War of Cousins
“it is a serious thing — just to be alive — on this fresh morning — in a broken world.” — Mary Oliver
I think we are all connected through what Carl Jung called the “collective unconscious” and that through that we are all subconsciously feeling the human anguish and pain of the inhumanity, the mass murder of innocents, now occurring in the world. It is part of why things feel so weird now.
It is hard for me to imagine what it is like to be at home with your family and have bombs raining down on your neighborhood destroying your home and blowing your wife and children to pieces. But that is what is going on right now in Gaza, a 5-mile wide, 25-mile-long strip of land where 2.3 million Palestinians, mostly refugees pushed off their land in 1947, are corralled in an open-air prison, or as Baruch Kimmerling, the former senior sociologist at Hebrew University, put it, “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” The irony is apparently lost to the Israeli government. That is 20,000 people per square mile, 31 people per acre, less that a 4-foot square per person, half of whom are children. So, any bombs landing anywhere on Gaza are blowing children to pieces. It is a war crime against humanity.
Anyone criticizing Israel and its treatment of Palestine is called an antisemite, thus there is “a rise in antisemitism” when Israel commits horrific atrocities. The founders of the of the US went to great pains to not allow any religious sect political power over others and opposed the idea of a theocratic state. High-minded ideals for sure but it was hypocrisy then and it is hypocrisy now. I am pretty sure I will be called an antisemite for writing this article. Semites? I am not against Semites.
First, Semite is an ethnic category not a religion. A Semite is a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including, in particular, the Jews and Arabs. Right, Jews AND Arabs. Of course, that works in America where there is a xenophobic element that hates both Jews and Arabs. So, the conflict is Semite on Semite violence, a war of cousins.
HAMAS emerged in 1987 during the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. The group was committed to armed resistance against Israel and the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state in Israel’s place. There is evidence that indicates its expansion was funded by Israel to oppose and replace the PLO because the PLO was focused on the economic issues and wanting peace while they perceived HAMAS as religious extremists wanting war, a divide and conquer strategy. Israel’s right-wing leadership wanted war too and engineered an excuse to chase the Palestinian population off their land permanently.
Norman Finklestein’s recent response to Bernie Sander’s opposing a ceasefire lays out the history from 2006 when Hamas, who had previously been opposed to elections, reversed itself to run as a party and to everyone’s surprise won the “completely fair and honest elections” according to former US President Jimmy Carter. When Hamas was elected, it repeatedly sent out peace feelers to try and resolve the conflict with Israel. It presented its own terms of the international consensus for resolving the conflict, namely two states on the June 1967 border. What did the US Israel alliance do? It immediately imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza, which brought economic life in Gaza to a standstill and has been enforced now for nearly 18 years. It is a war crime ignored by those in power.
However, in June 2008 there was a ceasefire arranged between Israel and Hamas. The ceasefire held until November 4th, election day in the US. While the world’s attention was riveted on the election of the US’s first black president in history, Israel attacked Hamas in Gaza, breaking the ceasefire, killing 1,400 people, 350 of whom were children, and systematically devastating the infrastructure of Gaza. That is about how many were killed in the recent attack in Israel by HAMAS.
Israel was created in 1947 at the behest of Zionists drunk on ‘Chosen People’ Kool-Aid. Albert Einstein called the Zionists criminals. Zionist behavior resembles Nazis behavior because they are both racist ideologies who believe they represent the “one right way” and that all others should either be their slaves or killed. I prefer to stand with the Hasidic Jews, the Zen Buddhists of Judaism, who believe Israel should only exist in one’s heart, not as a Jewish state.
In response to a balanced view of the conflict presented by the UN Secretary General recently, the Israeli defense minister demanded his resignation and falsely charged the Secretary General with “blood libel,” a spurious accusation that Jewish people used the blood of Christians in religious rituals.
Christians tended to be antisemites, wrongly blaming the murder of Jesus on the Jews However, Pontius Pilate was not a Jew; he was an exceptionally brutal Roman governor of the province. The Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews. The Jews were a traumatized people whose land was occupied by the Romans who were there to extract all the wealth they could for the glory of Rome. Sound familiar? Jesus had threatened the wealth scam going on by overturning the moneychanger’s tables and reportedly chasing them out of the temple with a whip. Interfering with the profitable usury going on was a capital crime and Jesus was killed for doing so.
As Christianity became the official religion of Rome in 380, and despite the facts, the Jewish people found themselves with a target on their backs for the collective crime of having murdered Jesus. While waves of violence began to be launched against the Jews, it became apparent to St. Augustine that something had to be done.
Augustine created a legal argument dubbed ‘The Doctrine of the Witness’ which emphasized the mandate of protecting Jews because, he argued, their very existence proved the validity of the life and mission of Christ. Couching his arguments in what today’s world would label ‘antisemitic language’, Augustine’s Doctrine of Witness saved countless Jewish lives from early extermination. Under Islamic rule of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates in the 7th century, St Augustine’s ‘Doctrine of the Witness’ became the legal backbone for the concept of ‘Dhimmi’ which dealt with Islam’s protection of Jews and Christians as a special class of citizens. Thus, the harmony that existed in the middle east before the western invasion. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic Religions, which according to the Bahai Faith, represent an evolution of religion, each uniting people into larger and larger groups. However, each of them being captives of a centralized authority the religious principles were abandoned in favor of hegemony.
Religions is defined as one’s personal relationship with the powers and principles of the universe, or God. Organized religion is not about that, it is political, the art and practice of influencing others, demanding fealty to the temple, church, or mosque. All the religions embrace the concept of “do unto others what you would have them do unto you” but that seems only to apply to its members at best if history is remembered. This war, however, as are most wars, is not about religion at all. It is about economic power and control of land and resources. And one cannot blame an entire people for the crimes committed by a few, so let’s look at who is to blame.
Let’s get down to specifics. War is very expensive, so who supplied the money for the bombs? Who supplied the materials to make the bombs? Who made the bombs? Who ordered the bombs be made? Who sold the bombs? Who ordered the bombs to be dropped? Who fired the bomb laden missiles? Who dropped the bombs? If people had refused to do any one of those things, children would not be being blown to pieces right now. If you are one of those people, who did not refuse to participate in this war, you can be forgiven. But to be forgiven, you must stop what you are doing now and work the rest of your life to oppose the war you helped make and work to provide reciprocity for all its victims. Or you could just go to hell.