October 17, 2003
It’s Time to Contemplate Existence
“The past three years have proven beyond any doubt that there will be no military solution in Palestine/Israel. On the contrary, the longer the carnage continues, the more entrenched it becomes. Saturday’s suicide bombing in Haifa was carried out by a 29-year-old woman, a lawyer whose brother was killed by the Israeli military in June. Air strikes in Syria will not stop others from following in her footsteps, only expand the circle of people with a reason to so do and reinforce their motivation….”
So reads a comment in The Daily Star (Lebanon) following a suicide bomb attack in Haifa by a young Palestinian woman last Saturday on the eve of Judaism’s holiest day. “This is an incident that cannot be ignored,” Israeli Health Minister Danny Naveh snapped. “This is our real opportunity to get rid of Arafat for once and for all.”
The chain reaction of violence continues. The scale of each recurring tragedy, newspaper reports and comments have a lot in common with the past. The call for peace is repetitive and the arguments identical.
Yet, the multi-dimensional nature of the human tragedy in the Middle East continues with a consistency that is tragic and confounding. As the death toll mounts and casualties multiply, there is little to suggest that words like remorse, compunction, empathy or fair play have any meaning in contemporary lexicon. The suicide-bomber acts staged by desperate Palestinians, including hijab-sporting teen-age youthful girls, is a cause of concern. So are the sufferings of innocent Israeli civilians gasping for precious life and helplessly scrambling for help. According to a Los Angeles Times report on the latest Haifa attack, “The bombing here turned a brilliant afternoon at the seaside into a grisly battlefield tableau, where the dead lay mangled and the wounded staggered through pools of blood and body parts.” It is truly a haunting spectacle - on both sides of the religious divide.
Both the Palestinians and the Israelis are experiencing a bloodbath, though of a varying degree. In this swiftly spiraling human catastrophe the question of paramount importance is: Does Islam or Judaism preach violence and should the losses experienced by the adherents of the two Abrahamic faiths be incurred in such a wanton fashion and on such a large scale given the fact that both Muslims and Jews have stakes in the region and neither one can succeed in surviving at the expense or exclusion of the other? A spirit of mutual accommodation must prevail in any plan or political initiatives chalked out to bring about peace in the region. Israel, with its marked military superiority and active backing of the United States, is undeniably better poised to take the initiative. It must, as well-known peace negotiator George Mitchell observed, realize that “a military victory is an illusion” and the two parties should “get back to the negotiating table.” His message for the Palestinians is equally important: the pool of suicide bombers has multiplied lately but it is not going to achieve the Palestinian objective of an independent state.
As for the other main actors on the world stage, there is at present little to suggest that the US is inclined to act with promptitude to reign in the two uneven combatants. The late Edward Said wrote in the newspaper al-Ahram (13-19 February): “But what is so monumentally hypocritical about the official US position is that literally everything Powell has accused the Ba’athists of has been the stock-in-trade of every Israeli government since 1948 and at no time more flagrant than since the occupation of 1967.” With Washington shying away from fulfilling its responsibility the catastrophe is likely to compound.
But, there are voices of sanity that breed hope. Appearing in a KCET TV program, David Grossman, author of Death as a Way of Life, conceded that the masses in Israel are “prepared to make concessions and are for a Palestine state.” The Israeli author did not agree with the clamor of the conservative right in the US that the land under occupation belongs to the Jews! On May 7, “evangelical leaders meeting in Washington denounced as ‘dangerous’ and ‘unhelpful’ the anti-Islam remarks made in the last year by leaders in their own movement and proposed new guidelines for churches to follow in relating to Muslims…Dr. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, which represents mainline Protestants and Orthodox denominations and frequently engages in dialogue with Muslims, said that he agreed that each faith must not dilute its own distinctions. But Dr. Edgar said: ‘We disagree that you can’t have dialogue unless you talk about Jesus. My belief is that dialogue is best built on relationships. People have to get to know each other, to trust each other, to like each other, and in some cases to even love each other before real learning and listening takes place.’ “ (New York
Times, May 8 2003).
‘Islam and democracy, not an impossible marriage’, an article in the Christian Science Monitor of May 8, too made insightful observations on a positive note: “Islam, the argument goes, breeds a submissive attitude - not only to Allah but also to political and religious leaders as well - that makes Muslims inherently incapable of participating in the rough-and-tumble world of electoral politics and of respecting the rights of minorities who follow a different religious or cultural path.
“In After Jihad, Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor with a doctorate in Islamic Thought from Oxford, builds a compelling and persuasive case that this consensus is misinformed... Both Islam and democracy hold that all humans are equal and that we have certain responsibilities to society. At its core, each treats human beings with respect and asks that we treat others the same way...”
Would such views, events and promises precipitate a wholesome change? As events unfold, one hopes the answer turns out to be in the affirmative.
One also hopes that the US plays a catalytic role in bringing peace to the Middle East. It did act nobly in Bosnia and Kosovo, and earlier, rescued Europe in the two world wars. It alone has the power to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table to ensure that the two arrive at a peaceful arrangement.
If memory serves right, it was Charles Dickens, well-known English novelist, who once observed: “Let’s conserve a livable world. Let’s contemplate existence.” A sane advice. One that both the Palestinians and the Israelis need to heed. For conflicts are created and ended by human beings.
