[Note from Steve: I hope you enjoyed the series of classic posts on writing.  It gave me a welcome respite from my own writing and some much needed R&R via casual reading—I read four novels, finishing the last yesterday (speed reading and touch typing were my most useful courses taken in high school).  So, it seems reasonable to return to my op-ed posts with a highly controversial topic, the Palestinian situation.  I’ve tried to be very fair here because neither side owns the moral high ground.  Moreover, it’s a freakin’ tragedy that it’s happening.  Read on….]

We’ve seen it in Northern Ireland.  We’ve seen it in Yugoslavia.  We’re seeing it in Iraq.  And it seems like we’ve seen it forever in Palestine.  Some pundits say that old hatreds will die when the old timers who do the hating die off.  Maybe…sometimes.  Other times, it’s best to separate the opposing groups (Iraq shows there can be more than two).  That seemed to work in Yugoslavia after much loss of life and bitterness that still remains.  The U.S. government tends to act cautiously in such circumstances (in Rwanda, it never did), even though many times it’s culpable of participating in their creation.

What’s clear is the following: while the parties doing the hating might migrate to certain fanatical ideologies (the adjective isn’t even necessary, of course, because all ideologies are fanatical—some more; some less; and some reducing to brainwashing) and might attract supporters from non-participating groups as a result, ideology isn’t really the issue.  The heat of the hate is, in fact, in direct proportion to how long that hatred has been around.  While ideologies come and go (they are often debunked by rational people who recognize their severe limitations), ethnic and racial hatred hangs around.

Whatever machinations were performed to create the modern state of Israel (and there were many), and whatever claims Arabs and Jews have over Palestinian real estate, there are groups in the Middle East out to destroy Israel.  Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist groups—that Hamas leads a rogue government is irrelevant.  Iran and the old Syria were active supporters of these two groups, and the PLO.  Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries are accomplices by financially supporting them and the religious schools and other organizations that feed new fanatics into them.  Religious jihadists abound in the Middle East.  Because they’re outgunned and outmanned by Israel with its modern army, they hide in civilian infrastructure and behind innocent women and children.  Whether the latter are forced to go along or not makes no difference.

Israel not only generates hatred—it generates envy.  The hostilities and inept governments hinder the Arab economies.  Ones with oil might get by; the ones without, especially ones with the most inept governments, use the tactic, portrayed so well in Orwell’s 1984, of creating a scapegoat, one that’s easy to hate because of the region’s history with its mutual hatreds.  Not to be outdone, there are currents in Israel that do the same.  It doesn’t help that Jerusalem is a holy city for the three faiths involved—they all want to control that city.

Israel shares part of the blame here.  The expansion into the West Bank and other areas taken in previous wars is interpreted as a land grab by the Arab parties.  Its government is more theocratic than Saudi Arabia’s if you analyze things objectively (religious zealots who study Hebrew religious writings traditionally avoid military service).  Seventy years of siege have created a national paranoia that goes all the way up to the PM—or, should I say, especially the PM.  Moreover, the Israeli’s aren’t above spying on their friends, the Pollard case in the U.S. being perhaps the most publicized.

Add the above to the one-sided death toll of the last month, exacerbated by attacks on U.N. shelters, it’s no wonder Israel is losing the PR war with Hamas.  Whether Hamas uses women and children to shield their missile launchers (a full-page ad in the NY Times on Monday by a well-known and respected sympathizer of Israel might only reflect a bias in the Times—there’s no ad supporting the other side), it’s hard to watch civilians die.  It seems obscene, but all war is obscene, and innocents, more often than not, are the victims.  A fanatic jihadist blowing himself up in a crowded Israeli market place, or in a plane crashing into a WTC tower, is just as bad.  Terrorism is war at its most obscene.

The national paranoia in Israel is fed by the centuries-old belief, often realized in fact, that the world is out to get the Jews.  The adage, “You’re a victim of your own success,” takes on a special meaning, creating anti-Semitic hatreds even in the U.S.  Many Jews are successful in science, technology, business, and the arts; many aren’t.  I applaud those who are, but I rarely consider ethnic labels (well, my being Irish motivates me from time to time to stick it to the Brits, all in good fun).

Recent wars (Afghanistan and Iraq being the most recent) and terrorist events (9/11 being the most egregious) has added anti-Islamic hatreds to our national potpourri of hates and paranoia, which become so extreme that some GOP members of Congress don’t want the Pope to visit the U.S. because he’s too liberal.  I’ve known both Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians.  The ones I know are hard workers mostly interested in supporting and educating their families and giving them a better future.  I’m sure most Arab families in Gaza and Jewish families in Israel are the same.

In research for my book Soldiers of God (an ebook second edition was recently released), I read from several sources that conjectured that human beings’ ethnic hatreds are possibly just a bad reflection of our evolutionary past—my tribe is good; yours, if different, is bad.  I saw a National Geographic episode where two different groups of chimpanzees went to war—the victors not only killed the vanquished, they ate some of them.  Ugh!  Are we stuck in this evolutionary bottleneck, doomed to continue our tribal-like ethnic and racial hatreds?  What went on in the world in the 20^th century and what’s going on in these first decades of the 21^st seem to indicate that the answer is yes.

I’ll end this post with the dedication from Soldiers of God: “To all those courageous people willing to stand up against hate and extremism of all kinds, I salute you.  May you have the numbers and strength to yank mankind out of its dark and tribal past and save our planet for future generations.”  I’ll qualify the last: I’m sure the planet will survive in some form; I’m not sure human beings will.

And so it goes….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under Fundamentalism, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.