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Middle East Peace Talks, and the Problem of Land

(Los Angeles Times) Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz - Israelis and Palestinians see the contested land they share in radically different ways. For many Israelis - not only settlers - the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is the Promised Land, the same rugged hills where their biblical forefathers pitched their tents after being delivered from Egypt, the same landscape the first Zionist pioneers a century ago reclaimed as their own. In Israel, even the fiercest secularists can trace their attachment to their homeland to the holy covenant between God and his chosen people, an ancient promise fulfilled anew by the Jewish state's Zionist founders. Israeli children are required to study the Bible throughout high school, where the good book - recast as a lesson in history and geography - underscores modern-day Israel's bonds to its storied and sacred past. And though Muslim Palestinians revere Jerusalem for its holy sites, the majority of Palestinians do not scour the West Bank's hillsides, ravines, wadis and groves in search of ancient ruins or transcendental meaning; for them, the land is earthly, not sacred. Religious language may jar outsiders accustomed to apparently rational, self-interested disputes over tangible differences. But it is foolish to try to pretend away a history of deep, fierce and contending passions. Todd Gitlin is a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University. Liel Leibovitz is an editor at Tablet Magazine.
2010-09-07 11:02:31
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