Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 17, 1993 TAG: 9401140009
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Though mostly immune to hype, especially television hype, I found that my own heart hadn't shriveled that far, either - and that the sight of two deadly enemies agreeing after nearly a century of perpetual warfare to open a peaceful relationship with each other demonstrates that, after all, it is still possible to do the impossible.
The opening is small, of course, and the old enemies got there less from conviction, perhaps, than from circumstantial reality; but though the actual accomplishment of peace will prove difficult, the accord takes a mighty first step from which neither party can easily retreat.
But there are impediments. One is the fact that the entire Middle East must eventually join in. Another is water, which is scarce everywhere there and coveted by everyone. Still a third is the nearly intractable resistance of the naysayers of both the Israeli and PLO right wings.
The Israeli right seeks to vote out Yitzhak Rabin's coalition government and bring in a government that will abrogate the accord. The Arab right threatens death to Israel, death to America and, before all else, death to Yasser Arafat.
It is the irrationality and the extremity of the opposition that is so frightening and will be so difficult for both sides, and for those who attempt to mediate between them, to channel into reason and civility.
And it may well be that the fundamental cause of it is something that went unidentified and therefore unsaid at the Monday signing. That cause is the age-old human penchant for demonizing its enemies.
Throughout most of the century in which Jews and Arabs have contested each other for the land now called Israel, they have depicted each other as monsters of evil. The fact that both had rational claims to the land, originating in both ancient and contemporary history, was ignored in favor of the easier knack for demonizing the other party.
Jews were depicted as greedy aggressors, Arabs as fanatics and layabouts who had done nothing to cultivate the land they occupied. When, following World War II and the Holocaust, the nations of the world made Palestine the Zionist homeland Jews had long sought, Arab resentment rose higher still and the image of Zionism grew darker.
Images so bitterly repeated have a life of their own and result, eventually, in attitudes of hatred that - though they rest upon misrepresentation - perpetuate themselves. They also result in acts of violence that accentuate differences yet do nothing to compromise between them.
Thus, Israel and the Arab world face immense problems, in this case problems they have made themselves by their own rhetorical excesses, as well as the very genuine grievances both harbor.
But the rest of the world need not believe itself superior. Throughout modern times, and perhaps throughout history, nations in conflict have painted one another in the darkest hues. Napoleon was the demon of Europe. Abraham Lincoln was the South's idea of a baboon.
In World War I the Allies portrayed Germany as the "Hun" and attributed atrocities to him - including the bayoneting of babies and the rape of nuns - that proved subsequently to have been the invention of propagandists. In World War II, though Hitler was a genuinely evil man, American soldiers were urged to regard Japanese soldiers as toothy, bespectacled monkeys (a dangerous misjudgment). Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and George Bush demonized both General Noriega and Saddam Hussein as utter monsters who must, like dragons, be destroyed.
Sometimes, as with Hitler, real demons exist. More often than not, however, they're demons of convenience, and the mischief they leave behind proves nearly impossible to overcome.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB