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I am a former diplomat who has been enriched and formed by the insights that came out of this group. There are very personal reasons why I was interested in joining the group, but I do not have time to go into them now. I regard my job as not to do what my colleagues at the Center do. I can understand what they say, but I cannot internalize what they do in the way that I can internalize my own experience and do what I did as a former diplomat. So my task in this group, as I see it, is to create a space in my world for what they are saying.
Now, my world is the world of power politics. My world is the world of statecraft, the world of diplomacy. That world is governed by a view of how countries and groups interact that does not fit today's reality. The power-politics model of world affairs is one that focuses on states—what governments do to each other. Essentially, it revolves around the idea that leaders amass political, military, and economic power. They pursue objectively defined interests against other states. This view doesn't leave any room for human beings. Throughout my intense involvement in the Kissinger shuttles, at Camp David with the Israelis and Palestinians, and with the Indians and Pakistanis my view was that if I didn't understand the human dimensions of those conflicts, I wouldn't be doing my job. And yet there was no concept of my job as a diplomat that included human beings.
I became acutely aware of this paradox in the middle of the Kissinger shuttles. My wife had died the day before the 1973 war started, and when I first saw Golda Meir, she took my hand on the day when the casualty figures from the Israeli war had been announced and said, “I lost a lot of people, too. I guess we feel somewhat the same way.” I said to myself at that time, “If you ever forget that these are people in pain, that these are people who have suffered great trauma—and that includes not only the victims of the Holocaust and the nation that was founded to be their refuge,