Religious Absolutism: Isaac and Ishmael

 

By David K. Shipler 

Also published by Moment Magazine  

If you list the elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you'll see that while most are subject to compromise, one is virtually non-negotiable: religion at its most dogmatic. It has grown more prominent over the decades as devout militants have gained power among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims.

Measuring its ultimate influence is difficult, for the dispute is largely secular, and is seen that way by most Israelis and Palestinians, polls show. In theory, the two sides’ overlapping territorial claims, driven by the clash of two nationalisms, could be resolved by drawing reasonable borders between Israel and a Palestinian state. West Bank Jewish settlements could be dismantled and consolidated. Security concerns could be addressed by humane, mutual protections. Jerusalem could be shared. Palestinians could bargain away their “right of return” to former villages inside Israel. The dueling historical narratives of grievance, so central to the conflict’s psychology, might gradually fade as uneasy neighbors learn to coexist. 

                That is all eventually possible, but less likely when each of the issues is salted with the absolutism of divine mission, as certain Israeli and Palestinian leaders are doing. They merge the sacred and the temporal, combine faith with tribal identity, and infuse piety into their peoples’ past grievances and present longings.

 The current example is the war in Gaza. At dawn on October 7, a voice on the Hamas military frequency announced to the fighters: “Rocket barrages are being fired right now at the occupied cities! May God empower and grace the holy warriors!” The man spoke in a pitch of ecstasy, echoed by another’s exultant answer through the static: “The resistance is now inside the occupied territories!”

“Allahu Akbar!” (God is most great!) the young Palestinians shouted as they streamed from Gaza through breaches blown in Israel’s border fence, their body cameras recording their fervent chants as they whooped in celebration over Israeli corpses. Each terrorist who died for his faith would earn the honor of being called shaheed (martyr).

Thus began the worst day for Israel in its 75-year existence, inflamed by religious slogans and symbols. Hamas wants to replace the Jewish state with an Islamic state. It named its sadistic attack “Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam, now in Israel’s capital.

In turn, after the Hamas slaughters that day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embraced a biblical analogy by likening the Palestinians to Amalek, the ancient nomads whose complete extermination was ordered by God. This seemed to consider the massive assaults on Gaza that followed as divinely blessed. Other religious terms were tossed around. Israeli officials named the artificial intelligence that picked its targets in Gaza “the Gospel.” Netanyahu reportedly proposed naming this “the Genesis War.”

Lessons From the College Presidents

 

By David K. Shipler 

                During a presidential debate in 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis sank his presidential campaign with a clinical, legalistic answer to a question about his wife from reporter Bernard Shaw: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

                Instead of reacting from his gut, Dukakis responded from his head. Instead of exploding first with a vengeful desire to tear the man limb from limb himself, he jumped right to the substantive answer on capital punishment:  “No, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We’ve done so in my own state. It’s one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America . . .” By that point, if not sooner, millions of voters were incensed by his lack of passion, no matter how legitimate his policy.

                It’s not an exact parallel, but it’s instructive nonetheless in how the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania made fools of themselves in last week’s congressional hearing. Excessively prepared by the prominent law firm of WilmerHale, according to The New York Times, they slipped catastrophically into procedural answers during a sequence of prosecutorial questions on whether calls by students for the genocide of Jews would constitute punishable harassment.

                Again, instead of the raw gut reaction of “Yes!” two of them in particular, Elizabeth Magill of Penn (who has since been forced to resign) and Claudine Gay of Harvard, tried to draw a line between speech and conduct. The first is usually protected, the second, often not. They failed to recognize that verbal calls to exterminate Jews, who make up part of their student populations, would at least blur that line and probably erase it entirely.

They may have been complacent about antisemitism on their campuses, as some Jewish students have complained. Or they may have been more sensitive than last week’s blundering made them seem. In any event, cautionary lawyering apparently made them gun-shy about potential free-speech lawsuits from students. The presidents acted as if they were in a courtroom instead of a hearing room. And therein lie some lessons.

1.       Never testify before Congress voluntarily. If you’re not under subpoena, obligated as a government official to appear, or seeking Senate confirmation for a position. Don’t naively imagine that the legislators are inviting you because they are actually seeking information. The Republicans especially want you as a foil to posture, perform, and promote themselves into political orbit.

For Israel: A Blank Check or Tangled Strings?

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine 

           This is an awkward time to attach conditions to the generous military aid that the United States provides to Israel. But it should be considered, not only to curb civilian casualties in Gaza, as some Democratic senators wish, but also to curb Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which have long poisoned prospects for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

           With the exception of the Trump White House, which supported settlements, Republican and Democratic administrations have declared Israel’s settlement policy an obstacle to peace. Yet the U.S. has never used the leverage of the purse to restrain the practice. Since the Oslo accords of 1993, the number of Israeli residents on the West Bank has soared from 110,000 to more than 500,000, the number of settlements from 128 to about 300, now scattered throughout Palestinian areas.

American officials have done little more than complain and wring their hands as Israelis have populated territory that might have formed a Palestinian state, constructing government-subsidized developments whose town houses, schools, synagogues, orchards, factories, and swimming pools have an aura of permanence that belies the term “settlements.” They are satellite cities and sweeping suburbs. They have created such a crazy-quilt of jurisdictions that piecing together territory for Palestinian sovereignty would now require the departure of tens of thousands of Israeli Jews.

Moreover, a thuggish minority of Israeli settlers have tormented their Palestinian neighbors through home invasions and vandalism, destruction of olive groves, and even murder with impunity. They are religio-nationalist zealots operating in a free-wheeling environment of self-righteous extremism. This is not new, just more widespread and unrestrained. It has been going on for at least 40 years, recently escalating to a level attracting international attention as settlers try to terrify Palestinians into fleeing—with some success. At least 11 Arab communities have been emptied so far this year, according to the West Bank Protection Consortium, a monitoring group of non-governmental organizations funded by ten European countries.

The problem may seem purely political and humanitarian, but it has military consequences for Israel. What happens on the West Bank resonates in Gaza, where Hamas ruled and armed itself for the gruesome slaughters and kidnappings of October 7. The Palestinian prisoners whose release Hamas is obtaining in exchange for hostages are virtually all West Bank residents, arrested by Israeli forces there and often held without charge or trial. By remote control, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank seem to have contributed to radicalization in Gaza, at least to some degree.