Gaza and Maine

             I live a couple of counties away from where the mentally ill Robert Card, apparently hearing voices inside his head that sounded as if people were putting him down, shot up a bar and a bowling alley and forever changed the lives of too many of the good citizens of Maine. 

The horror in what has been statistically the safest state in the nation competed for headlines with the exponentially larger agony of the brutal Hamas attack and Israel’s decimation of Gaza. 

The tragedies in Maine and Israel are cousins, however different in scale they appear. But are they in fact so different in scale? 48,000 Americans suffered gun-related deaths in 2021, the last year for which reliable statistics were available. 

Our newly minted Speaker of the House offered the usual contemptible dodge of thoughts and prayers, confirming the outrageous inability of our political system to address the gun violence epidemic. After the massacre, by contrast, one member of Congress, Lewiston-born Jared Golden, had the courage to change his mind toward favoring an assault rifle ban.

Ironically, there are very strict gun laws for civilians in the state of Israel. They must demonstrate good reason for gun ownership and obtain a permit, and people who are caught with an unlicensed gun receive strict sanctions, often a year in prison. The result has been far less gun deaths per capita there than here—at least until October 7.

To get and to stay elected in the U.S., politicians have had to augment their campaign funds with the blood money of the NRA, tenaciously ignoring the clear wishes of the American people for sensible reforms like universal background checks. 

The U.S. Congress along with a majority on the Supreme Court stubbornly adheres to obsolete interpretations of an amendment that was written hundreds of years before the AR-15 perversely became “America’s gun.” Nick Kristof, in an excellent article the New York Times keeps republishing after each new mass shooting, makes a case for the “whys” of our appalling statistics (for one, the crystal-clear correlation between numbers of guns and gun deaths). Kristof also lays out the common-sense changes we could make that would save a whole bunch of lives. 

Liberals blame the conservative obsession with the Second Amendment while conservatives advocate beefing up mental health initiatives. But real solutions will not emerge from blaming and either/or polarities. 

A similar political refusal to address root causes has come back to haunt Israeli politicians—and massacre the innocent by the thousands in both Israel and Gaza. Netanyahu maintains his power with a coalition that ignored the longing of great numbers of Israeli citizens for a peace that can only come by looking into the mirror of equivalent Palestinian longings.

While a subtle anti-Semitism often holds Israel to a higher standard than other nations, its reputation will take a tremendous hit from its military’s vain attempt to stamp out an idea, or an attitude, by collective punishment. The catastrophic destructiveness of Israel’s reaction, far from eliminating the cynical and nihilistic Hamas, will ensure a further generation of young men who see no alternative to murder and martyrdom. Hamas is playing Mr. Netanyahu like a violin.

There are plenty of wise citizens of Israel who, in spite of their tears and rage, have not been swept away by the siren voices of violent revenge. New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent on-site report cites a retired army general named Yair Golan, who told Remnick: 

“When you have a crisis, like Pearl Harbor or September 11th, it is a multidimensional crisis, a multidimensional failure. [Netanyahu] wanted quiet. So, while Hamas was relatively quiet, Netanyahu saw no need to have a vision for the larger Palestinian question. And since he needed the support of the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, he appeased them. He created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the over-all perception that the best thing to do was to annex the West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas.”

The cycle of violence is clearly systemic and cyclical, with mistakes, missed chances, and the inability of some to take “yes” for an answer. The righteous assertions of blame churned out by all sides becomes so much static, irrelevant to the copious flow of innocent blood. 

In like fashion, the U.S. head-in-the-sand fetish of gun rights guarantees an equivalent flow of blood will continue here. Robert Card lost the capacity to see his victims as fully human. Mr. Netanyahu heeds a voice within that tells him that only more violence can save his nation. He has been unable to see Palestinians as fully human, just as Hamas refuses to see Jews as fully human. 

The paralysis that continues this cycle of mutual dehumanization engulfing thousands of families and children in the Middle East may be different from the paralysis in the U.S. that failed to prevent yet another troubled man with a gun from mass murder and suicide. But the two tragedies are not only indistinguishable in their heartrending pain and loss. 

In Maine and in Gaza, violence became the last best way to subdue the “other.” Robert Card didn’t get adequate help for his illness, and acquired a gun far too easily. It could have gone another way. Hamas and Netanyahu each chose mindless revenge. It could have gone another way.

One Earth, One Humanity, One Spirit

 The immensity of the carnage in Ukraine, Sudan, and now Israel and Gaza, makes it seem as if the community preached by religious prophets old and new feels beyond the capacity of our species.

 

For “those to whom evil is done,” war becomes the pragmatic, necessary, and reflexive counter-response to an “initial” act of violence—or a response to some previous move in an extended cycle of retaliation, heartless vengeance, and brute strength vainly designed to intimidate.

 

Hamas’s cynical cruelty, in response to the Netanyahu government’s years of playing off the Palestinian Authority against Hamas while expanding the settlements in the West Bank, may have condemned both Israel and Palestine to decades more chaos and civilian death.

 

For Palestinians, the U.S.-Israeli alliance taints our fitness to be an honest broker, further intensifying helpless despair and rage. President Biden is a decent fellow. Behind our government’s rote statements of unqualified support for Israel he is surely urging the Israeli military to learn from the U.S. overreaction to 9/11. He’s also pushing Netanyahu to move beyond an unworkable status quo toward revival of the presently comatose dream of a two-state solution. Clearly Biden wants to deter wider conflict in the region,  which could all too easily draw the superpowers into WW3.

 

To simplify, humanity the world over could be divided roughly into three groups, two smaller and a third comprising the vast majority of us.

 

One minority are those who believe that killing is the only way to redress injustice. Given the barbarity of the Hamas attack, it is understandable that the Israeli army is possessed for the moment by the delusion that the very idea of Hamas can be flattened into extinction by enough air strikes. But this will only create a new generation of young men who believe their only option is violence.

 

A second smaller group are those who heroically put non-violence into action. An example would be the village of Wahat al Salam/Neva Shalom (“Oasis of Peace”) in Israel. Since 1970 Christians, Jews and Muslims have lived together and run a school where their children learn each other’s beliefs and customs while adults work through their occasionally difficult conflicts peacefully. There is a wait list for people to live there. However rare, the model proves that desirable alternatives to violent conflict are possible and in fact the only long term way out of a morass of paranoia and violence. Many other such initiatives have flourished in spite of the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Poignantly, peace activists were among those kidnapped by Hamas.

 

Is it so far-fetched to imagine at least parts of the Israeli settlement project imbued with a spirit of inclusiveness similar to Neva Shalom? Could activists plan settlements that welcomed Palestinians of similar good will, living together in the truth that Arab and Jewish blood is equally red? Clearly not now, but perhaps eventually.

 

A third grouping besides the fanatics and the peacebuilders could be called the great middle, the vast majority of the world’s populations who want only a secure existence and a fulfilling life for themselves and their children.

 

Though scant comfort to those innocents upon whom bombs are falling like rain, most of us most of the time do manage to get along. Sweden and Norway do not fight, nor do Massachusetts and Connecticut. As of the commencement of the European Union in 1993, former combatants like Germany and France no longer need to resolve their differences by what became global war.

 

The mass of the world’s citizens, though many adhere to one or another of the great religions, may not feel the unconditional love and compassion for one another urged by Jesus and Buddha and Muhammed, but they get the practicality of the Golden Rule: treat others in the same way you would wish to be treated. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You may not love them or even like them, but they are as human as you are. Getting along is the glue that makes every day civilized life possible. For most people most of the time, this is part of our ordinary cultural DNA, which is what makes what has unfolded on both sides of the border between Gaza and Southern Israel so horrifying.

 

Definitions of extremism may be changing in a good way, isolating and marginalizing those who put all their eggs in the basket of violence. For example, there is the growing global recognition, expressed in the number of nations which have ratified the United Nations Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons, that such weapons are in fact useless instruments of terror and mass dehumanization.

 

We are moving, too slowly, toward a world where threatening to use these weapons, or possessing them as the basis of a shaky, unstable deterrence, is itself a demonic, delusionary form of extremism, even though at the moment deterrence remains at the core of “establishment” values for both democratic and totalitarian governments. As long as this potential doom hangs over us, we are all Israelis and Palestinians under the gun, having to learn the apparently impossible task of getting along.

 

This begins when we acknowledge that while we claim identities as Jews, or Arabs, or citizens of the U.S. or the Congo or Shri Lanka or China, the core reality of our identity is as a citizen of one small planet, each of us equally unique and precious. Whenever my partner is asked on some bureaucratic form for her race, in a tiny protest against arbitrary categories, she always writes “human.”

 

This larger context of our quarrels can get lost in the bloody headlines. While Putin pursues his absurd visions of Russian grandeur at heinous cost to his own country and to Ukraine, the tundra in Siberia is melting and releasing methane that accelerates global warming. Everything everyone does or neglects to do affects everyone else. In the context of biosystems that are stressed or even dying, all the wars across this small planet are a double distraction, a double delusion, a double death. The need to sustain the life systems that in turn sustain us may be the ultimate self-interested motive for us to put up our swords and learn to live and work together—including Israelis and Palestinians.

Two in One

 

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”                       —F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

A few examples:

 

1.  Historical: The atomic bomb brought the war with Japan to a close more quickly AND the atomic bomb may have had much less effect upon Japan’s surrender than the Soviet declaration of war against Japan at about the same time (historians still have not resolved this difference of interpretation).

 

2.  Psychological: Human nature is fundamentally flawed, often violent, and subject to dark unconscious impulses AND Anne Frank was not wrong to believe that people are often really good at heart.

 

3.  Strategic: No less an authority than George Kennan asserted that pushing NATO eastward was the greatest foreign policy mistake of our time, causing Russia to feel once again mortally threatened AND Putin is a brutal dictator with delusions of imperial grandeur that have led to enormous unnecessary suffering in Ukraine.

 

4.  Political: America is a bulwark for democracy and against tyranny globally AND America often embroils itself in conflicts that end up creating far more chaos and death than if the US. had exercised more restraint and humility.

 

5.  Economic: The free market system has lifted millions out of poverty AND the same system continues to be a major factor as planetary ecosystems fray.

 

6.  A variation on 5.: The capitalist system has been a major factor in the fraying of planetary ecosystems AND the technologies provided by that same system (solar, wind, batteries—fusion? ) will be crucial to sustaining both people and the living systems of the planet.

 

7.  Strategic: Nuclear deterrence may have prevented a third world war for 75 years AND the system of nuclear deterrence could dissolve at any moment by accident or miscommunication into a planetary catastrophe.

 

8.  Philosophical/Strategic (a three-in-one): War is a tragic and inescapable condition that has gone one for thousands of years AND we now have the knowledge of conflict resolution tools and international law to prevent war AND nuclear weapons have rendered “victory” in all-out war meaningless—to survive we must wage a preventive war against war.

 

9.  Cultural/Political: Osama bin Laden perpetrated one of the cruelest terrorist acts in modern history AND articulated a set of demands that from his perspective as a committed Islamist were reasonable: these demands included that the U.S. should cease to support Israel against Palestine and that it withdraw its troops from Islamic territories. Did these demands justify the murder of 3000 innocent Americans? Not on your life. But surely such demands are worth examining in terms of learning about a certain Islamic mind set, if only to prevent the next 9-11.

 

10.Moral/Aesthetic: Picasso was a self-centered moral monster AND his genius has made invaluable contributions to our culture. T.S. Eliot was reflexively anti-Semitic until he regretted it, but still wrote Nobel prize-winning poetry.

 

11.Political: The appeal of the 45^th President is a mystery, but not to the MAGA millions who see him a charismatic leader. AND for millions of others he represents uncontrolled chaos and a mortal threat to our democratic system.

 

12.Political/Cultural: China has a uniquely controlling and cruel top-down system that oppresses minorities like the Uighurs AND China has done a remarkable job of pulling millions of their citizens out of poverty.

 

13. Philosophical: Each human is unique AND each human is like every other human. 

14. We are alive for only this tiny discrete moment in all of tie AND we emerged from and are completely connected to the story of a 29 billion-year-old Universe. 

15. A living example of the ability to hold opposed ideas in mind at the same time: Neva Shalom Wahat-al-Salaam is a village in Israel where Jewish, Christian and Muslim families have co-existed for decades, not always easily, but there is a wait list to get in. It’s a remarkable cultural environment for the children of the village, who all attend the same school and celebrate each other’s beliefs, customs and rituals.

 

Too many of us are uncomfortable with ambiguity. We want things cut-and-dried: who are the good guys and who are not. We silo ourselves tribally into “us” and “them,” with “us” being always right, or justified in any questionable behavior by rationalizing our “higher” goals in the name of a personal or national self-interest all too narrowly defined—“my country right or wrong.”

 

To wrestle with opposing points of view helps us walk in another’s shoes, preventing the dehumanizing of folks with whom we might be in conflict. This is going to be more and more important when, say, my use of energy affects the air quality in China, and their use of energy affects my own breathing.

 

All such twos-in-one take place in a context that is not two—it is a one that transcends deeply entrenched habits of narrow self-interest. We live on one earth and we are one species, dependent for life upon one interconnected biosystem. The planet is beginning to undergo a mental shift in this direction—not a deep change in "human nature," but at least a growing awareness of our dependence upon each other and the biosystem profound enough to affect global politics, economics, religion, education, and even the thinking of armed forces everywhere. Like it or not, our nuclear and ecological reality, that we’re all in this together, has become the foundational truth of our moment. 

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.     —Rumi