Gaza-a-Go-Go

Ehud Olmert spoke today about the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip as if the Israelis genuinely didn’t want to be there and didn’t want to cause disruption and loss of life, but that it was somehow necessary, and as if he actually believes that his state’s recent acts are going to crush Hamas and thereby solve all of Israel’s troubles.

If he really does believe this, he is utterly deluded. There is nothing in the past forty years of Israeli-Palestinian conflict to suggest that doing it exactly as they’ve always done it is going to somehow lead to a cessation of hostilities—just the opposite. It is certainly possible that he is indeed deluded, of course, as the past eight years of US history show that achieving high office in a democracy is no guarantee of sanity. It is possible that, being at the heart of the conflict, he and the rest of Israel are unable to see anything particularly clearly. But it’s just as likely that the leaders of Israel and Hamas are going after one another for purposes of reinforcing their power among their own constituents as that they really think they’re gaining any ground with one another. Clearly, Hamas rockets won‘t bring down the modern, nuclear-armed, US-backed state of Israel, and just as clearly, violent incursions in the face of an asymmetric opposition just leads to an entrenchment of the opposition, in this case Hamas or some party even more extreme that will form to fill its vacuum. You can’t crush a guerilla opposition short of genocide, or at least extreme and open brutality—public drawing and quartering, heads on stakes, that sort of thing—and Israel has managed not to go so far.

We must take into account, though, that when Olmert claims that Hamas is “an existential threat” to Israel, he’s not entirely wrong. After all, how would a largely secular but ethnically Jewish state define itself if it didn’t have an Other to define itself as not? The Palestinians, despite their current condition, suffer from the same potential problem. Recall what a statement it was for Arafat to don a business suit when he negotiated the Dayton Accords. There would have been no statement had his Westernized sartorial choices not been controversial at home.

Palestinians and Israelis have just as much trouble trying to define themselves as distinct from the other: they eat the same food and ostensibly worship the same god (when they worship) and have many of the same concerns, namely how to make a living in a barren landscape with few natural resources and a history of violence. If we in the West spoke truly, we’d acknowledge that nobody except the locals would be interested in the Israel-Palestine issue if it weren’t the home to the three major monotheistic religions: the area has no oil, no good farmland, few beautiful vistas. If not for the religious significance, the conflict there would be sort of like Sri Lanka’s problem with the Tamil Tigers: a minor sort of tragedy when we hear about it, the hearing of which we follow by an immediate return to the spreadsheet or caramel latte that calls for our immediate attention.

In back of this, there is also the fact that both Israel and Palestine have far right minorities that must be appeased. In Palestine, that is Hamas, and it was only after decades of oppression that the moderates of Palestine decided to give their extremists a chance to govern. Hamas was already acting as a de facto government, building schools and soup kitchens, and taking care of people when the more conciliatory but utterly corrupt Fata was just filling its own pockets with foreign-aid cash. Likewise, moderate governments in Israel are usually only able to govern by making parliamentary coalitions with the ultra-orthodox, whose settlement-building and zero-tolerance fundamentalism pulls the moderates’ puppet-strings if they wish to maintain power, and it is always the first order of business for any political party to gain and keep power.

But for religious moderates, there is always a niggling sense of having compromised one’s core principles for the sake of getting along with Modernity. I have witnessed this with Mennonites, most of whom speak and think of the Amish with reverence, even though they’d never actually wish to live the way the Amish do. Contemporary Mennonites think with one part of their minds that the Amish are somehow more “pure,” closer to the way God intended people to live, even though the Amish lifestyle was one adopted long after the founding of the faith—a faith that developed as a reaction by theologically sophisticated, university educated city-dwellers to the corruption of the existing church. It’s likely the Israelis and Palestinians view their own fundamentalists the same way and kowtow to them not only because of their political power but because, on some level, they think it somehow more “pure” and “godly” to do so.

Seeing the world in terms of a continuum of purity leads to the desire to protect those you think are more pure and destroy those you think are less pure. Since nobody’s position is at either terminus, relatively minor differences take on amplified importance: if I’m much like the Palestinian, and the Palestinian is not pure, I must prove my relative worth by destroying the Palestinian. This also leads to the “existential threat” as outlined above since it is definitional, but we see the phenomenon over and over again, from the “Holy” Land to otherwise reasonable people aggrandizing the small-town “values voter” in the US, even though few of us live in small towns, and even in small towns few, if any, of us ever live by those values we vote to uphold. This was exactly the destructive power unleashed in the witch hunts in Salem and the pogroms in Europe.

Sadly, none of the religions involved in the conflict at issue insist on the kind of purity that drives the current troubles. Judaism has its Jubilee and Christianity its forgiveness. Islam has its jihad—the internal struggle to follow the path the Prophet describes. If we were perfect, we humans wouldn’t need religion at all. The least we could ask of ourselves is that we privilege the moderation of our faith