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Headage Bedrock Tuesday night, I watched footage from Israel presented by Our Man Peter Jennings. Quite graphic. First, a Palestinian civilian trying to enter Ramallah gets an Israeli truncheon in the face. Bash! Then there was the man--earnest but eerily calm—showing the camera the splayed corpses in his tiny shattered apartment. "Yes--my brother, and my mother," he said, pointing in turn to each of the bloodied and contorted bodies. His apartment had been strafed by an American-made Apache helicopter. Another suicide bomber in the making, I expect. Another enemy of Israel. I thought, as I watched footage of Palestinians beaten and Palestinians killed, “They shouldn’t do that.” Then I remembered Netanya, and Israelis blown apart at the Seder table, and thought, “They shouldn’t do that.” Then I thought of Israeli checkpoints, and curfews, and summary imprisonment: “They shouldn’t do that.” Muslim grenades exploding in Pakistani Protestant churches? “They shouldn’t do that.” Torture sanctioned by the government of Israel? “They shouldn’t do that.” And so on. And so forth. And on...and on...and on... Part of the conservative ethos is the recognition that certain practices are conserved because they have survival utility, such as ‘to the winner go the spoils’ and so forth. There is a fatalistic pragmatism which declares that, when faced with violence against one’s citizens, equal or greater violence must be meted out simply to insure the survival of said citizenry and the state which shelters it. All so very true, so very practical, so very reasonable. Why, then, does most of the world flinch when the Israelis storm Palestinian apartments? Why the sickened grimace when faced with Israeli gunship-assassinations? Why does Israel not enjoy unreserved support in Europe for its defense against admittedly cruel and inhumane attacks? Is it simply because of the supposed Israeli refusal to acknowledge the humanity of those they have displaced? Is it (as is so often suggested) the age-old habit of anti-Semitism? Or is it that, as a broad culture, many in the West are simply tired? So very, very tired of the same solution to the same problems, of blood for blood, of vengeance for vengeance. Israel came late to the game of ethnic nation building. By 1948, the Europeans had already built their nation states, had spent centuries pounding the tar out of each other, had sent their merchants and governors to the farthest territories of the earth to administer empires and bury the aboriginal peoples who lived there. Such empires have been dissolved, many in the face of exactly the same sort of carnage we witness today in Israel. To the Europeans this is an old game that they no longer play. They enjoy peace and good relations with one another, and if things get out of hand they can always rely on the big, dumb adolescent strength of the United States. To them, the debate is informed by finer principles of justice, ethical practice and diplomacy. Not so the Israelis. Not so the Palestinians. The Israelis established their state at the expense of an existing population, and the leadership of that effort was well aware of that fact. The Palestinians, latecomers to the modern nation building game like the Israelis, oppose their expulsion from their land. Pundits on the left and the right may speak of the right of the oppressed Palestinians to resist or the determination of the Palestinians to destroy Israel, but beyond any position held by any commentator is the simple reality of people, earth, death, and grievance. I was recently asked why I am so ‘obsessed’ with the situation in the Middle East, with the current carnage, and with the histories of the peoples involved. It boils down to this: the Middle East is the place where the ephemeral morality and ethical theory of Western civilization hits the ground. Forget thought-experiments about old men and crippled children adrift in lifeboats stocked with limited food supplies. Stop theorizing about the hypothetical moral permissibility of Jews in a concentration camp killing guards in an attempt to escape. What is going on in the Middle East demands a response. The simple thing to do is to pick a side. In picking a side, one’s own ideological convictions are brought to bear. Thus, for the pro-Israelis, the democratic nation state has moral superiority over the stateless rabble, and the right to self-defense trumps the right to resist. For the pro-Palestinians, the right to self-determination thwarts the right of the nation state, and the mantle of moral superiority is conferred to the weak and oppressed. In each case, the evidence considered and the tropes declared have passed through an ideological filter. The situation in the Middle East becomes a confirmation of an existing worldview rather than an unfolding human interaction with its own relationships and history. Meaning is imposed upon it, rather than drawn from it. I am certainly not declaring myself free of ideology. I am suggesting that what is important about the conflict cannot be revealed by the application of modern liberal and conservative concepts. The origin of this conflict is not to be found in contemporary ideas of the nation-state, or human rights. It is found here, in these words: “And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.” (Genesis 13:14-17). It is 3,000 years’ worth of faith in this promise that has driven the Jewish people to return to the blood-soaked desert of Palestine. Before giving His people any ethical directives, God gave his people the land of Israel. Before there were Palestinians, Europeans, or Americans, God gave his people the land of Israel. Before there were liberals or conservatives, Christians or Muslims, God gave his people the land of Israel. It is some form of belief in the truth of this that makes an Israeli Jew--no matter how secular, no matter how non-observant--feel at home in Israel. To live on the soil of Israel, to breathe its air and to drink its water, is to connect across thousands of years with the ancient forebears of Jewish culture. It is to become a living part of the only Western culture that can claim a continuous identity for three millennia. Instead of forcing the Middle Eastern morass through our modern ideological filters, perhaps we should look beyond them, to the ancient past and the dawn of Western ethical thought. Perhaps the questions we should ask ought not to concern the nation state and the rights of the oppressed, but the deep bedrock of our culture. Not the foundations, mind you: these matters are deeper than that, and equivalent to the very bones of the earth upon which we build. Where, after all, did Muhammad get the idea that he was a prophet of the one, true God? Was not Jesus a Jew? It is the Judaic notion of a singular God who demands ethical behavior from his people that girds all three faiths. However, even before that comes the notion of binding a sacred people to sacred ground. The very first words that God spoke to Abraham, first patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee.” (Genesis 12:1). Not “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Not even, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Thus, the response demanded by the ongoing carnage is not an affirmation of Israel’s right to self-defense, or of the Palestinian right to resist, but a decision about whether the pre-ethical idea of a sacred people bonded to sacred soil ought to have any place in our world today. It is this belief, subtle, pervasive, and empowered by the conviction of a hundred generations, that is ultimately responsible for every drop of blood drying on the streets of Israel. The continual violence is intractable because at its root it transcends and pre-dates any rational notion of right and wrong, or good and evil. It comes from a time when righteousness simply meant faith, and evil was the descriptor for defeated peoples. The Europeans, still shell-shocked by the 60,000,000 corpses that littered the earth after their last great war, timidly approach the violence in the Middle East with their mature principles of justice, ethical practice and diplomacy. But these principles came long after the first principle which underlies that violence, and cannot fully address it. The Americans, with our pragmatic respect for violent solutions and our racial neuroses, cannot escape the notion that the Israelis are more ‘like us’ than the Palestinians, and so our efforts are also timid, without conviction. But in both Europe and America, a conflict simmers, below the level of abstract ethical thinking, deep in the moral sensibilities of our culture. That conflict is rooted in the suspicion that, no matter what each side may claim today, they are both driven by a principle that has no place in our modern world. Yet, because we in the West now hold such liberal values, and have adopted such tolerance, no one will question the value of the first principle of these cultures. The heirs of the civilizations that brought higher ethical and philosophical thought to the West are now drowning in a river of blood. Their aspirations and their very participation in the ongoing evolution of humanity may depend upon each people shedding its implicit belief that God himself calls them unique among all other peoples, guarantees them their homeland, and sanctions their acts. This is, of course, highly unlikely. And so, for the foreseeable future, we will watch on our televisions the beatings, the bodies, the explosions and the blood. And we will shake our heads: “They shouldn’t do that.”
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