Many years ago when I was an undergrad at a posh Scottish university, I handwrote an essay for Practical Theology that was marked down severely for naivety by my lecturer, a former Secretary of the World Council of Churches—an English, liberal, Anglican minister.
My naive analysis was that a Roman Catholic Irish Republican and a Protestant British Unionist, both born and living all their lives in Northern Ireland, would never agree on constitutional arrangements so long as they prioritised their identity over peace.
I didn’t write “constitutional arrangements” then but I would now because that’s what I meant. Identity politics were certainly rife in the late 1980s but that’s not how we referred to them. The only available alternative meta-analysis was Marxian, as full blown Critical Theory had yet to spread its spores all over academia.
His solution for the ills of the Northern Irish body politic was basically the talking cure, which in these islands usually translates to a listening cure—as dissidents are treated to middle-class Southern English people (yes, the women are just as bad and yes they’re mostly White or assimilated) jawing on about being reasonable, to Yorkshire regionalists or Scots nationalists or Welsh miners or Irish Republicans or Ulster Unionists, with absolutely no awareness of their own embarrassingly meagre grasp of relevant history or culture and absolutely no willingness to take responsibility for Westminster’s insidious role in producing current oppressive material relations.
I’m not being fair, I admit. He was a very nice gentleman (they usually are) and honestly believed that with enough hand-holding and Kumbaya all would be well and all would be well and all manner of thing would be moste well—as St Julian of Norwich almost said.
Now let me fess up: I am Roman Catholic, ecumenical, and have held hands in an ancient Scottish abbey while leading, unabashed, that very hymn. It is a powerful African affirmation of the incarnation—the presence of God among the people. When people focus more on what unites them than on their divisive identities, that kind of affirmation can be deeply healing. What tends to happen though is that people start to identify with a third community: Corrymeela or Iona or Taizé…or with some political movement that takes on and replaces the phenomena of church.
There’s nothing wrong with that, provided it doesn’t lead to cultish behaviour or self-deception but, as people move out of Identity A and Identity B towards Identity C, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade those left behind that there’s any overlap and—in extreme cases—these movers and shakers may end up being accused of treachery: how could you shake their hands, after all they’ve done to us?
I’m also being unfair to women who, notably, dominate peace movements—although usually on the unproven and sexist assumption that one sex is innately more aggressive than the other and that had women been in charge everything would be currently wonderful. I’m not a fan of sexism and I think this attitude is extremely naive.
I’m also not in favour of White Southern English Liberal Anglican ministers (of Church or State) who attempt to impose their religion of Reasonableness on everyone else because persons with that identity can be every bit as insidiously evil as anyone else. Rex Harrison’s facetious why can’t a women be more like a man? is echoed in their every Reasonable condemnation of behaviour abroad: why can’t they be more like us? Yet the list of atrocities committed by the British Empire is so long, you must have heard about at least one of them.
As sectarianism loses its grip (young people in these islands, where it used to matter, tend to care very little whether someone’s family is Catholic or Protestant these days) constitutional arrangements involving Northern Ireland may be resolved due to economic considerations rather than those of Christian denominational identity. Brexit, trade and immigration appear to be key points at the moment.
An immediate difference between Northern Ireland, South Africa and Israel/ Palestine is that the first two names do not seem to be extremely objectionable (to Catholics/ Protestants and Blacks/ Whites, respectively) whereas the name on each side of the latter binary seems now extremely problematic for the other.
While it is true that some Palestinians have dual identity—being ethnically Palestinian and legally Israeli—I have heard on social media and also in person that these people feel they can never return to Gaza or the West Bank for fear of being branded as traitors to their people.
So the official Israeli solution that all Palestinians should become assimilated citizens of Israel and submit to its laws and social mores seems at least unpopular, if not unworkable.
Solution 1
What if there were another name for that whole land—not Israel or Palestine, with all their associated cultural values, but something fairly neutral, like “Levant”?
At the moment, tragically, it’s very clear why the Lex Talionis was a legal improvement on internecine blood feuding. Each life lost by one side is generating the will (and the reality) of killing many more of the other. As I write, it’s very much one way—but what of the future and what of the situation of those associated with one side living in countries where those associated with the other massively outnumber them?
There are two strategies for stopping the bloodshed:
1) kill all potential terrorists and, as they’re difficult to distinguish in terms of person or place, just bomb everywhere they might be.
2) ask people to stop killing each other.
Neither strategy seems to be working. Even if every single Palestinian in Gaza is massacred, is the Israeli Government naive enough to imagine that the reprisals will end there?
People in trauma cannot be expected to act reasonably, and cannot be expected to make responsible decisions about where the line between defence and attack lies. Every person in that land appears to be in trauma now, even those in charge of it, on either side. They are not going to desist from attempting to destroy those who have attacked them and killed innocent members of their community.
Asking traumatised people, terrorists or not, to stop killing those seemingly intent on killing them is unlikely to meet with success. People must be forced to lay down their arms—but not forced by their enemies. Therefore, the question is, what force is available to massively overpower both sides to mutually guarantee the safety of survivors?
Solution 2
What if UN peacekeepers (from countries other than Israel, Palestine, USA, UK, Germany and Austria, and no Jews or Muslims) flooded Israel and Palestine, confiscated all of their arms and imposed martial law until a pacific political solution was found?
Even if both solutions were adopted (I’m aware that both solutions are extreme but their combination seems preferable to Armageddon) there would still be the ongoing trauma of the bloodshed and the very human desire for revenge. For this there are two possible solutions:
Solution 3a
What if there were a Law of Forgetting—that for 100 years no narrative of past bloodshed in the land could be published or spoken of in public and that public discourse were laid under an enchanted sleep, to give time for the body politic to heal?
Solution 3b
What if there were a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation—that in every village and every town and every city men and women and children could tell their truth of their participation in past violence, and of suffering, and be heard without call for, or fear of, reprisal?
For 3a the experience of Spain post-dictatorship may be helpful and for 3b the experience of South Africa post-Apartheid.
I am quite aware that these 3 solutions may be exactly what this conflict was engineered to bring about: Problem, Reaction, Solution. Yet I think that the technocratic aim would be different: total surveillance, digital ID linked to access to currency and all social interaction. It is very likely that the powers-that-be will try to use this conflict not only as yet another ground-clearing for the real estate opportunities of disaster capitalism but also in order to impose a technocratic state as they are doing in the Ukraine.
So peacemakers, if that’s what they really are, must be very wary indeed of that insidious agenda. Finally…the UN? No, they’re definitely not neutral but what other force is there that could be massively deployed and stop these people killing each other and avoid the situation escalating to the Samson Option: global thermonuclear war?
Thanks to Anon Anon who has released the image Palestine Gaza Hamas Israel Peace into the Public Domain.
alchemicalquality 