Depart in Peace

A friend of mine left recently for Israel, the national name for that ancient country in the Levant otherwise called Palestine, and recognized in different ways as Holy Land by three monotheistic world religions. The last night I saw him, we had a brief but remarkable exchange in the midst of considerable ambient volume and crowd, the kind of talk that did not fail to evoke reflection despite the circumstance.

We always get along well although I never see him as much as I would like; I am often busy, he no less so with medical school. In his words, he "got out of" serving in the army in Israel, for which he evidences guilt, and so he felt that he should go. All of his friends had been saying goodbye as though he is heading off to war ("with a tear in their eye," he said), and in a way he might be. It is always quite uncertain what will happen there, and the 'battle lines' might be anywhere at any time. He wryly commented that he should at least be wounded or he will not live up to his friends' expectations. I am not sure where he is going, but he estimated there is a seventy percent chance of total peace for him, thirty percent chance of something severe. I did not ask what 'severe' might mean. If he wants to of course he can take part in the conflict in one of the trouble areas. As he said, "they'll give me a gun." I certainly hope he stays away.

His perspective is of course pro-Israeli, but of course that does not say it all. It never does, as much as it may be in the interest of propagandists to encourage us to think so simply. For one thing, he has Palestinian friends and relatives. And we had talked before about how tragic it is that innocent Palestinians get killed. Though we became acquainted in the first place because of similar musical tastes and not social views, he has generally appeared in other respects besides politics to be a thoughtful human being. Since I suspect that the sustained conflagration in the Mideast has more to do with the opinions and beliefs of similar people suffering from exceptions to their usual thoughtfulness, rather than the essentially fanatical people determined not to become thoughtful, a conversation with him about the crisis is surely an instructive lesson in really understanding it, and why it seems to have no end.

He spoke about the importance of fighting for a cause. He stressed that the cause, for Israelis, is self-preservation. In his mind the cause of self-preservation can excuse much — in the minds of almost anyone, in fact. It is perhaps inhuman, unnatural, and certainly dangerous to be willing to simply sacrifice oneself to avoid struggle. We both agreed that a war fought for self-preservation is a worthwhile and noble cause. But what about the possible differences between self-preservation, and the current conflict? After all, so many outright acts of aggression have historically been excused by a claim of 'self-preservation,' that some careful skepticism might serve us well when we hear it invoked again.

So I said that a war fought for self-preservation or freedom was one thing, but just how can we judge this fight successful in preserving lives, and who is it freeing? It is far closer to enslaving all the region with fear, putting it under the constant threat of violence, punctuated by its deadly outbreak. If he is correct that the way to be happy is to care about something external to yourself, it should be clear by now that in that place, no side has found happiness in a cause.

He said that survival there was the same thing as the survival of the state, to which I replied with my concern that self-preservation is not the same thing as Israeli statism. As I have commented before, there are many people on both sides who believe in the solidarity of each side, and many who encourage this and may not believe it. Many conceive of the problem collectively, as though two giants wrestle in the Holy Land. This is nonsense not only because neither side is uniform, and is instead composed of many different independent individuals, but also because the sides themselves are ill-defined and factionally divided. Yet the myth is encouraged by both those who support Israel as a centralized, dominant, occupying state system, and many of those who fight against it, supporting an inverse variant of that system in the form of a Muslim Palestinian state.

Can the interests of a state ever be the interests of people? A state has no interests, after all — it does not live, as people do, to have interests. In real terms, a state's interests can only be defined by some people, to be biased toward certain interests of certain people. Assuredly a state established to be biased towards anything defined as Palestinian interests would have the same problem as Israel.

As if to excuse the actions taken to defend Israel which cause indiscriminate casualties, as war does, my friend claimed that every nation was created through war. In a sense, this is true, almost without exception. Yet what does a nation matter? The lives of people are what matter. If they forget that, and tie their destiny to a flag, they will suffer.

In this case, as in so many others, war is in the interests of the state. The interests of people are indeed something else. In order to serve the interests of people as defined in terms of founding a secular nation-state, a peaceful refuge for those who would be in danger elsewhere, a goal linked unusually in this case for 'the Jewish people' with religious significance of the land and the city of Jerusalem, the state of Israel was established. But by now it should be clear that rather than the state serving the interests of the people for safety, or even their interest in their religion, the people and religious significance of the land are being made to serve the nebulous interests of the state. In the name of Israeli security, and with the implied sanction of Judaism, 'the state of Israel' occupies lands contrary to agreement, segregates population and resources, shoots innocent civilians, musters and deploys the military aggressively and provocatively, and otherwise rules contrary to the needs of Israelis for safety, and quite contrary to the wishes of many devout Jews and Jewish religious leaders.

My friend knows, of course, even if I had not reminded him, that one great source of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim unrest and anger over the existence of Israel is that although the tragic murder and abuse of Jews in Europe became the great catalyst for the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations, Palestine is not in Europe. The Palestinians, the Arabs and Muslims in general do not have a history of anti-Semitism for which to 'pay,' so they wonder why they had to make way for a Jewish state. (For the assumption that those who had injured Jews owed the Jews a state was a functional lever for the foundation of Israel.)

To create Israel, he admitted, "there had to be an ideal." Israel is not simply about a refuge for Jews, or even the establishment of a state somewhere which bonds a secular government with Jewish religion, "it's about Jerusalem" as he said. It is about asserting the right for a particular religious devotion to control the area politically — thus, the state. But this of course is precisely the grounds on which peace is impossible there, for Muslims make a similar assertion about the very same place, just as long ago the Crusaders did under the avowed banner of Christianity. That a conflict of religions which accept no counterargument to faith is made into a conflict of politics ensures violence, because violence is the form in which contradictions of unyielding political control are ultimately expressed.

That is quite well-known, but to know it provides no solution. Perhaps this is why my friend appeared to tentatively endorse at different times two of the three 'solutions' to the problem of conflicting populations which are still employed, and have been employed in similar circumstances for thousands of years: appeasement of the enemy, defeat of the enemy, and elimination of the enemy. My friend confided that "personally I think they need to give the Palestinians lots of land, and lots of money." But unless this means entirely yielding Jerusalem it certainly will not be enough, and that would mean yielding the ideal. That would become unacceptable to the Jewish counterparts to those Muslims who now strive for control over it. So much for appeasement of the enemy. He also held out hope that Sharon's endorsement of aggressive military responses to terrorism might succeed. But as I pointed out to him, since this retribution would strike against individuals not responsible directly, and unable to control terrorist acts, it would be likely to inspire anger and recalcitrance — greater resistance in the future, not less. And, the consistent ability of the Israeli army to defeat all comers in war over the past half-century has not negated the fact that Israel is still surrounded by populous enemies and can be infiltrated by terrorists. So much for defeating the enemy. The third 'solution' to intransigent conflicts (which he did not expressly favor), eliminating the enemy, does not necessarily mean genocide, but forced emigration. Emigration did occur early on in Israel's history, but it solved nothing. The many millions of Muslims who oppose Israel's existence out of religious affiliation or sympathy for the displaced Arabs of Palestine are not going away, even discounting those Palestinians. So much for elimination of the enemy, which I would also note was proposed as the resolution in Nazi Germany for 'the Jewish problem,' first as a plan of forced emigration and then as genocide — and this helped to cement a most recalcitrant will among Zionists to establish Israel against any and all opposition.

A true solution does exist, but it involves an unmaking of the collective idea of 'the enemy.' There is no other alternative. The choice is either the end of the inherent political clash of 'enemies' along lines cut by the allegiance of group identity, or the end of lives as they are uprooted and cut down. The only real solution is the one which does not have the support of any either Jewish or Muslim zealots: neither a Jewish nor a Palestinian state dedicated to one or the other. Both Jews and Muslims must find a way to share the same land and live together as individuals, not separately according to allegiance, as enemy camps forever intertwined. But that of course is 'impossible' now. Well then — people will keep dying.

It was not always so impossible for Jews and Muslims to find common ground. I mentioned to my friend how important I feel it is to remember that at the time it began, Islam represented a most exceptional vision: the greatest individual freedom in the world, relatively and generally speaking, and a peaceful, protected union between Muslims and other "people of the book," Christians and Jews. Mohammed had proposed to a land of perpetual tribal discord and vengeance a foundation for unity and brotherhood unprecedented in that time and place. In its Golden Age, Islam most represented social, economic, scientific, academic, and artistic civilization in the west, while Europe was in a state of relative barbarism, known today as its Dark Age. Many Jews, in particular, found a refuge in Muslim Spain or what is now Turkey that they could not find anywhere else. This was all a spectacular accomplishment in context, a vision realized with few exceptions at one time. However things have changed since, that heritage must not be forgotten, and awareness of it is likely to be a necessary foundation for any peaceful future.

Neither should the Jewish past be forgotten. After all, the Diaspora has been a time of great accomplishment by individual Jews for many centuries, up through modern day. I wonder how many Jews would share in the sentiment of my friend's exclamation that the deaths of Jews in the Holocaust "erase all of that." Thus, I suppose, the state of Israel in all possible dominance becomes a necessary, if coldly realist, final redemption to that Jewish history. But do their deaths really erase all of that, any more than the deaths of Jews over the centuries erase their lives, or the death of any man or woman erases how they lived and what they did? Surely this is not the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust. We are all mortal. We will all die. The difference is how we live and what we accomplish so long as we still breathe.

Later that night, I felt a stillness that slowed down the moment as I watched him hug or say farewell to people, and walk away. It was one of those moments of clarity and fear when mortality became real to me, a living human being whose every instinct, like all living human beings, tells them to live and ignore the possibility and eventual certainty of their own future death, and the deaths of everyone they have ever known.

Supposing for a moment the worst, I realized that soon this living man I know really could be alive no more, dead and still. I imagined him fossilized as a line in a news report, to be read the next day and then forgotten, memories of him alive just as long as those who have them, and then lost. At most the news item might be unearthed by some researcher of this conflict in the future, by the time the reasons for his death are all but forgotten. Such will be the case with everyone who has died there, and everyone who has ever died in conflicts of passion, bloody causes bearing the ultimate importance — of the moment.

To my friend, goodbye, may you return. To those departed ones who cannot return, only goodbye.

previously published on June 29, 2001
page re-created on July 8, 2006
page updated July 8, 2006 20:48 EST

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