Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 - (Page 8)

THE SKEPTIC I came away from a recent visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with the belief that people on both sides want peace. Both have grown sick of the conﬂict that has poured blood into the streets for so many years. Peace was the strongest hope expressed by just about every Palestinian and Israeli I met, both in government oﬃces and on the streets of Ramallah and Tel Aviv. Nevertheless, on the day that I arrived in Tel Aviv a suicide bomber killed several people at a restaurant. And on the day I tried to enter the Gaza Strip, Israel launched a fresh wave of air strikes. To understand this contradiction, I recently attended a George Washington University lecture on the prospects for Middle East peace by William Quandt, a University of Virginia political scientist and former National Security Council staﬀer who helped negotiate the Camp David Accords and the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of the 1970s. Quandt is skeptical of the current push for peace. He argued that it takes strong heroes to make the concessions necessary to create peace in the Middle East and there aren’t many heroes left. Many Arab and Israeli leaders have been assassinated by their own people and the current crop of leaders on both sides is weak and divided. Another troubled element of the equation is the United States, which must play a substantive mediation role. e U.S. government has had, however, only weak involvement. Quandt said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent and rushed eﬀort easily reminds him of the Clinton administration’s end-of-term push for peace. Even with the best of intentions, he said the Bush administration’s lastditch eﬀort is also destined for failure. Quandt believes the United States is the only country that has the leverage to push the parties to make peace, but we’re too busy dealing with other problems in the region. Quandt said another U.S. limitation is that the very strong Israel lobby in Washington makes it appear that we are more a partner of Israel and less a mediator between the two sides. Without that U.S. pressure, Israelis and Palestinians will likely do nothing more than 8 Winter 2007 maintain the bloody status quo. I now appreciate that, much as they say they want it, Israelis will not live free of terrorist attacks and Palestinians will not be free of their Israeli occupiers until their leaders are willing to negotiate through compromise. And those negotiations will not take place unless the United States is willing to take the risks of leadership to press a negotiated solution. Over the years we have seen wonderful photographs of Arab and Israeli leaders shaking hands as an American President looms in the background. But photo-ops don’t create peace. omas Strouse SUBMERGED Armed with interviews from the likes of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Kenya Nobel winner Wangari Maathai and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Russian premier and founder of the environmental Green Cross International, producer and narrator Leonardo Di Caprio premiered his environmental documentary, e 11th Hour, at a downtown Washington, D.C. theater this summer. e facts laid out in the ﬁlm make a central point: We’re screwed. To quote one scientist in the ﬁlm, “We are ultimately committing suicide.” Some of the data for the ﬁlm was presented in the form of computergenerated Robinson projections–those pull-down maps we studied in our high school classrooms–and the data suggests the changing shape of desertiﬁcation, water scarcity, deforestation, air pollution, water levels and other critical factors of the planet’s life. Speciﬁcally, certain countries will be abandoned by man for lack of water while others will be submerged under water. e ﬁlm made very few suggestions and oﬀered little opinion. e tone of the delivery was that all of this will happen. It showed us, in our 11th hour, what to expect. What’s the worst-case scenario? Earth becomes Mars, Di Caprio tells us. Earth could look like that. Oh, and by the way, that means no humans. A major argument in the ﬁlm is that we’ve been forcing the environment to adapt to our needs when it really should be the other way around. In biology class, I learned that the environment–through all its plants–exchanges carbon dioxide for oxygen and nitrogen; that’s how our atmosphere works. We are nitrogenbased life forms. Technologically speaking, we could do all that exchanging ourselves. If all the trees on earth are cut and all plant-life eradicated, we have the technology to do their job anyway; but it will cost us three times the current gross domestic product of all nations. It’s like creating bullet-proof vests out of Kevlar, which is not as strong as a spider web. Nature has a more cost-eﬀective way of maintaining our habitable environment and we should respect that. e ﬁlm delivers a punishing array of information relieved by instructions during the last quarter of the show on how we can do better. Diagrams galore and pictures of a perfect, environmentally sound world assaulted me, allowing no escape from massive, solar-powered cities and houses or artiﬁcial ecosystems designed to purify air and water. Di Caprio’s ﬁlm does not deliver new facts. e purpose here is to make clear that the time for action is passing fast. We are now, after all, in the 11th hour. During a panel discussion after the ﬁlm, I asked a Di Caprio co-producer what will happen in many of the lessdeveloped countries during this global warming. Her reply was, “It’s basically just a crapshoot.” Byron Grant CORRECTION From “Islands of Islam” in the fall issue, 49 Peace Corps volunteers were sent to Indonesia between 1963 and 1965, when the program closed. e nation’s ﬁrst elected leader, Sukarno, was an Indonesian nationalist who increasingly played democratic and communist forces against one another until his formal ouster by General Suharto in 1967. e language of instruction in Indonesia’s 9,000 high schools and 20 state universities is conducted in Bahasa Indonesian.

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Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 Contents President's Note Lafayette Park Note to Readers Commentary Letter from India Commentary Letter from Botswana Letter from Ha Teboho Letter from Jumbi Valley Letter from Mununga Letter from Medellin Giving Back Community News

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

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