Ray of Hope

Mideast madness insanely complex
By LISA VAN DUSEN | Thursday, 8 January, 2009

While another bloody chapter in the most dysfunctional bilateral dynamic on Earth unfolds in Gaza, the only thing harder to fathom than what got us all here is what might get us all out.

Whatever did get us all here, it's definitely all of us and not just the Israelis and the Palestinians anymore, not that it ever really was.

If you're interested enough in the Middle East to have read this far, then you probably already know that Iran and Syria back the Hamas hold on the Gaza Strip that Israel is aiming to end and that the timing of this, toward the end of a tough Israeli election campaign and on the eve of a new U.S. administration, is crucial.

There are now so many proxies haunting the streets of Gaza, it's like the armed combat version of the truism that there's never just one other person in your bed.

For people who haven't had reason to wade into the peace processes come and gone and the conditions, concessions and withdrawals that sustained or undid them, the question of why these people are still killing each other can seem insanely complicated.

Even when you've been immersed in it for years, you come up with tricks to conceptualize it. My latest is a straight line on a 100-degree gradation with the zero point in the middle and 50 degrees on either side. The zero point in the middle represents the status quo, one end of the line represents peace, the other mutual annihilation.

The demarcations aren't national, ideological or religious, because each of those labels is found at every point in the scale and because those divisions have been blamed for so long that it can seem more useful to construct a bottom line based on everyone's bottom line.

The status quo-middle marks the position of those, including politicians elected and unelected, armed and unarmed, who feel no urgent need to change that status quo and who may even be doing everything in their power to maintain it, mostly out of fear of the alternative.

The 10-degree margin on the peace side of it includes the Bush administration, notwithstanding the deathbed blip of Annapolis, which absolutely nobody, including everyone sitting around the table in Annapolis, actually thought would work.

The mutual annihilation end represents everyone willing to die in the name of destroying the other side.

This includes most of Hamas, suicide bombers, the most radical of radical Israeli settlers and the assassins of peacemakers.

The opposite -- or peace -- end of the line represents people who believe in the possibility of a reality closer to what both Israelis and Palestinians would rather raise their children in.

Those final five degrees are where the ones who died for peace once lived (a smaller fringe, they don't usually self-identify ahead of time).

To people halfway between the status quo and dying for peace -- whose bottom line is that they are against anything that undermines a negotiated, peaceful solution -- the horror on the ground now is only part of what Barack Obama's new American administration will be working with Jan. 20.

And the one ray of hope there, the thing in this story that you could chart on a whole other graph, is that it never gets better without getting worse first.