An excellent article from William Irwin Thompson in the Wild River Review on the Israel / Gaza situation. He takes a larger, longer-term, and less reactionary view than most of the other people talking about the current conflict.Thinking Otherwise: On Palestine
by William Irwin Thompson"We Irish Think Otherwise", Bishop BerkeleyIf ever there was a need for thinking otherwise, it is in the Middle East. We need to accept the fact that more of the thinking of the last fifty years cannot resolve our tragic predicament. We cannot bomb our way to peace--not in Gaza, not in Iraq, and not in Afghanistan. The shrapnel of bombs become the dragons teeth through which new terrorists and suicide bombers spring from the exploded earth.
We need to think in a new way. First off, we need to recognize that we become what we hate. In defending itself, Israel has become what it tried to escape: a military state with racist attitudes. Sharon took a page from U.S. history by using the army in its own Cowboys and Indians campaign and establishing reservations to contain the culturally inferior. In effect, Sharon used the Jewish settlers to break up Gaza and the West Bank into reservations and there create a new cheap laboring class for the advanced technological society of Greater Israel. This strategy was a fatal blow to the viability of the two state solution; the present invasion is its coup de grace.
Israel will probably be able to kill off the leadership of Hamas, but the collateral suffering, such as the shelling of the U.N. International School with its forty deaths, will be so great that all the widows and daughters will become an unstoppable flood of suicide bombers.
The Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan called the unhappy marriage of the French and English in Canada "Two Solitudes." The tragic co-habitation of the Palestinians and Israelis has become two genocides. They will remain genocidal as long as their political thinking is founded on religious identity and efforts to build homelands on the old Nazi conception of "Blut und Boden."
On my WRR Blog posting for Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan last year, I proposed that only a secular state with provincial capitals in Tel Aviv and Ramalah, and a UN internationally policed World City in Jerusalem could provide an alternative to unending war. The Israelis fear that in a secular state in which Israelis and Palestinians are equal citizens, the Palestinians will reduce them to a minority through their reproductive differential.
Societies that deny women equal rights and lock them up so they can do nothing but produce large families will always overwhelm in numbers those societies in which women go to universities and work with men in industry, academe, and the arts. European women, for example, have on average only one child per family; consequently Western Europe is not reproducing itself and Muslim fundamentalists prophecy a time when England and continental Europe will be part of Islam, as they feel it should have been in 732 CE.
The United States has addressed itself, without conscious recognition, to this demographic problem by being more open to illegal immigration, especially from Christian Latin America. We are also seeking to become a multicultural planetary civilization, and are now in the process of trying to establish the presence of Islam in our new culture. The problem is that the Muslims are not giving enough thought to the presence of American Enlightenment values in their culture. In a confrontation between American Constitutional law and Islamic Sharia law, where do the loyalties of Muslim citizens lie? Jesus said to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, and that idea for the West became the beginning of the separation of Church and State.
In changing our thinking, we have to stop trying to fight our way to peace. Barack Obama's desire to send the cavalry into Afghanistan with bugles sounding the rescue from the Taliban will only work in the movies or in the imagination of a John Wayne President. We already tried that with Ronald Reagan, and then Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush. It didn't work--not in Lebanon with Reagan nor Iraq with Bush. The war in Afghanistan will all too easily spill over into Pakistan and Iran and reignite in Iraq. Instead, Barack Husein Obama should convene a World Congress on Islamic Civilization and use his clean record and personal history of being the only U.S. President ever to have gone to an Islamic school to serve as its chair.
After the adventures of Napoleon with his manic visions of a French United States of Europe, and after the misadventures of World War One, the nations of the world tried to address themselves to diplomacy. True, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 was reactionary and locked Europe into monarchy and aristocracy. But that was because one nation, England, sought to make up for the revolutions of America and France by locking monarchy in place with the help of the empires of Austria and Russia. This failure was one, not of diplomacy, but of the diplomats led by Metternich. And after the disasters of World War One, the Treaty of Versailles expressed revenge against Germany and only served to sow the dragons teeth of Hitler and the Nazis. Trying to go back in time or get even in revenge never works.
So we need to go forward. The lines in the sand drawn by the British Empire after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire have not become the outlines of viable nations. And the efforts of the American Empire to reinforce these imaginary nations composed of tribes have not succeeded. So at this proposed World Congress on Islamic Civilization, President Obama should announce that American troops will leave Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010. And in his call to convene, President Obama should formally apologize to Iran for the CIA's elimination of Mossadegh and affirm that Iran is one of the world's great and ancient cultures and invite it to sit at the table, along with Syria, Lebanon, and all the other Islamic nations.
We can talk to our friends and allies at any time; it is precisely our enemies we need to talk to. The agenda for such an international conference should be: 1) the policing of terrorism, 2) the formation of Palestine, 3) the recognition of Israel, 4) the rights of women (including the outlawing of the un-Koranic practice of genital mutilation, and 5) the recognition of the rights of co-existence with other religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Ba'hai.
Out of this establishment of a recognition of religious freedom, the UN should establish Jerusalem as the first World City, a shrine of the Abrahamic religions. It should be policed by the Blue Helmets of the UN, who would guarantee equal access to its shrines for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. No provincial military forces or governing administrative offices of Palestine or Israel should be allowed in this United Nations World City.
Is this vision too visionary? Of course, but since all the other so called realistic approaches of the last fifty years have been unviable, new visions are called for. I recognize that in such a World Congress, the Turks might conspire against the Kurds, and the Saudis might seek to block the Iranians, and all the micro-ethnicities of Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran might assert themselves to create a Tower of Babel.
But the United States as a hated imperial presence cannot prevent these conflicts; the best we can hope for as a political force in our weakened economic condition is to force Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran to move into the vacant space we create to form a new, more European model of nation-states for the Middle East, and thereby help to stabilize the world economy.
If the Islamic nations no longer have us defined as Crusaders, they will be forced to become more responsible to shift from serving as sponsors of anti-semiticism (for example, by publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Saudi Arabia) or funding terrorist organizations, to become co-operating agents of governance. Such is politics, and much like our politics of Kansas and California -- from the Bible Belt to Castro Street -- what we need to do is to let politics, to paraphrase Clausewitz, become war by other means. Bombast is better than bombs.
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