SESAME physicists’ “indirect peacemaking” stirs little US interest
King Abdullah II of Jordan (front row, fourth from right) stands alongside SESAME leaders following the opening of the synchrotron light source.
Noemi Caraban Gonzalez/CERN
“They’ve built a machine in the desert in the heart of the Middle East,” began a Washington Post article about the then-imminent 16 May international ceremony to open the SESAME synchrotron light source. Author Joel Achenbach rose immediately to the wider implications: “Israelis will use it—and so will Iranians, Jordanians, Turks, Pakistanis and many others. Scientists from countries recently at war or without diplomatic relations will work side by side—Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists sharing the pursuit of knowledge.”
Why have most US news organizations scanted this science news that goes way beyond science?
Most, but not all. At the New York Times, Dennis Overbye opened a similar piece by deeming SESAME “a spark of light in years of darkness.” An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor argued, “Sometimes peace starts through universal activities like science, arts, and sports.” It began with an observation on what it called “indirect peacemaking”:
When nations are at odds or even at war, sometimes peace can come quietly through a back door. China and the United States reconciled decades ago through a table tennis match. Serbia and Albania have edged closer after putting on a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” India and Pakistan have talked of joint research on Himalayan glaciers. South Korea, host of the next Winter Olympics, hopes to welcome a team from North Korea.
“In science,” the CSM editors declared, “there is an inherent demand for truth, openness, and trust. Researchers often unite in the joy of making discoveries. They later carry back home those moments of unity experienced during mutual learning.”
Yet with the exception of a report in Physics Today, there’s been little US attention to what the PT headline calls the new “scientific beacon in the Middle East.” Online news-site searches yielded no hits at the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, CNN, Time, CBS, or ABC. Meanwhile, according to Google News, at Israel’s Haaretz, the Times of Israel, BBC, Xinhua in China, Al Jazeera, Nature Middle East, the Jordan Times, Daily Pakistan, Arab News, and others overseas, there’s substantial awareness of the “indirect peacemaking” implications.
Physics Today sent editor Toni Feder to the 16 May ceremony in Jordan at the site of SESAME—a name that invokes the resonant Arabian phrase “Open, sesame” and that stands for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. Participants are Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, and Turkey, with other countries in observer status, including the US.
Feder’s report conveys the peace-catalyst optimism, but also conveys the need for realism. “The ceremony was not immune to the fragile political situation in the region,” she wrote. “At least one Palestinian delegate chose not to attend in solidarity with prisoners in Israel who had been on a hunger strike since 17 April. And Roy Beck-Barkai, a biophysicist at Tel Aviv University, says that many of the thousands of scientists in Israel who are potential SESAME users will need convincing—they’re used to going to Europe and nervous about traveling to a Muslim country.”
Overbye described SESAME participants walking “a political and technical tightrope past wars, treaties, negotiations, ultimatums, assassinations and other crises.” BBC recalled the controversial deaths of two Iranian nuclear scientists a few years ago, conjectured as having been caused clandestinely by Israel. Both scientists had ties to SESAME. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that at the 16 May ceremony, Iranian scientists balked at engaging Israeli media or revealing ties to Israeli researchers. A Times of Israel article told of an angry dispute between Israeli politicians about attendance at the event. And when queried by email, the Pakistani physicist and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy replied, “There are precious few Pakistani scientists who could usefully use synchrotron radiation.”
Still, awareness of the obstacles hasn’t hobbled physicists’ resolve to reach for indirect peacemaking by struggling to establish this light source. In fact, an often-reported SESAME-origin story hinges on a challenge to engage and overcome the obstacles. In 1993 Italian physicist Sergio Fubini issued the challenge to Eliezer Rabinovici, a physics professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who now serves as vice president of SESAME and chairs the high-energy physics committee of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The story usually moves on to cite a magnitude 6.9 Mount Sinai earthquake in 1995 that Rabinovici is said to have suggested, jokingly, to have signified heavenly endorsement of an important early meeting of SESAME participants.
Physicists have also used theoretical physics for whimsical conjecturing about SESAME’s potential for indirect peacemaking. Overbye recalls asking Rabinovici why he works to develop SESAME:
The answer, of course, comes from string theory, where, he explained, it often (and controversially) comes out that there are many possible universes. “I must say that personally, I always wanted to visit some of these other universes, just to see how things are there.”
So with the Sesame project, he went on, “I actually got to live in a universe where Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Pakistanis work together for the same cause for their own people, for humanity. And that definitely feels good.”
It’s widely reported that SESAME already has more scientific user proposals than it can schedule and that it expects to become solar powered. BBC predicts , “Looking ahead, already discussions have started about copying the Sesame model by building similar synchrotrons in other parts of the world including Africa and Central America.”
There’s also the future of women in the Middle East and in science. Feder predicts, “The new facility should be a special boon for female scientists from Muslim countries. Gihan Kamel, an Egyptian physicist who is the only woman on SESAME’s scientific staff, says that there will be less opposition to the region’s women traveling to Jordan than to Western countries to do research.” Achenbach reports concerning Zehra Sayers, a Turkish scientist: “She’s now the chair of [SESAME’s] scientific advisory committee, and intends to use the light source for a project to study how a protein in a bacterium latches onto iron.”
But none of this is being engaged in the US media generally. Nor is SESAME being engaged as a matter of US funding contributions. Achenbach quotes both Rush Holt, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Herman Winick, the Stanford light-source physicist who has been involved with SESAME from the start. They call the situation “embarrassing.”
Whatever the hopes for SESAME, US general press inattention to its opening and the US outlook for federal science funding probably combine to discourage hope about something mentioned in a Nature editorial . Just after the US presidential election, the editorial observed that “brokering peace in the Middle East is something that Donald Trump said on the campaign trail he’d ‘really like to do.’ For less than the cost of a return flight to Tel Aviv on Air Force One, his administration could help SESAME to develop from a bare-bones scientific laboratory into a true beacon of peace and cooperation.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.