Levey - How to make peace in the middle east in six months or less : without leaving your apartment

Praise for
How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less
Without Leaving Your Apartment

Gregory Levey may or may not be able to save the world. But I do know this: He writes a very entertaining and informative book. The section on Second Life alone is worth the price of admission.

A. J. Jacobs, author of My Life as an Experiment

Greg Levey has made a comic masterpiece out of the worlds most intractable conflictyet hidden among the sidesplitting laugh lines are insights about the Middle East that are no laughing matter. Ive read dense scholarship on Israeli-Palestinian affairs that does not capture the irony or the humanity of the situation half as well as this hilarious book.

Joseph Braude, author of The New Iraq:
Rebuilding the Country for Its People,
the Middle East, and the World

The conflict in the Mideast isnt best handled by diplomats, ideologues, or think-tank wonks, but by Greg Levey, the one man with the courage to call it like it is: an exhausting, frustrating, dinner-party-killing morass, ruled over by nutjobs of all stripes. HTMPITMEISMOLWLYA is the comedic Oslo Plan weve been waiting for, and Levey delivers his diagnosis of the situation with the on-the-ground wisdom of Thomas Friedman and the experimental wit of A. J. Jacobs. Make laughs, not war.

David Sax, author of Save the Deli

Laughs AND insighta killer combo. Loved it so much I am looking forward to How to Create Cold Fusion Without Getting Out of the Hot Tub.

Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids

A lively and humorous account of one mans quest to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leveys thoughtfulness and wit make this book an absorbing read for Middle East neophytes and veterans alike.

Jennifer Miller, author of Inheriting the Holy Land:
An Americans Search for Hope in the Middle East

Also by Gregory Levey

Shut Up, Im Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons
I Learned in the Israeli GovernmentA Memoir

FREE PRESS
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Copyright 2010 by Gregory Levey

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Free Press hardcover edition September 2010

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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levey, Gregory.
How to make peace in the Middle East in six months or less
without leaving your apartment / Gregory Levey.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Arab-Israeli conflict1993Peace. 2. United StatesRelationsIsrael. 3. Israel
RelationsUnited States. 4. Levey, Gregory. 5. JewsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
DS119.76.L473 2010
956.05'4dc22 2010005547

ISBN 978-1-4391-5415-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-6329-0 (ebook)

For my parents
one a warrior,
the other a diplomat

I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people.

Jack Handey

I dont want to give anything away, so Im not going to tell you whether or not I succeeded in making peace in the Middle East. Youll have to read this whole book if you want to find that out.

But I will tell you that my intention was never to make light of the tragic situation in the region. On the contrary, as I wrote in my first book, Sometimes it is the comic details that best reflect the gravity of the larger picture.

To the best of my recollection, all the events recounted here are true. I really did play phone tag with the White House, go undercover as an Evangelical Christian, do combat training with a paramilitary group, and end up at a real castle owned by a guy who seemed to always wear a cape. But while I was quite often taking notes, for some events and conversations I have had to rely on memory, with its considerable limitations.

I have sometimes obscured peoples personal details to protect their privacy. Astute readers, news junkies, and friends might notice that I have also tinkered with the chronology of events, both political and personal, and that in a few isolated cases, I have used composite characters. I did this to maintain narrative flow and in order to entertain youso I dont want to hear any complaints about it. Dont be a Fundamentalist.

One final note. In looking over this book, it occurs to me that even if I intended to take a birds-eye look at the Middle East situation, I have inevitably approached it from the point of view of someone who is North American, who is of my generation, who is secular, and who is Jewish. In other words, from my own perspective.

But with a conflict so dense and complicated, I think thats all any of us can hope to do.

G.L., January 2010

CHAPTER ONE

My Struggles with Dementia

I was in the hallway outside an auditorium, waiting to give a talk to the audience sitting inside, when the organizer of the event told me something that gave me cause for concern.

Just so you know, she said, your opening act has dementia.

I thought I must have misheard, and wanted to ask her to repeat herself, but she had already walked into the room to get things started.

My opening act has dementia? I thought. What?

To be honest, I was surprised to hear that I even had an opening act, since I was just a first-time author doing a talk about my book.

I stood just outside the room and watched a man in his early sixties take the podium and proceed to give a presentation that was part lecture about the Middle East, part prayer, and mostly gibberish. The audience, which was composed largely of middle-aged and elderly people, took it in stride, and later on I found out that this was the groups standard procedure. This guy was apparently a regular at these events and had a habit of yelling out nonsensical statements during peoples presentations, so the thinking was that if they let him do his little talk before the real guest speaker went up, he was less likely to interrupt. Indeed, when he was finished, my opening act got a fair amount of applause. I took this as a good sign. Apparently I was dealing with an easy crowd.

That was the first time I had encountered literal dementia on my book tour, but because the book I was promoting was about the Middle East, more than a few of the people I was interacting with were a bit off the rails. I had encountered everything from armchair extremists more fanatical than their on-the-ground equivalents to peace activists so strident in their pacifism that they seemed on the verge of violence. In fact, these bizarre, often frustrating interactions had driven me to set a new goal for myself.