Comment: two states.(The Talk of the Town)(Israeli and Palestinian border conflict)

Like any great tragedy, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is full of smaller sadnesses. One of these is that, as the Israeli tanks have rolled through the West Bank, discussion of the conflict has begun to take the form of horror stories about whichever side is the enemy: the orders placed for explosives, the crushed houses and cars, the baby stillborn at a checkpoint, the bombers blown up on the way to kill more people. This is not yet an all-out war -- in all-out wars, we should remind ourselves before completely giving in to despair, many more people die than have died in Israel and Palestine since the second Intifada began -- but it is close enough to produce the pattern of thinking that leads to wars, the mutual conviction that the other side has moved morally beyond the pale.

It is difficult for Americans to imagine their way into the Middle East: it feels as if we were being presented with two competing stories of a people's absolute righteousness (in both the grand historical sense and the day-to-day atrocity sense) and asked to choose which one to believe. Americans aren't used to making choices like that. But it may be useful to contemplate some similarities -- historically inexact but emotionally resonant -- with a dismal period in our own history: post-Civil War Reconstruction in the South.

In 1865, the United States won a crushing victory over the Confederate States of America, just as Israel won the Six-Day War, in 1967. Then the government commenced a military occupation of the land it had conquered. Just as the Civil War had two intertwined rationales, union and the abolition of slavery, the occupation during Reconstruction had two rationales, national security and guaranteeing the citizenship rights of the former slaves. (One upside-down aspect of the comparison is that, if the South was America's West Bank, the conquering power's settler equivalents, the carpetbaggers, represented the political left, not the right. Another is that the most obviously oppressed people in the American story, the former slaves, were much more concerned with establishing political and economic rights than with claiming a homeland.) The former Confederates, having lost their recourse to conventional military power as a result of having lost the war, turned to terrorism as the means to their political ends. All through Reconstruction, and particularly toward the end, the South went through cycles of terrorist violence -- by the Ku Klux Klan and, later, the White League and similar organizations, against the carpetbaggers and politically active African-Americans -- followed by military crackdowns.

For most of this period, the United States was led by a politically unsophisticated career military man who had personally conquered much of the occupied territory and was sympathetic to the goals of the settlers, Ulysses S. Grant. The occupation proceeded in a heartbreaking fashion: the longer it went on, the bolder the terrorists became, and the less general support there was for it. In the fall of 1875, Grant declined the entreaties of ...