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Between Rome and Jerusalem

(Jerusalem Post) - Yossi Klein Halevi Reporting on the differing perspectives he encountered at a conference in Rome about religion, media, and "regions of conflict": Rome believes that there are solutions to every problem, if only people would overcome their fears and resentments and start talking. In Jerusalem we know that much of the Arab world is still dreaming of military glory and revenge rather than prosperity and reconciliation. Rome doesn't understand that, in the past two years, both America and Israel have glimpsed the Islamist apocalypse. Rome thinks of September 11 as a criminal attack by a marginal group, rather than as part of a widespread anti-Western assault nurtured by key Middle Eastern regimes. Rome views the collapse of the Oslo process as a technical failure which a bit of tinkering can repair. Rome doesn't understand that when former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak placed Jerusalem on the negotiating table - the first time in history that any nation offered to share sovereignty over its capital - and received suicide bombings as the counter-offer, the Oslo process was over. Rome doesn't understand that, after the first intifada, the centrist Israeli majority accepted the legitimacy of Palestinian national claims, while no reciprocal shift occurred on the Palestinian side in accepting the legitimacy of Jewish national claims. Astonishingly, Rome has forgotten that this terrorist war was declared not against a government headed by Sharon but against the most peace-minded government in Israel's history. Rome doesn't understand that the second intifada, unlike the first, isn't a war of desperation against the occupation but a war of religiously-incited triumphalism against Israel's existence. Rome sees how the world can be, but dangerously deludes itself into believing that that is how it actually is.
2003-03-03 00:00:00
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