Everything's All Right in the Middle East

Can we, just for a minute, dispense with the hand-wringing and acknowledge that the problem Israel and the Palestinians are having with one another is actually their mutual solution to the problem of being mortal?

Of course, to understand what I’m talking about it is first necessary to recognize that it’s not love or sex or money that makes the world go around but the fact of death; that what drives virtually everything we believe and do is the need to reduce, to at least a manageable degree of fear, the terror and panic the anticipation of extinction causes us. (If you can’t quite grasp this notion, if you have to be reminded that terror and panic constitute the human default condition, then whatever you’re believing and doing is working for you.)

Of the myriad subtle and blatant ways we’ve come up with to make living with an impossible given tolerable, one example would be the symbolic immortality we assure ourselves of by the making of a scientific discovery, or a work of art, that will continue to exercise an influence on the world after our departure. Another is the accumulation of inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great sums of money buy enable us to feel not just superior to the common man, but less vulnerable to the common fate. Still another is getting “high,” which is about getting ABOVE the body that we know will one day be our undoing.

And then there’s our invention of an afterlife. Presenting us with a chance to survive death–if we honor the pronouncements and follow the dictates we’ve assigned to deities of our own fashioning–it’s this immortality illusion that’s at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Arabs are qualifying for eternity by doing what they’ve determined to be God’s work, which is to make war on those who, ignoring or questioning His authority, are undermining His plan for the planet. And Israel, dropped in the Arab’s midst, its diverse culture implicitly challenging the validity of Arab beliefs, provides the Arabs with the infidel they need to carry out their mission. For Arabs, it’s not about killing Jews, per se. Jews are simply a fortuitously placed means to a purchase on heaven. (You could say that their culture being, by all appearances, limited in its repertoire of immortality illusions to the resources of Islam, suicide is the only instrument of self-perpetuation available to the Palestinian terrorists.)

On the other hand, the Arabs afford Israelis an opportunity to continually certify their biblically bestowed “chosen” status–AND TO ASSURE THEMSELVES OF THE POST-CORPOREAL REWARDS IMPLICIT IN THE ANOINTMENT–by constantly threatening, but never accomplishing, Israel’s destruction. Persistently testing Israel’s exalted designation but never disproving it, enabling Israel to be embattled AND remain intact, the Arabs are every bit the blessing to Israel that Israel is to the Arabs.

It follows that the violence each side visits on the other must be measured; balances and proportions need to be kept. For one side to win, after all, would be for both sides to lose; would, that is, return BOTH sides to a contemplation of the Void. We might call this aiding and abetting of one another’s immortality illusions–the cooperation and the accommodations it requires–the deeper definition of the “social contract.”

So we can engage ad infinitum in the most earnest discussions about anti-Semitism, about Arafat, about Sharon, about territory and occupation, and forever miss the real dynamic of the situation. The Arab-Israeli problem is, again, a solution to a more pressing problem, to what is, literally as well as figuratively, the mother of all problems. And what accounts for the tenaciousness of the conflict is the ongoing success it’s enjoying in the service of its underlying agenda. As long as this holds true, Arabs and Israelis will, on one level or another, be enemies. Because for all of the horrors hostilities between them cause, they cause a more acceptable, a more BEARABLE species of horror than the fact of oblivion does.

The pain we are witnessing is a palliative. These are not the worst of times in the Middle East.

I disagree completely. You are making a huge generalisation based on little or no evidence, citing a personal interpretation on people`s attitude to life.

Perhaps you are right in saying that many of us wish to be immortal and that dying scares us, but I do not think it correlates to the Intifada in the Middle East. My knowledge of Arab culture is significantly less than that of Israeli culture so I apologise if my argument focuses more on Israel.

In my opinion, your mistake comes from suggesting that EVERY Arab in the world has these ideals. The fact is, you haven’t asked every arab, and it is unlikely that they would all agree with you. SOME extreme terrorists who happen to be Muslim, will give up their lives because they have been indoctrinated to believe that they will go straight to heaven. This does not represent the sentiment of the entire Arab world and therefore cannot be the sole reason behind the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Your Israel claim is even MORE ridiculous.

Where is your evidence for this? Have you actually even asked ONE single Israeli? 70% of Israel is secular and do not ally themselves to the Jewish Religion but only to the culture. It goes without saying then, that they are not fighting the arabs to “certify their biblicallz bestowed chosen status.” Even the most orthodox jews living in Israel wouldn’t be so vindictive as to want to die just to assert biblical authority. Such a position would qualify for lunatic asylum. What is perhaps a more reasonable suggestion is that the majority of Israeli citizens want to get on with their lives. The fact is, the news only shows the extremists like the settlers who are occupying land against UN regulations. But THEY ARE NOT representative of Israel.

I have been living in Israel for the past two months and from conversations I have had with countless Israelis is that they are sick to death of living their lives in fear, and having their economy, tourism, technology ruined by the fact they have to be involved in the Intifada. The “chosen race” line is a just a big misnomer. Most Israelis couldn’t a rats ass about the Bible and who chose who.

On the other side, the majority of the Palestinians just want their land back. The extremists may blow themselves up to get to heaven quickly, but they ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE of the Palestinian people. The palestinians want their land back, to live peacefully and to have the right to self-determination.

This isn’t a war about God or about religion or death, it´s a war about people in a difficult situation, where extremist minorities are given the louder voice while the more moderate majorities have to live in fear.

Robert Levin,
I second Ben’s claim. If there is anything that can be said for the issue of the Isreal’ and Palestinians, it is not that everything is okay. As far as I know, things havent been okay there for thousands of years.

The war is more about homeland, and what has been believed to be religious doctrine, but recently has been admitted to be based on nothing more than ancient mythology. The Jews have no sacred right to the land according to their religion, only by their mythology.

Furthermore, the fighting and killing between Isreali’ and Palestinians has been attempted to be resolved by the greatest powers of the world; who failed to stop it. It was first given to the League of Nations to be handled, they couldn’t stop it, so then it was given to the United States to handle, but they too couldn’t stop it and were tired of sending soldiers over that only came back in body bags. So, it was given to the, now, United Nations to handle. To this day the issue has not been resolved and people continue to die.

Sure there is a religious aspect to it, but it is nowhere near the topic of mortality or immortality. Arabs were living in Isreal, Jews kept claiming that the land was bestowed upon them by God, after WWII the united nations established a unification of Arabs and Jews to live in Isreal. Arabs saw this as an infringement on their way of life, especially religious synagogues and temples that the Jews after having moved in, destroyed.
Isreal is the only piece of the British Empire that was given up on (it was once part of the British Empire). Basically it was said “Whoever wants it, can have it, we are sick of dealing with this problem”. In the mid 1940s Britain’s influence on the world was much greater than it is now, which goes to show the deeply routed problem and its complexity.

Ofcourse you can argue that the extremists have visions of immortality for this problem, just as I could argue that the war is just about an ego trip for each side wanting to prove they are right. I would have just as much basis for an argument as you. Let’s stick to the facts, atleast some kind of facts. Speculation on what extremists mean with their visions, statements, promises, and declarations are rarely based upon the real problem at hand, instead they are usually based in a twisted world of anger and hatred which leads to huge generalizations of the facts, from which they infer conclusions of grandure and extremism. For want of a better word, attention. Furthermore, of the extremists I have seen are postulating grand statements to be included in history and to get attention. Statements like “freedom of the people”, “our God will protect us”, most will quote a verse or two from a biblical doctrine, twist it and augment it until they find a way to surround their argument around the verse to appear to be backed up by the word of God. It is one thing to make a claim “freedom of the people”, it is yet another thing to explain how people aren’t free, why they aren’t, who or what is stopping them, what the consequences are of proposing freedom within that society, how they can go about making change, what the problems will be with making change, how long will it take, what will it cost, what regular citizens can do to help, etc. These questions are very logical and very basic, I can’t help but stress the basic and logical nature of them, by which I mean to elucidate the emotional state and psychological underworkings of these extremists that will lead you to believe they are right shouting, quoting the bible, showing you dead people, all in order to strike irrational emotion within you to get you on their side without thinking. Unfortunately, this usually works enough to get a militia going and to do some serious damage. But this happens in many niches of that society, and they all get confused, each side has a slightly altered version of the other parties vision or belief. Sooner or later, each doesn’t even know who is their enemy, so just to be safe; they kill all other political parties. No one even stops to ask, “Could I be wrong?”; Robert Levin, before reading this last sentence did you ask yourself “Could I be wrong?”

What’s your take?