An idea tentatively proposed

I noticed a conversation between Peter Gordon and Avi Matalon on Facebook, itself provoked by Natanyahu's recent speech to Congress in which he had made at least some positive sounds about support for gay rights. Even though the conversation between the two was entirely civil and reasonable I found myself profoundly depressed by it because it illustrated how hard it is to frame the competing political imperatives in the Middle East in such a way that one doesn't end up in a position that is totally partial. I don't think this is a feature particular to the politics of Israel and Palestine. However conflict over the way newly revivified religious, national and ethnic movements can be institutionalised in politics, and how differing normative orientations can co-exist, get dramatised there in a way that is more vivid than in France, Holland or Denmark.

Within the borders of the EU it would be nice to believe that political Islam's engagement with European democracy will repeat the transformation of political Catholicism into Christian Democracy (anticipations of an Islamic Reformation however strike me as really misguided). In that scenario the Justice and Development Party in Turkey is the interesting development that points to what we might hope to see within the states of the Union. Unfortunately the contemporary conditions are not a good match for the nation-building moment of the late nineteenth century or even the more chastened post-war moment of Adenauer, Monnet, Spaak and Schumann. It is impossible to imagine a circumstance in which Europe and its constituent nations balance the contesting claims of universality and identity (and the claims to legal power and resources that go along with them) if the nations of the Maghreb and the Middle East do not. Globalisation makes it hard to cultivate just your own garden, even if that is the way of wisdom.

There is little prospect of the Isrealis and the Palestinians making sense of this conundrum on their own, but  the core constituent problem of the the creation of rational (in the sense of not being a threat to the well-being of their own citizens or others) political communities is far from being theirs' alone. This problem of political comity is the reason that the European Union was founded in the first place. The acquis communitaire, in its more than 80,000 page glory, may not have the inspiring tone of the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, but it is a powerful resource and a living, evolving solution to this set of problems.  This acquis was profoundly important in the transformation of Ireland over the last forty years and the framework it offers has had obvious effects in the post-Communist democracies in Eastern Europe (which is not to say that the institutions of the Union, and in particular the Commission have been popular). It could provide an institutional and constitutional framework within which to reframe and escape some of the zero-sum games of Palestinian-Isreali politics. If Israel and Palestine were to be offered full membership of the union together they would inherit a legal and institutional framework that does much more than regulate inter-state relationships. European citizenship creates opportunities for individuals to reorientate themselves toward one another. Obviously folding this conflict into the institutions of the Union will test their robustness, and no-one expects universal brotherhood and amity to break out. To achieve civil dissensus would be a triumph of statecraft. Moreover the challenge of such integration might provoke the rest of Europe to some necessary political creativity. And this is not entirely a step into the unknown. The Israelis have already taken the first step: winning Eurovision.