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June 26, 2005
All Rights Reserved
World Copyright
© Martin Foreman
Column 12: Why not Hawaii?
Sibling rivalry in the Middle East
By © Martin Foreman
Word Count: 798 words
Publication date: April 24, 2005
How familiar are you with the names of Baruch Goldstein and Muhammad Abd al-Basset Oudeh? Both were mass murderers. Both were circumcised monotheists who spoke a Semitic language and refused to eat pig meat. And both killed for the right of their fellow-believers to occupy a piece of land smaller than New Jersey.
In 1994 Goldstein, a Jewish doctor, shot 154 people in a mosque in Hebron. Twenty-nine died and the carnage only ended when he himself was killed. Goldstein’s motivation was a hatred of Muslims worshipping on a site sacred to Jews. The fact that the mosque honored Abraham, the same dead patriarch that Jews venerate, was, in Goldstein’s eyes, beside the point.
Muhammad Abd al-Basset Oudeh, a Palestinian Muslim, died when the bomb he was wearing exploded in the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002. Twenty-seven of the 167 casualties died. Oudeh believed that he was doing Allah’s will and he would be rewarded in the afterlife with the companionship of several dozen virgins. The idea that the virgins might remain virgins throughout eternity, leaving him an extremely frustrated young man for a very long time, does not appear to have crossed his mind.
Oudeh and Baruch are only two among thousands of young men and women in Israel-Palestine who insist they have the right to kill others in God’s name. Hundreds of thousands more are less bloodthirsty but nonetheless convinced that their belief in their version of God entitles them to deny others equal access to land, life and liberty.
To an observer from Mars – or any intelligent being with no emotional commitment to either side – the situation is absurd. For millennia Arabs and Jews have shared a social, linguistic and cultural heritage. They are siblings who have taken different paths in life, but siblings they remain. And instead of rejoicing in their common origins, they fight endlessly over the family inheritance.
[Incidentally, the very nature of that inheritance undermines the basis of Judaism. If Yahweh really existed and considered the Jews his favorite people, he would surely have offered them a more comfortable home than the Negev desert. The Romans, Incas and Polynesians all got a better deal from their multiple gods than the wandering tribes received from Jehovah. If I were a practicing Jew, I would be praying daily to complain that we didn’t get Hawaii.]
Centuries of persecution and warfare, often involving Christians, have led to an endless spiral of violence where one side’s reaction is the other side’s provocation, like children playing tit-for-tat. To accuse one or both sides of terrorism is to miss the point, like a doctor who focuses on the symptoms rather than the cause of a disease.
Currently the Israelis have the upper hand. But instead of using their military, moral, economic and political advantages to ensure a just settlement for all who live in that part of the world, the Israeli government seeks to condemn their neighbors to hardship and poverty. The rationale is easy – we have to protect ourselves; reasoning – everyone deserves protection – is more difficult for men and women driven by emotion.
Ariel Sharon may indeed be seeking to end the violence, but his vision of peace is limited. The Wall steals land from the Palestinians, destroying their farms and their ability to build a strong, viable state. Sharon’s failure to see the Palestinians as equals may lead to a temporary peace but it condemns both sides to further conflict.
Hostility will persist as long as it is based on the fiction that there is a God who demands that his followers subjugate their fellow human-beings. Take Allah-Yahweh out of the equation and the conflict is immediately reduced to manageable levels. [Of course, if God existed and performed a true miracle rather than the party tricks with which he is usually credited, peace would come swiftly.]
So, close all synagogues and mosques, award every resident dual citizenship, teach every child both Hebrew and Arabic and have them learn by heart the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Without the bigotry inspired by religion, political and community leaders can focus on the real issues that plague Israel-Palestine – poverty, lack of water and over-population. At that point a single secular state becomes inevitable and the Wall as irrelevant as its Berlin predecessor.
Unfortunately, indoctrination and prejudice run too deep for such a radical solution. The best that can be hoped for is outside pressure favoring neither side. George Bush may believe that by declaring support for a Palestinian state the US is moving both sides towards a fair solution. The reality is, however, as Bush’s recent meeting with Sharon proved, America is doing no more than supporting Israeli’s creation of an apartheid- and bantustan- state. Yahweh may be celebrating, but his alter-ego is undoubtedly plotting his revenge.
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT
"Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Archbishop of Genoa, told an Italian newspaper that “it astonishes and worries him that so many people believe these lies.” It would be nice to think that the Cardinal was referring to his employer, the Roman Catholic Church, which owes its existence and considerable wealth to 2,000 years of maintaining the fiction that God and the Devil, saints and miracles, and Heaven and Hell exist."
American values - and Vatican lies
"Today belief in God is crazy, pointless and sometimes downright harmful, but that wasn't always the case. Religion helped us evolve from primates dominated by short-term instinct into human beings capable of forming sophisticated societies."
The evolution of religion
"The United States prides itself on championing freedom and in enshrining the pursuit of happiness in its constitution. It is ironic that so many Americans espouse a moral code whose impact is to restrict both freedom and happiness. America needs moral values, but values that respect and honor every citizen."
What moral values?
"In 2002, seven women were ordained priests. Wasn’t that great, especially since the Church has a problem recruiting young men to the priesthood? So what was the Pope’s response to these people who wanted to serve God? He threw up his hands in horror at the fact that the seven had the spiritual, but not the physical, balls to be priests and excommunicated them."
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