American Avocet & Black-necked Stilts : The Abraham Accords

This is an American Avocet amid a flock of Black-necked Stilts. I framed this photo in scant light at a long distance and didn’t realize two species formed this flock. To my eye, they all looked the same, harmonized. Only in the photograph, in this fractional-second record, that I discerned a distinction. These birds are clearly comfortable together, flying in the same direction, coming from the same place, able to “get along as they go along.” Merely that one is different does not impede its belonging among the others.

From the end of Jewish statehood in 70 CE, Jewish communities globally have wrestled with their integration. Equally, the surrounding societies have grappled with “The Jewish Question.” Diaspora history in many ways may be depicted by the spectrum of acceptance in Napoleonic France and modern America to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition and Hitler’s Germany. Only in the last 75 years - another fractional-second record - has Israel’s statehood given us a new opportunity to bypass this dilemma. Rather than (un)tolerated constituent, the Jewish nation now lives in a peer state on an equal footing with other countries.

Until 1979’s “cold peace” with Egypt, Israel lived in a state of war, essentially a national-level ghetto or pale. 1994 brought more cold peace, with Jordan. Stopping war was a first step, but starting interaction still remained to come. 2020’s Abraham Accords declaring friendship among (so far) Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan is fundamentally different. These affirmative relationships are generating previously unthinkable business, cultural, and political exchanges. Common interests are subsuming differences. Like the Avocet among the Stilts, we may well be witnessing the beginning of Israel and its neighbors “getting along to go along.”