When thinking of the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, something that invites skepticism among many Jews and others, I am reminded of an old saying: “On the eve of most revolutions, they are thought to be unimaginable; on the morning after, they are thought to have been inevitable.”
I hardly think of a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as inevitable, but I have seen stranger things in my lifetime — for example, the Cold War ending in 1989 without a shot being fired.
Still, there is nothing inevitable about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reason why few things in life are inevitable is that there are too many “what if” moments we all experience that can change our lives. We can talk all we want about beshert, that something is foreordained or destined to happen. But aside from the fact that we all have some capacity for free will, there is always an element of chance that can dictate our future.
Let me offer just three examples from my own experience.
Samuel Doe was a Liberian politician who served as president of Liberia from 1986 to 1990. As a master sergeant in the Liberian army, he led a coup in 1980 that brought him to power after the murder of President William Tolbert and a violent succession struggle. In 1990, his presidency ended when he was assassinated in a bloody rebellion.
I mention this because I came very close to being tortured and hanged alongside Doe. The president’s personal emissary came to the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1989 to extend an invitation to me and my colleague Fred Pearson to visit Liberia as his special guests. Fred and I had just coauthored an international relations textbook. We were told that Doe was reading it in his graduate course at the University of Liberia and that he found it very stimulating. Fred and I decided to forego a visit to Liberia, a fortuitous choice because, had we been there when Doe was captured, we may well, as his “mentors,” have met his same fate.
A second “what if” example involves my mentor, Professor William Coplin of Syracuse University. As I was graduating from college, I was faced with having to decide on my next step in life. For me, the choice was law school or graduate school in political science. I chose the latter, although that still left open the question of which graduate school to attend. I was admitted to my first choice, the University of Chicago, but they did not offer me any financial support. I ultimately chose Syracuse, whose Maxwell School of Citizenship (which this year celebrated its 100th anniversary) was ranked as the No. 1 public-affairs program in the country.
Coplin was a rising young international relations scholar who in 1969 had just arrived on the faculty at Syracuse. His field of specialization was international law. I was assigned to him as his teaching assistant. And so I found myself accidentally having to focus on the study of international law, something I heretofore had no particular interest in. Thanks to Bill Coplin, I ended up enjoying a very successful 50-year academic career that included publication of many scholarly works in international law and related fields.
About my book “The New Warfare” (2016), Michael Glennon, chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1977 to 1980, wrote: “This is an important study of the deterioration of rules that govern the use of force. It should be read and pondered by international lawyers, international relations theorists and policymakers.”
Had I been assigned as a teaching assistant to another professor, I might well have ended up a student of state and local government or American national politics, trying to figure out how the electorate ended up with two presidential choices like Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris.
A third “what if” example involves my son Stephen, who since he became a Lubavitch Jew has called himself Shaya. Upon graduating from Clayton High School in 1993, he applied to a dozen or so schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, University of Virginia and other elite colleges. Accepted into most of them, he chose to attend Yale. This proved to be a life-changing decision.
It was at Yale that he met a charismatic young Lubavitch rabbi named Schmully Hecht, who converted my son, a Reform Jew, into an ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Lubbavitcher, black hat, beard and all.
Schmully and Shaya, along with a few other Yalies — including Cory Booker, who was attending Yale Law School and would become a U.S. senator — founded a new organization on campus called the Chai Society, which became a center of Jewish life that would rival Hillel.
Shaya became a successful bankruptcy lawyer but, more importantly, a deeply observant follower of the Rebbe — the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who even after his death in 1994 continued to inspire hundreds of young men (including my grandson Mendy) to become schlichim, emissaries establishing Chabad houses of worship all over the planet. (As the joke goes, “How do we know there is no life on Mars? Because there is no Chabad there.”)
Would Shaya’s life have taken the turn it did had he not chosen Yale and attended some other university? Would he have still ended up living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with seven children? It is highly doubtful, to say the least.
What about the initial question I raised about Israel? The Rebbe believed that everything, including the founding and development of the state of Israel, was based on Divine Providence. There remains much to be done to produce peace in the Middle East.
In his July 24 speech before the U.S. Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for “demilitarization and deradicalization” of Gaza along with “a civilian administration” governing the territory. But he never said his vision ultimately called for a Palestinian state. I think the latter remains a sine qua non condition for a long-term peace, possibly achievable through an international, Pan-Arab interim governance regime that would help rebuild Gaza.
There is nothing beshert about this, but it would seem within the realm of possibility if we wish to see security and prosperity for all the people of the region.
