Sewage and Ahmed’s refrigerator ...

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Frustration was palpable Sunday among participants in the lone L.A. Times Festival of Books panel discussion specifically aimed at the Middle East. The occupation of Iraq, the now 60-year-old conflict between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians, as well as the vilification of Islam and Muslims in the West -- all have made the region more combustible than ever and our own U.S. democracy that much more tenuous.

‘We are one or two terrorist attacks away from a police state in this country,’ journalist and writer Chris Hedges told more than 200 people in a packed UCLA auditorium Sunday for the panel, ‘Contentious Ground: The Middle East.’

Hedges, a former New York Times correspondent who has covered the wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia and El Salvador, decried the ‘gross mischaracterization of Islam as a religion of violence,’ which has skewed the U.S. public’s perceptions about Muslims, the Arab world and the real sources of instability in the Middle East. Citing his experiences while covering the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s as just one example, he said, ‘Bosnian Muslims were the only peaceful ones in the conflict.’

But what does that have to do with sewage, or a refrigerator?

Moderator Zachary Karabell, author of the 2007 book, ‘Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence in the Middle East,’ bemoaned the fact that our focus on the Middle East has obscured arguably more dire violence in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Myanmar and elsewhere around the world. But as the U.S. war in Iraq lurches into its fifth summer, the scholar and writer conceded that we may well be too invested in conflict rather than in finding peace. (Curiously, Karabell noted, even his publisher seemed to be banking on this, changing the subtitle of the new paperback edition to ‘Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation.’)

Singling out intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, panelist and journalist Amy Wilentz said, what’s needed is for the U.S. government to knock heads, to force Israelis and Palestinians to conclude a final deal on a Palestinian state.

Ain’t gonna happen, according to scholar Reza Aslan, so long as it remains the stated policy of the U.S. and the European Union to ‘starve the Palestinians into changing their minds about who they voted for,’ a reference to Hamas, the party elected to lead the Palestinian Authority unity government and Gaza, which remains under lockdown, deprived of food, fuel and medical supplies.

Aslan, author of the 2005 book, ‘No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,’ cited the example of Um al-Nasr, where a sewage treatment plant failure ultimately engulfed the Bedouin town in northern Gaza, killing at least five people and rendering much of the place uninhabitable in 2007. He said the Israeli government had been warned months earlier that vital parts and know-how were needed to prevent a humanitarian disaster, but took the position, ‘let Hamas fix it,’ when the situation clearly called for engineers and spare parts unavailable in the occupied territories.

Wilentz, as Jerusalem correspondent for the New Yorker in the mid to late 1990s, watched things go from hopeful to dire in a just a few years as she tried to put a human face on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This culminated in her 2001 novel, ‘Martyrs’ Crossing,’ the tale of an American-born Palestinian mother at an Israeli checkpoint trying to cross into Jerusalem to get medical help for her young son. Sadly, she said Sunday, the story is just as relevant today because neither side will do the hard work of negotiating with an enemy.

Hedges, who spent years based in Egypt and Israel for the New York Times, said that the Israeli agreement to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1993 Oslo accords signaled that economic security might come for the occupied territories, that ‘Ahmad could get a refrigerator’ and his children an education. But that hope, he said, has been dashed by what he called the right-wing Israelis who have held sway since the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who’d pushed through the Oslo agreement.

What can be done to resolve the conflict, an audience member asked the panelists.

‘Stop bombing people,’ Aslan said. ‘It’s not that complicated.... You feed people, they like you. You bomb people, they don’t like you.’

Could it be as simple as redirecting some of the U.S. aid pouring into the region toward refrigerators and schools for all the Ahmads of the occupied territories and beyond?

Kristina Lindgren