders of the Jewish orthodox and reformed sects in Israel and their counterparts in the Muslim world, as well as Buddhist and Hindu leaders. (The non-involved religious leaders were invited to provide added credibility to the proceedings.) The new US president and EU leaders gave secret and subtle signals that they endorsed such a meeting. Deft use of the mediaparticularly live interviews on CNN and 60 Minutesmade it hard for the religious leaders who were invited by the pope to refuse to meet and talk.

When the plans were made public, Muslim hardliners called this a new Christian crusade.Jewish right-wingers were also not very interested in the views of the Catholic Church, recalling the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem during the Crusades.

Yet the meeting plans continued and the religious leaders met on neutral ground, at an isolated ranch in New Zealand, and called their historic session Religious Leaders for Peace, or RLP. That the Chief Rabbi of Israel and the Grand Mufti met in the same room was viewed as a worthy accomplishment and a milestone in its own right on the way to peace, since attending the meeting carried the very real risk of being ostracized by conservatives in their own camps.

At the first meeting, the initial coolness worsened a bit after each member justified his or her position as God-given. Then the pope said, Yes. God has blessed each of you as you have said, and he has also given us brains with which to reason, and that is what I pray we can do. This issue of Jerusalem pertains to religious law and custom; it should be above secular self-interests and politics and we can at least begin to discuss how to resolve it. It is too simple to say that Jerusalem can be a city-state like the Vatican; there are three religions involved here. We must ask God for guidance.

Perhaps the meeting went ahead because Jews, Palestinians, and Arabs were war-weary; perhaps the governments realized that the possibility of progress without some help from outside was not good; perhaps it was the general belief that the issue had progressed to the point of being much too important to be left to governments; perhaps the rise of interest in religion around the world caused people to be open to considering a higher way.

The religious leaders began with points of agreement: free access to the holy sites should be guaranteed. How ludicrous it would be, they agreed, if one religion were to attempt to deny access to anyone of another religion who wanted to pay homage there. The plan must be beyond political, ideological, and economic interests. It grew from these seeds of agreement. Jerusalem should be an open city under no nations sole jurisdiction, but under religious protection and authority. They recognized that the problem of Jerusalem does not affect just Israel or a future state of Palestine but is of global concern.

Their proclamation recognized that Jews, Muslims, Christians, and other faiths have to work toward a sharing of Gods gifts.

But the question before the group was how to proceed.

• One participant pointed out the UN had already laid the foundation. In late 2003, a UNESCO conference had noted that two of its resolutions had strong support from both Israeli and Palestinian representatives.

• The UNESCO participants reiterated their support for the initiative taken by the director-general to prepare a comprehensive plan of action to safeguard the old city of Jerusalem (al-quds); and invite him to send as soon as possible, in cooperation with the concerned parties, a technical mission and to establish, within a year, a committee of experts entrusted with proposing, on an exclusively scientific and technical basis, guidelines for this plan of action.

• Several participants argued that each groupChristians, Jews, and Muslimsshould have definitive borders in the old citybased on their history and tradition.

• Other participants focused on governance issues: a subgroup suggested that the city have a constitution and a representative administration, involving the three religions but also including a UN representative with a double vote for five years or until normalization without the UN presence could be achieved.

• Another acrimonious issue: some of the delegates felt the Temple Mount should be an open areanot belonging to any jurisdiction; others said that the open city idea would not work because of problems of security, customs control, and so on. They argued that the UN failed in 1947 to enforce its plan for internationalization of Jerusalem, and it was not plausible that such a plan would succeed today. It was an idea whose time cameand went.

• Finally, some people said they wanted no part of the UN at all but suggested another international organization be created for these purposes to establish clear goals with respect from all the actors and with plain authority to carry out the results of the negotiations and make them permanent.

When the debate seemed endless and agreement elusive as ever, the pope moved the group for prayer at the holy sites, at the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and at the graves of Palestinians, and asked that the religious leaders pray for forgiveness of violence, for wisdom, for the spark of leadership, and for the insight needed to form a plan. It was a poignant and catalytic moment. A plan was drafted and the leaders pledged to maintain contact and work under their God for peace.

The Religious Leaders for Peace report that emerged from the meeting was directed to the Secretary-General and asked that the UN General Assembly enact a resolution to declare Jerusalem an open city of a new design and that the governments of affected nations support the plan with required legislation. The UNs role would be codified by the UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions. Under this plan, Jerusalems leader would be elected every six years by the General Assembly, with the rule that no sect would have control for more than one consecutive term. Terrorism in the area would be dealt with harshly.

Publication of the RLP conference recommendations evoked widespread public acclaim and a few pockets of dissent and grumbles of sell-outand worse, but it was clear that the weight of public sentiment had begun to build an unprecedented momentum for peace. Even the most extreme factions felt the ground shift under them; what God wanted was now redefined.

Religious leaders around the world discussed the potential consequences of RLP. Although they did not put it so directly, the mullahs, mashaikhs, and orthodox rabbis in the Middle East faced a central issue of preserving power and face.

For the mullahs, there were new arguments. Muslim believers had long said that all of Palestine was given by Allah to the Muslims. Yet a holy man said the Jews had a right to be in the Middle East as surely as we ourselves do. The holy Quran tells us of the Promised Land for Jews.

It says that God had promised the Holy Land to Moses and his followers on their way out of Egypt (the Quran 5:2021), so Muslims cannot casually dismiss the concept of the Promised Land. Muslims need to develop methods to attract Jews to come back in a way that is not threatening to Arabs and Muslims. Imagine if Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan could develop policies and provisions that say:

We would welcome any Jew who wants to come to this part of the world, being part of the promised land, to come and live, well give you citizenship; you want to buy a house, buy land, fine; you want to have your relatives come live or visit, fine; do your work, live with your community, build your synagogue, have your own laws to govern your family and community life. But do not threaten a national entity. And come to any part, come to Syria, come to Egypt, come to Iraq, and come to Jordan, whatever you believe the promised land to be.

Such a solution would be based on a religious understanding of Gods promises to Jews and Muslims alike. And he added: without intending to be cynical, we can expect in return from the Jews an equal admission of the right of our displaced people to return to their homes as well.

Turmoil. Chaos. Other Muslim clerics interpreted the holy word in their own ways but no matter what spin was put on the proposition, Quran 5:2021 was clear enough and could not be rationalized away. Terrorism needed to be declared a religious crime. The threat of a fatwa for those who disagreed helped end the suicide bombings. Some extremists said that they would continue, that violence worked, that the holy Quran could be read and interpreted in different ways, but the die was cast and the momentum for peace built.

In Israel, orthodox rabbis who steered the far right were at a loss. By providing a religious basis for the Jews to exist in the area, the Muslims had, in a single stoke, eroded the political power of the Israeli far right. Check, maybe checkmate. The rabbis issued this statement:

Jews accept that the way to fulfill the promise of God does not include depriving others of their homes; and if Muslims and Arabs recognize the sincere attachment of Jews to the promised land and make serious efforts to accommodate that promise & we are in for a deep peace ,not a superficial one that has been broken, stepped upon, and tarnished, for 55 years. We vow to extend the Jewish idea of the sanctity of the home to others and will help bring about a future that makes homes, all homes, holy and safe.

The idea that started in New Zealand among religious leaders took on political reality: the retaliatory bulldozing stopped. Religious leaders urged that seek-and-destroy missions be put on hold, and they were.

The fanatics did not yield immediately. From one side: We will bomb until Israel topples. And from the other: We will retaliate with all our strength; we were weak once and it cost 6 million lives. Yet slowly the power base of the extremists eroded as it became clear that support was disappearing, and they gradually became irrelevant. In Israel and the future state of Palestine, a movement toward secularism accelerated.

Against the background of improving conditions (removal of the Wall, a workable social net for Palestinians, ending of the killings), education of young Muslims changed. The schools that once taught hatred for the Jews moderated, turning to if not enthusiastic tolerance, then at least an acceptance of laissez fairea reasonable first step for moderates on both sides. The schoolbook texts damning Israel were withdrawn; in their place were books teaching tolerance and the positive elements of each religions work in the region. This so-called Cordova program was launched by three Arab countries (including Syria and Egypt) and was based on the successful collaboration of all three religions under Spain’s Moorish golden age in the tenth century to teach tolerance, cooperation, and the values of a win-win peaceful world. Exchange programs were extended to provide education for teachers in other settingsIsraelis in Arab universities, Arabs in Israel. Schools in the region were created to teach both Arab and Israeli children. To change from hate to tolerance could not be instantaneous, but it began with the hope that the new generation would do better than the old and would carry visions of peace into adulthood.

With RLP, the UN mission, the diminished teaching of intolerance, the acceptance by many Muslims of the idea of a Jewish presence in the Middle East, the end of suicide bombings and the retaliation they evoked, and the softening of the teachings that had inflamed rather than calmed, all that remained was to cement the nervous peace that existed.

With violence from both sides almost at an end, a tenuous ad hoc confidence was built from the bottom up through hundreds of thousands of projects and business ventures that involved both Muslims and Israelis. The projects were large and small (from agricultural cooperatives to jointly owned shops), local and national (from new schools open to all students to lower import and export restrictions between Israel and Arab countries). And with this improved spirit of confidence, the ventures grew in number and significance, economic development grew, jobs became plentiful, unemployment dropped, and in a marvelous demonstration of social feedback, nascent prosperity bred more confidence and cooperation. Travel into and out of Israel was normalized, controlled only by passports and visas. A NAFTA-like free trade zone was established (covering Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan) to improve the competitiveness of the region in the global economy, to decrease dependence on outside big powers, and to help transform domestic economies. In addition, expatriate communities of Jews and Arabs established functional ties aimed at making this new pan-Middle East a reality. Through investment, leadership, and pressure, expatriates became a powerful force that moved the process forwardto the benefit of their nations and of their nation’s businesses, economies, and people.

Outside observers marveled at how the need for employees eradicated the prior need for travel restrictions. It was only possible, they said, when the end to suicide bombings and retaliation was a credible fact. Some years ago, someone had said, End the suicide bombings and the response to them and everything is possible.He was right.

A joint project sponsored by international Christian aid agencies, Arab oil sheiks, and Jews around the world contributed not only to the elimination of poverty in the region but also to growing religious and cultural understanding.

A special Israeli-Palestinian fund was also established for reconciliation; thanks to this fund, victims of torture and arrests and the families of people killed by the army and terrorists of both parties obtained compensation. It would have been too much to hope that all violence ceased as if a switch were thrown to move from darkness to light; even in the most peaceful setting there are violent people. And so it was in the Middle East. But now nations and their people disavowed isolated acts and labeled them inhumane and counter-religious.

In a year of growing economic cooperation, an Israeli-Palestinian commission was appointed to review the status of refugees. They negotiated an agreement specifying a particular number of Palestinians who would have the right to return to Israel and of Israelis who could remain in the Palestinian areas. Israel argued that this limitation in the number of migrants was in fact no different from any country setting immigration limits. Palestinians responded by saying that Israeli limits would keep people from the locations of their birth and their families. The Israelis were clearly concerned about being outvoted by the immigrants (Palestinians called them repatriates) in their democratic society. The issue promised to be inimical to the process, but compromise was finally reached by accepting a limit based on census data that recorded ethnicity and by restricting the vote to people who had lived in the country for more than seven years. In addition, should a Palestinian state be established, Israeli settlers in Palestinian areas and Palestinians living in Israel would be given the opportunity for dual citizenship.

Post-Arafat, post-Sharon politicians followed their vocal populations. A historic proposal came to the UN from Israel, based on discussions and contributions of Israeli and Palestinian constituents. There was skepticism about requesting a role for the UN, but in fact there was nowhere else that this proposal could be made. It rested on the tradeoff between the need for Israeli security and the need for a permanent Palestinian state. Israel agreed to withdraw from all areas it had occupied since the 1967 war, to close appropriate settlements, and to cede these areas to the new state of Palestine. Israeli settlers in the areas would be given dual citizenship. It called for the free and open recognition of an independent Israel by all Arab states, with a sovereign right to exist in perpetuity. From the Palestinian point of view, the recommendation clearly defined the borders of the newly proposed state (roughly as in the Geneva accords). Since the Palestinians had participated in the definition of the resolution, it was clear that the recommended borders would be acceptable. The resolution also called for enforcement by the UN (a much debated point) and defined sanctions and penalties for violation of the provisions of the resolution. In a move never seen before but perhaps reflecting a pattern for the future, the resolution was ratified by a plebiscite, helping to ensure that when the agreement was accepted by the UN it would be supported by people in these countries.

Extremists on both sides attempted to derail the plebiscite and the agreement and to intimidate people through various atrocities. But these just caused the public to revile extremism even more, and the vote approved the resolution overwhelmingly.

Thanks to the economic boom, the successful peace process, and the growing political culture, both Palestine and Israel became islands of democracy and prosperity. The beneficial influences flowing from them contributed to profound political changes in the Middle East. The situation in Lebanon became much more stable thanks to the return of Palestinian refugees to Palestine and Israel and to the dismantling of militia such as Hezbollah. Muslims and Christians in Lebanon followed the good example of Palestine and confirmed the peace treaty; Lebanon became the prosperous country it used to be.

And the mullahs, mashaikhs, and rabbis, reflecting on the events since the RLP conference, said it was Gods destiny. The rest was details. Inshallah.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation