In the Middle East, It’s Right Vs. Right

My keyboard, so used to criticisms of President Trump, is shocked as I hammer out this column. But Trump genuinely deserves great credit for (belatedly) ramming through the Gaza cease-fire and release of hostages and detainees. Bravo, Mr. President.

Yet what lies ahead is more prayer than plan, and to make this a lasting peace it would help if we all discarded the Manichaean paradigm of good versus evil that many Westerners apply to Israelis and Palestinians (while disagreeing on who gets which label), making compromise difficult or impossible. To make progress, it may help to think of the conflict not in terms of right versus wrong, but of right versus right.

The Middle East, as I see it, reflects a contest between two national yearnings with a measure of right on each side. Two peoples are fighting each other to preserve their hold on land to which they have ancient roots, and each is traumatized by the other’s violence.

Israel is not only an economic and technological marvel but also a democracy for its own citizens, albeit an increasingly flawed one. Palestinian citizens of Israel have a more meaningful vote than citizens of neighboring Arab countries, and there is a freer press and more space for civil society watchdogs and human rights groups. There is much to admire about Israel.

At the same time, Palestinians have the same rights as Israelis to a state, self-determination, freedom, opportunity, dignity and hope. To regard as morally acceptable the oppression that Palestinians routinely suffer in the West Bank with no end in sight, or the mass killing and starvation they have recently endured in Gaza, is to reject the fundamental credo that all humans are created equal.

Whatever your view about the Middle East, we should acknowledge that an Israeli Jewish baby and a Palestinian baby are moral equivalents, each with the same right to grow up in freedom without fear of bus bombs, missiles or ethnic cleansing.

Yet these aspirations clash, so equally this is sometimes a case of barbarism versus barbarism, of moral blindness vs. moral blindness.

If each side has rights, each has also at times behaved despicably toward the other. Arabs massacred Jews at Hebron in 1929, and Jews slaughtered Arabs at Deir Yassin in 1948 and Qibya in 1953. In a notorious 1978 terror attack, Palestinians killed 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, while Israeli commanders permitted Lebanese Christians to massacre perhaps 2,000 or more Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982. (Accounts of these incidents and the estimates of deaths vary greatly, for history is as much a battleground in the Middle East as territory; the past can be as murky as the future).

In a May poll, half of Palestinians said they approved of the Oct. 7 attacks, while 87 percent denied that Hamas had committed atrocities against civilians — just as many Israelis both supported the destruction of Gaza and denied the famine they inflicted on Gazan children. In short, the respect we owe each side for its rights and aspirations should be tempered by recognition of moral myopia driven by trauma, fear and dehumanization of the other.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, two longtime peace negotiators, write in their new book, “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” that Palestinians and Israeli Jews see in the other “their own national nightmares, ethnic cleansing for one and extermination for the other. It is no surprise that they both so freely bandied about historical metaphors of yesteryear: a reprise of the 1948 Nakba for Palestinians; another Holocaust for Israelis. Residents of southern Israel paid for all the pain and humiliation Palestinians had suffered at Israeli hands. The people of Gaza paid not only for Hamas’s actions but for Nazi crimes as well. History does not move forward. It slips sideways.”

The challenge for Trump and other leaders is to prevent that sideways slippage in the coming weeks, for many details about Gaza’s future have to be worked out. Disputes are certain — for example, about Hamas surrendering its guns and Israel fully withdrawing its troops.

Trump let the last Gaza cease-fire, from January, collapse in March, and for months until now he allowed the war and starvation to drag on and claim even more children’s lives. We can only hope that his ownership of the new cease-fire — which is already under stress — will lead him to show greater commitment to preserving it.

Trump’s bullying style has also undermined important American relationships around the world but in this case just might help force concessions on each side to keep peace alive another day.

Bloodshed in the West Bank is another obstacle to a lasting peace. As I argued in a column during my most recent visit, earlier this year, Israel has embarked on a policy of “Gazafication” of the West Bank, applying the tools of the Gaza war to Palestinian towns and villages elsewhere. Any broader peace will require, as a first step, Israeli restraint in the West Bank and an end to the impunity for settlers who attack Palestinians.

I strongly doubt that “this is the historic dawn of a new Middle East,” as Trump said in his speech to the Knesset. That would require movement toward a two-state solution, of which there is no sign. The parties remain stuck in cycles of trauma, distrust, revenge and extremism that Oct. 7 and the subsequent war have exacerbated — and that’s why we need a new paradigm.

So if we transcend the rubric of good vs. evil in the Middle East, here’s my suggestion for what can replace it: a recognition of shared humanity.

That may seem mushy and unattainable, but it’s urged by those who have the greatest reason to hate: some of the parents on each side who have lost children to the conflict. The Parents Circle — Families Forum is a nonprofit made up of more than 800 bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. They unite in grief that underscores all that unites us as human beings.

It’s not inevitable that the Middle East spirals forever downward. Note that the war in Gaza was also accompanied by huge and unexpected progress elsewhere in the region: the demise of the Assads in Syria, the end of Hezbollah’s chokehold over Lebanon and a significant weakening of the repressive and misogynistic regime in Iran.

May the positive surprises continue. I urge President Trump to keep up the pressure he used so effectively so that two peoples unhappily sharing the Holy Land can heed the call of Isaiah to “beat their swords into plowshares.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section

A

, Page

20

of the New York edition

with the headline:

In the Middle East, Think Right vs. Right. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe