Caught in the Middle

For three decades, David Ignatius has talked to all camps in the fractious Middle East. Then came Davos, and an effort to "moderate" a conversation between irreconcilable sides on the Gaza war. The center not only cannot hold, he concludes -- it no longer exists.

BY DAVID IGNATIUS | APRIL 15, 2009

I still have the press credentials I gathered nearly three decades ago from the Middle East's various combatants: one from the left-wing Druse militia in Lebanon, one from the right-wing Lebanese Christian militia known as the "Phalange," one from the Palestine Liberation Organization, another from the Israeli government. The only common features are the photos of me in my early 30s: scruffy, glowering, determined to penetrate the veil of secrets.

The press cards remind me of a time when you could be in the middle of the Middle East conflict and imagine that you were covering all sides fairly. And when I say in the middle, I mean that almost literally. Back in the early 1980s, you could interview the PLO in West Beirut in the morning, sneak past the snipers along the "Green Line" at midday, and then interview the Israeli-backed Phalangists that afternoon in East Beirut, even as the two sides were shooting at each other.

Not long ago, I found myself wishing I had one of those old press passes, which carried the implicit message: "Don’t shoot; I'm a journalist!" I had just "moderated" a heated discussion of the Gaza war at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The session became a minor international incident when I told Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that, because we had run out of time, he could not have another round of comments responding to Israeli President Shimon Peres, whereupon Erdogan walked off the stage. In the aftermath, I received many outraged messages complaining I had censored Erdogan and sided with the Israelis.

For someone who has spent much of his career trying to operate in the middle of the Middle East conflict and working hard to avoid any appearance of bias, it was an unpleasant situation. Trust me, you would not like to examine the e-mails I got or read the articles in the Turkish press about the incident. There are several explanations I could offer about what happened: that we were 15 minutes late, that each of the speakers, and especially Peres, had abused the time limits, and that the organizers had signaled it was time to end the event.

But that only obscures the larger point. At Davos, I found myself in the middle of a fight where there was no longer a middle. My efforts to do what moderators do -- let everyone talk for a while and then find a few inches of common ground -- blew up in my face.

 

David Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post.

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January/February 2010