Palestinians must be overwhelmed by the violence they have faced in the past few days. It is true that the recent violence was triggered by Hamas' refusal to stop sending their rockets into Israel. However any reasonable analysis will tell you that Israel's response was excessive! By yesterday's counts Israel had killed 400 Palestinians and injured many more. What is appalling is that 25% of those killed are civilians. Politically, it is a repeat of 2006 with Hezbollah in Lebanon! And it is interpreted as a confrontation between mighty America and fundamentalist Muslims.
But who pays the price? Not the fundamentalist leaders nor mighty Israeli government. Only ordinary people like you and me who are caught in the middle whether Palestinians or Israelis. The conflict is not, as some people imagine, a recent one, not even a 60 years old one (if you are thinking of the reincarnation of Israel in 1948).
It belongs to human history. So take a deep breath and read:
Israel was there, in Palestine, since ca 1900 BC until their scattering around 135 AD. In that long period many wars were fought between them and other ancients until in 70 AD their Temple was destroyed by Titus and their capital, Jerusalem, was finished. Uprising again took place when Bar Kochba, a Zealot, attempted to overthrow the Roman occupation from Judea in 133-135 AD. The Jews were already well established in major cities around the Mediterranean such as Alexandria and Rome. Many of them fled to the "Diaspora."
After Constantine's conversion to Christianity in the early 4th century, Christianity became the official religion of the empire. Jews were intermittently persecuted by Christians in the Roman empire, which left them to seek their unity in ghettos. In the long history that followed, many of them rose to become philosophers, traders, and financial advisors, but they did not have their own state which they once claimed to be their own.
In the 20th century, three major events took place that directly affected the Jewish people. World War I, World War II, and the establishment of their state in modern Palestine.
The United Nations had this to say about the first event:
"The Palestine problem became an international issue towards the end of the First World War with the disintegration of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Palestine was among the several former Ottoman Arab territories which were placed under the administration of Great Britain under the Mandates System adopted by the League of Nations pursuant to the League's Covenant. All but one of these Mandated Territories became fully independent States, as anticipated. The exception was Palestine where, instead of being limited to 'the rendering of administrative assistance and advice' the Mandate had as a primary objective the implementation of the 'Balfour Declaration' issued by the British Government in 1917, expressing support for 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. During the years of the Palestine Mandate, from 1922 to 1947, large-scale Jewish immigration from abroad, mainly from Eastern Europe took place, the numbers swelling in the 1930s with the notorious Nazi persecution of Jewish populations. Palestinian demands for independence and resistance to Jewish immigration led to a rebellion in 1937, followed by continuing terrorism and violence from both sides during and immediately after World War II. Great Britain tried to implement various formulas to bring independence to a land ravaged by violence."
The second event was, as every one knows, the Holocaust - an attempt of Nazi Germany to eliminate the Jewish people in what was termed 'The Final Solution.' This took place between 1939 and 1945. It seems that since 1945, the West is trying to make up for the historic aggression against the Jews which culminated in World War II. And it is doing that by humiliating Palestinian Arabs.
The third event was the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 after much violence and forced expulsion of native Palestinians from their land.
I will turn again to the UN website to explain the history of two peoples since then.
"After looking at various alternatives, the UN proposed the partitioning of Palestine into two independent States, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish, with Jerusalem internationalized (1947). One of the two States envisaged in the partition plan proclaimed its independence as Israel and in the 1948 war expanded to occupy 77 per cent of the territory of Palestine. Israel also occupied the larger part of Jerusalem. Over half of the indigenous Palestinian population fled or were expelled. Jordan and Egypt occupied the other parts of the territory assigned by the partition resolution to the Palestinian Arab State which did not come into being. In the 1967 war, Israel occupied the remaining territory of Palestine, until then under Jordanian and Egyptian control (the West Bank and Gaza Strip). This included the remaining part of Jerusalem, which was subsequently annexed by Israel. The war brought about a second exodus of Palestinians, estimated at half a million. Security Council resolution of 22 November 1967 called on Israel to withdraw from territories it had occupied in the 1967 conflict...
Events on the ground, however, remained on a negative course. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the declared intention to eliminate the PLO. A cease-fire was arranged. PLO troops withdrew from Beirut and were transferred to neighboring countries after guarantees of safety were provided for thousands of Palestinian refugees left behind. Subsequently, a large-scale massacre of refugees took place in the camps of Sabra and Shatila...
In December 1987, a mass uprising against the Israeli occupation began in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the intifada). Methods used by the Israeli forces during the uprising resulted in mass injuries and heavy loss of life among the civilian Palestinian population. A Peace Conference on the Middle East was convened in Madrid on 30 October 1991, with the aim of achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement through direct negotiations along 2 tracks: between Israel and the Arab States, and between Israel and the Palestinians, based on Security Council resolutions ... (the "land for peace" formula). A series of subsequent negotiations culminated in the mutual recognition between the Government of the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the representative of the Palestinian People, and the signing by the two parties of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government in Washington on 13 September 1993, as well as the subsequent implementation agreements, which led to several other positive developments, such as the partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, the elections to the Palestinian Council and the Presidency of the Palestinian Authority, the partial release of prisoners and the establishment of a functioning administration in the areas under Palestinian self-rule...
In 2000 and 2001, Israelis and Palestinians held talks on a final status agreement, which proved inconclusive...The controversial visit by Ariel Sharon of the Likud to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Temple Mount) in 2000 was followed by the outbreak of the second intifada. A massive loss of life, the reoccupation of territories under Palestinian self-rule, military incursions, extrajudicial killings of suspected Palestinian militants, suicide attacks, rocket and mortar fire, and the destruction of property characterized the situation on the ground. Israel began the construction of a West Bank separation wall, located within the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004. In 2002, the Security Council adopted resolution 1397 affirming a vision of two States, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders. In 2003, the Middle East Quartet (US, EU, Russia, and the UN) released a detailed Road Map to a two-State solution. In 2005, Israel withdrew its settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip as part of its “Disengagement Plan,” while retaining effective control over its borders, seashore, and airspace. Following the Palestinian Legislative Council elections of 2006, the Quartet concluded that future assistance to the Palestinian Authority would be reviewed by donors against the new Government’s commitment to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements. "
Of course, the UN website failed to mention who took charge of Gaza following the above elections. The political and military government to-date is that of Hamas who continues to refuse the recognition of Israel to exist. Their goal is to reestablish an Islamic state in all of Palestine. The other major element, in support of an Islamic state in Palestine, is Hezbollah which gets its financing, rumours have it, from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It is all aggression after aggression from both sides. You can probably see now why it has taken so long in wars between peoples of nations. In both Jewish and Islamic traditions, eliminating the enemy by physical force is a viable option. And both of Israel and Hamas, with the support of Hezbollah, are not able to resolve it.
It is worth noting that the Catholic Church, which is today the single moral voice in the world, has so far succeeded only in helping refugees from the region, but no real moral influence seems to be capable of resolving the conflict.
Is there a solution from a Christian perspective to this highly explosive situation in the Middle East? I think that at a minimum both sides should accept to stop the violent actions against the other and work out a permanent solution based on justice where by the dignity of the human person is preserved. Once this is done, the West may want to provide the necessary economical help to the suffering Palestinians.
But the question is much larger than two peoples. It has to do with Original Sin.
Our miserable situation - of greed, self-sufficiency, self-eternalization, aggression, and destruction - is rooted in Original Sin. What does Original Sin of our first parents tell us?
Take two contemporary thinkers: Joseph Ratzinger thinks that in the face of death there are two ways in which the ancient human civilizations attempted to perpetuate the existence of the self:
1. Self-reproduction through sexual intercourse. This is why infertile men and women were thought to be cursed by God (or the gods). This is also why polygamy was quite widespread in almost all ancient civilizations.
2. Self-eternalization through statues and temples. If I cannot be self-eternalized through my offspring, then I may be self-eternalized through memory of me.
This is evident in what governors, kings, and pharoes built throughout all the ages. Actually we still do it today in different ways. We build sky-scrapers, universities and internet blogs even though the stated intentions may be quite different.
What Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, says is about self-preservation. Unfortunately, in a world of greed and sin, this is the first step towards aggression and violence.
René Girard, Stanford professor of civilization, now a member of the Academie francaise, takes an anthropological view. In his view, every act of violence and aggression is nothing but mimetic rivalry. His theory, now advanced by research institutions in psychology, claims that rivalry potentially exists between young children when they look out for the toys of each other. This rivalry grows and intensifies with rivalry between tribes, cultures, and, eventually, nations. Mimetic rivalry is very clear in early civilizations. In the Bible, Girard says, the story of Solomon’s judgment in the third chapter of 1 Kings is a good example. Two prostitutes bring a baby. They are doubles engaging in a rivalry over what is apparently a surviving child. When Solomon offers to split the child, the one woman says “yes,” because she wishes to triumph over her rival. The other woman then says, “No, she may have the child,” because she seeks only its life. On the basis of this love, the king declares that “she is the mother.” Note that it does not matter who is the biological mother. The one who was willing to sacrifice herself for the child’s life is in fact the mother. The first woman is willing to sacrifice a child to the needs of rivalry. Sacrifice is the solution to mimetic rivalry and the foundation of it. The second woman is willing to sacrifice everything she wants for the sake of the child’s life. This is sacrifice in the sense of the gospel. It is in this sense that Christ is a sacrifice since he gave himself “for the life of the world.”
Girard's conclusion is that as much as mimetic rivalry is the cause of our misery, true love actualized by Christ's sacrifice is the only remedy. We can touch on his thought in another lecture. What matters here is how close we are today, in our thinking, to our own misery. We seem to have lost our way from a Christian perspective into self-centredness that what matters is only me.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq a few years ago claiming it is going to liberate the people, Fr. Henri Boulad commented that it is not by force that we liberate or change people. How appropriate are his words today! Granted, there must be just laws to govern the relationships between peoples and nations. The old theory of Just War, expounded by St. Augustine, maintains that there are many conditions for justifying launching a war in case of danger. With massive destructive power owned by humanity today, justification of war becomes questionable. Furthermore, the Christian way is not to force a solution, but to work from within the human person. The human person despite the wound of Original Sin is still a good creature that can be educated and rehabilitated. May be that is the long-term solution to the Palestinian Question. May be it is also the solution to fundamentalism anywhere.
Think back of these words and only then you may be able to find the solution to the Palestinian Question. It is in you!
George Farahat
January 3, 2009
References in this lecture:
1) http://www.un.org/depts/dpa/qpal/history.html
2) http://www.jewishhistory.org/
