In the letters section of this week’s NY Times Magazine, Carol Haskill of San Francisco writes of the Middle East as
…a strange, timeless place where nothing has changed for thousands of years, where fierce hatreds are as ancient as the deserts and cannot be tamed or reasoned with in Western terms. We will never understand it.
She’s right about one thing: We will never understand the Middle East if we cling to gibberish of precisely this sort. The idea of the Middle East as somehow impervious to analysis, let alone dialogue and compromise, has been thoroughly debunked by Fred Halliday, among others. The Mideast conflict is an entirely modern phenomenon that can and should be studied comparatively (Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, etc.). The view outlined by Haskill is unfortunately widespread, and it’s very much a part of the problem.
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