Stuck on the Wrong Road to Peace

I was delighted to hear that two writers I hold in especially high regard, Michael Doran and Michael Koplow, would be authoring responses to my essay “The Return of the Peace Processors.” (Part of me hoped they would comment on an issue of peripheral importance to my essay but on which both of them have a lot to say, namely Turkey’s role in the U.S.-Middle East dynamic.) In my original essay, I tried to focus on one particular intellectual tradition within the American discussion of Israel and its conflicts with its neighbors. In choosing that focus, I deliberately left out a great deal. Both of my interlocutors ding me for it, Doran slightly and Koplow significantly more, so let me defend myself in due measure against each one.

My argument looks closely at the group of Middle East experts I call the peace processors, at how they and only they think and speak. It’s a contrived limitation on the discussion, which I fully admit. Doran asks me to broaden my scope to look beyond the peace-processor camp and allow into my discussion ideas that are politically a bit to the right and a bit to the left (in American terms at least). He says, in effect, hey, these things aren’t isolated. You can’t even begin to understand how rough it is to be a peace processor (and, implicitly, an American Jewish liberal) without understanding that they’re under constant and unremitting pressure from left-wing anti-Israel obsessives. And then, looking right, he wants to bring into the discussion Republicans, particularly in the first Reagan and last Bush administrations (not Trumpists), who pushed against the assumptions of the peace processors from within the establishment.

In effect, though not in words, Doran argues that the isolation I have performed is not just artificial (which, again, I accept), but that it misses the point.