Forced Expulsions and Promised Lands
Seeking to make sense of the Israel/Palestine horror by exploring deeper contexts
Over the last few weeks, I have been looking into Islamic thought and Jewish history, seeking to define a deeper context for the Gaza nightmare, which could easily plunge us into World War Three. As I mentioned before, I never focused on Israel – never felt a personal connection to the idea of Israel – until I visited a few years ago when, I must admit, I fell in love with the country. Before that, I always thought it was an insanely perverse project to put a new country of traumatized, dispossessed people in the middle of a continent where they would be forever reviled, and where they were also forced to dispossess a native population to make room for themselves.
Having said that, I find myself struggling with – resisting – what has become the standard Leftist position on Israel: the position taken by Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Sean King, and so on. Hedges, who never for a moment gets off of his Apocalyptic soapbox, writes:
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascist within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state… The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.
While I am not sure if you can call the current Israeli government “fascist” as Hedges does very freely and stridently (they still allow open dissent and opposition parties, for instance), I also find it extremely wrenching to see the photos and videos coming out daily of children and other civilians dead in the streets of Gaza from bombing – the pain and suffering seems almost unimaginable. It pains me deeply that Jews, of all people, are causing this horror.
In my efforts to dig deeper, I just read My Promised Land by Ari Shavit as well as Sylvain Cypel’s The State of Israel Versus the Jews. Both authors are Israelis and former Zionists who have become deeply suspicious and concerned about the ongoing Zionist project and the violence endemic to it. I will explore their critiques of Israel in my next piece.
Based on my last essays here, I also some received criticism that I seem Islamophobic. I have given that a good deal of consideration. I truly love aspects of Islam – I particularly love the Sufi tradition, and consider mystics/artists like Rumi and Ibn Arabi to be amazing, at least equal to anyone the Anglo-European tradition has produced. I also find many Islamic traditions beautiful and profound, such as the daily prayers directed to Mecca, and the basic austerity of the devotional life that is so common in Muslim cultures.
As I mentioned, my entry point into getting a sense of Islam, from the inside, came from the traditionalist Sufi philosopher Frithjof Schuon, particularly his books, Understanding Islam and The Transcendent Unity of the Religions. These works made a profound impression on me. They are extremely complex, hence hard to write about. Essentially, Schuon argues that, as Christianity is, at its core, the religion that preaches love and compassion, Islam, in its essence, focuses on the purely transcendent domain of the Absolute, which is God in His fullness, beyond human conception. For devotees of Islam, this vertical dimension of the Absolute is so palpably felt that it can have the effect of somewhat negating the value of ordinary lived experience, leading to a form of anti-humanism.
I am only interested, ultimately, in helping humanity to reach peace and harmony, so that we might attain a higher state of being and knowing, collectively. However I believe that the only way we can do that is to utilize the intellect to its fullest capacity, to truly understand our immediate circumstances as well as the deeper historical and ideological causes that have led us to this precipice. Unfortunately, it may be the case that the truth of our situation – parts of it – are not easy to handle, neither comfortable nor pleasant. Many choose to act like insipid children, spraying opinions across social media without deeper study or authentic self-reflection, perhaps acting as unwitting dupes in a larger propaganda war.
I always seek to remain open to changing my ideas if I find new information or perspectives that I consider more comprehensive, better, than what I thought until that point. I realize this can be irritating to some readers, as my views can be hard to pin down. I feel I perform a better service this way than if I dogmatically held onto a belief or an opinion, despite new evidence to the contrary.
Among the difficult things we have to do, if we hope to make any progress, is to deal with human beings – also countries, political systems, and so on – as they are now, not as we wish them to be (avoiding “shoulds”). From my perspective, I would say that I feel deeply troubled by many countries in the Middle East due to their attitudes toward human rights, their treatment of women, and their repression of dissent. Many of these countries — Syria and Libya, for instance — are in desperate shape, due to various historical and cultural factors we can track and analyze. We can place some blame on European colonialism as well as the engine of Capitalist growth, which divided up the region to suit their interests, after Europe defeated the Ottoman Empire in the first decades of the Twentieth Century. There are, also, indigenous elements that have made the region one of immense suffering and prolonged cycles of violence. For example, a long history of local despotisms and caliphates means that democratic, participatory forms of government do not seem to take hold in most of the region. This is the case even after the Arab Spring in 2011: A gigantic outcry from the collective Arab soul for change, liberation from despotism, and evolution. In the end, this collective impulse was tragically denied.
Of course, we might look at human history as an endless chain of cause and effect, action and reaction, going back into prehistoric, primitive, and even primordial times. As I noted in “Freedom is ‘Freedom from Freedom,’” a recent essay, I don’t believe in free will, except as a necessary illusion. Increasingly, this perspective is becoming a popular one with scientists and philosophers1. It accords with ancient Vedantic philosophy, expressed in works like the Bhagavad Gita.
In this way – and others – my metaphysical perspective is not substantively different from that of esoteric Islam. There is one major difference: I see inevitability and the reality of the Absolute as two facets of an understanding that can orient us toward seeking to increase the lived domain of human freedom – as well as civil rights, equality, social experimentation, equal rights of women, and so on – rather than curtailing or abolishing them. Therefore, I find the most prominent current forms of Islam to be destructive and regressive. As time goes on, if unaddressed, this may have increasingly drastic consequences for all of us.
Among the thinkers I have explored in the last few weeks is a reformist Islamic philosopher, Ziauddin Sardar, whose books include Postmodernism and the Other (1998), Islam Beyond the Violent Jihadis (2016), and Mecca: The Sacred City (2014).
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