Sobbing Crocodiles

''Scuse me,' said the Elephant's Child most politely, 'but my father has spanked me, my mother has spanked me, not to mention my tall aunt, the Ostrich, and my tall uncle, the Giraffe, who can kick ever so hard, as well as my broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, and my hairy uncle, the Baboon, and including the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, with the scalesome, flailsome tail, just up the bank, who spanks harder than any of them; and so, if it's quite all the same to you, I don't want to be spanked any more.'

'Come hither, Little One,' said the Crocodile, 'for I am the Crocodile,' and he wept crocodile-tears to show it was quite true.

Then the Elephant's Child grew all breathless, and panted, and kneeled down on the bank and said, 'You are the very person I have been looking for all these long days. Will you please tell me what you have for dinner?'

'Come hither, Little One,' said the Crocodile, 'and I'll whisper.'

Then the Elephant's Child put his head down close to the Crocodile's musky, tusky mouth, and the Crocodile caught him by his little nose, which up to that very week, day, hour, and minute, had been no bigger than a boot, though much more useful.

'I think,' said the Crocodile–and he said it between his teeth, like this–'I think to-day I will begin with Elephant's Child!'

(Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant's Child, Just So Stories)

The myth that crocodiles shed tears before or after killing and eating their prey is an old one. But it has a strong symbolic image for people; faked emotion, pretending to feel a sorrow that is not at all real resonates. And so the myth is still with us. Unfortunately, so is the reality of people and nations shedding feigned tears for others in order to divert attention form internal failures. Lisa Beyer, writing in Time Magazine, points that out when reviewing the false reality of the Baker Commission's conclusion. For the tears are of the crocodile type.

No sensible person is against peacemaking in the Holy Land. Applause and hopefulness would seem the reasonable reaction to the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the Bush Administration "act boldly" and "as soon as possible" to resolve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. But as a front-row observer of similar efforts over the past 15 years, I could muster neither response. In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem–and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too–the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that the fundamental problem in the Arab world is the plight of the Palestinians.

It is a falsehood perpetuated not just by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who came late to the slogan after their actual beefs–Saddam with his neighbors; bin Laden with the Saudi royals–gained insufficient traction in the Arab world. The mantra is also repeated like an axiom in the U.S.–in parts of the State Department, in various think tanks, by editorial writers and Sunday talk-show hosts.

Yes, it was a great disturbance in the Arab world in the 1940s when a Jewish state was born through a U.N. vote and a war that made refugees of many Palestinians. Then the 1967 war left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and thus the Palestinians who lived there. But the pan-Arabism that once made the Palestinian cause the region's cause is long dead, and the Arab countries have their own worries aplenty. In a decade of reporting in the region, I found it rarely took more than the arching of an eyebrow to get the most candid of Arab thinkers to acknowledge that the tears shed for the Palestinians today outside the West Bank and Gaza are of the crocodile variety. Palestinians know this best of all.

The perpetuation of this enormous falsehood comes from all quarters, the better to mask the failures of the other nations in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter promotes exactly the same mythology in his latest screed. European governments constantly carp upon the issue. And it does not serve either the Palestinians, the Middle East in general or the world any good to continue to weep these phony tears. It accomplishes no more good than a real weeping of crocodiles would.