Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (50 page)

Afterward I was invited by the Hamas leadership in Damascus for further talks, and I asked Israeli leaders if they thought this line worth pursuing. “Ask them one question,” a confidant of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert advised me. “Would Hamas, not now but in the future, somewhere down the line, recognize the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state in the area, under any conditions, any borders?”

The most forthcoming answer I got at the time was from Hamas deputy chairman Abu Musa Marzook, which fell far short of what the Israelis said they needed to hear: “You don’t need conditions or recognition. There are examples. The Irish negotiations began without conditions, and East and West Germany coexisted in peace living side by side without mutual recognition, and the two Chinas.”

But Marzook went on to suggest that by showing respect for Palestinians’ core values, a dialogue could open. “For us, for thePalestinians, it is not about the amount of money or the material compensation; for us, you see, there are values, and one value is
karama,
dignity, and an apology. An apology would be important to us, but words alone are not enough.”

Then a former U.S. government official who had accompanied me to Damascus asked, “In your heart of hearts, not as Hamas officials, do you want peace with Israel? Do you want to live side by side as two states?”

Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s political liaison with the outside, who had come to the meeting from his headquarters in Beirut, answered, “How can you live with people you cannot trust? A snake is a snake and you know what to do if you see it coming. Arafat came to the UN in 1974 with a gun and an olive branch. He said, “Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand.” The Israelis did nothing. In 1984 in Morocco, the Arab countries accepted a two-state solution and peace as a strategic choice. Israel did nothing. At Madrid, there was a chance after the Gulf War; the Arabs were weak, the Israelis did nothing. When have the Israelis made any moves toward peace? They will always want to kill Arabs and drink their children’s blood.”

Marzook was clearly uncomfortable with his colleague’s reply, because he added, “When we have two states, then we will see. Let Israel withdraw from our homeland to the 1967 borders, and let there be a Palestinian state, because there already is an Israeli state. And then there will be no resistance.”

But Hamdan was not about to compromise. “Yes,” he chortled, “it will not be called violence, because between two states it is war.”

Marzook enjoined him that Hamas did not want war, and it seemed that there was a profound disagreement between the two leaders being played out before us. I have witnessed too many subsequent disagreements among the personalities and factions of Hamas to think it not genuinely torn about what to do with Israel.

In March 2009, Sheikh Hamed al-Betawi was in hiding after the Israelis began re-arresting any Hamas or Hamas-leaning leader they could lay their hands on due to frustration over the collapse of the Cairo negotiations earlier that month. After Israel’s January 2009 incursion into Gaza, the strongest attack on Gaza since the 1967 Six-Day War, Israeli leaders seemed to assume that they had softened Hamas’s resolve enough to make trade-offs, such as exchanging Corporal Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in June 2006, for a thousand Hamas prisoners. But the Gaza attack only stiffened Hamas’s resolve, at least in the short term. Although Israel, for the first time ever, offered to release prisoners who had been involved in suicide attacks and had “Jewish blood on their hands,” Hamas insisted that all prisoners under discussion be released, including Marwan Barghouti, the leader of Fateh’s “Young Guard” and Hamas’s most popular political rival.

At his safe house, I asked Betawi again why he thought Palestine was the Mother of All Problems, and again he said, “Because this is sacred land.” But when I reminded him of our previous conversation and his pledge to fight Israel until its destruction on the basis of his interpretation of a Koranic injunction, Al-Tauba 111, I was surprised that he had to look up the passage to remind himself. And then he gave it a very different take:

“The problems cannot be solved with muscles,” he said, “but only with the mind. When Israel learns to use mind over muscle, then we can have a
hudna
[provisional armistice].”

“But can the
hudna
ever become a permanent peace?” I asked.

“That is for future generations to work out, and only for the good, if minds are used instead of muscles.”

I related the conversation to Ben Israel, who remarked, “The world community thinks that our strike into Gaza was a mistake, as was our strike against Hizbollah [in Lebanon in 2006]. But we haven’t had a peep out of Hizbollah since then, and I predict muchless trouble from Hamas, at least for a while. They may still think time is on their side, but they now know that they’ll lose in any muscle match. But what do they offer us? Nothing, not even a conditional something, as you well know.”

A few days later, I went to see Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, as her ruling party was about to cede power and go into the opposition. Israel’s centrist Kadima Party, led by Livni, had beaten Netanyahu’s right-leaning Likud Party by one parliamentary seat in the recent election, but a coalition of right-wing and religious parties gave Netanyahu a majority. Then the old stalwart of the left, the Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, who had been defense minister in the previous Kadima-led government, jumped ship and also joined Netanyahu.

“As long as Hamas remains an ideological group, they will never declare their acceptance of Israel,” Livni said. “An ideological group finds it very difficult to compromise on anything that goes against their core beliefs and values.”

“So is there any hope of some way of living with Hamas?” I prodded.

She noted that she herself had made the move away from rigid ideology, as had perhaps some in Hamas: “If the Palestinian nationalist camp (the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas) makes peace with us,” she replied, “Hamas can say, ‘It’s not our fault’ and then accept the status quo as the will of the people without compromising itself. But time is working against the moderates because they see that the world is doing very little to stop the extremists, who believe that all they have to do to win in the end is wait.”

The next day, I asked Ghazi Hamad what he now thought about the prospect of a permanent peace with Israel.

“We believe in democracy and will respect the choice and will of the Palestinian people,” he said. “We are not like the Taliban or Al Qaeda. We believe in human rights, women’s rights, andinternational law. We do not believe in using violence to impose Islam, but support the moderate method of [Turkey’s current leader Recep Tayyip] Erdogan that allows both Islamic and Western traditions to live side by side, and lets democratic elections decide policy by the ballot box instead of bullets.”

I mentioned that Khalil Shikaki’s polls show that Israelis and Palestinians both prefer a permanent peace, but that each side believes the other is lying about it and can’t be trusted.

“People in conflict cannot think clearly,” opined Hamad. “We need a symbolic breakthrough. I think Obama can make that breakthrough happen. But time is working against us because the intolerable status quo is radicalizing our young people.”

And I was reminded of Longfellow’s lines about “Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness.”

CHAPTER 21
WORDS TO END WARS: THE SCIENCE OF THE SACRED

Words are like eggs: When they are hatched, they have wings.

—A PROVERB FROM MADAGASCAR

THE NEWS FROM GAZA, MID-JANUARY 2009

More than a thousand Palestinians were dead, and thousands more wounded. Perhaps hundreds of Hamas fighters were dead, but also hundreds of civilians, including women and children
¹
whose only culpability was to have been born in the wrong place. Israelis couldn’t stand being rocketed (imagine what America would do if rockets started hitting Texas from Mexico), but they will gain no peace this way. No nation that conquered another in the twentieth century and subsequently sought to control its territory (whether by direct occupation or not) has ultimately succeeded.
²

As diplomats stitched together yet another cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, the most bewildering and depressing feature of this conflict was the sense that future fighting was inevitable. Rational calculation suggested that neither side could win these wars, but that both would win with peace. The thousands of lives and billions of dollars sacrificed in fighting demonstrate the advantages of peace and coexistence; still, both sides opt for war.

(By 2009, rocket fire from Gaza into Israel had dropped by 90 percent, making it the quietest year on that front in a decade. “It can last for months or years,” noted Yoav Galant, the general in charge of Israel’s southern command, “but ultimately it is going tobe broken.” Ismail Haniya, a leader of the current Hamas regime in Gaza, defiantly reclaimed the whole of historic Palestine, including Israel, “from [the Mediterranean] sea to [the Jordan] river.”)
³

The Wall at Kalandiya checkpoint separating the West Bank from Jerusalem and Israel, and the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, for whom “Values become your destiny.”

This small territory is the world’s great symbolic knot. “Palestine is the mother of all problems” is a common refrain heard from people I’ve interviewed across the Muslim world: from Middle East leaders to fighters in the remote island jungles of Indonesia; from Islamist senators and secular nuclear physicists in Islamabad to volunteers for martyrdom on the move from Morocco to Iraq and Afghanistan. And in the Western world, too: from the U.S. National Security Council to governments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Some observers see this as a testament to the essentially religiousnature of the conflict—even to the toxic nature of religion itself. But our research suggests a way to go beyond that. For there is a moral logic to seemingly intractable religious and cultural disputes that cannot be reduced to secular calculations of interest but must be dealt with on its own terms. As I noted at the end of chapter 19, it is a logic very different from the marketplace or realpolitik.

Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or cultural values that incorporate moral beliefs—such as the welfare of their family and country or commitment to religion, honor, and justice—is, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Research with colleagues, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, suggests that people will reject any type of material compensation for dropping their commitment to their sacred values and will defend their sacred values regardless of the costs.
⁴

In our research in the Middle East, we surveyed nearly four thousand Palestinians and Israelis between 2004 and 2008, questioning citizens from across the political spectrum, including refugees, supporters of Hamas, and Israeli settlers. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for lasting peace.

In one cycle of studies designed by psychologist Jeremy Ginges,
⁵
we used a “between-subjects” experimental design, in which we randomly chose some subjects to respond to a deal with an added material incentive, such as financial compensation, while a third group responded to a deal in which the other side made a symbolic sacrifice of one of their own sacred values. In another cycle, we used a “within-subjects” design, in which all subjects would be exposed to the same set of deals. First they would be given a straight-up offer in which each side would make difficult concessions in exchange for peace. Next they were given a scenario inwhich their side was granted an additional material incentive. And last came a proposal in which the other side agreed to a symbolic sacrifice of one of its sacred values. Results were similar for the between-subjects and within-subjects designs, indicating that the order in which deals were presented didn’t matter and that people responded the same way to deals given singly or as part of a set.