December 1995

Older Arabs and Israelis are more likely to bridge gaps in certain crucial areas. Emphasis on positive human exchange among Generation X’ers and pride of ownership by Palestinians will reduce hostility. Real changes in geopolitics, the calculus of future war scenarios, and increased apathy and individualism of Israel’s Generation X require rethinking matters of principle till now defended by human assets. Alienation of Generation X in Israel by an increasingly marginalized religious establishment carries consequences pitting secularist Israelis not only against fellow Jews but against their Arab counterparts as well. This alienation among Israel’s future generation may constitute a more existential threat to Israel than does the real and/or perceived hostility and plots of its Arab neighbors, an assessment borne out by recent cataclysmic events.

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I have had the good fortune to make and keep many friends of all religions in all socio-econornic levels in several Middle Eastern countries. I am perpetually shocked at how many people I know who have traveled representing the IMF and various foreign ministries never meet any ordinary people, particularly in the 21-35 age bracket. While we in the US tend to feel such people are insignificant, abroad these people who were ignored when they studied here are being put into top technocratic positions and they are truly becoming princes in their countries. Take Khaled, a 24 year old senior investment advisor of a major Arab bank. Or Barak, a 27 year old Israeli doing big deals in Mongolia and Cuba with ex-KGB agents. Or Awni, a 30 year old consultant who just arranged deals for a top US bank and hotel chain. Or Ayman, a 21 year old attorney who is mulling over 6 offers of employment from top firms and companies in his country. I can’t think of any 25 year old attorney in the entire US who has more than 2 or 3 offers in this environment. These people will, in ten years, be making the decisions that determine whether the peace process bears fruit at ground level, in enduring ties between people.

What do these Future Generation Arabs and Israelis think and how does it affect the overall calculus in evaluating regional prospects?

In short, these people know they’ve been lied to by their leaders, are clear-headed and non-ideological, business people and are eager to get on with the business of peace. When the Ramadan fast ended during one Amman meeting, I pulled out a stack of Israeli candy bars which were eagerly consumed and enjoyed. Jordanians watch the Simpsons on Israel TV, root for the Maccabee Tel Aviv basketball team, surf the Internet and watch MTV. They abhor the pornography shown during family viewing hours on Israel TV. They shop at Safeway in Amman which has a Little Caesar’s pizza place inside, eat take-out Chinese on Thursday nights, and know the answers to more Trivial Pursuit questions than most of us do.

Politically, they have feelings and opinions but are increasingly willing to be sensitive to alternative viewpoints.

For example, Ayman is the youngest person ever to graduate from a DC-area law school with an LLM at 21 as law is a BA. degree in his country. He points to good Jewish professors and friends and likes to discuss Holmes’ judicial opinions. He wrote his thesis on maritime law and the peace treaty with Israel. He is Moslem and says there can’t be peace without Jerusalem. On the other hand, when we met he didn’t know the importance of Jerusalem or the Wailing Wall to the Jews and didn’t know that contrary to an agreement, the Jordanians didn’t let the Jews pray there from 1948 to 1967. Once the victim, the Jews don’t want to let it happen again, I said. Particularly since if you take away the Wall, there’s no Medina or Al-Aksa to turn to in the alternative. The point resonated. Another point: Amman is growing toward the periphery just as Jerusalem finds it hard to stay within its western borders. Jordanians agreed that anyone who would say they must freeze expansion or give up peace would be told to go to hell.

Ayman checked out my story about King Hussein warning Golda and Dayan in 1973 of the Arab surprise attack and said he was royally disillusioned with the Arab world that was no longer denying these events. “You find out that for 20 years the Likud was talking to the PLO, the King was committing virtual treason by coordinating with the Israelis, and everyone was essentially dealing behind everyone else’s back. The whole thing is a joke --  it’s real bullshit.” Ayman’s father used to be a high PLO official when they lived in Libya during the 70’s. Even though it was forbidden to have contacts with Israeli lawyers, he asked me to send him a list of top Israeli Law firms and contacts. He says he doesn’t care if his colleagues aren’t ready to do business with Israel and the law forbids it; he doesn’t want to be left behind. Don’t get the idea that he’s not without strong Palestinian sentiments; he’s just trying to deal pragmatically with reality.

Khaled plays the markets for his bank. He is watching the Israeli market closely and, he confides, his country’s economic policy-makers are coordinating with their Israeli counterparts and have been doing so for years.

Though at peace, very few Jordanians in this age bracket have met Jewish Israelis except when they have seen soldiers bearing arms. Several people said to me, “you’re the first Jew I’ve ever met who wasn’t holding a gun.” Most Jewish Israelis have only seen Jordanians as Palestinians when they stopped them at checkpoints or searched them at borders, Obviously, so far they have had no good reason to like each other. They may not like each other even in peace.

The Israelis that will seek to do business with Jordan are perceived as rougher and slicker who will walk around with their cellular telephones looking like they want to do everything in one day and to take advantage of the stupid Jordanians that can’t be trusted. The Palestinian-Jordanians, a more European than Arab classy and soft-spoken breed, aren’t stupid and aren’t going to take kindly to being grabbed by what they will perceive as the fly-by-night opportunistic Israelis. They figure that Israelis look down on them and will try to take advantage and to grab. They know Israel is strong; they respect the “clever” Jew (I heard that word used a lot) for making money, being thrifty and for building up a strong state against the odds. Culture Clash: Israel is a place where you push to get ahead or lose your place. Jordan is a place where you play by the rules, mind your manners and take your time, or get pushed aside.

Jordanians don’t believe that the average Jew likes to kill people. On the other hand, they find Jews to be cheap. A president of a major travel agency said he strongly dislikes working with Jewish tourists as they are always demanding the world and never want to pay for it. If a Jew is “dirty” it’s usually in a monetary sense. They didn’t take kindly to tourists bringing in their own food and taking hotel towels. Of course, when they hear about kosher laws it makes them think twice about the brown-bagging. That Moslems shun toilet paper appears neanderthal-like till one learns they prefer bidets, particularly given the grocery bill produced by large families.

There’s also the idea of “who knows what will happen tomorrow” that drives Israelis but doesn’t drive Arabs the same way. The Jordanian’s first reaction to the concept is that if the Jews don’t know what will happen tomorrow, that must mean they feel weak. But, as I explained and they later agreed, it’s more complex. For example, the Jew will some to Amman and deal in the short term for now because he isn’t convinced the peace will last. 99% of Israelis know someone who either died or was wounded in uniform or as a civilian and the daily news of conflict in the region is not just statistical but personal. Kids in high school see their friends die in the army and wonder if they’ll be next. Everyone in Israel wore gas masks during the Gull War. So of course they drive like crazy, aren’t looking to buy real estate in Amman just yet and tend to grab what they can since they don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

In contrast, the Jordanians I spoke to said that fewer than 5 out of 100 know anyone in the army who got hurt or died. Terrorism is not an issue in Jordan which is very safe. Open opposition to the King and not following the rules in Jordan are just not in the cards -- not in a place where the King’s smiling photogenic countenance is EVERYWHERE (even in gas stations) and everyone fears the savage but effective Bedouin army/police that deify the King. So time passes more casually. The Palestinians have a sense of time but in a longer span -- say decades; the Hashemites I ran into have virtually no sense of time and couldn’t care less if you come in and visit Jordan or not or do business there or not. The King is moving unusually quick to solidify the new concept of peace; people over 40 say “We need time to adjust; we’re trying; time will solve all complications. Just give us a chance to come around to all this.”

The Palestinians fear the more aloof Crown Prince Hassan will not deal as beneficently with them as does King Hussein. Logic says Hassan would be crazy to kill the golden goose by stifling the Palestinians, Of course, logic never stopped regimes from eradicating their brand of cosmopolitans among them, the Jews for instance. This shared history of outsidership and of being despised among the nations -- a sort of kinship among enemies (ie: the joint emphasis on education and working hard to get ahead and then making money which draws the jealousy of the society around them) -- is felt more by Palestinians about Jews more so than Jews as to Palestinians. Jews don’t know Palestinians and their stories; they don’t feel for them. Some Stories: I shared a taxi from the border with a man who left Egypt and his family on his own to go to university in Amman because a Palestinian couldn’t get into an Egyptian university in the mid 1970’s. He brought me to his house for dinner and then dropped me off at Imad’s for the night. Imad was evicted from Kuwait after the Gulf War to Dubai and is now in Jordan and is only in college. Khaled at the bank was thrown out of Kuwait along with his family after the Gulf War. How can these encounters not affect my feelings?

Essentially, the “peace” envisioned by Rabin’s Israel was “redeployment of forces to more efficient positions.” It was based on separating Israelis and Palestinians from each other. In Rabin’s military sense, peace was based on cynicism plus the knowledge of all parties that, for the first time, any cost of future war will have to be borne mostly by the parties themselves and that none of them can afford it. Peres envisions more interaction and fewer fences. The Jordanians view the peace as an economic imperative. The state of war has gained nothing and is economically inefficient. Jordanian Palestinians fear that gains by West Bank Palestinians from the peace will be limited. However, the Jordanian Palestinians feel as much kinship with their West Bank counterparts, even when they visit, as American Jews have with Israeli Jews which is not much at all.

Israelis say that no matter what Palestinians say they won’t be able to resist the temptation to try and overthrow the Hashemite rulers of Jordan and, being 70% of the country, maybe they’ll succeed. The Israelis are absolutely sure that the Hashemite rulers of Jordan are opposed to a Palestinian state; the Palestinian Jordanians refuse to believe this. How do you know these things, I asked, have you ever met one of these people? Of course not.

Palestinian elites make up 90% of the Jordanian business community. They are making hordes of money and live palatially and better than most of us. They say that if they controlled the government, they would fight amongst themselves just as the Palestinians are doing on the West Bank. Basically, they don’t want to ruin a good thing by importing Palestinian rule to the East Bank of the Jordan. They’re quite happy with Hashemite rule, they say. On the other hand, they feel that free movement of people between Jordan and the West Bank within a confederation will help West Bankers achieve normal lives and businesses and perhaps make them more reasonable to Israel’s taste in the future. The separation envisioned by Rabin’s Israel cut against this vision, ultimately to the Palestinians’ detriment. The question now is whether Peres’s more integrated vision will be matched by Arab readiness to contend with the competitive forces that such integration will impose; all indications are that they will and are so doing, because they know they must submit to these global trends if they are not to fall further behind.

The root of the challenge of the peace is mutual suspicion based on lack of contact of a positive nature. Israelis and Arabs don’t trust each other. Israelis say: “The Arabs just tell you what you want to hear. They talk a lot and do nothing. They will invite you into their house and stab you after you leave.” So can I believe anything I heard?

In Jordan I did not shy away from controversy but was not adversarially argumentative. I got the impression across the board of elites -- Palestinians and Jordanians, ages 8 through 80, Christians and Moslems -- that I was talking to reasonable and sophisticated people more or less on the same wavelength (usually depending on age). Israelis, particularly natives and Sefardis, tell you that’s Western naivete at work. “We lived with them for 50 years; you don’t know the neighborhood.”

True, but most of these people don’t know any of these people personally or speak Arabic. When they do see them, it’s in a military context. Even Israeli Arab professionals who speak Hebrew and English, were schooled in England, drive fancy cars and eat falafels in West Jerusalem are non-entities to them.

You’d think the up and coming generation of Sefardi Israelis would have more in common with the Arabs than the European stock that runs the country. But after my experiences, it’s clear that the Sefardis’ experience with Arabs leads them to utterly mistrust them while the cosmopolitan Ashkenazis mix better with the Palestinians. The Ranin/Peres team raced not only against time but a generation and cultural gap as well as they look at the next generation of Israelis coming to power.

I spoke with people who walk around with NBA-logoed basketball caps, and play the same games such as soccer, basketball and tae kwon doe. I’ve had more interesting conversations with guys my age in Jordan than similarly aged co-religionists in Jerusalem or the Upper West Side where the conversations can be limited to Jewish geography. Having traveled for business in many countries I compare Jordan favorably when it comes to follow-through and professionalism, and the general feeling that you say X and the other person understands you. Memos and correspondence come back timely word processed in Microsoft Word and in the Queen’s English.

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, I think we can do business with these people. The older generation will talk a lot and be cautious and slow to sign; they will make excellent and loyal friends for the long term, if dealt with honorably. Leaders from both countries must invest in having more human exchanges in the 21-35 age bracket. As Jews and Arabs meet, it will help eliminate misconceptions. When I was preparing to go to Jordan, I asked for assistance from the US, Israel and Jordan and from Jewish and Christian organizations in facilitating such exchanges; the response from all sides was virtually non-existent and reflected a total ignorance of the potential and reality.

Generation X won’t stand on ceremony; the ability to accommodate to a new reality without calling the move a concession is rather liberating to a generation that feels freed of emotional baggage. In such a world, the Arabs can put a fence around the Orient House and declare it the capitol of Palestine and fly the Islamic flag over the Al-Aksa mosque. Will it truly change anything in East Jerusalem, where Jews are afraid to go? I personally feel safer in Amman than in East Jerusalem where my taxis got stoned and the hostility is palpable.

Clearly I am influenced by personal contact with people who have been shunted from one country to another and want a place they can call their own. I am sensitive to the fact that the world has changed; the communist menace no longer manipulates a proxy rivalry in the Middle East. I don’t believe there will be a war coming from the north or east with tanks coming over the Jordan River. Attacks may come by missile from Syria or Iran with specific objectives, but mutually assured destruction capability offered by Israel has deterred and will continue to deter unconventional attack. Peres, the father of Israel’s nuclear program, won’t budge on this point and Egypt, the country most offended, no longer seriously contests the Israeli program. The idea that the West Bank is a buffer zone makes sense if you expect tanks to come; who has tanks that constitute a threat and how will they ever get to the border undetected in 1995 now that Israel has spy satellites watching Iraq? More relevant, who can afford to pay to go to war? The rich Arab countries are going bankrupt, Saudi Arabia included. The party – the indulgence of bankrolling phony struggles -- is over. Arabs on both popular and elite levels fully realize they face far more existential threats from each other than from Israel. Legendary bogeymen atrophy.

There is no dispute that Israelis occupy much territory that was not originally partitioned to them and which is no longer desired by a significant segment of the citizens of Israel, particularly the Generation X’ers (the majority of them secular) being asked to physically defend it. In over 20 years of right-wing government, less than 2% of Israel’s population moved to the territories. Today’s generation of young Israelis is, more than anything, individualistic and apathetic. Every grand prize on a TV show is either a trip abroad or a car. Skiing in Switzerland and lower taxes are much higher priorities than reserve duty and maintaining an army on the Golan. Young Israelis will leave the country given that kind of choice. Partly driving Rabin’s struggle for peace was the pressure by villa-desiring Generation X’ers upon the establishment. Even as Rabin tried to deliver he was aghast at the distinct absence of willingness to sacrifice shown by Generation X.

Generation X’ers will not shoulder the tax burden and personal costs of having 1,000 troops for several million dollars a year defend 400 Jews who insist on living among 120,000 antagonized Arab residents of Hebron. They won’t relate to Yechiel Leiter’s heart-tugging story of 8 year old Hebron kids crouching down on the floor of school busses going to and from school. Their reaction will be to look at the childhood these people are denying these kids; using kids as pawns is not going to be admired when these observers would rather move a mile away to Kiryat Arba and have a life. Sure, all Generation X’ers would in theory prefer possessing all of Eretz Israel without cost. They would be happier if the Arabs disappeared and the world were filled only with their kind of people. The Arabs feel similarly from their end. So would most people in their most candid moments. But let’s get real.

I wonder that if God matters to the religious Zionist parties why He is never given credit for sustaining the Jewish people for the past 5,756 years? Surely God will not let a duly elected government of Israel commit national suicide? If it does, perhaps the Jews deserve to withdraw and raise the risk factor. The Bible said the Biblical land of Israel was a privilege, not a right. Jews would lose it if they didn’t deserve it. Is withdrawal from the territories a divine punishment for backing a secularist government and pursuing policies that to a degree give in to society’s increased unwillingness to sacrifice for common purposes? In such a prism the turn toward an almost hopelessly secular, hedonistic and individualistic Israel with its Cable TV, McDonalds cheeseburgers and Tel Aviv Friday night shrimp fests is more of an existential threat to Israel than the Arabs will ever be.

Not only has the fixation by religious Zionists on territory alienated Generation X as it conflicted with convenience and the pursuit of more earthly pleasures, but the assassination of Rabin stemming from a sense that the sanctity of land exceeded that of human life marginalized the movement on moral grounds.

Mainstream rabbis realize more than they have in many years that they stand at the abyss. While it is convenient to point fingers at secularists and Arab bogeymen, they recognize the failure of Israel’s rabbinate after 45 years to convince the majority of Israelis that religion is good for them. Even the mainstream National Religious Party founded on integrating religion with mainstream Zionism finds itself marginalized. The National Religious Party Is virtually admitting defeat and searching for a new program in tandem with the new reality. For starters, it now accepts the inevitability of the Oslo agreements.

Young secular Israelis are not only ignorant as to religion --  they are turned off by it and don’t want to know. Future diplomats from the Foreign Ministry specifically asked me at a Friday night dinner I hosted in Jerusalem if I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t wear skullcaps at the table. Youngsters sneak pieces of cheese into Burger Ranch restaurants to be able to eat cheeseburgers. They are revolting against corruption in the rabbinate which they perceive withholds kosher certification for reasons having nothing to do with food, blackmails the government to prevent convictions of rabbi-politicians and extorts money from the national treasury for yeshivas.

No need for the suicide-fearing nationalists to worry or the pacifists to leave their posts -- vigilance will not disappear. Enough Arabs will always hate Jewish guts. Terrorism won’t stop, even under the best of circumstances. It’s easy worldwide for committed sophisticated party-poopers to blow up planes and massacre in the town square. Beyond the immediate future which will be bloody and nerve-racking, integration amidst cantonization will work because it benefits both sides and there is no more realistic alternative given the physical realities at ground level. Each community will reside in its canton-enclave under its own power but the two peoples are destined to be in each other’s faces to the extent the exigencies of commerce and convenience permit. As Palestinians gain pride of ownership, they will be less hostile just as native Blacks in Kingston, Jamaica are than their scowling counterparts in America’s inner cities where Black rule exists in fact but not in reality.

I have emphasized the Israeli secular-religious dynamic as it pertains to Generation X because it is unique in the Middle East. Particularly with regard to the convulsions faced by religious Zionist leaders following the Rabin assassination, the fight is on for the hearts and minds of this sector of the population that will inevitably have its say regarding the type of peace Israel has with its neighbors.

There is concern that Arab secularists are more respectful toward religion (even Judaism) and points of etiquette, modesty and heritage than their Jewish counterparts in Israel and abroad. Leaders of Israel Bonds Future Generation Division in America often don’t know where the Golan Heights are, what kosher food means and what the Jewish holidays are. Israelis to dangerous degrees don’t care and don’t want to know. Jewish religionists are increasingly not interested in knowing Palestinians, let alone non-religious Jews.

In a world increasingly bipolar based on religionists and secularists, some say that the new alignment in the Middle East is Israel and the moderate Arabs against expansionist Islamic extremist states and dictators with attitudes. But even moderate Arabs are more tolerant toward religious observance than their Israeli counterparts. Failure to stem the rising tide of negativity toward religion by Israel’s Generation X threatens to spill over into a culture clash with otherwise Internet-surfing and Whopper-eating Arab counterparts. In the meantime, the damage that will occur within Israel as Israelis fail to relate to each other cannot be underestimated. 

New thinking as it regards Generation X’ers in the Middle East realizes that existential threats facing nations in the Middle East also emanate from sources that are not always convenient to finger.

Ivan Cimentt is President of Dollar Box --  an international telecommunications company in Rosslyn, Virginia and an attorney based in Washington, DC.