Denes Martos

Jehovah versus Allah

War and Terrorism

Which elements make up the explosive mixture that recurrently feeds the Middle East conflict? As in every complex and critical struggle, it is impossible to admit the two or three more or less official arguments claimed to be the cause of the problem. In these cases, the arguments brought up by one side or the other usually reflect only what each party dares confess in public. For an in-depth analysis, it would  be even more or less useless to go into the detail of hidden intentions, because conflicts of this sort are not restricted to conscious motivations of  the participants. In fact, in these cases the alleged arguments are never much more than just pretexts to justify what nobody wants to say. And those things nobody wants to say are only the conscious and more or less rationalized terms of totally or partially irrational motivations of which the individuals involved may  not be in any way aware of.

That being so, in order to understand what is going on in Middle East the first thing to clarify and state openly to begin with, is the war itself. Not necessarily this war but rather the contemporary war as such.

From the series of events of the last months, and even the last years, anyone can draw countless conclusions. About and around those conclusions everybody can then make, of course, countless comments. Following that method, we could  start by pointing out the relationship between Israel and the US on one side, and Hizbollah and Iran on the other.  We could then analyze the various groupings inside Islam and maybe even put them in side by side with those between the US and Europe (or within Europe itself, for that matter) . Then, we could go into the issue of the Iran-China relationship after which we could consider the situation of Moscow and the Muslim population that historically has always formed a belt around the southern border of the Russian Empire. We could talk about oil, geopolitics, Euros, Dollars, economic interests, technical possibilities and demographic questions.

Maybe it could get quite interesting, but I am afraid it would be quite as useless. To begin with, it is enough to  look at the enormous amount of literature than already exists about the conflict to understand that this task has already been done. But, leaving that aside, we would also be far off-target for we would be forgetting an essential factor. Talking about the causes – or possible causes – of the war, it is more than doubtful that we would actually get closer to the war itself. We would be talking about the ingredients of this war but not about the  elements making up  the contemporary war.

After two European World Wars – and especially after the Second – the West  has lost something that is fundamental: i.e., the capacity to constrain war and keep it within certain limits agreed upon and respected by all participants. The vast majority of today’s opinion manufacturers  completely ignore the fact that European Society  managed to achieve something unheard of in all human History; something almost unbelievable: Europe managed to regulate war.

By that I do not mean the four Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, nor the preceding Hague Convention of 1907. These norms, like almost all written regulations, were practically breached the very day after they were ratified by those very same people who signed them.  In fact, they were debased even before they were signed. What I am referring to are the habits, traditions, practices and normal behavior of regular combatants that Europe managed to develop and which are not only much older than the mentioned Conventions, but even made them possible and acceptable at all. My reference is to that European Continental International Law that von Clausewitz still took for granted.

The Geneva Conventions did not innovate nor create any new legal concepts. They just tried to restore – albeit with very little success – an international legal order that had been weakened by the First and almost completely subverted by the Second European World Wars. Decent treatment of prisoners; humanitarian care for the wounded; the basic criteria that “troops fight the enemy; criminals are taken care of by the police”; respect for the enemy who surrenders; precise identification of combatants by their uniforms, flags and symbols of rank; the concept that war is a confrontation between States and not between individuals; and, above all, the unambiguous and clear difference between the military and civilians; these are all concepts – and the list is far from all inclusive – that emanate from that aspect of European International Law that we can call “classic”.

The failure of the Geneva Conventions is due to the fact that this legal framework was definitively destroyed by the appearance of modern revolutionary warfare. Within the logic of this new kind of war, the opponent ceases to be an adversary that has to be defeated, and instead becomes an enemy that has to be killed. While conventional European war evolved and became almost a duel between gentlemen at the service of two conflicting States, modern revolutionary war went back to the ancient and primitive concept of a personal enemy whose physical annihilation is required in order to guarantee your own survival. In this way, while classic wars could end with the defeat of an enemy, today’s wars can only end with his funeral.

One of the consequences of this is the necessary criminalization of the opponent. Classical European tradition still allowed respecting your opponent and even rendering him honors in certain cases. This was possible because his death – although very possible and maybe even probable – was neither necessary nor indispensable to attain victory.  The surrender of the opposing army was enough to win a battle and sometimes even to win the war. On the contrary, present wars, based more on the partisan model than on the regular soldier model, forcibly need to demonize and criminalize the enemy, given that the end to be achieved is his extermination.  You cannot justify the deliberate intention to kill and destroy a person if you do not represent him as despicable, vile, dangerous, ill-willed or even pathologically criminal.

That is the underlying “logic” of irregular warfare and what presently goes under the name of “Terrorism” is nothing more than the forceful and consequential evolution of guerilla warfare as an accepted method of waging war. By abandoning the limited and regulated enmity of classical warfare, we have landed in the midst of the absolute and unlimited enmity of irregular warfare which ceases to be an armed conflict between professional soldiers representing lawfully constituted political organisms, and becomes instead a primitive fight between personal enemies bent on massacring each other.

The fact that in the equation one can still find – theoretically at least – some States (be it with regular troops or “paramilitary” corps) does not change the situation. The “rationale” of contemporary war continues to be the annihilation and not merely the defeat of the enemy. Consequently, a regular air force will bomb a whole city, killing thousands of innocent civilians because, being unable and even unwilling to distinguish its enemy precisely by his uniforms, flags or insignia, it will consider the entire population of a given geographical area as a collective enemy. And in the same way that it criminalizes the real combatants in order to justify its unwavering decision to kill them, it will also necessarily criminalize the whole population of that area to justify, in some way or another, its decision to bomb the region to smithereens with no consideration whatsoever for those who are going to die.

In this way, the existence or absence of identifying symbols becomes even completely irrelevant and the difference between “regular” and “irregular”, between “soldier” and “partisan”; between “military” and “terrorist”, ends up fading away. With or without uniform, with or without conventional structures of command and control; with or without responsibilities built into a chain of command, contemporary war rests on the principle that the enemy is a dangerous criminal and, that being so, he is an outlaw so you are  allowed to do anything to kill him.

With this criterion, the West has fallen back nearly two thousand years.

The conclusion that this is so can be seen in, among many other symptoms, the incredible hypocrisy with which war-related concepts are handled such as, for example, “aggressor” or “aggression”, just to name two. This is something that has forced Americans to re-invent the age-old excuse of “preventive war”. Even the concept of “Terrorism” has become intrinsically hypocritical because the action in itself no longer matters; the only thing that does matter is who perpetrated it. Exactly the same action will be considered justifiable if the “good guys” carry it out, while it will surely be condemned in the severest terms if the “bad guys” do it. Of course: we are always the good guys and they are, without exception, the bad ones.

Among those who believe that “they” are always “the Arabs” only very few are willing to remember – just to mention an example – that between 1945 and 1948, while Palestine was under the rule of Britain, the underground Zionist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi commanded by Menahem Beguin launched hundreds of terrorist attacks against the British. Throughout several months in 1945 and 1946, operations were coordinated by the Hebrew Resistance Movement and directed by the Haganah. But at a given moment, Beguin decided to play his own game and organized a bomb attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British Administration had its headquarters. As a result of that bombing, there were 91 dead; 28 British, 41 Arabs and even 17 Jews among them. Later on, the Irgun attacked a prison in Arce where they strangled two British sergeants.

The essence of all this lies, not so much in the nature of the operations commanded by Beguin. Not even in the fact that this same Menahem Beguin later managed to become Prime Minister of Israel. As it is, in spite of being responsible for the Deir Yassin butchery he went even further by winning the Noble Peace Prize in 1978, together with Anwar Al-Sadat of Egypt. The truly relevant issue here is that, regardless of these facts, that same Britain today follows the United States in its policy of supporting Israel and thus shares its furious criticism of Arab irregular fighters whose operational methods do not differ substantially from the ones we just mentioned. With that behavior, British foreign policy has adopted the American logic contained in the phrase that some attribute to Cordell Hull referring to Trujillo and others to Franklin D. Roosevelt referring to Anastasio Somoza: “…he may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch”.

Beguin’s Irgun attacks may have received some criticism both within Israel and abroad, but were finally forgiven because “our” good guys perpetrated them. Those pulled off by Hizbollah or Hamas were never forgiven because it was “their” bad guys who killed “our” good guys. The actions do not differ. The only difference is in who carries them out.

With that same logic, those operations where the CIA was frequently involved are catalogued as “covert ops” within a “non-conventional war”. But almost exactly the same operations, when they were carried out by guerilla groups of the seventies, ended up being considered “terrorist actions” for which “subversive gangs” were responsible. Naturally, hypocrisy also works backwards. If one listens to certain left-wing intellectuals, the guerilla operations of the seventies are presented as the response of the “people in arms” to the aggression of “imperialist terrorism”, and anti-guerilla warfare is supposed to be nothing less than a bloody enforcement of “state terrorism”.

Again: there is practically no difference in the actions themselves. The sole difference lies in who carries them out and to which party the person that judges them belongs.

The Zionist Project

Within this context of absolute enemies seeking to annihilate each other, motivations acquire obviously a great role. Consequently, arguments that refer to those motivations also acquire at least certain importance in spite of the fact that, as we have already seen, generally speaking those arguments are only rarely related to the underlying truth.

From this point of view, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the main Zionist argument is of an almost irredeemable historical weakness.

The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, the son of Emperor Vespasian and later Emperor himself, took place in 70 AD.  From that moment onwards – or at least from the failure of Bar Kochba’s rebellion in 135 AD – the Jews lived scattered over most of the world. The present State of Israel was founded in 1948. Be as it may that we evaluate the Diaspora and whichever value we give to the religious ritual that maintained Jerusalem and Israel within the Jewish cultural tradition with the annual repetition of the saying “Next year in Jerusalem”, the concrete and objective fact is that the Jews today claim a territory from which they were absent as a politically organized nation for more than 1800 years.

The Zionist argument is weak simply because it does not resist generalization. By the same token, today’s Iranians could claim almost all of Iraq (or vice versa) and the Egyptians could claim the land between the Nile Delta and the Fourth Cataract together with a good part of present-day Libya. Additionally, the Italians – claiming to be legal successors of the Roman Empire – could demand that the whole of the Mediterranean Sea and beyond be given over to them. By a somewhat similar argument, the Mapuche Indians could claim a significant part of present-day Argentina. The remaining Apache Indians in North America could claim that Arizona, New Mexico, a good piece of Texas and even the Northwestern part of Mexico itself should be given back to them. Celtic Welsh people could claim Great Britain. More still: the European Community could present territorial claims on Tibet and India if it should turn out to be true that all Indo-European people originally migrated from there.

As one can see – and the examples mentioned are but a few of thousands that could be construed – the generalization of such claims does not resist even the most superficial analysis. If it is true that “native peoples” have rights over the territories they lost by conquest or abandonment, then the only true owners of this earth would be the direct heirs of Neanderthal Man, because even the successors of Cro-magnon Man would have only questionable credentials.

But, in addition to that, the Zionist argument is weak because already in the mind of its very founder, in the writings of Theodor Herzl himself, Palestine does not appear as an inalienable claim. Quite the opposite: "Let sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves”. (T.Herzl, The Jewish State - Ch. The Plan). So, basically and at first, what Herzl had in mind was only some piece of land on the surface of the planet. In other words, a colony for Jewish colonists. Something – and not by chance – perfectly in line with the colonialist spirit that prevailed at the end of the 19th Century.

Even more; there is a entire chapter dedicated to dealing with the question: “Palestine or Argentine?” . It may be worthwhile reading carefully the substantial part of this chapter. “Argentine is one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has a sparse population and a mild climate. The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us. The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some discontent, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement”.

“Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering”. (T.Herzl Op.Cit. “Palestine or Argentine?)

Needless to say that these paragraphs have been understood in many ways and, in fact, they have given ground for all sorts of comments. But leaving those comments aside, and even ignoring the obviously interesting reference to Argentina, I think that two points deserve being highlighted. The first is the idea of an “an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” and the second is that Europe “would have to guarantee (the) existence” of the new State.

The concept of an “outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” reveals a set of mind that is – to say the least – quite exclusionist. Even if one does not consider religious dogmatic convictions; even if we forget that we are speaking of a nation that states – or at least whose believers state – that they have made a personal Covenant with God; even so, anyone considering himself an “outpost of civilization” opposed to an undetermined number of “barbarians” is certainly someone who will hardly have an honest disposition to live peacefully and in harmony with them. In our own country, we have the most proximate example for this. In Argentina, the feud between “civilization” and “barbarism” was the result of the same mindset. Its consequences can be found in all History books. Regrettably, also in many graveyards.

On the other hand, the idea that the existence of a politically sovereign entity should be guaranteed by another political entity is not only a contradiction in itself; not only is it political nonsense – a sovereign State whose existence is guaranteed by another State simply cannot be a sovereign State –, but it also explains quite well the present role of the United States as well as Europe, which from the 19th Century till today has lost the political clout it had in Herzl’s times.

It has been heatedly discussed whether or not Israel is the 51st State of the Union; whether or not it is just a “land-based aircraft carrier” in Middle East service as a bridgehead for the United States, or if, contrarywise, whether or not the United States are the most important colony Israel possesses outside of Palestine. After the recent report prepared by scholars Mearsheimer and Walt regarding the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy, this last proposition can hardly seem too far-fetched.

And yet, the discussion may be interesting from a certain point of view, but it ends up being politically irrelevant. It is irrelevant because, in fact, neither of these countries is sovereign. Not only because any one of them can be a dependency of the other, but because, Israel as well the US are acquiescent to the Power of an international plutocracy that imposes its will over both.

Consequently, at the very foundation of the Zionist idea, we have two elements that are relevant to assess its role in the conflict: a discriminating mindset on one hand, combined with a contradictory and intrinsically unviable political project on the other.

Anti-Semitism

Just 10 or 20 years ago, nobody could even raise his voice against any Israeli operation without being automatically crucified under accusations of racism, Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the times of Golda Meir or Menahem Beguin, to criticize the Israelis was simply unimaginable.

It is quite surprising how this has all now changed. Today, voices disapproving the actions and the behavior of the Israelis are clearly more vigorous, more audible and, above all, more generalized. There is even a certain amount of sympathy inclined to excuse the behavior of their Arab opponents. Most amazingly, the tendency does not have its origins in some neo-nazi fantasy, but rather comes from left-wing intellectuals and, in many cases, even from Jewish intellectuals.

During the fifties and sixties of last century – practically even up until the eighties – those who criticized the Jews exploited clandestine copies of NSDAP pamphlet literature, recurred to generally quite dubious versions of Rosenberg, Hitler, Goebbels, Julius Streicher or even cited in extenso the always handy and inextinguishable Protocols of the Elders Of Zion. This has changed dramatically. Today no serious criticism of Zionism or Israel rests on any of these literary relics.  Present criticism is extremely easy to find, and pretty much updated, consulting the opinion of Jewish scholars and intellectuals such as Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky or Israel Shamir; Jewish artists like Gilad Atzmon; rabis like Yecheskel Roth, Avruhom Leitner, Rav Koppelman, V. Soloveichik and Joel Teitelbaum; or former communist party leaders like Roger Garaudy, and a long list of many others.

Has anti-Zionism replaced anti-Semitism? Not exactly. It would be childish to deny that there are essentially “anti-Semitic” critics who use anti-Zionism as an effective argument. This certainly could speak against the sincerity of some “anti-Semites” but, all in all, it hardly challenges the soundness of all arguments in a necessary and irrefutable way. Two times two is still four, even if the calculation is made by someone who, for some reason, does not like me.

More so: from a “neonazi” point of view – whatever that may mean anyway –  anti-Zionism would be something like an ideological deviation. As it happens, the German Nazis were never against the idea of Jewish people having their own State. They even toyed with the project of offering them Madagascar and it is more than likely that, if they had won the war, they would have removed the British from Palestine, allowing this land to be settled by the followers of Herzl. Nazi Germany and the Zionist Movement had more than one point of contact on more than one occasion. It would be quite hard to construe an unconditional enmity between Nazis and Zionists – at least on account of the Nazis who looked upon Zionism as quite an attractive way of getting rid of the German Jews without too much of a hassle.

Even someone like Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s main ideologist, could bring himself to write that: “… Zionism is to be vigorously supported to the ends that an annual contingent of German Jews can be sent to Palestine.” (A. Rosenberg “Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten”, Munich 1937, p. 153). In the realm of the SS, the pro-Zionist position of Heydrich is also a quite well known fact. And this is not strange at all if one remembers that the German Zionist organization operated legally inside the III Reich until as far as 1938 – that is: five years after Hitler’s takeover and just one year before the beginning of  WW II. The Zionist periodical “Jüdische Rundschau” appeared until that same year (See Leibowitz, Israël et Judaïsme, Ed. Desclée de Brouwer, 1993. p. 116). Within this context, it is not at all surprising that Hannah Ahrendt, in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem” mentions the passive complicity of the, mostly Zionist-controlled, Jewish Councils in Germany.

On the other hand, the very term “anti-Semitism” is almost unsustainable. “Semite” is a linguistic denomination. There is no such thing as a “Semitic race”. There is none, for the very simple and same reason that there is also neither a brachycephalic dictionary nor a slanted-eyed grammar. The real “anti-Semites” – the few that really existed – were nothing more than unredeemable chauvinistic Europeans who based their theories on a highly questionable definition of race. Up to a certain degree, their position may be explainable given the scientific, linguistic and anthropological knowledge available from, say the middle of the 19th Century till the first decades of the 20th. But today, such a theory would be clearly untenable.

It is certainly true that you can find some cases where idiomatic unity matches some degree of relative racial homogeny. But between this fact and accepting that idiomatic uniformity is a reliable indicator of racial homogeny, there exists an unfathomable gap that only ignorance can bridge. It suffices to say that, with that criterion, Afro-American people would have to be considered as “Anglo-Saxons” and the Haitian people, who speak a French patois, would qualify as “Latinos”.

So, if someone is a real Nazi, he could not deny the State of Israel its right to exist without contradicting his own ideology. Even less as a State founded on blood, soil and cultural traditions, because it was exactly on these bases that the National Socialist State of the III Reich was built.

But then again, if someone should really want to be an anti-Semite, he could not then support the Jews against the Arabs, nor the Arabs against the Jews, because if he is honest with himself, on the ground of anti-Semitism – be it racial or linguistic – he will never find a sure and unambiguous way of differentiating them.  Just put the photograph of Yasser Arafat and Jacobo Timmerman side by side and you will easily realize the scope of the problem.

Look at it as you may, the concept of some sort of philonazi anti-Semitism, such as it is commonly applied to reject opposition to Zionism, falls by reduction to absurdity. If the historical argument of Zionism is weak, its main propaganda argument is straightforward ridiculous, for it supposes that members of a “Semite” ethnocultural environment may become “anti-Semites” merely by opposing Israel.

The core of the conflict

Throughout its existence  in the Diaspora, the Jewish people had and suffered many confrontations with members of other nations and other cultures. As it happens, this is the first time in more than 1800 years that the Jewish nation has a serious conflict in Palestine itself. From all that has happened since 1948 till today, it is clear that the Jewish culture is simply not prepared to explain and understand an enmity that has arisen within the environment of its own ethnocultural sphere. In previous conflicts, Jewish intellectuals always could blame all sorts of dislikes and abhorrence on anti-Semitic “Aryans”, anti-Semitic “Christians”,  “barbarian” anti-Semites or just simply on the ignorant and savage Goim who were incapable of being appreciative and respectful of Hebrew culture. It is Israel’s bad luck that this comfortable formula of ethnic self-justification may have worked with reasonable success in the Diaspora but it cannot be applied to the Middle East.

The enemy that Israel has to face today is not an external enemy. It is an enemy of its own cultural sphere and, therefore, an internal enemy. That is why the whole conflict is more like a civil war than an international war. Also, that is why this war is so brutal because, as we all know, civil wars always tend to be the least civilized of wars. The Middle Eastern conflict is a civil war which the Jewish people are not at all prepared to fight; neither intellectually nor emotionally. The Jewish nation spent more than 1800 years fighting external enemies. It simply does not know how to deal with an internal enemy.

As for the Muslims, they make the mistake of considering the Israelis as representatives of the West.  From a certain point-of-view, this is understandable: more than eighteen hundred years of Diaspora have not passed in vain and, in spite of the fact that they fought against assimilation, Jewish communities forcibly became “westernized” up to a certain degree, and have taken to Israel this distinctive attribute. The Arab world has also been exposed to Western culture but that happened a very long time ago – at the time Greek culture spread after Alexander the Great – and was pretty much interrupted precisely after the emergence of Mohammed’s Law, when Islam attacked Western Europe, first by invading Spain, and then Eastern Europe by invading the Balkans in a storm that ended finally at the gates of Vienna. 

From its very origins, Islam has considered the West as its external enemy. For that reason, and because the Israelis have come mostly from a Diaspora scattered throughout the West, Muslims consider Jews as enemies belonging to a different culture. A perception that is even reinforced by the unconditional support Israel receives from the US.

The fact is that both main players in the Middle East conflict act as if they were attacked by an external enemy. The Israelis consistently behave as if they were victims of a pogrom organized by the Minsk Okhrana and the Arabs react as if the Israelis were members of a Tenth Crusade. They are not. Both opponents belong to the same ethnocultural realm and the role played by the US is nothing more than the role of a partner who is functional in supporting Israeli interests. They may be a partner who, given the opportunity, might pursue some business of their own, but they still remain a partner whose central strategy is clearly at the service of Israel’s national interest.

The most relevant point in this is that neither of the main participants belongs to the sphere of Western culture. Islam has always been a foe of the West. Judaism never assimilated and its leaders have made, and continue making, tremendous efforts to avoid even the possibility of assimilation. It is only necessary to read current Zionist literature to understand that one of the central issues that most worries Zionist intellectuals is precisely the possibility that Jewish identity might become diluted by assimilation to the West.

It is high time in Middle East for Arabs and Jews to understand once and for all that the war in which they are immersed is not a war fought against each other but between each other.

Because as long as they continue ignoring this, they will be unable to understand the core of the conflict and its solution will continue being politically impossible.

The underlying metaphysics

In spite of all of the above, it would be a great mistake to think that the Middle East conflict can be fully explained by its racial, ideological, economic, historical or political roots and driving forces. To accept such a hypothesis would probably mean ignoring the most essential issue.

More than ten thousand years of History prove that, in the last instance, beneath or behind every great war there is always a religious conflict.

This, of course requires greater precision, especially in the West where scientific relativism has become almost universal.

When scholars with an admitted and defined religious position declare that all crucial conflicts are basically religious, they obviously do not mean to say that every serious dispute implies the intervention of some religious institution. It does not even necessarily imply the explicit involvement of one or more specifically religious dogmas. We have seen many wars in which no formally constituted Church participated in any way whatsoever, and at least as many in which there was no religious doctrine being disputed.

This reflection means that, in the last instance, really deep-rooted convictions are, either explicitly religious or they operate in exactly the same way as a religious faith does. Berdiaeff, for example, proved beyond doubt that Soviet Communism, when it reached the height of its power and prestige, operated as a true religion – in spite of the militant atheism of the Communist Party and its members.

All great wars, all truly significant conflicts, are fought for ideals and convictions. And all really significant ideals, all really deep-rooted convictions, rest on faith. And all faith cannot be but religious. As human beings, we simply have no other way of expressing faith.

It is impossible to justify war through reason. From a rational point-of-view, all wars are nonsense. Under the magnifying glass of reason, all wars look perfectly stupid. Wars –  real wars, not the clashes and the more or less bloody skirmishes triggered by greed, ambition or thirst for power – are armed conflicts of great proportion waged over matters of faith and not matters of reason. This is so true, that even those who pursue wars of convenience are forced to disguise them with grandiloquent patriotic or ideological arguments in order to drive people to the battlefield. It will always be necessary to pretend that the war is being fought for liberty, democracy, truth, honor, patriotism or even – as with incredible inconsistency it has also been claimed many times – for peace. It happens to be that nobody is spontaneously willing to die or to kill for an oil well, for a uranium field, for the balance of a bank account, nor for the ambition of a petty power-hungry politician.

To this, we have to add that things in the Middle East do not work like they do in the West. In the course of our History, and certainly after many bloody clashes, in our culture we have become used to considering the State as an exclusively secular institution. Under its protection it accepts coexistence of the most diverse religious beliefs. The contemporary western State has ceased to be confessional. It acts as a non-intervening and even indifferent institution in religious matters. From the “two swords” – the worldly and the spiritual – that used to be attributes of Christian kings who reigned by the Grace of God, the contemporary State has retained only the first and declares itself almost completely indifferent as to who keeps the other.

Whether this is positive or negative remains an open question, and it surely admits a long and complicated debate. It is true that in the West we no longer kill each other for religious issues. But it is not less true that politics have become essentially immoral.

Be it as it may, the point is that the Middle East has not followed this path. Neither in Israel nor in the Muslim countries, does the State remain indifferent to matters of religion. In these States, religion is not only a constitutive part of politics, but in many cases it directly determines State policy. Civil law is not independent of religious law. On the contrary: religious law prevails over civil law. The State of Israel has not been founded upon the Napoleonic Code nor on Roman Law. It is founded upon the Law of Moses. Israel, which boasts of being “the only democracy in the Middle East”, does not even have a Constitution. Almost exactly in the same way, Muslim countries also do not rule themselves by Constitutions concocted by a bunch of lawyers. Muslim countries are ruled by the Qu’ran. Israel is ruled by the Torah and the Talmud. In spite of the obvious fact that both religious beliefs have their agnostics, their skeptics and, surely, even their atheists.

To understand the Middle East conflict, it is not enough to realize that contemporary war has ceased to be a constrained conflict between States with a will to attain power, and has instead become an absolute conflict between persons willing to kill each other. Even understanding the essential cruelty of civil wars is not enough.  It is not, because in the Middle East, war is something much worse than that. It is a war between religious faiths that simply cannot, and do not want to, coexist because their believers are firmly convinced that to admit the possibility of surrendering would be like deceiving God himself.

Essentially, what we are seeing in the Middle East since 1948 is not a war between the Israeli State and some Arab States. Neither is it just a tribal war between terrorists driven by different ideologies or geopolitical ambitions. What we are seeing is a deadly clash between Jehovah and Allah in whose names the respective fighters believe that they can commit the most incredible atrocities simply because, for each of them, the enemy is an agent of the Devil.

This even reinforces what has already been said about the internal characteristic of this conflict due to its common ethnocultural factors. Because it just so happens that Jehovah and Allah are relatives of each other.

To begin with, neither Judaism nor Islam are strictly monotheistic religions as is commonly believed. Both originated from a common polytheistic – or “henotheistic” though not pantheistic – root, according to which the gods of other peoples exist, but the only “true” one is the god of one’s own people. Jehovah, as well as Allah, are by tradition, tribal divinities of only one nation and they differ in innumerable aspects from the Universal God Father as conceived by Christianity from its very beginnings. With time, the supremacy of these tribal gods acquired an exclusive character and this is what gives both of them certain characteristics that are similar to monotheism. Exclusiveness always tends towards uniqueness.

Among many other things, this explains a trait that has drawn the attention of many scholars: the inborn intolerance of sects and religions that vindicate their Middle Eastern origins, Christian fundamentalists included.

The Jews converted “their” god into God himself. From having a god they ended up believing that they have the one true God. They even made a Covenant with Him conceiving the concept of “chosen people” as an all-exclusive contract. For them, only “their” god is God; and God is the God of Israel, and only of Israel.

On the other hand, Muslims did exactly the same operation. The word “Allah” is a contraction of two other words: al- meaning “the” and “ilah” which means “masculine deity”. Allah therefore, means “the God” and it is quite significant that some Muslim scholars do not agree with our translation of “God” for Allah claiming that while “God” admits a plural form (“gods”), Allah can only be expressed in singular. And this is essential because only by being “the” God could Allah cease to be “a” god and differentiate Himself from other gods of the pre-Islamic environment such as Hubal, al-Lat, al-Uzzah or Manah.

However, from a wider perspective the most significant fact is that both deities come from a common cultural source. The expression “Allah” originated long before Muhammad was even born. Moreover, Muhammad’s own father – obviously born before his son founded Islam – was already called Abdullah; a name that means “servant of Allah”. But also, some four or five centuries later, Abdullah was the name of the grandfather of Maimonides, the most renowned rabbi and Jewish theologian of the Middle Ages who wrote most of his works in Arabic, signing them as “Mussa bin Maimun ibn Abdullah al-Kurtubi”. And this is far from being as strange as it seems. In biblical Aramaic, the word for “God” is Elaha (or Alaha in Syriac), a term that comes from the same proto-Semitic root as ilah which in Hebrew has given terms like Eloah or El.

Essentially, therefore and in last instance, the war in Middle East is a religious conflict. It is the fight between the “Party of God” – the Hizbollah – against the “People of God” – Israel.

Jehovah and Allah have declared war upon each other.

And the crisis is worsened by the fact that both are something like cousins. They are tribal gods of related tribes and the fight for supremacy of these gods cannot be resolved.

There is no earthly solution to a war between two almighty gods who compete for the souls of the same family.

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Faced with this situation, the best thing – and perhaps the sole thing – the West could do, is  exactly the opposite of what the US and Europe are doing today. The best for everybody – and probably the only achievable objective – would be to stay as far away as possible from this conflict. Because, stated as it is, it has no viable solution. Even more: if the US would cease feeding the struggle by supporting Israel unconditionally in the name of a “Judeo- Christianity” that exists only in the fantasy of heretic Christians who have given the Old Testament a relevance it does not deserve; if the various lobbies would stop dragging the West into the battle to attack and invade the region and seek enmity with more and more countries; in that case the war might come to an end through exhaustion; whether of the participants themselves or of their military resources.

If this does not happen, then we can rest assured that the war shall continue unabated.

We will continue seeing massacres; we will continue hearing about bombings, strikes, explosions and deaths. We will continue seeing children torn to pieces rescued from under collapsed buildings and held in the arms of desperate fathers and mothers. We will continue seeing the inside of busses covered by the intestines and body parts of mutilated passengers blown to bits by some suicide bomber. We will continue hearing big speeches given by petty politicians and little partisan intellectuals, trying to impose on us the decision to support any one of the factions at war. And we will continue having to endure being called anti-Semites, neonazis, racists, genocides and only God knows how many other stupid insults thrown at the face of anyone not willing to glorify one or the other faction and help one faction destroy the other.

Personally, I don’t care at all about such name-calling absurdities. When I see a dead child, I don’t care about who killed him or her. And I don’t care about whose child it was either. The only thing that really matters to me is that there is a dead child. The death of that child has – at least for me – enough meaning to render absolutely irrelevant all excuses or explanations that may be alleged by those who killed him.

Besides, in spite of all the hypocrisy that tries to hide the issue under the term  “collateral damage”, I still cannot find a single argument that can justify the indiscriminate butchery of defenseless civilians. I still cannot – and most probably never will – justify a war that murders women, children, the elderly and people who have no power whatsoever to influence – in any imaginable way – the course of the conflict.

But then again, I am probably being rather anachronistic. It happens to be that, regardless of enmities and regardless of combat, I still believe that there are certain things a man of Honor simply cannot do. I still feel instinctive repugnance against those who kill defenseless people. I still stand for the old concept of classical European International Law which excluded civilians from battles fought by the armies of sovereign States. I still believe in that ancient code of Honor that commanded that war is combat amongst soldiers; a feud between warriors.    

You may call me by any name you wish, but I still believe and will continue to believe that by restoring and enforcing that old Code of Honor, we would make a most positive contribution towards making this world a less cruel and less nauseating place than it is today in certain regions.

It would surely not be a perfect world.

But at least it would be a better place to live in.

September 2006