The difference between peace and signing a paper

Yaacov Lozowick has written another brilliant essay at his almost-but-not-quite abandoned blog:

In recent months I've had the occasion privately to discuss the efforts to obtain peace with a number of unusually well-informed observers of the conflict. Each of them has been American, Jewish or not; each of them has impressive command of the details and minutiae of the historical chronology and familiarity with the important and secondary historical and contemporary actors. Unlike the vast majority of pundits, these fellows (they've all been men) know what they're talking about.

Yet I've found the exact same chasm between my understanding of how the story could unfold and theirs; it has become clear to me that this difference is itself interesting and significant. In a nutshell, the issue is about the finality of peace agreements.

American history is probably unusual, in that the United States has rarely experienced anything resembling permanent conflict. ...

You could forgive Americans for the idea that conflicts are fought resolved and ended, to be continued, at very worst, on non-military fields. Indeed, such historical optimism probably lies under the widespread receptivity to books such as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker, of course, doesn't limit himself to North American history. His theses is that humanity as a whole is weaning itself of violence on all levels, and the Long Peace of post-WW2 Europe and the New Peace of much of the rest of the world are permanent; the rest of humankind simply has to catch up and calm down.

A perceptive reading of Pinker, however, ought to remind us of the simple fact that throughout most of history, peace agreements at the ends of wars were temporary affairs. When one side destroyed the other, they could last for centuries; but when both sides remained standing, they often returned to battle sooner or later, in the same configuration or in a different one. The Bible aspires for "forty years of peace", which is a reasonable approximation of "permanent".

Pinker's conception rests on more than the statistical fact that since 1945 there have been (almost) no wars in Europe and that at the beginning of the 21st century there are fewer conflicts than usual worldwide. He shows how multiple things have changed, so that nowadays people don't regard war-making as an option for resolving conflicts.

But there-in lies the rub, as I pointed out when I recently reviewed his book. In order for a peace agreement to be the prelude to lasting peace, it must obviously be fair enough that all sides prefer it over the continuation of conflict, and more important, the vast majorities of the populations must cease to regard war as an option. These are two very different things.

My thesis here is that the people striving for peace between Israel and Arabs are working hard at attaining the first, while assuming that the second will necessarily follow. This assumption, however, makes sense only if something has changed in the character of the peoples involved. If Jews and Arabs (not only Palestinians) have together reached the same stage of history the nations of the Long Peace have reached, then indeed, a peace agreement between them is likely to usher in a permanent Middle East Peace.

Must I elaborate on how utterly silly that is, in 2013?

...[T]he peace makers need to be striving not for a magic combination of gestures and moves on the ground which will call forth a peace-signing ceremony on the lawn of the White House. They need to be creating a new reality. If all they achieve is the goal of an agreement without changing the essentials, they will have created an interlude in the conflict. At worst, they might even create the motivation for the next round.

I would add that even the well-funded NGOs that get tens of millions of dollars and euros to help Arabs with human rights and democratic processes are doing literally nothing towards the goal of teaching them how to live with Jews. So we see that even the organizations groomed to be the ones to set the stage for peace will defend antisemitism until threatened with losing their funding.

The idea that peace will automatically follow a "peace" of paper - one that gets signed only under great external pressure - is not only a pipe dream; it is manifestly stupid. And as Lozowick demonstrates, it is an illusion that even the most well informed Americans have.