Death Marches Through Middle East Once Again
Wars, Slaughters, and Humankind
If any of the ancient people, whether a learned scholar or an illiterate peasant, suddenly found themselves transported into our modern world, there would be only two things they would recognize — war and religion. Interchangeably.
It would be too easy, and possibly too convenient, to leap from that realization directly into the conclusion, as many do, that religion(s) is the principal cause of all human suffering. As it would be to dismiss such a notion out of hand, as it also happens. Not least because nothing in human affairs is that simple. On the contrary, history has shown us time and time again that everything is complex, multilayered, and difficult.
It is precisely because of those multilayered complexities that we are, once again, witnessing the slaughters in the Middle East, less than two years since similar slaughters started in Eastern Europe. There are, of course, many differences between those two conflicts. However, there are also some clear and tragic similarities — the chief amongst those being that, in both instances, innocent people, including children and babies, get massacred mercilessly.
Not that humankind has ever been reluctant to embark on such endeavours — there has virtually been no time in the history of humans when one group or groups have not massacred or tried to exterminate the other(s). If any proof is needed, just think of the Romans, Mongols, Crusaders, Samurais, Nazis, or many others.
It has long been established that humans are creatures that, above all else, seek dominance over other humans and respond to power, either by submitting to it or rebelling against it. Whoever seizes power and establishes dominance soon learns that it only lasts until challenged and eventually overturned. In such a way, the circle never stops, not even in our modern times, which many herald as ‘tolerant, peace-loving, inclusive.’
Perhaps from the safety and comfort of a newsroom, podcast room, cabinet office, or any other place where the so-called ‘moral high ground’ is carefully nurtured and then unleashed on the audience. Outside those ‘observatories,’ it is clear that nothing but technology has changed since the time Vlad the Impaler (courtesy of Bram Stoker, immortalized as ‘Count Dracula’) littered the grounds with his enemies (many of them simple villagers) dying on stakes, or Genghis Khan left millions of corpses in his wake.
The exclamations that often follow those parallels — how the world has changed since those barbarians, how we have rules, laws, and international laws — are not only false but also dangerous. Because it enables us to perpetuate the delusion that progress is measured by scientific and technological advances.
It is not, or at least not only. What we are seeing around us testifies to that.
Unless we are in the business of denying reality, either because it is unpalatable to us, or because it does not serve our interests, or because we don’t wish to be disturbed, it is obvious that as long as we keep on slaughtering each other and our children, for whatever reason and in whichever fashion, we are no different from any of the slaughters that came before us, and we cannot claim any real progress. Because there is, or should be, only one measure of progress — how we treat each other and our children.
Those, and there are numerous, from learned historians to laypeople, that feel obliged to;
explain the long and complicated history of Israel and Palestinian conflicts,
seem to overlook one of the basic and many-times-tested principles — any attempt to correct historical wrongs (real or perceived) inevitably leads to long and bloody wars.
Those, and they are even more numerous, from official media channels to amateur podcasters, that feel obliged to speculate;
about the right of Israel to defend itself, as proclaimed by often-cited but selectively applied ‘international law,’
Iran’s role in funding and training Hamas (founded in the Gaza Strip in 1987, mainly Sunni Muslims) and Hezbollah (founded in Lebanon in 1982, mainly Shiite Muslims),
Russia’s and China’s roles, and potential benefits from the attack that started exactly 50 years after the first surprise attack on Israel was carried out under the slogan; ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!’
whether 75 years of occupation and mutual killing without any resolution can ever be resolved,
whether funds that poured into the region from the West (including 6 billion dollars the USA recently released in frozen Iranian funds) are used to fund terrorist organizations,
whether the pro-Palestine rally gathered in the Australian capital to celebrate the attack and chant ‘Gas the Jews’ in the full view of Australian police signals the lack of concern for Jews and/or fear of aggravating further those chanting,
seem to overlook another of the basic and many-times-tested principles — all and any speculations or analyses become irrelevant when confronted with the existential battle where one group of people does not believe that the other group has a right to exist there with self-determination.
It is the mindset that eradicates any attempt at peace before it even started.
What I know to be true, for I have witnessed it, is this:
Whenever and wherever babies and grandmothers are beheaded, (as reports are showing), when battle cries call for the extermination of the others, when massacres are celebrated — those who survived, be it many or a few, will live their lives with those memories, installing them in their children and their children’s children for generations to come. Some, if not most, will seek retribution … and so it goes.
In the words of Viktor E. Frankl:
We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
