I just spent a bit more than three weeks in the United States, in the suburbs of the capital, and once again I had to deal with the intense and contradictory feelings of familiarity and strangeness. It's the country where I grew up, where I speak the native language like a native, but so much has changed in the 36 years that I've lived away from North America. Frequent visits and keeping up with the media - seeing American films and TV shows, reading American books and magazines - all that is not the same as living there.
On my last day in Washington, DC, I went into a Borders book store for the first time (!) and bought a couple of books, including
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, who may be a bit too glib for some people's taste, but he's definitely very smart and insightful. I read the book within a couple of days, on the plane home and in bed when jet lag gave me insomnia.
I was especially taken by the chapter on context: if you change the context in which people act, you can change their behavior. I began to wonder (and I am far from coming up with any answer) how it would be possible to change the context here in the conflicted Middle East so that the epidemic of violence would tip and an epidemic of non-violence might begin.
Long ago I was involved in Tai Chi, where, as in many Asian martial arts, the theory is that you can defeat your opponent not by overpowering him but by using his strength against him. The sub-title of Gladwell's book is something like: how a small change can make a big difference. The peace movement doesn't have the power to make big changes, but if it makes the right small changes in people's attitudes, in the context of behavior, they could lead to a big change. Up to now, the Israeli peace movement has been largely ineffective in changing attitudes. Obviously it's been doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing be?
So what's the connection between my opening paragraph about the strangeness of being in America for me and the rest of it, about the Tipping Point and changing the context of behavior? For me, the strangest (and most wonderful) thing about America was the visible change in racial relations. Over and over again I saw mixed groups of black, white, and Hispanic people walking in the street, sitting at tables in restaurants, passing each other on the street, in the most natural way.
When I was growing up, even in multi-racial New York City, it would have been very rare to see people of different races mingling. Something has tipped in America with respect to
race, and the election of a man with an African father as President is a symptom of the change, not a cause of it.
I'm not so naive as to think that discrimination is gone, or that people of darker color aren't disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and badly educated compared to people of lighter color, but the open, unselfconscious mingling shows that some of the fear and hostility that had marked race relations in the America I grew up in has abated. Black people are no longer invisible in the United States.
So couldn't the same thing happen between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine?
disused railway station to the west and the Mount Zion hotel, to the east. The Scottish Church, which appears in the photograph here, is to the north, and to the south is a recently refurbished stucco building that once housed part of the government printing office.
