I promise you it’s possible to discuss Israel / Palestine without making anyone out to be undeserving of dignified existence on earth. I’m equally sure I can’t solve the problem of how difficult that is with this post, but I’m remembering two recent posts I made on Facebook.
One was a Libra season / Justice post where I spoke about the concept of equity among competing priorities, and the other was about vengeance and rejecting dualism. The thing is, the state requires there to always be an us and a them, for its logic is violence and that always means there must be someone pointing the gun and someone having the gun pointed at them. For this reason it divides us into categories — citizen/immigrant, man/woman, gay/straight, married/single, working/unemployed, etc… and pits those interests against each other to justify its own existence. This is why dualist thinking about god (good/evil, righteous/sinful, etc…) maps so well onto systems of harm. If you can be made to feel connected to an in group, then you can be made to feel threatened by the out group and the rulers can gain your consent to point their guns at the out group to “protect” you.
I know the tension between Israel and Palestine is rooted in deeply held beliefs about national identity, religious conviction, and a long series of harm done in the name of retaliation, liberation, nation building, and more. Genocide, terrorism, apartheid, sanctions. I’m not interested in taking a side in this — I’m also not interested in sitting the fence. The side to be on is the human side, and from what I can see the conditions in Gaza don’t meet the basic standard of human dignity and compassion.
The counter to dualism, to the logic of us/them, is holism. A perspective which doesn’t try to sort the object of discourse into “sides” so it can label them with a value judgment and tip the scale. Holism looks at the scale of justice as a thing not to tip, but to balance, not with condemnation or favor, but with equity. I don’t have the answers to what’s happening there and as a US American if I even breathe in the direction of a foreign nation I risk having my government traipse off on another merry goose chase of endless interventionism and occupation. So I try not to do that.
But looking here at home, we have a big christian nationalism problem on our hands, and one major component of that is a misguided idea of the end times that has evangelicals sitting around waiting for Jesus to fix everything while they justify letting it all go to hell because they think it has to happen for the rapture to come. In this way it’s not unlike waiting endlessly for the revolution, but I digress — the point is, these are the people driving US support for Israel, and that’s a problem within reach. We actually are responsible for conditions and we actually do bear a responsibility of stewardship to seek a better world not in the afterlife, but right now.
That world can’t come from dualist thinking, from judgments about in groups and out groups, who is right and who is wrong. We absolutely can and must hold ourselves and each other accountable for doing better, and also doing better can’t look like pouring fuel on an already raging fire. The solution has to include deescalation, mutual understanding, listening more and provoking less, moving away from old ideas that separate toward new ideas that draw together. This doesn’t mean letting anyone off the hook, and it certainly doesn’t mean condoning structures of abuse that justify their existence by blaming their “enemies”, but it does mean upholding holistic solidarity as a desirable outcome.
I’m sure the last thing anyone cared to read today was a kum bye yah style “let’s all get along” post and I don’t want to be misunderstood that way. The way forward probably doesn’t lead through a green sunny meadow full of flowers and singing hippies. It very likely leads through more turmoil, and holistic thinking would caution me from judging that, instead to trust transformative process. We already know humanity isn’t ready for a non-violent anarchist world so what makes one conflict any more unsurprising than another? The question for me is, what is humanity ready for? How can we meet them where they’re at and help them take one step closer to being ready? That’s going to be a little different for each of them, and it’s labor intensive work. There is no way around doing this work.
Ultimately the systems we construct together are built out of the attitudes of the people from whom governments (or post-state social structures) derive their mandates. There is no collective separate from the people. The collective is us, to change what’s possible collectively we have to change our collective selves. And if I were to ask myself, what does the collective need to hear today, it wouldn’t be Yet Another Screed About Right And Wrong™ or A Handwringing Call For World Peace™, it would be this contemplation on justice and dualism and how much work we have ahead of us.
It’s OK for that to take however long it takes. It’s OK to to take action toward getting there faster. It’s OK to be overwhelmed and just breathe. We will get there.
I hope that gave everyone something to think about. You are valid and you are loved and we will solve these seemingly insurmountable problems together, because we’re humans and that’s what we do.
Have a wonderful day!!
