Small country, big query

May 8, Israel is 60 on that day, and a more charged anniversary would be hard to find. Passion is big when this small country is under discussion. Any analysis needs to get the fundamentals clear. So let8217;s recognise that while the list of Israeli mis-policies on Palestine is distressingly long, the country is West Asia8217;s only functional democracy. This is no small achievement for a country born out of hugely tragic and controversial circumstances, one engendering and sometimes courting hostility and one situated in an area not exactly famous for its tradition of democratic governance. An Israeli president has been investigated for personal misconduct and a sitting prime minister, who was also a war hero, faced full-fledged corruption inquiries. Governments are changed by popular mandate. The economy was horribly state-socialist at one time but has modernised and is ticking along nicely, with a strong emphasis on high technology. Leave out the Palestine question and a democracy like India can find much to approve of in a democracy like Israel. But of course you can8217;t and shouldn8217;t leave out Palestine.

And on the Palestine issue, in an irony that so typifies the vexatious Middle East problem, Israel8217;s biggest achievement, being a democracy, is related to its biggest handicap, the incapacity to find a broad middle ground on how to deal with Palestinians. Israel8217;s electoral system seems designed to prevent the creation of a political and social centre where the Right and Left, settlers and urbanites, the religious and the secular can meet and make meaningful, necessary, overdue compromises. Ariel Sharon8217;s Kadima was a move towards such a political centre, maintaining its distance from both Likud and Labour, yet incorporating former hawks and doves who believed in a pullout from the West Bank as well as the demolition of the settlements 8212; without giving in to terror. But, true to its frenetic democratic credentials, Israel could not generate the momentum and consensus required for such a reversal of state policy. This has to change. A huge majority of ordinary Israelis have no problems about a Palestinian state. They have problems about an Israeli state that has to live in a constant state of alert. Israel8217;s political elite must find a way to offer a changed policy that will survive electoral changes, just as India8217;s Pakistan policy is now more or less election result-proof.

Palestinians, whose misery needs no recounting, of course have been served far more poorly by their leaders. Post Yasser Arafat, who was no nation-builder, Palestinian leadership is fragmented, fractious and in parts militant. Israelis and Palestinians deserve better leaders. And they don8217;t have the luxury of waiting another 60 years.