When I was a child, it was fashionable to hold one’s fingers in a peace sign and say “Peace in the Middle East.” We could do this because these were the years after the Oslo Accords but before the Second Intifada, when peace in the Middle East seemed possible. A good metaphor for the 90s as a whole: superficial peace and prosperity masking a cauldron of instability.
Peace in the Middle East will not come any time soon because the West and the Arab world have built theologies and identities that make compromise impossible.
For the West, an obsessive pluralism has replaced Christianity as the defining worldview. The West is also driven by PTSD from the memories of the Holocaust, justly kept alive by Eli Wiesel and others. The West’s penance for this and other sins is an outward fixation on elevation of minorities. A prime example is near universal, fervent support for modern Israel as the Jewish national homeland, to be defended at all costs.
The West cannot let Israel fell, and cannot exercise any meaningful restraint on Israel without giving up a cornerstone of its identity. Were we in the West to let Israel fall, we would have to admit with Elijah that we are no better than our fathers. Like 20th century Europe, we too marginalized the Jews and then stood idly by while hostile militants waged savage war on the Jewish people. And if there is anything we in the West cannot do, it is to admit that we lack moral superiority over our racist ancestors.
If anything, the Arab world has defined itself even more closely with opposition to Israel. At first it was an expression of the pan Arab militant secularism common to regimes like Nasser’s Egypt and Hussein’s Iraq. Now it is an expression of Islamist militarism, which is a unifying thread across groups as different as Sunni Hamas and Shiite Iran. 75 years after Israeli independence, many Middle Eastern states cannot bring themselves to recognize Israel. Doing so would be to accept Western dominance and imperialism. The Middle Eastern states believe that eventually, as with the Crusader states, the West will tire, then enough Muslim powers will unite, and expel the invaders. To accept Israel would be to accept the West’s ability to dictate who rules historically Muslim land, including some of the land most sacred to Islam. It would also be a rejection of the Qur’an’s command in 9:29 that Muslims fight Jews and Christians until they are brought low and pay tribute.
And so, despite the tiny area of land involved, the conflict will continue to be a festering wound. After the next bombardment and invasion of Gaza, Israel will continue to live under constant threats of terrorism that no other Western nation would accept. The West will continue to pour billions of dollars and credibility down the drain doing public penance for their fathers and grandfathers. Nearby Muslim states will continue paying to funnel rockets and explosives to genocidal murderers while the masses of the Palestinian people live desperately, relying on Western aid to stay alive. Middle Eastern nations will cynically point to Israel as the scapegoat for their own failures of government. Wider Muslim militant group will continue to point to the real abuses against the Palestinian people as cause for young men to radicalize and take up arms against the West. And the target will remain placed firmly on the United States as Israel’s main military and geopolitical enabler.
While there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas, we must ask: how many people must die across how many decades for the West to keep its promise to itself and complete its penance? When do we receive absolution, and who can give it to us?
