El-Youssef / The Levantine Review Volume 1 Number 2 (Fall 2012)
and reach a peaceful agreement.” “Nothing” here means “we couldn’t get rid of them or destroy them, so we have to make a deal with them.”
No
wonder
the
peace
process
has
always
looked
like
a
half-baked
process.
When
discussing
what
went
wrong
with
the
peace
process
an
annoying
expression
was
repeatedly
used;
“there
is
no
culture
of
peace,”
it
was
often
said.
This
makes
one
imagine
communities
in
the
Middle
East
doing
nothing
all
day
long
except
digging
trenches.
That
is
not
true!
The
Levant
is
no
poorer
a
place
than
any
other
in
the
culture
of
peace.
But
what
has
been
lacking
in
the
Levant
is
actually
the imagination of peace;
people
for
a
long
time
have
been
living
in
one
state
of
conflict
or
another;
or
a
state
of
no peace and no war,
that
they
have
no
idea
how
the
world
might
look
like
without
war
or
the
expectation
of
conflict
and
violence.
Indeed
people
of
the
Levant
seem
to
have
got
used
to
such
assumptions
that
the
alternative
appears
to
them
as
an
unreal
world.
In
a
literary
event
that
brought
together
a
group
of
Palestinian
and
Israeli
writers,
just
before
the
failure
of
Camp
David
Talks
in
2000,
I
remember
the
late
Israeli
writer
Batya
Gur
commencing
her
talk
by
reading
Cavafy’s
famous
poem
Waiting for the Barbarians.
There
had
been
a
moment
of
exaggerated
hope
at
the
time;
a
time
during
which
a
breakthrough
in
the
Israeli-Syrian
peace
talks
was
expected.
Such
a
breakthrough
would
have
meant
that
the
last
major
stumbling
block
before
achieving
total
peace
will
have
been
surmounted.
Yet,
in
spite
of
the
exaggerated
hope,
as
Gur
explained,
one
could
nevertheless
still
sense
the
feeling
expressed
in
the
last
two
lines
of
Cavafy’s
poem:
“Now
what
will
become
of
us
without
barbarians?
/
Those
people
were
some
kind
of
solution.”
Whenever
there
has
been
a
breakthrough,
the
sense
of
“Now
what
will
become
of
us
without
barbarian?”
has
spread.
Why?
Because
imagination
has
failed
to
keep
up
with
reality.
Imagination
is
meant
to
precede
reality
and
to
provide
examples,
models,
and
images
of
how
the
new
reality,
the
world
in
a
state
of
peace,
would
look
like.
Instead,
when
the
time
for
peace
arrived,
imagination
seemed
to
lag
behind,
stuck
within
an
old
world
languishing
in
the
tyranny
of
the
memory
of
a
dark
past
and
an
attitude
of
scepticism
towards
the
“other.”
No
wonder
that
every
time
a
peace
treaty
has
been
signed,
people
felt
that
they
were
venturing
into
the
wilderness
or
at
least,
like
those
who
waited
for
the
never-arriving
barbarians,
that
they
have
been
deprived
from
a
source
of
consolation.
The
question
in
the
title
of
this
essay,
“is
the
Levant
a
zone
of
conflict
or
culture?”
is
an
ironic
one
indeed.
Anyone
with
a
token
knowledge
of
the
Levant
knows
that
the
Levant
is
of
both,
conflict
and
culture;
it
is
only
that
the
people
of
the
Levant
need
to
be
reminded
that
theirs
is
a
land
of
great
culture,
and
that
they
need
pay
more
attention
to
it.
I
was
born
and
brought
up
in
Rashidiyyé—a
Palestinian
refugee
camp
in
Southern
Lebanon.
Rashidiyyé
was,
and
still
is,
as
bad
as
a
