How Hate Dies

• Share

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.