His key thesis in para [5]: "...the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.
"To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism...".
It raises a number of questions for me:
Key thesis: anti-semitism is defined as European. What about Muslim anti-semitism, which has history back to the beginning of Islam and was rife in the Middle East well before the times covered here? See Andrew Bostom's seminal scholarly work on the issue: The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.
Para [9[: Is it correct that the rest of the world should have accepted (as it has) that the "Palestinian Arabs" should claim, in the 1930s, a nationality as "Palestinians" distinct from Arab, or Southern Syrians, as they had been until then. And if so, why?
[9] and [10]: 5,000 Arabs in Palestine were killed by the British colonialists. Noone can think this is trivial, but is it "eradication", when the number of Arabs in the area at the time was somewhat over 600,000. [note to self: read more about the "brutal" British response to the Palestinian "resistance" in the 1930s]
[13] Mention of the old, now deceased, fraud, Edward Said. And, of course, therefore, the creation of a moral equivalence: "...both bear a brutal legacy for which neither is responsible." Which always brings to mind the non-equivalent statement for me: "if Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if Israel lays down its arms it will be annihilated".
Other: no mention of the British Mandate of Palestine, supported by all 50+ members of the League of Nations, and thence the United Nations, which allowed/encouraged the migration of Jews to the region
No mention of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem at the time covered below; he alone was responsible for turning Arabs against the Jews in Israel. There's a strong case that if he hadn't poisoned the politics in the region they would have had 60 years of working together (as Carroll hopes for here) instead of the destruction and hatred they have in fact experienced. History is not predetermined. Husseini was indeed the "Icon of Evil".
[1] THE DIFFICULT gets done immediately. The impossible — well, so far it has taken almost a century. How long before the Israelis and the Palestinians reach the true peace agreement that has eluded Jews and Arabs since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I? In separate meetings in the Oval Office recently, President Obama pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift from the “proximity” talks enabled by ever-shuttling US special envoy George Mitchell, with support from former British leader Tony Blair, to the direct negotiations which alone can lead toward resolution. Mitchell and Blair have made valiant efforts. But as great-power diplomats, they represent more than they know. The American and the Englishman, while putting themselves forward as the solution, embody the oldest problem.
[2] Across generations that saw political reconciliation replace ferocious enmity between France and Germany, England and Ireland, and even Moscow and Washington, why has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proved so intractable? Assuming direct talks do resume between Israel and Palestine, what obstacles must negotiators overcome?
[3] Immediate issues are obvious: the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, security arrangements, the question of “settlements,” the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli concern about ongoing incitement to violence, the place of Hamas. Before Netanyahu arrived at the White House last week, a senior US official said, “The gaps have narrowed. And we believe there are good opportunities to further narrow those gaps.”
[4] But in addition to immediate obstacles, however thorny, the Israelis and Palestinians face each other across not a gap but a yawning ditch, the width and depth of which are insufficiently measured. Deep history is the abyss in which so many Middle East hopes are buried. Direct talks are necessary, but for talks to succeed, so is a direct reckoning with the theological and political strata that underlie that history.
[5] Against the usual perception, the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.
[6] To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism, each of which is thought to be well understood. But their recombination begets something new — a lethal feedback loop, as the historic hatred of Jews mixes explosively with the contempt for native peoples that defined imperial expansion.
[7] Now Europe, together with its legacy culture America, sends representatives, such as Mitchell and Blair, claiming to offer disinterested “help” to the stubbornly warring parties. Yet that broader culture is fully complicit as the source of the two momentous animosities. Because that complicity is never reckoned with, energetic diplomatic interventions, going back past Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to successive British “white papers,” have come to nothing.
[8] If the past is remembered as a tapestry, take only a single thread, one that leads back through World War I. The arrival in Palestine of the British under Lord Edmund Allenby in 1917 established the permanent pattern. The overlord method of British imperialism was to ignite conflict within local populations, and the new rulers made contradictory promises to Arabs and Jews alike. This double game would last a full generation.
[9] When Palestinian Arabs, claiming a national identity distinct from Pan-Arabism, finally mounted resistance in 1936, the British response was brutal, involving more royal troops in Palestine than there were in the entire subcontinent of India. Zionist fighters struck at Arabs, too, but overwhelmingly this was a London-ordered colonial war. In three years of fighting, more than 5,000 Arabs were killed. Whole villages and neighborhoods were destroyed. Political institutions and economic systems were devastated. The Palestinian social fabric was ripped asunder, never fully to be restitched again.
[10] This crippling of Palestinian hope in its infancy partially explains the Zionist complaint at the lack of local leaders on the other side with whom to deal. If Palestinians seem invisible, as they often protest, the phenomenon begins not with willfully unseeing Jews, but with British eradication. Thus, the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the Arab defeat of 1948 was “no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936-39.” Who remembers that today?
[11] Of course, those were the precise years in which European anti-Semitism was reaching its grotesque boil with the Nazi assault on Jews. Juden raus! Of the nearly 500,000 Jews who lived in Palestine in 1939, most had arrived in that decade.
[12] The return to the land of Israel was momentous for people who had prayed for most of two millennia, “Next year in Jerusalem.” From the Arab point of view, however, Zionism could only be taken as a manifestation of the colonialism that native Palestinians had by then every reason to detest. Just as it is wrong to take Zionism as colonialism, it is wrong to take Palestinian hatred of Jewish arrival — and, even more pointedly, of Israeli occupation — as anti-Semitism.
[13] It makes the point to note that even a fierce partisan like the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said saw the double-ruff connection between anti-Semitism and colonialism, how both peoples bear a brutal legacy for which neither is responsible. Said described “orientalism,” which he defined as Europeans’ colonialist contempt for the “East,” especially the Arab East, as “a secret-sharer of Western anti-Semitism.” Indeed, the empire-enabling European (and American) denigration of indigenous peoples, especially the Muslim “infidel,” was itself patterned on Christian contempt for the Jew.
[14] When Palestinian and Israeli negotiators finally face each other across one table, these common notes of experience should be paramount — but only for the sake of moving beyond them. Two peoples who have each defined themselves positively by negative hatred of the other have been at the mercy of a broad culture that created this very habit of mind. Jews and Arabs can renounce this history without renouncing themselves. Each can then receive the other’s account of the past, and, perhaps for the first time, hear it respectfully.
[15] That, more than anything else, is the prerequisite to peace. The Palestinian and Israeli negotiators need the diplomatic support of outside powers. But in this long history, the West has not been a disinterested bystander. By naming it as a secret-sharing third party to the conflict, historic creator of the double-sided trap of Jew hatred and colonial contempt, Israelis and Palestinians can leave the trap to find the way forward. They can focus on what remains between them, which is enough.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. This is the first of six special columns, which will appear every other week. His new book, coming early in 2011, is “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: The Ancient City that Ignited the Modern World.’’ 
