Taking the Peace Train

The G20 Summit is not an event that often captures my attention. Yes, it’s a theoretical big deal—the twenty wealthiest and most powerful nations and international organizations meeting annually (or at least theoretically annually) to discuss issues relating to the global economy, the earth’s changing climate, international financial issues, and matters relating to the question of sustainable development. Lots of talking! But that’s all it generally feels like to me: lots of talking, not much action, rarely any reason to foresee real or positive change. Maybe it’s just me! (And, just to be precise, the G20 has twenty-one members now that they voted to admit the African Union at this year’s summit.)

But this year’s summit was different. For one thing, it was the first G20 held in India. For another, certain key players were missing: Vladimir Putin sent his Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Xi Jinping sent Chinese premier Li Qiang in his stead. But what caught my attention this year had nothing to do with people in or not in attendance, but with an announcement by Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modai that President Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had agreed to join him in working to create a rail- and sea corridor that will pass through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel to link Europe and India in a way that even a year or two ago would have seemed unimaginable. That caught my attention. It won’t come cheap: conservative estimates put the price tag at something like $20 billion. But this project has the potential truly to change the face of the Middle East and I couldn’t agree more with President Biden’s assessment of the project as, and I quote, “a real big deal.” That, it surely is. Will it be possible to take a train from Paris to Tel Aviv and then continue on to Abu Dhabi…and then take advantage of a dedicated ferry link to Mumbai? Now that would be a trip I’d take in a heartbeat!

There was a time when the Middle East, including Turkish Palestine, was linked by a vast network of railroad tracks. I think of that often when I imagine what could be in the future in the Middle East. But, of course, thinking of the future by remembering the past is so basic to the way Jews think of the world that that kind of fantasy comes almost naturally.

Abdul Hamid II, forgotten today by most in the West, was the last sultan of the soon-to-be-mostly-dismantled Ottoman Empire. He reigned from 1876 to 1909, and left behind a legacy so brutal that he was known in his own day as the Red Sultan (i.e., with reference to the amount of innocent blood his forces spilled). But he was also a railroad enthusiast and built the Hijaz Railroad, connecting Damascus, Haifa, Basra (today in southern Iraq), Lod, and Medina (in today’s Saudi Arabia). It cost a fortune to build—the final price was the equivalent of 15% of the budget of the entire empire—and was financed entirely by the Ottomans with contributions from Muslims around the world. The remainder, the Sultan made up himself with public funds. It took years to complete the project and then, finally, passenger service began in 1908.

Israel was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. World War I was years in the future. No one imagined then that a war of almost unimaginable barbarism was a mere six years away. But even fewer, if anyone at all, could have guessed that when the dust settled Israel would be wrested from the Ottomans and handed over to, of all nations, Great Britain. That actually did happen, of course. But I believe that prospect would have struck most, if not all, as unimaginable in 1908. And so, when the railroad began operating, it was to the Ottoman Empire what the Transcontinental Railroad was for the United States in 1869: a way to united a large nation of disparate states and regions by making travel reasonable, inexpensive, and easy between its far-flung states or provinces. By 1914, there were three weekly trains from Damascus to Medina and seven weekly trains ferrying people from Damascus to Haifa. (The trip from Damascus to Haifa took 11.5 hours. By way of comparison, it took 83.5 hours to travel from New York to San Francisco by rail in 1876.)  

Not many people think about what life was like in Ottoman times these days. But, of course, the great efforts of the early Zionists was precisely to bring Jews to Turkish Palestine. When Joan and I got married in 1980, some of her great-uncles were still alive and I heard lots of stories from them about their aliyah in 1909 to what was then a moshavah outside of Petach Tikvah called Ein Ganim. They had a lot to tell, but the detail that stuck me then was Uncle Shimshon’s comment that they fully expected the Jewish State to be born on land wrested from the Ottoman Empire. And so these Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews took Hebrew lessons out of conviction, but they also took daily Turkish class so as to be able to deal with the government, the bank, the post office, the local police, etc. Shimshon himself worked as a trumpet player in the Turkish Police Orchestra in Jerusalem, a job that most Israelis today would find surprising even to know once existed at all, let alone was open to Jewish musicians. But it was!

The announcement of a new rail-and-sea link from Europe to India G20 got me to remember the old Hijaz Railroad. (Hijaz, by the way, is the name of the western part of Saudia Arabia  where Mecca and Medina both are located.) And then I noted in the paper something even more surprising: that Hayim Katz, the Israeli Minister of Tourism, entered Saudi Arabia a few days ago to attend a U.N. Conference, thus becoming the first Israeli cabinet minister to travel in public to that nation…and that Naif al-Sudairi, the Saudi ambassador to the Palestinians, traveled through Israel to the West Bank to meet with officials of the Palestinian Authority. And that double-headed piece of unexpected news, combined with the endless speculation that I see all across the press and the internet that the Saudis may soon join the Abraham Accords, which decision would almost inevitably bring along other Muslim-majority countries as well, has filled me with an uncustomary sense of cautious optimism as this new year dawns.

What concessions Israel would be called upon to make as their part of the bargain, I have no idea. Where the Palestinians would fit into all of this, if they would part of it at all, I also have no idea. (On the other hand, I can assure you that that is precisely what Ambassador al-Sudairi is discussing with the Palestinian leadership this week.) But the announcement at the G20 that the world’s leaders can already imagine flying to Istanbul and then traveling easily through Israel, Jordan, and Saudia Arabia to India has truly caught my imagination. The Hijaz Railroad is probably gone for good—I don’t see the Syrians establishing a rail link between Damascus and Tel Aviv anytime soon. But the idea of taking the train from Haifa to Medina, or north to Beirut (which was also a public train line not that long ago) is thrilling.

So that’s my dream. A Middle East united not by political theory or by treaties, but by actual travel, by the interaction of people eager to live together and to prosper as neighbors and, even, as friends. To buy each other’s tchotchkes in the shuk. To attend each other’s universities. To learn each other’s language. Coincidentally, and while I was daydreaming about taking the train to Medina, one of our Shelter Rockers sent me a link to a blog published by the Times of Israel in which a Syrian woman named Rawan Osman wrote very movingly about her first encounters with Jewish people and with Israelis. (To read her piece, click here.) And her point was the same as mine: that the way barriers between peoples are broken down is not by politicians talking at each other, but by people actually meeting, drinking coffee in each other’s café’s, window-shopping on each other’s streets, etc. But most of all, connections are created through free, unfettered, affordable travel. And railroad travel could be the key to it all.

This last summer, Joan and I took the train for the first time from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was a great experience for us: on time, clean, comfortable…and incredibly fast: we were in Tel Aviv less than 45 minutes after leaving Jerusalem. So that was great. Maybe next summer we’ll take the train to Amman. Or to Medina. A new year is dawning. Who knows what it might not bring?