Avoiding a Technical Trap in the Middle East

by Daniel E. Levenson

January 26, 2010 

Lately I have been spending my evenings travelling back through time. The vehicle for my journeys has been Michael B. Oren’s book Six Days of War, which chronicles the events of the June 1967 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab nations. I have read this book before, but as I pay attention to the news coming out of Israel and consider, once again, what prospects there may be for peace between Israel and the Palestinians in the coming year, I find myself looking into the past in an attempt to refresh my memory about the tangled web of political intrigue and military mayhem which is responsible for so much of the present state of affairs in the region.

As I read Oren’s words, I am reminded of the ways in which the conflict is so often presented in present-day media as a straightforward clash between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Israel and the Arabs, but is in fact the product of nearly a century of complex events, ideologies and actors. This is what those who would seek to help solve this conflict must realize, that this is not merely an issue of borders or land, of access to ports or supplies of freshwater, but the result of a volatile mix of personalities and events among two very different groups of people each with their own set of deeply held personal beliefs revolving around religious and cultural identity. And to add another layer of complexity, within each community there are a broad range of ideas, from pacifist to war-mongering, when it comes to solving the problems these differences create.

It never fails to amaze me though, how people think that there are simple solutions to such difficult problems. Several years ago I worked on a project in the department of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which was organized by a group of academics who believed that by focusing on Jerusalem and looking at some of the issues surrounding the way the city functioned, that broader problems relating to the Palestinian-Israel conflict could be addressed in a more productive way. Having spent some time living in Jerusalem (most recently for 8 months in 2009) I can agree that the city has some serious issues when it comes to infrastructure, and I cannot argue with the fact that there does seem to be a significant disparity between the conditions to be found in West versus East Jerusalem, but the issues underlying this conflict, any serious student of the region knows, run much deeper than this.

Although I am no longer affiliated in any way with this project, I thought of it recently during a leadership education seminar at I attended, where Dr. Hugh O’Doherty of Cambridge Leadership Associates and the Kennedy School of Government, gave a presentation on the principles of “adaptive leadership,” which is a method of approaching difficult problems within a group that require a deep level of change. I have read about adaptive leadership before, in the work of Professor Ron Heifetz, and I have had some experience using it myself in different settings and organizations, but as I listened to Dr. O’Doherty talk about one of the ways in which people avoid the difficult steps necessary in doing adaptive work, I thought of the overall approach of the MIT project, and I realized that one of the reasons that I became so disillusioned with it was precisely because the organization was approaching the problem as a technical one, the kind which could be solved through better plumbing or trash pickup. I’m not saying that these things don’t improve quality of life – I believe they do, but looking back on it now I can see that a big part of my frustrations with this project came out of my own experience in the region, and at heart, the knowledge that no matter how many people might want to see this as an issue to be solved with better municipal services and planning, the truth is much more complicated. Real progress, I would argue, is only going to come through the kind of difficult adaptive work that requires both sides to confront uncomfortable truths and give up certain things, with the hope that they will gain from their efforts something even greater.

I know it may not be realistic to hope for the beginnings of real peace in 2010 given the level of tension in the region, but I do hope that the individuals within these societies who will need to make this change happen will begin to see that the way forward is not merely a question of who will ultimately control which resources or define particular borders, but whether they can muster the willingness to do the work within their societies and within themselves to start Israel and the Palestinian people down a more productive road to peace.

Daniel E. Levenson is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the New Vilna Review. He was educated at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Harvard University. He is presently a student in the Rabbinical School at  Hebrew College.