President Barack Obama has repeatedly said that peace in the Middle East requires negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. PA president Mahmoud Abbas has been urged to resume negotiations with Israel, and no one has been more anxious for resumption of talks than Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The aficionada call this “conflict resolution,” and Washington has usually played the role of neutral mediator or “honest broker” in this diplomatic affair.
Evident here is the mentality of democracies. Since democracy is based on the primacy of consent or persuasion, democratic governments seek to resolve international conflicts by negotiations rather than by force or coercion.
But the exact opposite is the case of dictatorships, which is precisely what describes the Palestinian Authority. Since the domestic structure of dictatorships in general, and of Arab dictatorships in particular, is based on the primacy of coercion rather than consent, they generally seek to resolve disputes by the use of force or intimidation.
Moreover, whereas the modus operandi of democratic government is publicity, Arab dictatorships thrive on secrecy and duplicity. Thus, for democratic spokesmen to speak of “confidence-building” measures between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is to engage in Orwellian doublethink, the kind we should expect from the spokesmen of dictatorships.
Of course, “conflict resolution” and “confidence building” is the jargon employed by the morally neutral political science of modernity. This political science, whose father is Machiavelli, makes no distinction between good regimes and bad regimes. To do so, in contemporary language, is to make a “value judgment”—unbecoming today’s sophisticated political scientists.
Consider, however, the unsophisticated view of things—the view of the ordinary, decent citizen of a democracy.
This decent citizen makes a distinction between a “good citizen” and a “good man.” He defines a “good citizen” as a law-abiding person dedicated to the principles and goals of his country. Whether a “good citizen” is also a “good man” would then depend on the moral character of his country.
Reasoning on these lines, the “good citizen” of a democracy would be, to that extent, a “good man.” In contrast, the “good citizen” of a dictatorship —which is to say a person dedicated to the principles and goals of a dictatorship—would be, to that extent, a “bad man.”
Our decent but unsophisticated citizen makes these distinctions because he regards democracy as a good regime and a dictatorship as a bad regime.
Such a person may thus be puzzled by negotiations or a peace conference between Israel and the Palestinian Authority presided over by the United States. For at such a conference the spokesman of Israel, a democracy, will be negotiating with the spokesman of the Palestinian Authority, a dictatorship. But if a democracy is a good regime and a dictatorship is a bad regime, it follows from our previous definitions that a “good man” will be negotiating with a “bad man”!
This conclusion has a number of interesting implications. Our decent but naive citizen may ask: “Why would a good man want to negotiate with a bad man, when a bad man is bound to be untrustworthy. After all, honest men avoid doing business with known scoundrels.”
Our decent citizen may even ask: “Why should the President of the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, be so committed to bringing bad men and good men together at a peace conference?”
Compounding his moral confusion, our ordinary decent citizen might wonder: “Why should the leading spokesman of the most powerful democracy be ‘neutral’ or ‘evenhanded’ in a conflict between a democracy, a good regime, and a dictatorship, a bad regime; hence, why should he be impartial in a conference between good men and bad men? Nor is this all.
The more our decent citizen reflects on the subject, he may begin to wonder whether the good men at this conference are really good. He may even begin to suspect that the “good citizen” of a democracy is not exactly a “good man.” He may also draw the subversive conclusion that even though a democracy is preferable to a dictatorship, it is not intrinsically a good regime!
For although our decent citizen has not gone to college, this doesn’t mean he lacks discernment. Indeed, he may be more discerning, morally speaking, than morally neutral political scientists. He may even draw the conclusion that great learning and great stupidity often go well together under the same hat.
