Israel and Hamas are back at it, following a short ceasefire. Is the mess in the Mideast a “problem without a solution”? A lot of people have very firm opinions on the matter, without much agreement, so the current chaos will likely continue, as it has, on and off, for 75 years, give or take. And there’s been plenty of give and take, none of it very constructive. Much of it very destructive. It doesn’t look as if either side will give up — or even wake up.
Only one thing is certain: Whatever both sides are doing about the problem, it isn’t working, and lots of people, innocent and otherwise, will continue dying as a result.
Meanwhile, we play the blame game. How we love the blame game. Almost as much as we love the justifying game. Makes both sides feel more righteous, less culpable.
Back and forth we go:
- Hamas started it, killing women and children, taking hostages, so Israelis are justified in retaliating.
- The retaliation is disproportionate (thanks to U.S. military assistance), killing far more Palestinians, far more women and children. Not exactly a fair fight.
- Civilian casualties are unavoidable. Hamas hides among the innocent, in effect taking their own people hostage.
- You can’t root out an insurgency. Ask the American military after Iraq and Afghanistan. It just grows back, usually stronger. You can bomb people back to the Stone Age (as one U.S. general so delicately put it during the Vietnam war), but you can’t bomb them into submission.
Back and forth, forth and back.
Who’s to blame? Both sides.
Who has legitimate grievances? Both sides.
Who’s going to win? Neither side, unless they come up with a new approach — where both sides win.
Israeli society has paid a stiff soul price for adopting methods of the oppressor in exchange for their security, a horrible irony for a people long oppressed in other parts of the world, where antisemitism is still the default setting, just looking for the slightest excuse to surface.
Gazans pay a stiff soul price for allowing themselves to be governed by a terrorist organization, not that they seem to have much choice in the matter, but it feeds anti-Islamic bias elsewhere, especially in the U.S.
I sympathize with both sides. I’m critical of both sides. I doubt I’m alone in this.
Gazans and Israelis aren’t the only ones at fault. They are merely the flash point of tensions that go way, way back.
It’s appropriate to talk about this as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, who founded a religion that bears considerable responsibility for this mayhem.
Western civilization and Christianity grew up together in the two millennia following the death of Jesus. They married one another, you could say, and spent the next 1,500 years blaming the Jews for killing Christ, as Jews spread throughout Europe during their diaspora, leading to predictable results. Persecuted, segregated, pogrommed and finally holocausted, Jewish migrants returned en masse and reclaimed the land of their ancestors, even though it meant displacing those who lived there. Great Britain, the fading colonial power of the time, shoehorned them into their own state in clumsy fashion as the British empire evaporated following World War II. The UN approved the new plan. The surrounding Arab states did not.
During that same millennium and a half, Islam was born and holy wars fought against Christian invaders (better known as the Crusades), complicating the Mideast even more. By the time the state of Israel was born in 1948, the region was a white-hot crucible, ready to rumble, a version of Yeats’ “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. A veritable second coming. Only now Bethlehem has a large, ugly wall around it.
The animosity goes back further still, to the historical mythology chronicled in the Book of Genesis, a wild and turbulent melodrama of family divisions and intrigue, starring Abraham, the pro-genitor of both Judaism (Isaac, born to his wife Sara) and Islam (Ishmael, born to his servant Hagar). Half-brother vs. half-brother, bad blood, grudges. There are conflicts all over the globe, but none quite like this one. Truly a battle of Biblical proportions.
The sins of the Western world met in the messy Mideast, compounded, creating a problem with no solution.
Who’s to blame? Who isn’t?
Who’s most to blame? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll wager the solution won’t come from the Israelis and Palestinians, who seem utterly unwilling to cut this Gordian Knot.
When I first heard about Europe’s “Hundred Years’ War” in history class during high school, I couldn’t believe it. A war lasting 100 years? Oh, come on. But it continued, off and on, for just over a century.
Not sure how that war finally ended, but the ongoing Mideast conflict is already 75 years old.
And it doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon.
Who’s at fault?
Blame it on all the people who play the blame game.