Taming the "Noble Savages"

The nations of the West should strike a free-trade agreement with those of the Middle East: we'll give you bad ideas, money, and guns-you give us war. America's foolish handling of the fallout from the summer's war in Lebanon and Israel is a recent example. In the war's aftermath, prominent Israeli politicians began to propose holding peace talks with Syria. But so far, the Bush administration has explicitly forbidden Israel from pursuing this.

During the war, it became clear that America viewed Israel as a proxy with which to fight Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah. American war hawks even suggested that Israel should invade Syria. Behind this hostility was anger over Syria's facilitating the insurgency in Iraq, the U.S. government's biggest headache. The hawks hoped to use Israeli blood to pay for another regime change (because that's such a fruitful concept).

The Israelis looked at Syria with more neighborly concerns. For Israel, it's not a matter of good guys and bad guys-it's about seizing opportunities. Why not pull an Egypt and get out of a cycle of unwinnable wars with a territory swap? Hawkish Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, former head of the Shin Bet security service, called for negotiations with Syria. So did Defense Minister Amir Peretz. Vice Premier Shimon Peres invited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, U.S. opposition to peace talks grows louder. How can Israel make a "separate peace" with the Syrian dictator? What of the march of democracy and the war on terror? Israelis are skilled at keeping criticism of the United States, their sole patron, to themselves. But lately, Israeli journalists and politicians have echoed what Ariel Sharon was known to say under his breath about Bush's grand plans for the region: impractical, deluded, and doomed.

The Republicans have recently paid for the abysmal failure of neoconservative policy in the Middle East. Unfortunately, neocons aren't the only source of bad ideas. While Bush's war on terror is a disaster, the answers from the other side of the spectrum are equally out of touch with reality. Misleading binaries about the Middle East are more attractive than thorough scrutiny. From academics, the International Organization for Standardization, and Europeans, you'll hear that America's pro-Israel policy is the only real problem.

Europe has a more accommodating attitude toward the Arab side. But this favor merely masks a racist echo of colonialism. It's the patronizing Lawrence of Arabia syndrome: the "noble savage" Arab is portrayed as frightening but romantic. Violence, like the Palestinian intifada, is co-opted by the Western leftist agenda. Local goals (like Hamas' Islamic bent) are ignored. The ultimate expectation is that the Arab can be "brought into civilization"-but only when European standards are implied by the term. Europeans spare no discrimination to maintain their cultural authority over the Arab and Muslim communities in their midst.

Proponents of both "blame Israel" and "blame Arabs" attitudes have black holes in their picture of the Middle East. On the left, there is an unwillingness to confront the thoroughly illiberal and terrorizing trends in the region. Resistance to occupation is fine. But in glorifying the form it has taken, its cosmopolitan supporters forget the sinister forces beneath it: schemes that have more to do with cynical power plays than liberation.

As Palestinian mothers have protested, Hamas favors using impressionable youngsters for suicide bombings and shootouts-virtually children, between ages 14 and 22. Manipulatively, Hamas fires rockets at Israel from private fields and apartment buildings. The Israelis respond-bombing the fields, leveling the apartment buildings. Now the unemployed farmer and homeless family must find someone to support them. Hamas waits with open arms-and loaded weapons-for their newest members. Their popularity rises, their schools fill, more rockets shoot off. Hezbollah has applied this strategy-bomb, rebuild, bomb-to make the whole of south Lebanon beholden to their infrastructure.

These groups sacrifice their own people to gain political stature. Will their globally minded partners not also strike at the West?

Islamic fundamentalism is the boogeyman of our terror fears. But the right-wing response is also riddled with blind spots. They fail to realize how Islamism becomes a desirable option from a Middle Eastern perspective.

The region has found itself producing lots of wealth without most people seeing any of it. Americans often think the solution lies in plugging into globalization: regime change plus culture change. But the governments that promote Westernization there have been brutally undemocratic.

And, while global capitalism claims to bring a free market of choices, Western options (from food and dress to morals and traditions) often win out over the local ones. The most authentic gives way to the most efficient. Middle Eastern societies naturally resent this.

America crushed almost every ember of socialism during the Cold War. Thus, a return to Islam has become the main alternative to a globalizing system that seems to favor values and interests antithetical to Middle Easterners.

A clash of civilizations will get us nowhere. Even Israel, with no respite from extremist threats, knows that there is also no purely military solution to the local dangers. As long as the people of the region feel deprived of enfranchising alternatives, violence will be easy to foment. Backdoor racism isn't the answer. Neither are front-door invasions. We must leave our ideologies at the region's door and sort the problems out as they are experienced by its people.