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If there is to be hope for reconciliation and resolution in any of the world's identity-based conflicts, then "Who am I?" must lead to the much more important question, "Who should I be?"

There are already signs that the U.N.-brokered ceasefire agreement in Lebanon is beginning to unravel. Vision publisher David Hulme offers insight into what it will take to achieve a lasting end to these continuing and deep-rooted hostilities. 

A ceasefire that does not lead to cessation of hostilities is a cynical sham at best. Despite the UN-brokered truce, deaths from military/militia strikes on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border are likely to continue. After agreement was reached, guns still fired and katyushas fell more intensely for several hours. Even when 15,000 UN and 15,000 Lebanese soldiers replace 30,000 Israeli troops in the next month or so, the potential for violence will remain high. As other observers have noted, the Middle East is a dangerous neighborhood, where ironies abound.

Last week, the celebrated Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman—whom some have referred to as the anguished conscience of Israel—spoke at a Tel Aviv rally. The Lebanese government had made a proposal to deploy troops to the southern part of the state, and Grossman, who had initially supported the Israeli response to Hezbollah’s attacks, decided it was now time to speak out against further escalation. He received what must have been an encouraging call from his 20-year-old son, Uri, who was part of an Israeli tank crew inside Lebanon. The young man was happy at the news of the coming ceasefire and spoke of being home for Friday dinner. But the next day Uri’s tank was hit by a Hezbollah anti-tank rocket and he was killed. Over the years, Uri and his brother had often accompanied their parents in peace rallies, and Uri looked forward to completing his military service in November.

My heart goes out to the Grossman family; 16 years ago I was in their home in Jerusalem interviewing the author for a television program. David provided some of the best commentary we have gathered on the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma. He is a realistic man, clear in his convictions that an end must come to what he calls the “noise” of conflict and rhetoric. Back then he told the story of how, as a child, he had heard the Egyptian president Jamal Abd al-Nasir on radio threatening to come and throw the Jews into the sea. Now the peace-loving man’s son is dead at the hands of other aggressors in a confrontation they both sought to stop.

David Grossman understands the need for peace based on focused understanding and respect for the differences between today’s antagonists. Whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO or Israel, none of the immediate parties will achieve lasting peace without recognition of an unavoidable truth: identity and ideology matter to everyone. That’s because from an early age identity is something we establish, maintain and extend in our search for psychological security. Then ideology comes along to tie together the loose ends of identity formation, as Erik Erikson—the father of modern identity studies—would say. He saw identity and ideology as two sides of the same coin. Take away a person’s identity, and he or she will set about its recreation. There can be no attempt to destroy identity that will not produce further conflict. What is happening in southern Lebanon, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is an attempt by all parties to destroy the Other’s identity.

Albert Einstein saw the Arab-Israeli conflict as between “two rights” and secretly lent his name to efforts to resolve it. Despite his balanced assessment and his support for a peaceful resolution, there has been little progress in the decades since he made the observation. Why? It’s been said that “no student of Middle Eastern international politics can begin to understand the region without taking into account the ebb and flow of identity politics” (Shibley Telhami and Michael Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East, 2002). Identity and ideology are central elements of the Middle East dilemma, yet they are rarely addressed in the search for a solution. That’s the basis of the forthcoming book, Identity, Ideology, and the Future of Jerusalem, published by Palgrave-Macmillan and available September 3, 2006.

Looking at the biographies of 14 key players on both sides of the more-than-100-year Arab-Zionist conflict, the book focuses more on the parallels than the differences. These leaders, from Zionism’s Theodor Herzl to Hamas’s Shaykh Yassin, from Israel’s David Ben-Gurion to the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, lived lives with parallel goals for their people, and with identities that were more akin than apart. Understanding the role that identity and ideology played in their lives—leaders at the center of the impasse—is crucial to discovering the way forward in today’s ongoing conflict.

The concluding chapter shows how recent findings in brain research may provide hope for resolution. Behavior modification studies have shown that rewiring of the brain is possible through self-directed action. How such rewiring might be achieved where political impasses rest on deep-seated issues of identity and ideology is hinted at by Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist Steven Pinker. He observes that the new discoveries in neuroscience explain “what makes us what we are” and also invite us to “ponder who we want to be.”

Identity asks and answers the question “Who am I?” But identity awareness is only the starting point in resolving intercommunal problems. If there is to be hope for reconciliation and resolution in any of the world’s identity-based conflicts, then “Who am I?” must lead to the much more important question, “Who should I be?” This is about initiating a process by which leaders and publics come to understand the role of identity and ideology in their lives. Because the identity-ideology nexus is not easily self-understood, it requires a process of education and self-examination to bring its reality and consequences to the surface. The resulting change of heart in the personal identity-ideology relationship is the first essential step to broad political change.

DAVID HULME

Order Identity, Ideology, and the Future of Jerusalem by David Hulme at Amazon.com.  A portion of the proceeds will go to intercommunal peace efforts in Israel and Palestine under the auspices of Vision.org Foundation.