On Saturday night I flew business class to Qatar for the Doha debates. I always fly economy, but as the saying goes, I could get used to this fast. The seats on the Boeing 777 folded down to make a full bed and I was next to a guy from Cesar Pelli’s architectural firm. At the Four Seasons in Doha, I sent my wife an email. “They have Occitane soap in the bathroom.” “Life is good,” she responded. A BMW took me to and from the souk.
The debate was over the proposition, Obama is too weak to bring about Middle East peace, and I argued the affirmative along with a guy from American University of Beirut named Ahmed Moussali. He was unshaven and chain-smoked and kept the other side off balance in the green room by making fun of their clothing and telling scatological jokes. They were both courtly men, Roger Cohen of the New York Times and Sami Abu Roza of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Roza had longish hipster hair and a German-inflected accent from a youth in Europe. Cohen has an English accent and opened the debate by speaking with fervor about Obama’s character and strength. Moussali promptly undercut him by saying the question was not about whether we love Obama or don’t love him.
He and Cohen clashed a lot during the debate. It wasn’t just a difference in manners, but in world views.
Moussali talked about the right of return. He said Arabs were made to pay the price for European crimes of World War II, and 1 million Russians moved to Palestine when people who were born there cannot visit their former village. He said that Palestinians ended up with less than 22 percent of the land. Cohen was dismissive of that view. He said we cant keep dwelling on history and trying to outvictimize one another. Cohen had just been in the West Bank. He said to Moussali, When is the last time you have been in the West Bank? He spoke about how much progress the Palestinians were making economically with reduced checkpoints, and he said that Salam Fayyad says the Palestinians are trying to build something and go forward. Cohen was saying that Moussali and I are stuck in the past.
Before the debate Cohen and I had met in the Four Seasons lobby and both regretted that we were on opposite sides. He’s been a leader in American mainstream journalism; and I have several times celebrated him here, for saying that he was ashamed of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, for his personal courage in Iran last year, for attacking neoconservatives on the craziness of the idea of attacking Iran.
Still I don’t know how a liberal can say that it is a good thing for people who are denied basic political rights and human rights to accept a hot lunch of economic progress. The Boston tea party was about that. Palestinians want freedom, to come and go, and not to live with separate roadways for Jews who are steadily taking more of their land. I talked about East Jerusalem and the creation of ethnically-cleansed Jewish neighborhoods that memorialize Israel’s annexation of an international city, a violation that happens not in the past but under our noses.
Strategizing that afternoon over espresso at the Four Seasons, Moussali had told me to tell the audience that this debate doesn’t happen in the U.S. There is not a panel that pitted Cohen and Abu Roza on the right and me and Moussali on the left. Indeed, later this week Cohen will be debating a neocon at the American Jewish Committee on the vital question of Iran (the same debate Cohen won handily at a synagogue in New York last year), but no American stage explores the difference between his views and mine, between his attachment to the two-state solution and my own strong feeling that Israel, a democracy that denies leadership to 20 percent of its population, must be reformed. Between his concern for the civil rights demonstrators murdered in Iran, with endless attention in the US, and my concern for the civil rights demonstrators murdered by Israel without a squeak from our press.
It was a foregone conclusion that our side would win, 58-42. Moussali told me if the debate were held in Syria it would have been 90-10.
I sat up late at the Four Seasons talking with friends from Saudi and Palestine, both highly educated and well off. The Saudi had lately given me the book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s classic about nationalism, and the Palestinian had read it in grad school. He told me that the negotiating team for the Palestinians always gets along with the Israelis, because “elites always get along with one another.”
I thought about that bit of wisdom for the next day. Of course elites do. When you are at the Four Seasons and discussing the history of nationalism, you get along. And as a Jew, I am accustomed to thinking in such terms. I’m a member of an elite. Israel’s Reut Institute says frankly that Israel needs to personally cultivate the "entire [American] elite" in culture, arts, politics and academia to maintain its status. And Fayyad is the elite of Palestinian society. Roger Cohen and I both went to fancy schools and lead privileged lives in the US, and surely some of his love for Iran had to do with the education levels of the protesters.
On the trip back I rolled my seat down, drank Bourdeaux, and watched Avatar till it got too boring. I saw it as others have, a parable for the US relationship to the Arabs– its glorification of an indigenous people tied to the land (the Nabi) and of the American “grunt” hero who is up against the pencil-necked elites. A Jew couldn’t write a movie from the vantage point of a jarhead, I thought. Well I couldn’t.
But during the debate I had been the most forceful on the issue of Palestinian conditions, about life in East Jerusalem and Gaza. On my left I saw Sami Abu Roza nodding his head in agreement. We’re both good guys. Somehow I think the Palestinians also need others to represent them.
