Page:The Levant - Zone of Culture or Conflict.pdf/4

El-Youssef / The Levantine Review Volume 1 Number 2 (Fall 2012) and reach a peaceful agreement.” “Nothing” here means “we couldn’t get rid of them or destroy them, so we have to make a deal with them.”

No wonder the peace process has always looked like a half-baked process. When discussing what went wrong with the peace process an annoying expression was repeatedly used; “there is no culture of peace,” it was often said. This makes one imagine communities in the Middle East doing nothing all day long except digging trenches.

That is not true! The Levant is no poorer a place than any other in the culture of peace. But what has been lacking in the Levant is actually the imagination of peace; people for a long time have been living in one state of conflict or another; or a state of no peace and no war, that they have no idea how the world might look like without war or the expectation of conflict and violence. Indeed people of the Levant seem to have got used to such assumptions that the alternative appears to them as an unreal world.

In a literary event that brought together a group of Palestinian and Israeli writers, just before the failure of Camp David Talks in 2000, I remember the late Israeli writer Batya Gur commencing her talk by reading Cavafy’s famous poem Waiting for the Barbarians. There had been a moment of exaggerated hope at the time; a time during which a breakthrough in the Israeli-Syrian peace talks was expected. Such a breakthrough would have meant that the last major stumbling block before achieving total peace will have been surmounted. Yet, in spite of the exaggerated hope, as Gur explained, one could nevertheless still sense the feeling expressed in the last two lines of Cavafy’s poem: “Now what will become of us without barbarians? / Those people were some kind of solution.” Whenever there has been a breakthrough, the sense of “Now what will become of us without barbarian?” has spread. Why? Because imagination has failed to keep up with reality.

Imagination is meant to precede reality and to provide examples, models, and images of how the new reality, the world in a state of peace, would look like. Instead, when the time for peace arrived, imagination seemed to lag behind, stuck within an old world languishing in the tyranny of the memory of a dark past and an attitude of scepticism towards the “other.” No wonder that every time a peace treaty has been signed, people felt that they were venturing into the wilderness or at least, like those who waited for the never-­arriving barbarians, that they have been deprived from a source of consolation.

The question in the title of this essay, “is the Levant a zone of conflict or culture?” is an ironic one indeed. Anyone with a token knowledge of the Levant knows that the Levant is of both, conflict and culture; it is only that the people of the Levant need to be reminded that theirs is a land of great culture, and that they need pay more attention to it. I was born and brought up in Rashidiyyé—a Palestinian refugee camp in Southern Lebanon. Rashidiyyé was, and still is, as bad as a ISSN: 2164-6678