U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was already in Egypt Tuesday. Why did he backtrack to Spain? Was it for a mere photo opportunity with European Union’s (EU) foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Russia’s foreign minister, and the United Nations’s (UN) Kofi Annan?

Ah, but what a photo opportunity! An epochal one. It showed that the U.S. has finally joined what has for two decades been called the “international consensus” on a solution to the Middle East conflict: a viable Palestinian state beside Israel.

Only the U.S. and Israel had held out — with Oslo and Camp David II as half-measures that failed. Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has been on board even longer, in a shifty, tortuous way, but no more so than the shifty, tortuous manner of all international diplomacy, as I hope to show.

What are the signs of this change? Take Wednesday’s gruesome bus bombing in Haifa. Two weeks ago, it would have been a cue for the U.S. to harangue and isolate Mr. Arafat. Now it doesn’t impede Colin Powell’s plan to meet the Palestinian Authority (PA) leader. Or take the U.S.’s new support for outside monitors, which it and Israel have resisted until now, probably so as to leave Israel a free hand.

I’ve always assumed that those in power talk one way to each other on subjects such as the Middle East (about oil, Israel as their policeman, power politics etc.) and another way publicly (about democracy, terror etc.), but what happens when they reverse course?

How do they deal with all the myths and bullshit they have put out there to justify past policies, such as their rejection of the international consensus they now accept.

Well, The New York Times said Colin Powell had “won wide international support here yesterday for his Middle East peace mission,” as if the rest of world had long blocked the option, but the U.S. finally got them behind it. They just rewrite the history. Never mind, what matters is they got there. What other mythologies must be revised if the consensus is to take hold?

The bottomless pit of hate: An article in The Toronto Star called the suicide bombings “the result of indoctrinated hatred actively carried out or condoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority,” citing sermons, articles etc. There is no doubt that venomous hatred of Israel exists in the Arab world, often shading into anti-Semitism.

So what else is new? Where in the world does hatred not exist? Israel has just put in its inner cabinet a man who calls Israeli Arabs a “cancer” and wants Palestinians expelled, as do forty-six per cent of Israelis. The late Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor, spent decades as a human-rights activist, exposing the hatred and exclusivism found in Israeli society. Here in nice Canada, one of the editorials that must be carried by all Southam papers, casually used the phrase, “even by the barbaric standards of the Arab Middle East,” as if we all know that about them.

Don’t get me wrong. I think hate does damage. But it won’t go away. You will never extirpate it, but you can go around it, while debating it if you choose, and get on with the constructive work. If it depended on eliminating hate, there would never be any progress or reconciliation.

The clash of civilizations: You could call this the “otherization” of others so that there is no possibility of reconciliation — either they obliterate us or we obliterate them. Jonathan Kay writes in the National Post, “To have a dialogue, interlocutors need some baseline quantity of shared values. It is not clear that Arabs and Westerners can satisfy that baseline any longer.”

But what values do I, a Westerner and a Jew, share with Jonathan Kay, also a Westerner and a Jew? We Jewish Westerners often differ on values. Richard Gwyn, in The Toronto Star, writes, “Beyond any question, though, Israel belongs to the West … If Israel is seriously threatened … then the West will, and must, come to its aid.”

He writes as if the choice has nothing to do with morality, or right and wrong. That sounds more like team spirit or tribal loyalty than civilizations and their values. If you allow a role for universal human and moral values, the clash of civilizations starts to fade.

The leaderization of everything: This one I really picture the people in power saying among themselves, “How do we put this in simple terms the dummies out there can grasp?” Then they reduce a complex situation to Osama, Saddam or Yasser and send one of the Bush boys out front to peddle it.

But how much power can Yasser Arafat truly wield, sitting in the dark with a cell-phone? You can put the same stress on the centrality of Ariel Sharon, whose record of terror surely compares with Mr. Arafat’s. But when you do, you miss much of what’s there, like the fierce fighters of Jenin, who told The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen that their leaders in the Palestinian Authority “gave bad orders. Their belief is peace, and they are weak.”

Or the Israeli refuseniks, who also reject their leaders, or the remarkable new internationalists in the West Bank, risking their lives to bring food or medicine, or to protest, or shield the innocent with their own bodies …

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.