The recent Geneva Peace Accord exists in some sort of alternate dimension:
Representatives from two sides in a conflict hack out an agreement without actually representing either side or coming to agreement on many of the more pressing issues; a document that will guarantee peace has no provisions for stopping violence. An event earlier this month featured the authors of the Accord; adding to the paradox a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who always tells us that peace can be achieved no matter what failed to contain his rage when criticized.
So step inside this house of mirrors where seeing a distorted reality is believing emphatically in it and you’ll find yourself taken away by the trip if only for a while.
The Israel Policy Forum is a strange brew of lobbying organization think tank and hobnobbing facilitator. Its chair is Jack Bendheim a powerful Jewish Democrat a guy who has Ehud Barak over to his house for sleepovers – when Barak is in office. As it approached its tenth-anniversary commemoration dinner on December 4 it planned on having New York Times columnist Tom Friedman keynote the event as well as a discussion with analysts Steven Cohen and David Makovsky. When Israeli leftist Yossi Beilin and Palestinian Yasir Abbed Rabbo the lead parties in producing the Geneva Accords started their tour of the United States that week the IPF dinner added them to the schedule too late to have their names on the programs.
So Friedman was still something of the main attraction and yet in many ways not – producing yet another surreal sequence as the stage was set for the Electric Kool-Aid Peace Accord Test.
Roaming the reception hall as attendees mingle is kind of like attending a high school reunion: it’s been some time since these players in the American Democratic party and the Israeli Left had power but for the night they go on in suspended animation as though senior year never ended. Politicians out of power are routinely referred to by their former titles but Democrats seem to do it more often and with less subtlety than Republicans: The President in former-staffer parlance is still Bill Clinton and similar titling abounds for former senators governors and secretaries.
In a room away from the main reception the dinner’s honorees and featured guests mingle while the members of the press try to get as many of their questions answered as possible. Cornering Beilin and Rabbo is pretty easy. I ask them what their agreement contains that will ensure Israeli security and the answer is pretty much bubkes.
On the question of whether their agreement addresses the Palestinian right of return they’re similarly lacking in answers. On the two questions that have most vexed peacemakers in the past these two fellows have absolutely nothing to contribute. But these kinds of questions aren’t important in the world of the Geneva Accord; we’re supposed to be just accepting that this plan is new and important and a platform for peace – we’re supposed to be sippin’ Geneva juice.
Laid Back
The idea that Beilin and Rabbo don’t really represent anyone or anything is supposed to be similarly irrelevant. It’s a reality that fluctuates over the course of the night: when credit needs to be given to the accomplishment they’re important leaders in the struggle for peace; when the obvious shortcomings of their effort are noted well take a chill pill man nobody ever said these guys were actual leaders.
And the Accord isn’t an accord – when it’s being trumped up it’s an agreement; but when you get caught in the nitty-gritty it’s not an agreement it’s really an accord; and at times when it’s meant to be separated from its authors it’s a document. Since the reality is fluid the words can be too. Dig?
