Dialogue of the deaf by Judea Perl June 16, 2005 The age of terror, it seems, has sprouted an era of dialogue. A host of conferences meant to bring together East and West have been cropping up. There was World Economic Forum's recent Middle East regional summit in Jordan. A few weeks before the star-studded Mideast "Davos" conference, I had the opportunity to attend the similarly high level US-Islamic World Forum, held in Doha, Qatar. The Doha conference was packed with hundreds of progressive pundits and activists from all sides who diligently discussed both the needs and the means for achieving democracy, reforms and renaissance in the Muslim world. And, as expected, there was hardly a Muslim speaker who did not stress the pivotal importance of seeing progress toward settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, kicked off the discussion by stressing that hot conflicts in the Arab-Islamic world had to be resolved if we hoped to make progress on reform issues. He was followed by Palestinian Authority Civil Affairs Minister Muhammad Dahlan, who called on America and the Muslim countries to pressure Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to stop what Dahlan saw as delaying tactics. Indeed, almost every speaker ended his or her speech by arguing that American credibility hinged on resolving the Palestine issue. Rami Khouri, executive editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon, summarized these sentiments, noting: "Democracy is essential, but it is incomplete without full sovereignty, and cannot be promoted credibly under conditions of foreign occupation. Resolving the Palestine issue in this respect is vital for progress, and should be addressed alongside movement toward democratic reform." As a person sensitive to this issue, I was deeply impressed by the civility with which the issue was discussed. The word "occupation" was scarcely mentioned, and the usual accusatory terms "brutal," "racist" and "apartheid" were pleasantly absent from the main discourse. This stood in sharp contrast to another East-West conference that took place earlier that month in Putrajaya, Malaysia, in which the Malaysian prime minister reportedly stated that Israel should cease to be "an exclusively Jewish racist state," where the leftist Israeli delegation was snubbed for being overly concerned with "Israel's racist needs and wishes." The overwhelming majority of participants at the event stated that Israel was founded on pillars of injustice and must be dismantled (peacefully, of course). Enticed by this aura of civility in Doha, I was curious to find out what the participants had in mind when they pressed for "progress" on the Palestine issue: progress toward what? Deep in my heart, I had hoped to find the Doha participants more accommodating of the so-called "two-state solution" and the road map leading to it. If this were not the case, I thought, then we were in big trouble again. Muslims might be nourishing a utopian dream that the US cannot deliver and, sooner or later, the whole dialogue process, and all the goodwill and reforms that depend on it, would blow up in the same conflagration that consumed the Oslo process. I was not the only American with such concerns. Richard Holbrooke, America's former ambassador to the UN, who was on the same panel with Dahlan, stated that the Arab world must contribute its share toward meaningful movement of the peace process. He reminded the audience that, by now, two and a half generations of Arabs have been brought up on textbooks that do not show Israel on any map, and that such continued denial, on a grassroots level, is a major hindrance to any peaceful settlement. I had a friendly conversation on this issue with one of Dahlan's aides, who confessed that "we Palestinians do not believe in a two-state solution, for we can't agree to the notion of 'Jewish state.'" "Judaism is a religion," he added "and religions should not have states." When I pointed out that Israeli society is 70 percent secular, bonded by history, not religion, and that by "Jewish state" Israelis mean (for lack of a better term) a "national-Jewish state," he replied: "Still, Palestine is too small for two states." This was somewhat disappointing to me, given the official Palestinian Authority endorsement of the road map. "Road map to what?" I thought, "to a Middle East without Israel?" Where was the reform and liberalism among the post-Arafat Palestinian leadership that was expected to breed flexibility and compromise? I discussed my disappointment with an Egyptian scholar renowned as a champion of liberalism in the Arab context. His answer was even more blunt: "The Jews should build themselves a Vatican," he said, "a spiritual center somewhere near Jerusalem. But there is no place for a Jewish state in Palestine, not even a national-Jewish state. The Jews were driven out 2,000 years ago, and that should be final, similar to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain 500 years ago." The problem with Muslim elites could be seen again, even at the University of California at Irvine, where the Muslim Student Union organized a meeting entitled "A World Without Israel" - cut and dry. Also in May came a colorful radio confession by the editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi Abd al-Halim Qandil: "Those who signed the Camp David agreement ... can simply piss on it and drink their own urine, because the Egyptian people will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli entity." Qandil's bald statement drove home a very sobering realization: in 2005, I still cannot name a single Muslim leader (or a journalist, or an intellectual) who has publicly acknowledged the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between two legitimate national movements. One side dreams of a world without Israel, the other sees Israel as a major player in the democratization and economic development of the region. Will this clash of expectations burst into another round of bloodshed? My heart goes out to all the Europeans and Americans who believe they have found a spark of flexibility on Israel's legitimacy in the progressive Muslim camp. But looking ahead at the plentiful attempts to build bridges to the Muslim world, one wonders whether this outpouring of goodwill should not first be harnessed toward hammering out basic common goals and educational campaigns to promote them, rather than glossing over oceans of fundamental disagreement. Failure to address uncomfortable differences has a terrible way of extracting higher costs later on. ---------- The writer is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, an organization that promotes cross-cultural understanding named after his son, a Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.