The airplane took off from London and set a course for Moscow. A smiling stewardess handed out a pile of newspapers and magazines, and the passengers immersed themselves in their reading.

The Russian papers informed me that London had turned into hell on earth. Asphalt was melting under car tires and railroad tracks were buckling because of the high temperatures. Survival in such conditions was becoming almost impossible, it seemed.

In fact, the weather in the British capital was not the point. The humidity was awful. Brits joked that they felt like they were in a sauna all day long. "More like a Russian banya," I told them. The hot air was laden with moisture.

But the rails have not buckled, and the asphalt has not melted. The journalists who wrote these stories obviously had no understanding of physics. No matter how hot it has been in Western Europe this summer, it is still a long way from the temperature at which metal begins to soften. Even so, I'm more than willing to check on the reports about the rails, since Britain's railroads have been in terrible shape ever since privatization.

It is a shame that it is easier for the press to write about natural disasters than social issues. Socio-political problems catch the attention of journalists just as they are about to erupt into full-blown crises. Journalists need an enraged mob roaming the streets and police firing tear gas grenades -- or, even better, bloodshed and bombs.

Lebanon is another matter entirely. Bombs are exploding every day, and people are dying. The journalists have something to write about. Shocked television viewers are confronted first by mountains of rubble where houses once stood and weeping Israeli and Arab children in bomb shelters, and then by self-satisfied analysts who conclude with an air of great importance that all diplomatic possibilities have been exhausted before calculating how many tanks the Israelis will need to crush Hezbollah's resistance.

Yet while Lebanon was enjoying a period of relative calm before the current hostilities began, no one thought to ask what was going on there. Any arguments and conflicts were presented either as clashes between political groups or as recondite geopolitical games in a conspiracy theory with reference to "Syrian interests," "Israeli plans," "American strategy," "Russian influence," and so on.

In this picture, millions of people -- Lebanese, Israeli, and Palestinian alike -- are little more than victims and statistics that are of little interest to the press. No one is particularly cares what they were doing previously or why they started to fight one another.

Why has the peace process that started in the Middle East so promisingly 20 years ago degenerated into bloody chaos? The current situation appears even worse than the unrest of the late 1980s.

The mountains of analytical articles on this war-torn region contain next to nothing about the area's economic situation or social problems, never mind anything about daily life for the majority of the people there. In fact, economic paralysis made possible the growth of radical movements like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. Hezbollah's strength is not that the organization is dependent on Shiites, but that Shiites are the poorest and most excluded members of Lebanese society. As long as religious and ethnic differences are used as a basis for the division of labor, and as long as inequality between communities remains and is upheld, conflict between them is inevitable. Likewise, it is just as obvious that the Palestinian development plan being implemented jointly with the European Union, Israel and Arab countries has failed by not creating new jobs, self-dependent growth, or incentives for technological advancement.

The odd union of the free market with bureaucratic corruption and dependency on foreign aid has created a social situation that fosters only fear, envy, and hatred. It should come as no surprise that mass resentment has been led by Hamas radicals, as all other groups have either been destroyed by the Israelis and Americans or discredited by collaborating with them.

Decades of political efforts not supported by economic or social policy in the interest of the bulk of the population have led to disaster. And the greater the political efforts and the more effective they have been, the worse things have become. All political artifice can only be harmful if it contradicts people's basic interests. The tragedy is not that Arabs and Israelis hate each other; it is that they have no option left other than hatred.

Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times