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EVERYTHING'S
ALL RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Can
we, just for a minute, quit the Elie Weisel
hand-wringing crap and acknowledge that the
problem Israel and the Palestinians have with
one another is actually their mutual solution to
the problem of being mortal?
Of course to understand what I'm talking about
it is first necessary to recognize that it's not
love or sex or money that makes the world go
around but the fact of death; that what drives
virtually everything we believe and do is the
need to reduce, to at least a manageable degree
of fear, the terror and panic the anticipation
of death causes us. (If you can't quite grasp
this notion, if you need to be reminded that
terror and panic constitute the human default
condition, then whatever you're believing and
doing is working for you.)
Of the myriad
ways we've come up with to make living with an
impossible given tolerable, one relatively
transparent example would be the quest for a
SYMBOLIC immortality accomplished by a
scientific discovery, or by the creation of a
work of art, that will continue to exercise an
influence on the world after our passing.
Another example is the accumulation of
inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great
sums of money buy enable us to feel not just
superior to the common man, but less vulnerable
to the common fate. Still another is getting
high, which is about getting outside of, getting
ABOVE, the body that we know will one day be our
undoing.
And then there's our invention of an afterlife.
Presenting us with a chance to survive death--if
we honor the pronouncements and follow the
dictates we've assigned to deities of our own
creation--it's this immortality illusion that's
at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Arabs are qualifying for eternity by doing
what they've determined to be God's work, which
is to make war on the parties responsible for
undermining His authority and His plan for the
planet. And Israel, dropped in the Arab's midst,
its variegated culture implicitly challenging
the validity of Arab beliefs, provides the Arabs
with the infidel they need to carry out their
mission. But, for Arabs, it's not about killing
Jews, per se. Jews are simply a fortuitously
placed means to a purchase on heaven. (You could
say that--their culture being, by all
appearances, limited in its repertoire of
immortality illusions to the resources of
Islam--suicide is the only means of
self-perpetuation available to the Palestinian
terrorists.)
On the other hand, the Arabs afford Israelis an
opportunity to continually certify their
biblically bestowed "chosen"
status—AND TO ASSURE THEMSELVES OF THE
POST-CORPOREAL REWARDS IMPLICIT IN THE
ANOINTMENT—by constantly threatening, but
never accomplishing, Israel's destruction.
Persistently testing Israel's exalted
designation, but never disproving it, enabling
Israel to be embattled AND remain intact, the
Arabs are every bit the blessing to Israel that
Israel is to the Arabs.
It follows that the violence each side visits on
the other must be measured; balances and
proportions need to be kept. For one side to
win, after all would be for both sides to lose;
would, that is, end the game and return BOTH
sides to a contemplation of the Void. We might
call this aiding and abetting of one another's
immortality illusions--the cooperation and the
accommodations it requires--the deeper
definition of the "social contract."
So we can engage ad infinitum in the most
earnest discussions about anti-Semitism, about
Arafat, about Sharon, about territory and
occupation, and forever miss the real dynamic of
the situation. The Arab-Israeli problem is,
again, a solution to a more pressing problem, to
what is, literally as well as figuratively, the
mother of all problems. And what accounts for
the tenaciousness of the conflict is the ongoing
success it's enjoying in the service of its
underlying agenda. As long as this holds true,
Arabs and Israelis will, on one level or
another, be enemies. Because for all of the
horrors hostilities between them cause, they
cause a more acceptable, a more BEARABLE species
of horror than the fact of oblivion does.
The pain we are witnessing is a palliative.
These are not the worst of times in the Middle
East.
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