Reality-based approach to Middle East peace is essential
https://arab.news/vw5ws
Jonathan Ross is the founder of the generative AI chipmaking behemoth Groq. It earned him a prime slot on Time magazine’s recent list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. Jonathan is brilliant and among his best observations is the need to amend the criteria for measuring human intelligence based on the intelligence quotient (IQ) and the emotional quotient (EQ) criteria.
For Ross, there is a third leg to the intelligence stool that matters just as much as IQ and EQ. He relies on this third factor when he hires key members of his growing company and he thinks about it as he lives every day in the rarified air of those navigating the future of generative AI for the rest of us.
He calls this third factor “RQ,” or the reality quotient.
It is a term he has popularized, if not coined altogether. We do not just need IQ and EQ to manage the world, we also need a healthy dose of RQ to get it right.
A lack of reality quotient makes the world more dangerous, and nowhere is this more apparent than in peacemaking
Rev. Johnnie Moore
In short, the reality quotient is the ability to be able to “perceive reality accurately.” It’s a type of intelligence that can see the world as it is and not just as one wants it to be, as it feels or as it should be. It is a check on the type of feelings-first thinking that dominates our digital age, always pulling on our heartstrings, and it adds something to the prosaic, inflexible facts alone-based analysis, which often makes problems much worse before making them better.
These days, we have an abundance of EQ in our political discourse, some IQ, but very little RQ.
This is especially the case when it comes to navigating the growing challenges afflicting our conflict-ridden world. According to the 2024 Global Peace Index report, “many of the conditions that precede major conflicts are higher than they have been since the end of the Second World War.” There are currently 56 active conflicts in the world.
A lack of RQ makes the world more dangerous, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the fraught world of peacemaking in the Middle East, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Unlike some in my own conservative community, and like many of the victims of the Oct. 7 attacks in the kibbutzim around the Gaza Strip and at the Nova Music Festival, I have always been a determined advocate for peace between the Israelis and Arabs, including the Palestinians. We must recognize the Oct. 7 terrorist attack for what it was: fundamentally an attempt by terrorists to sabotage peace.
And, like most of those massacred on Oct. 7, I have never publicly opposed a two-state solution and I have always believed peace was possible. I still do, but I believe it is only possible if we embrace the reality quotient.
See, it’s an RQ problem that has made declarations in favor of a two-state solution little more than talking points defined by a world that no longer exists and which has not existed for a long time. Those words are also not a magic wand that will immediately put out fires fanned by foreign non-state actors and war.
A two-state solution — even for those who have advocated for it for years — is further away than ever because so few people want to consider the “reality on the ground quotient” that has led us to this point, especially since the total withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
As a Christian friend of Israelis and Arabs, of Jews and Muslims, I find it frustrating how these arguments take place in echo chambers — often EQ echo chambers that avoid facts and reality.
The leaders of moderate nations in the Arab world know the reality and may be uniquely able to prepare credible plans for the future Palestinian leadership based upon reality. Those plans must address the proliferation of terrorist financing and arms trafficking, address systematic corruption (often involving money stolen from Arab and Western countries) and achieve the deradicalization of educational and humanitarian organizations financed by the international community.
Simply collecting half-hearted pledges about a recommitment to a two-state solution will not do it
Rev. Johnnie Moore
The Trump administration tried with its Peace to Prosperity economic summit in 2019, promising many billions of dollars in investment in a Palestinian future. But while that historic event was attended by many Arab countries and global business magnates, it was sadly boycotted by Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority.
Simply pacifying extremists by tolerating anti-Israel propaganda or collecting half-hearted pledges about a recommitment to a two-state solution will not do it.
We have to really tackle reality.
Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, recently published a thoughtful editorial in The Financial Times. While I do not see everything exactly the same way as my friend, I agreed with most of what he wrote.
He called on us to “embark on an irreversible road to resolution … by embracing a solution that allows both peoples to coexist in peace,” and then “we can dismantle the cycle of violence that has entrapped both sides for far too long.” He wrote that “the true obstacles to peace are not the Palestinians and Israelis who yearn for stability and coexistence,” but “radicals and warmongers … who seek to spread this conflict across our region and beyond.”
I am sure Arab genius can help tackle these challenges, beginning with the current war, but it simply has to be alongside the historical and present neighbors who are also the children of Abraham: the Israelis.
Nations do not have to have normal diplomatic relations to meet, even in person, to work in good faith to try to negotiate a better future based on reality in pursuit of everyone’s respective best interests.
Keeping the problem solvers apart is an age-old tactic of those who traffic in dehumanization and of those who sabotage peace.
- Rev. Johnnie Moore is president of the Congress of Christian Leaders and president of JDA Worldwide.
