By strange designs of fate and family, the two places I’ve flown to most are southern California and Israel. And although the two occupy dramatically different places in the average American’s cultural inventory, I always find myself grouping them together.
After all, they share what my home state in the American Northeast lacks: a beautiful climate, an around-the-clock selection of amazing food, and rolling hills of semiarid scrub.
As of this week, Israel has followed southern California in another concurrence: its dry, rolling hills have broken out into an intense forest fire. On the slopes of Mount Carmel, which overlooks the bay city of Haifa, over 40 Israelis have been killed in what appears to be the worst blaze in recorded Israeli history.
For its concentration of regional power, Israel is ultimately a small country operating under serious spatial and material limitations. Representing the Jewish state’s greatest transferable asset, army units from around the country have been deployed to curb the fire’s spread and help with evacuation efforts.
But the renowned force of Israel’s first-world army simply hasn’t been big enough to take on the blaze alone. In recognition of this bind, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has reached out for help from Israel’s allies, partners, and neighbors.
Defying the expectations of international observers, Egypt and Turkey – both recently at diplomatic odds with Israel – have pledged the assistance of firefighting planes. The usually pugnacious Foreign Minister Lieberman is reported to be very thankful. This never happens.
What can the region learn from this rare flash of amity?
For one, even Israel, somehow transformed into the Goliath of the media’s Middle East narrative, is not all-powerful. Pro-Palestinian activists on the global left should recall that Israel is a small state operating under many special constraints – an important force for understanding.
They can take solace in the fact that for however well Israel’s government can leverage its voice in the conflict, there’s only so much it can defy. Small, rationally-acting countries are, as a rule, beholden to the actors that allow them to survive.
More importantly, the realization of Israel’s limits in unilateral problem-solving has alarming implications for the fundamental assumptions of the Israeli peace camp. A common stereotype holds that liberals in Tel Aviv want “peace”: a two-state solution that will get the international community off Israel’s back and the messy problems of the Palestinians squarely out of their view.
But if Israel can’t fight forest fires alone, who could imagine an independent Palestine taking up the challenge? In spite of the genuinely admirable state-building efforts of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Palestinians would emerge from the peace process poor, infrastructurally challenged, and politically divided – occupation or no occupation.
In truth, the two-state “solution” on its own does not entail a solution. If achieved within the right framework – the expectation of trade, social collaboration, and resource sharing – it can be the best path toward thenormalization of one of the world’s most enduringconflicts. If stumbled through willy-nilly, it could be an unimaginable disaster for all but the most radical.
The best model for a successful peace process, ending in a real solution, will depend on the novel “forest fire model.” Regional cooperation is key to any vision of a lasting peace – because, at the very least, a new Palestinian state and its realigning neighbor will without fail experience internal and cross-border “blazes.” Containing them is in the interest of everyone’s prosperity and security.
Taking another cue from the Mount Carmel forest fire debacle, the most reliable local agent for exercising action and maintaining stability will naturally remain the Israeli Defense Forces. Ideology aside, experts can safely agree that the IDF ranks among the world’s most intelligent, effective organizations – and will have to step in from time to time to fill the security void left by the end of the occupation.
As uncomfortable as the idea is for Palestinians and their advocates, they have no choice but to countenance it. Independence will remain a pipe-dream or a half-losing proposition until Israelis can be assured that it doesn’t mean Hamas raining down rockets on Tel Aviv and Haifa.
As for forest fires, on the other hand, Haifa has less of a choice these days. While we hope for a quick mitigation of the disaster, let’s take out of it a lesson: nobody wins without cooperation. It sounds trite, but then again – how’s not cooperating been working for the Middle East lately?
