¿Todos los caminos llevan a Jerusalén?

No suelo comentar mucho sobre la política internacional. Pero de vez en cuando encuentro un artículo que vale la pena destacar. Ayer leí esta nota de Lee Smith, que aparece en la revista Slate, la cual plantea un argumento muy válido. Cito los párrafos centrales:


"Jerusalem used to be the direction in which the prophet Muhammad and the first Muslims turned to pray. In time, Muhammad changed the direction, or qibla, and Muslims began to pray facing Mecca, as they do today. All the Bush White House did was change the qibla of American Middle East policy from Jerusalem to Baghdad. While the present clique of White House ideologues assumed that a safe, stable, and democratic Iraq would reshape the region, Zinni, Brzezinski, and company still maintain that the peace process is the key. They don't know more about the Middle East than the Bush White House; they're just angry that someone replaced their absurd reductive paradigm with another, equally absurd reductive paradigm.

For quite some time now, U.S. officials have believed that there's a magic lantern, and if we rub it in just the right place, we'll get our three Middle East wishes?cheap oil, peace, and the undying friendship of Israelis and all the Arabs. But as one writer notes, there are no quick fixes in the Middle East, an area where experts are just as likely as neophytes to be dangerously wrong.

Brzezinski and the others should consider the possibility that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so combustible because American policymakers have helped to make it so. They have seen it as the keystone of the entire Middle East, rather than as just one among many regional issues that cannot be solved with grand schemes but only managed by competent policymakers."

Aleluya. En efecto, hemos sido condicionados a creer que todos los problemas de Medio Oriente se resolverán si los palestinos e israelís llegan a un acuerdo. Esto no es cierto, aunque es una mentira conveniente para los autócratas de la región y para las grandes potencias. No es para menospreciarlo, pero el conflicto palestino es uno de tantos que hay en el mundo y, en términos de vidas perdidas, de hecho es bastante menor (como he señalado muchas veces, es asombroso que los países musulmanes y occidentales ignoren conflictos muy sangrientos como las guerras y conflictos civiles en Sudán, Nigeria, Pakistán, Indonesia, etc. que cobran miles e incluso millones de vidas).

Entre más rápdio salgamos de esta trampa, mejor.