This article presents an interesting perspective on peace in the Middle East. While I do not agree that the conflict is religious, the follow statement is supported by my own research.
"Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs."
So when a good transcends typical values it defies rational calculations and compensation.
"Indeed, across the political spectrum, almost everyone we surveyed rejected the initial solutions we offered — ideas that are accepted as common sense among most Westerners, like simply trading land for peace or accepting shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. Why the opposition to trade-offs for peace?"
"This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire."
So what is the path to peace? Its pretty simple actually. Simply apologize.
"Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist."
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4 comments:
And what if Palestinians and Israelis finally understood that they are all human beings? What if people understood that they are all the same genetic material, that all cultural barriers are an artificial illusion? There are no Jews and Arabs, it's all bullshit. The system made us believe that life is a struggle between "us" and "them", when in fact, there is no such thing.
Just maybe, if more humans understood that we are all brothers and sisters, evolved from the same monkey, which in turn evolved from simpler species, as simple as the simplest form of bacteria, then maybe people would realize that all of us are one. Just one, not Jews and Arabs, but homo sapiens.
No country, no religion, no race, just human race.
I'm just so tired of nationalist idiots I meet everywhere. I have been to many countries, met many people of different cultures. And everyone I went I met people who were convinced that their culture, their country, their religion is the best.
In USA, many are convinced that their country is the greatest in the world (whatever that means). And then you go to another country, no matter how small or how poor, their citizens will radiate with pride for their country, thinking they are the best. They have created themselves a new religion, it is called nationalism, their symbol is the flag, they worship it like the God of thunders.
But how can they all be the best? And what if no one culture is the best, and thus has no right to dominate any other country?
I think it takes a special dose of open mindedness to understand that everyone is really pretty much the same. More similarities we see between ourselves, more we realize that others are just like us. We all have the ability to feel pain and willingness to avoid it, as well as the ability to feel joy and the will to pursue it.
Regardless of culture.
More we see this, less reasons we have to hate other, less reasons to fight wars.
Because when you think about it, our days are numbered. How many days to live we have left before the worms eat our corpses? So then, what is the point of competing, of fighting, of creating rivalries between ourselves, between our cultures?
What is the point of struggling for technological progress. And what is progress, building of better nuclear missiles that can reach their target faster and with greater precision?
Or maybe progress is more efficiency at work, working double the hours as a year ago? Or is progress the process of destruction of rain forests?
Why not just sit back, relax and enjoy the time we have left on this planet?
Why not have a blast while there is time, because guess what, this life is all we have left, and after we die, we probably disappear forever.
Screw religion, screw national pride, long live the human race!
It is curious to see how religion has always been the protected word, especially in USA. Barely anyone points out religion as the cause of world conflicts. Take for example the Iraqi civil war, how often is it referred to as religious war?
No, the Iraqi civil conflict is probably most often referred to as an ethnic conflict. But is not the word "religious" more proper? The Sunni vs. Shia, these are both religious groups, fighting each other. Therefore, the civil conflict in Iraq is a religious conflict. Simple.
The conflict between Jews and Arabs is not religious? But there are 2 different religious groups opposing each other, how is that not religious conflict?
I think most commentators fear to use the word "religious" because of the weight of controversy it carries. To offend religion is worse than to burn the flag in USA. The religion is a taboo subject, just like terrorism. You just don't talk about it, for the sake of peace of mind.
But I don't care about political correctness just to accomplish peace of mind. The reason why I educate myself is not to conform with the rest but to become a maverick, not to fear to ask inconvenient questions. I want to get to the bottom of honest truth.
I want to know why my professor thinks that the conflict between Palestine and Israel is NOT a religious one.
One could say, because it is over territory, it is over West Bank and Gaza. But territory is not everything, if Jews lived in the Gaza City and in Tel Aviv, would there be a territorial conflict between Jews and Jews? If Jews were just an atheist sub-culture, say like punks, and Arabs were a soccer team, like Manchester United, and they would both live in Israel, would they blow each other to pieces of plastic explosives and F-16 fighter jets?
Virtually any religious war is also a war over territory. The Great Crusades were also wars over territory, Europeans striving to conquer the Middle East. But who in their right mind could deny that the Great Crusades were religious wars?
Every religious war is a war over territory, but not all territorial wars are wars over religion.
The Israeli Palestinian conflict in my opinion resembles a religious conflict, in addition to a territorial conflict, but I would like to be proven wrong. But please, if anyone decides to answer, do not give religion any dose of special protection for the sake of political correctness. Let's have an honest discussion.
National pride can be important for state building, so it is not universally bad. It is only when this factor is used to motivate conflict that it can be negative.
I would not suggest that all religious wars are territorial. If you see a pattern there, could it not be that all wars that we assume are religious are really motivated by territorial considerations. You need to be careful about war and its causes. The key thing to do is to demonstrate that the war aims are connected to the purported causes. Using that test, religion fails to explain why conflict start.
It would be really interesting to find out about studies on the influence of religion and nationalism on war. I just have a gut feeling that countries with a high volume of nationalism and religious faith are at greater risk of going to war with other countries. Maybe I'll write a paper on this in some class, in the future.
Like you have explained to me, religion itself cannot be a source of territorial conflict, but it surely is a contributing factor - it is easier to manipulate masses with religious messages(i.e. jihad, great crusades). This is just another good reason to do away with it.
As far as national pride being important factor for state building, this is true, but in my opinion this subject is very slippery, I think that reasons against it outnumber the reasons for it 10 to 1.
Strange thing is that in many European countries (especially Western Europe), nationalism is something considered laughable, out of fashion, outdated and ridiculous (at least among young and educated people that I came into contact with). Maybe because it does not take much to bring back old memories of countless wars, fought over "national pride".
In Germany, for example, you just don't see cars with bumper stickers that say: "God bless Germany" or you don't see their flags on too many non-government buildings. There just isn't all that much nationalism going on, and as I traveled through EU, from my observation. It seems that allegiance towards the European Union is more of a "cool" thing these days than national pride. But on the other hand, this may be just another form of nationalism, just on a bigger scale. But fine, I just can't imagine EU conquering countries to gain "Lebensraum", so this allegiance to EU is not a bad thing.
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When exactly does a fan turn into a fanatic? The line is not so visible. It seems that nationalism is like egoism but on a larger scale. Countries obsessed with their ego, like sociopaths, artificially inflating self perception of their interests to ridiculous levels. My country is better than yours, it is more important than yours.
Why should we go help there to help them when we have enough to do here. It is worth out time to do stuff for us, but for them it is not worth it. But what is really this imaginary difference between us and them, this I will never understand.
As soon as someone considers something more important, that something becomes worthy of more privileges. My country has the right to dominate this stuff, and when the other country thinks the same, the conflict between "them" and "us" becomes inevitable.
Nationalism is not bad in entirety, but it should be constantly curbed, like a dog on a leash.
So I am sure there are tons of advantages of nationalism, but I won't praise them and encourage people to worship their flags. Such people should really find better things to do.
Maybe this all comes down to my fundamental philosophy, that it is better to unite than divide. And nationalism divides more than it unites. It unites a relatively small group of people (1 country out of over 200), alienating them from the great global community. Maybe this was a good thing in the past, before the age of modern globalization, before this huge economic interdependence. But today, it seems that nationalism is a relic of the past, symbol of 2 world wars....
Nazis were experts at drawing lines between "them" and "us". Before the SS got orders to exterminate Jews or Slavs, their heads were first filled with proper propaganda. They were told that Jews or Slavs were NOT humans like them, but sub-humans, incapable of doing all the great human things that Germans were capable of. This way, the cultured German society was turned into a society of mass killers. The only thing that the system had to do was to convince the public that their enemies were not humans. They were "them", not "us".
The human is incapable of hurting another human, once that human realizes that the other human is a human, just like them - the victim is capable of feeling pain in the identical way as the oppressor. This is called empathy, but in order for empathy to exist, a feeling of oneness must exist, feeling of unity.
Anyway, I just think people should really see more similarities and less differences. If more people realized that first we are all humans before we are countries, then there would be less fighting. Whatever divides us should be thrown out.
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