Gaza

Needless to say, it's sad to see the Middle East erupting again in war.

It's hard to see a resolution. Recently Ireland has been floated as a comparison, because of the
religious war that raged there. The trouble is, the war in Ireland was never truly religious. It's
certainly true that the Scots Irish who arrived as conquerors tended to be Protestant, rather than
the general Catholic of the population they conquered, but it was the fact of conquest and the
tribal division, that kept that conflict alive. Religion was merely a convenient shorthand.

In the Middle East, it really is about religion. The defining Jewish religious text, attributed to
Moses, and his successor, Joshua, recounts the conquest of Palestine, and the slaughter of the Philistines. To those who take those writings seriously, as religious texts, this was an act of
heroic religious devotion. To those who take those writings seriously, as historical documents, this was a series of horrific war crimes, for which the perpetrators today are hanged.

The Jewish claim to the San Diego of the Old World rests not simply on it having been their
ancestral land. If anyone took those sorts of claims seriously, the Dutch would be suing in world
court for the return of Manhattan, which they actually purchased from the Asians who had gotten
there first. The trouble with all such claims is that all land is stolen. I would love to lay
claim to all of Virginia, in the name of my ancestor, Powhatan, but the fact is that he had just
finished stealing all of that land when Smith and company came along to steal it from him. And
by their own record, the Jewish claim is tainted by their own admission that the land was taken
by force from its inhabitants. On the other hand, every claim to land on the planet is so tainted.

Rather their claim rests on three pillars - one religious, one tribal, one military.

The religious claim, of course, is Moses' claim that Palestine was a perpetual divine land grant
to the descendants of Jacob. The credibility of that claim rests squarely on the question of
whether Moses was a demigod or a war criminal. For those of us who are not religious, there can be
no question. For those who are religious, but of a non-Jewish flavor, there is no question. Only
the Jewish religions, and not all of those, will come down on the demigod side. So for Jews,
Christians, Protestants, Mormons, one answer is simply obvious; for the Islamic wing of the Jewish
religions, and for the rest of the world, the opposite answer is equally obvious.

The tribal claim is the historical fact that Jewish people need to be able to guarantee their own
protection, because of the tribal animosities between them and other Jewish religions, notably the
Catholic and Islamic wings. It's not clear to me what the real source of those animosities is.
From the horse's mouth, as it were, we have Mel Gibson's drunken, and for that reason perhaps most
honest, expression of animosity. It would seem that he's internalized the idea that Jesus' death
by torture is the fault of people born two millenia later, a concept that is too ridiculous for
words. Jesus, if the account is historically correct, (and all history is forging the future by
forging the past), was killed by politicians whose power he challenged. All politicians in every
age engage in the torture and killing of those who challenge their power. Ask George Bush.

To hold a people accountable for the actions of their politicians is simply blaming the victim.

At any rate, it's hard to see why Islamic people would get worked up over that one. The second
Gibson complaint was that Jewish people were responsible for all the wars in Europe. That's an
interesting one, because it's both more and less stupid than it sounds. The kernel of reality in
it is that bankers were the financiers for war, which are the kind of entrepreneurial endeavor
that most appeals to thugs, and Europe's rulers have been nothing if not thugs. The bankers were
Jewish, but that's why the complaint is even more stupid than it sounds. The bankers were Jewish, because all the other Jewish religions, and there's no way to say this nicely, were too stupid to
understand that you can't borrow money if you won't pay interest. Collecting interest, in the
Catholic and Islamic view, is a sin. Which means that lending money, in all practical terms, is
also a sin. Which is a view that damns you to economic hell. No money lending, no capital
formation. No capital formation, no new business creation, no business expansion, no jobs, no
food. The Catholics and the Islamic peoples should be falling to their knees in prayers of thanks
for the willingness of Jewish bankers to sin, and thereby save them from their own disastrous
folly. Instead, it's "robbing a bank is no crime compared to owning one".

I'll leave for a later day a discussion of why interest has to be paid. It turns out to be a
consequence of the Principle of Selection, that whatever is more probable probably happens more.
It turns out that money is a matter of life and death, in a certain precise way.

But today there are plenty of bankers of all religions to hate, so the lingering animosity is hard
to understand on that basis.

Perhaps it really is a religious dispute, in the narrow sense of social evidence. There's a
remarkable tendency for religions to become proselyting at the precise historic moment when they
become objectively incredible. For Christians, that moment was the death of their deliverer. For
Jehovah's witnesses, it was when the set day for the end of the world came and uneventfully went.
For Mormons, it seems, it was Oliver Cowdery finding Joseph Smith in bed with a fourteen year old.
I don't know what that moment was for Islam. I suspect it is related to the split that persists
today between Sunni and Shia. The psychology that underlies it, is that if you're unsure of your
own beliefs, you can quiet your doubts by convincing others. If you succeed in convincing them,
that provides evidence to you that you must have been right.

I had the occasion not long ago of teaching a course to a group of men from North Africa. During
lunch breaks, I got to talk with them about their country, and their life. One of them, more or
less out of the blue, expressed his gratitude for "having the truth". To me it sounded so ...
Mormon. And, thinking back on my religious childhood, I saw the spectrum of bemused to offended
that was undoubtedly provoked by such pronouncements. And that's the rub.

The defining characteristic of the Jewish religions is "there's only one god so there's only one religion, and we're the chosen ones". To the nonreligious, and presumably to those belonging to
other religious traditions, it's more amusing than offensive. But the internal logic of the Jewish
religions dictates that each must claim to be the only true religion, directly challenging each
other's claim to legitimacy. Laying that to rest means giving up the central tenet. Not laying it
to rest means a constant provoking of nagging doubt, with all the irritation and agitation that
ensues.

We can confidently predict that there will always be new Jewish religions arising, and that they
will always deny the legitimacy of their predecessors. Jesus showed definitively how you win that game, and that play book has been trotted out many times since. The best that can be hoped for is
a low grade fever of resentment and animosity, and the less successful of these sects will need
protection, which they'll only reliably obtain from themselves.

The third pillar, of course, is military. Everybody has the land they are successful in defending,
or in taking. As I write this I'm sitting in San Diego, on land stolen from Mexico by some of my
own relatives. Mexico, of course, stole it from Spain, who stole it from various Asian tribes,
who'd been stealing it from each other since they got here.

So, while we'll never see justice in the Middle East, perhaps one day we'll see casinos in Gaza.