HENCE, THERE CAN BE NO SOLUTION FOR THE MIDDLE EAST “CRISIS”

——————– “Political Negotiation Won’t Resolve Mideast Hostilities”

The Washington Post Saturday, January 10, 2009; B09

Below is an excerpt from “On Faith,” an Internet feature sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek. Each week, more than 50 figures from the world of faith engage in a conversation about an aspect of religion. This week’s question: Hamas leaders claim that their understanding of Islam makes Israel’s survival a theological and moral impossibility. What’s your response to that? How should Israel respond? How should other Muslims respond?

I do not believe, although good men on both sides have tried in the past, that any sort of lasting peace settlement is possible in a region where claims to the same piece of land are based on passions, religious beliefs and tribal loyalties rooted in irrationality. I wish that I could see the situation in a more optimistic light, but I think that Barack Obama is almost certain to fail in his peace-making efforts, as all of his predecessors have. The best that can be hoped for is a containment of hostilities for as long as possible. But, as Hamas’s firing of rockets into Israel and Israel’s most recent attack demonstrate, the region is always on the edge of violence. How can it be otherwise, when the primary parties to the conflict both believe that their god has chosen them to live on holy ground? The Israeli- Palestinian conflict is the most tragic example in modern history of the folly of trying to base political arrangements on the myths in ancient books.

Whatever the influence of secularly oriented governing elites in the Arab world, the majority of ordinary Palestinians (as demonstrated by their election of the radical Hamas in Gaza) want the destruction of the state of Israel. There’s no argument about this; the Hamas leaders have stated their position clearly. They believe that a Jewish state has no right to exist because Jews do not accept the supremacy of the prophet Muhammad.

Israel would accept the existence of a Palestinian state, but only if all groups like Hamas and Hezbollah were thoroughly dismantled. And that is not going to happen. The futility of Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas through a ground invasion will become thoroughly evident if and when Israeli troops move into Gaza City, where heavy civilian casualties will horrify the rest of the world. This is already happening; the Israeli strike Monday on a U.N. school is a case in point. And at the end, there will be new Hamas fanatics to take up the task of the fallen — just as there will be new ultra-Orthodox settlers on the West Bank who would rather die than leave the land that they think God has given them.

I don’t believe that the views of so-called moderates — of any religion — in the rest of the world will have any lasting impact on this situation. The major mistake of people who do not realize the limits of reason in confronting the utterly irrational is the contention that this is an ordinary political situation that can be solved by political negotiation. This is not to say that the Middle East conflict has no modern political dimensions, only that its ancient religious and tribal roots are the real obstacle to any settlement.

— Susan Jacoby, author and reporter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/09/AR2009010903192.html

[To read the complete essay and see more “On Faith” commentary, hosted by Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn, go to http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith.]