How Hate Dies

By Johanna McGeary

Love thy neighbor. A simple precept all too difficult to practice. So when the lion and the lamb do lie down together, everyone is surprised. Hate is such a ferocious force that we are awed to see it fade away. Yet we have seen that happen with amazing speed in the past four years as one of the two great conflicts of our age vanished: the Berlin Wall fell, the cold war ended, the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, in a moment that astonishes the spirit as well as the mind, the other great enmity recedes as Israelis and Palestinians embrace. "In my heart," says Israel's former President, Chaim Herzog, "I feel we are living history."

What this is all about is breaking the matrix of hate. The conflicts that always seem most implacable spring from an intensity of loathing rooted in the conviction that it was "us or them": enemies who could not live together, ideas that could not compromise, land demanded entirely by one claimant. Outside intervention might have quelled the quarrels, but only if one side could be vanquished. In the struggle between Western democracy and communism, the danger of using force was literally too great. In the five wars between Arabs and Israelis, neither side could obliterate the other.

Statesmen preen with the conceit that they can alter the forces of history and cool the passions of humanity with their bold leadership or clever diplomacy, and on occasion they do. But in the case of ingrained historic hatreds, true change can come only from the volition of the peoples involved. For reasons that can be explained by hardheaded circumstance -- though not fully understood -- men wake up one morning exhausted by their enmity and replace it with more rational considerations, a resetting of the psychic gyroscope that finally counts the cost of hatred too high. From that point, peace is possible.

Of course that psychological decision is not always sufficient. If the Soviet Union had not wasted its resources on subversion abroad, unilateral arms buildups and aggressive international mischief, it might have sustained its oppressive empire for many more years. The unrelenting pressure from the U.S. and NATO that forced Moscow into bankruptcy opened the way for dissent that swelled to overwhelming dimensions. A whole realignment of the geopolitical stars brought Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat to their fateful accord: the end of the cold war eliminated superpower rivalry for the affections of Arab states, and made Israel realize that it could not count on a strategic alliance with the U.S.; victory in the Gulf War made the U.S. the sole regional power, opened the door to diplomacy, and cut Arafat off from his treasurers.

But rational self-interests only gain the upper hand when one side has worn out its ardor in denying the other side's humanity. That time comes when people understand that their malevolent dreams cannot be realized: neither Israel nor the P.L.O. can destroy each other. Or that moment arrives when two groups realize they do not have the wherewithal to defeat each other but can actually become stronger if they combine resources. South African whites cannot suppress the blacks without exacting a death toll they cannot tolerate; neither can the blacks shoot their way to power. By joining hands in a multiracial transition council, they can lift the international sanctions that have beggared them both. Such realizations come hard, over a long arc of years, after all attempts to demolish the enemy are done.

Sometimes the people reach that point first; sometimes their leaders do. Popular sentiment for an accommodation between Israel and the Arabs has been pushing up through the Middle East soil for six or seven years, ripening but not ready. Who's to say, exactly, what made an avowed terrorist and a gruff, tough soldier reckon the time to pluck it had come? Rabin, hero of the Six-Day War, stern enforcer of the occupation, talked about territorial compromise but seemed an unlikely figure to break long-standing taboos. As Defense Minister during the early days of the intifadeh, he vowed to defeat it with "force, might and beatings," but the uprising ended up changing him. Instead, back in February 1988, Rabin told fellow Labor Party members: "I've learned something in the past 2 1/2 months: you can't rule by force over 1 1/2 million Palestinians." So simple a lesson, so hard to learn.

There is a lesson for the U.S. too: no globocop, however powerful, can step in to wipe out the hatreds that have made Bosnia, Somalia, Liberia, Kashmir, the Caucasus run with blood. U.S. power can be brought to bear successfully in conflicts like the Gulf War that are not principally about hate but about aggression, power, territorial acquisition -- the old game of nation states. The U.S. can cajole and encourage accommodation in lots of political, diplomatic, even military ways, but it cannot fundamentally change the minds of people determined to make their hatred for each other the reason for living: they have to do it themselves. At best, the U.S. might defeat one side by force of arms, but that often proves temporary when the underlying grievances are not eradicated. Nor are Americans ready to spend the money and lives that such bloody methods require: witness Bosnia.

Some practitioners of hate felt free to carry on their animosities on the assumption that, to prevent a world war, a higher power would save them from themselves. Yugoslavia's breakaway states figured the U.S. or Europe would rescue them before it was too late. Historians will argue for years over whether the deployment of U.N. troops in the summer of 1991 would have kept Bosnia's simmering passions in check and prevented the carnage. Somalia's clan anarchy now seems stoppable only if the U.S. forcibly disarms or defeats the rivals -- a job it refused to undertake at the start of Operation Hope. But the new world order in which the sole superpower can prevent or purge most -- or even any -- of the globe's hate wars is a fantasy. It is the nature of huge barriers, once they have fallen, to seem small in retrospect. The Berlin Wall, substantial as it was, now seems a frail dike that could never have withstood the floodwaters. The resistance of white South Africans, once so unyielding, looks like the shell of a not-so-mighty tank. The evil empire of the Soviet Union now appears to have been a Potemkin enemy. If Rabin and Arafat can untangle the barbed wire separating Arabs and Jews, history will one day record that their blood feud began to lose its thrall in a flash of signatures.

With reporting by LISA BEYER/JERUSALEM