I sat on a curved metal bench last week in Congo Square in New Orleans playing a djembe. Surrounded by about 20 drummers, on congas, djembes, and other drums, making rhythm happen. For more than 250 years, hand drummers have gathered in this place to play together, conjure up the spirits, the ancestors, and slip into a mystical, African/Caribbean/indigenous beat, a pulse passed from leader to drummers and back.
I felt lost in time but deeply rooted in this spiritual place. One of four or five white drummers, including my beloved younger adult child, who has lived here for nearly a decade. Their time here, and the pull of my grandchild, now six, brought me to the heart of one of the most wonderfully diverse cities in America.
New Orleans has a long colonial history and many problems – hurricanes, heat, humidity, wealth gaps, limited resources, the mendacious politics of Louisiana. It has an intriguing mix of cultures, heartbeats, African, Caribbean, Creole, indigenous, European, Cajun, and more. It is a sinking city, surrounded by water that rises higher than the streets. The diversity and community of the city is palpable on every street corner.
One day this strange, enchanted, gritty place will be a submerged memory. But it is also a touchpoint in history. A place where a tragic, deep colonial experience is recognized and seen every day.
I think of this, especially now, when I see the deeply offensive and tragic genocide taking place in Gaza, where an estimated 30,000 Palestinians have paid the price of Israeli revenge for the criminal, violent attacks on Israeli settlements of October 7, while millions of others have been driven to the extremes of homelessness, violence, starvation, and medical disaster. My heart sank on October 7. I wept for the Israeli dead and feared for the vengeful riposte that Israel is now visiting on the Palestinian people.
I am not a scholar of the Middle East. In graduate school in the 1960s, I thought I might focus on that region. I ended up focusing, instead, on Western Europe, having concluded that Middle East problems were intractable and hopeless. I was right, though their very intractability would have guaranteed a lifetime of work.
My sense of the Middle East, historically, is that it, too, was engulfed in colonial enterprises in the 19th and 20th centuries. The French in Lebanon, the British in Egypt and elsewhere, the Americans, all entangled themselves in the Byzantine politics of the region, including Palestine. The region, itself, is a tangle of ethnic groups, religions, and nations. Even within the nations, as in New Orleans, there has been a patchwork of identities and cultures rubbing up against each other with a history of interaction and much historical acceptance of the actual diversity on the ground.
I tried to “stay out of it.” But I ended up working regional issues anyway, once I had left the academy. The Middle East is like sticky mud; it just keeps adhering to my policy hands no matter how much I try to brush it off.
As the Clinton administration’s White House budget official for national security programs, I traveled to Israel, Jordan and Egypt at what was, to me, the high point of a possible regional revolution that would combine Israeli capital and technology with Arab ingenuity creating strong economic growth. Yitzhak Rabin was the Israeli engineer of this vision; the Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, and Gulf Cooperation Council states were eager to define an integrated economic region that could help overcome the separation and conflict that had raged since 1948.
It was a time of hope and high expectations that were dashed with the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli extremist several months after my visit in 1995. With that and the rise of Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu, the vision died.
Netanyahu arrive promising security and safety for the Israeli people. Tragically, I think his policies, strategy and actions have produced the exact opposite – less security for the people of Israel. Expanding settlements inevitably exacerbated tensions with the Palestinians. Foot-dragging on the two-state formula laid out in the Oslo accords killed that prospect. A security “wall” added to the burden the Palestinian people bear. Draconian security crackdowns on Palestinians added to tension, conflict, and ill will.
Closing off Gaza and limiting its interaction with the Israeli economy has made the sad situation I saw there in 1995 into a tragedy even before the almost unimaginable horror being rained today on the occupants of Gaza.
Nor do I see positive prospects for the future. A cease-fire is a minimal first step, but it would do little to change the politics. The genocidal attacks on the Gazan population seem guaranteed to produce greater resentment and hostility, hardly conducive to understanding. The feckless and corrupt Palestinian Authority is a poor substitute for effective governance. A two-state solution seems even further away as long as the right wing of Israeli politics is in office. The prospects of electing a more centrist or Labor government are not promising, let alone what the Israeli right might do, should such a government accept the idea of a separate Palestinian state. Settlement residents would make such a state almost un-functional, in any case.
So, I am saddened by the turn of events and not optimistic for the future. A future of peaceful and generative inter-communal relationships seems far in the distance, if imaginable at all. Perhaps I was right, after all, to step back from Middle East regional politics back then.
There may be no Jerusalem drumming circle any time in the near future.
The Palestinians have no future as long as Netanyahu is in power. What many miss is that Israel doesn't either.