Oh, My Goodness, Look at This Mess

Many years ago, when I was in the army, I had a client who had been convicted of murdering a fellow soldier over a minor dispute. I met him years after his conviction, when he was already well into his sentence in a civilian facility, and handled some outstanding issues for him, and was very surprised to find him delightful. Over the years I would meet lots of convicted murderers, many of whom committed the crime years before and matured to be thoughtful, kind, calm individuals, but back then I didn’t quite know what to expect so I was somewhat surprised by the wit, warmth, and kindness. The charges were pretty brutal, so when my client and I got to know each other, I asked him why he did it – what on earth was he thinking?

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “I think about this all the time, of course, and I’m so horrified by what I’ve done that sometimes it’s hard to believe I did it. But I did, of course. I don’t think I thought about it a lot in the heat of the moment. I was just so angry with him that I wished he didn’t exist anymore.”

When I heard yesterday’s press conference, that conversation with my client floated back into my mind, because the idea of wishing another person into nonexistence, wishing a problem someone else poses into nothing, is not really a solution. It’s the sort of thing three-year-olds confuse with problem-solving: “I wish he didn’t exist anymore.” Which is why it’s so on-brand for the current American administration.

The Trump proposal–I can’t think it’s serious, I suspect it was put forth publicly to bolster Netanyahu’s coalition–is absurd on its face (Netanyahu won’t need a plane to come home, he’ll be flying on the wings of his own ego). How does he plan to persuade so many people to move out of the home they know and love and have been willing to fight, and die, and kill for? Is the U.S. government going to offer a buy-out to every single Palestinian family? Does he understand that no other country–Jordan, Egypt–wants to absorb these people? Does he understand why? Is the proposition of American military boots on the soil putting people on trucks at gunpoint really a winner with the American public, of any political stripes? Even in the unlikely event that some people take him up on it, does he not realize it will be the political moderates with the better prospects, leaving behind the more radical ones firmly dug into ideological and literal tunnels? The delusional dimensions of this parallel the “river to the sea” chanters around me. Leave it to Trump to punch a hole in the wall and expand the Overton window in ways that beggar belief.

The crux of the matter is that there are two peoples on a smallish piece of land. Each one wants the other gone, wishes the other did not exist. It’s not a perfect symmetry, and no one can sell me on the idea that it is after what I’ve seen in the last year and a half (and certainly in the last few weeks), but from each perspective there are claims to the whole land, not to a percentage of it. On each side this is backed up by massive amounts of mythology, history, culture, politics. It is impossible–impossible!–for everyone to get what they want. And here we are, looking at a mess that no one wants to clean up. Cleaning up after ourselves is a job for grownups, and in this case everyone would have to alter their bargaining stances so fundamentally that I wouldn’t know where to start. But perhaps the best place to start is to understand that just wishing the other person did not exist is not a solution.