The Sharon Syndrome

Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talks have much in common with Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel.  The wheezing peace talks roughly parallel Sharon’s last breaths, reported to be imminent.    Both have been kept alive artificially and both have actually been dead for years. Sharon became the author of Israel’s settlement movement while he was Housing Minister, a post he was forced into after he was held responsible as Israel’s General for the slaughter of Palestinians in the refugee camps at Shabra and Shatila in 1982.  His will still prevails.

           The familiar peace formula sponsored for years by the U. S. always asks the Palestinians to again compromise a little more over their borders in order to accept most of Israel’s settlement growth, now somewhere near 450,000 and counting. This is a familiar bad joke in the Middle East.  Every Israeli prime minister since Ben Gurion has approved new settlement construction.   

Heaping insult on injury in this very first week of 2014 the Israelis are insisting on protecting their security by requiring an agreement to its felt need to occupy a wide zone along the banks of the Jordan River from Jericho to the Galilee.  This is a low point  in dark humor since the Israelis for decades have occupied that western side of the Jordan with hundreds of thousands of acres of date palm plantations.

While many of the violent fires raging in the Middle East from Southern Sudan to Pakistan cannot be laid at the feet of Israel and its U. S. partner, the sheer hypocrisy, the affectation of moral legitimacy, of the U. S. posturing as honest peace broker, is like gasoline poured on the fires of abject poverty, illiteracy, and inequality and is feeding the growth of terrorism across North Africa all the way to Pakistan.  The fires are growing worse every day.

Behind these fires is a Britannica of theological material.  A guilt-ridden compact tied to the origins of the Holocaust has existed between Christians and Jews since WW II and has led both to a fresh purchase on Western triumphalism. The franchise lives on today in the form of a global imperialism of the wealthy in a framework of growing inequality. 

Generations of modern Christians and their denominations have no experience at all with the historic dogmas on which Anti-Semitism was based, but dutifully and periodically confess a symbolic complicity with the Holocaust. The result pulls the teeth on constructive criticism and dialogue and amounts to reality denial as generations of modern Jews continue to suffer from Holocaust fear in much the same way that pharmaceuticals advertise their cancer medications. It could happen to you.

These are theological chains that imprison everyone with their specious versions of history.  Jews adhere to an Israeli secular theology that uses biblical narratives about the land with little historical validity or meaning, preening for political support from their extreme Orthodox factions.   Christians, terrified of possible conviction for an anti-Semitism that is entirely foreign to them, support an Israeli right to land that takes priority over the Palestinians and Arab peoples in general.  Both faiths then buy into a compact that holds them to be both exceptional and morally superior to those around them.  It’s a compact that drives the U. S. Congress and Israel’s worst angels to guarantee fresh supplies of gasoline for the terrorist fires.

There is an alternative.   Here are great world religious traditions that could stand for something so drastically different—they could even stand together—and cut the tangled chains that imprison their better angels.   Christians, with their transcendent symbols of God without tribal allegiance who is aligned with the poor and outcast; the Jews with their high moral tradition of ethics rooted in righteousness, justice and equity. Islam, linked with Jews and Christians as people of the same book but with their own tradition expressed in capacious Mosques into which the most humble camel herder may come as one of God’s own.  (It is worth noting that the Christian-convened Councils of Nicaea included no camel herders.)

Advocacy for universal human dignity and equality, justice for all, genuine political righteousness, a just economic life—all are common themes among most world religions.  Such advocacy makes good New Year resolutions, and in case you’re interested they could be seen as a fresh epiphany.