{pic by cactusbones}

As the largely civilian death toll among Palestinians from the Israeli invasion of Gaza surpasses 1,000—including more than 300 children—some Israelis are engaged in a bit of soul-searching. In the opinion pages of Haaretz, for instance, Gideon Levy describes the invasion as “war deluxe,” with “pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles.” He describes a conflict in which “a large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.” And he reminds us that “the children of Gaza who survive this war will remember it” and that “a child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive,” thus breeding a new generation of resistance fighters and suicide bombers.

With a similar sense of existential anguish, Avraham Burg opines that Israelis refuse to negotiate with Hamas because “we are incapable of speaking with ourselves.” According to Burg, Israelis are not yet “ready to talk about the evacuation of settlers out of fear of the domestic price entailed in pulling out the agents of the occupation. We are incapable of acknowledging the fact that we have become a state of the settlers and that the Israel Defense Forces is the settler defense forces.” He laments on behalf of both Israelis and Palestinians the “faith-based murderousness that is killing our two nations and religions.”

It is this last point that gets at what is perhaps the most psychologically intractable element of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—quite apart from the historical injustices experienced by Palestinians who were expelled from their lands when Israel was created in 1948, and who lived under the decades-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that commenced in 1967. As Haaretz columnist Tom Segev writes in the Washington Post, “in recent years, with the rise of Hamas and the increasing militance of some Jewish settlers, this precariously irrational conflict has also assumed a more religious character—and thereby become even more difficult to solve. Islamic fundamentalists, as well as Jewish ones, have made control of the land part of their faith, and that faith is dearer to them than human life.” In other words, legions of well-armed lunatics on both sides believe quite firmly—fanatically, in fact—that their god has given them the divine right to wipe out their ethno-religious enemies by any and all means necessary.

Ideally, the Hebrew god (Yahweh) and the Islamic god (Allah) might be persuaded to get in the ring and fight it out to decide who is right. But, unfortunately, neither is real, so this is unlikely to occur anytime soon. Both faiths believe there is only one true god, and he has apparently promised all of the “holy land” to different groups of people at the same time. Under such circumstances, rational discussion becomes difficult at best. It is for this reason that Segev counts himself “among the new majority of Israelis who no longer believe in peace with the Palestinians. The positions are simply too far apart at this time.”

However, it’s important to keep in mind that the lunatics on the Israeli side are being propped up by enormous amounts of U.S. money and weapons, and the lunatics on the Hamas side by large, though not quite so enormous, amounts of Iranian money and weapons. Were those two sources of external support removed, perhaps more people would quickly come to favor reason over religious fantasy.

{pic by balakov}

During the final weeks of 2008, the Washington Post ran two very different stories on very different topics that captured beautifully the delusional nature of the “conservative” mindset in its broadest sense.

The first, on December 23, concerned George W. Bush’s final visit as President to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he met and dispensed Purple Hearts to wounded soldiers. The soon-to-be former president told reporters, “I oftentimes say being commander in chief of the military is the thing I’ll miss the most. Coming here to Walter Reed is a reminder of why I’ll miss it.” It boggles the mind to think that Bush can gaze upon the mangled bodies of the soldiers he sent off to murder and to die, in a war in Iraq that he launched under false pretenses, without feeling even a shred of guilt or shame. But, apparently, he can do precisely that. Through a magical combination of hubris and stupidity, he apparently believes his own lies…an essential survival skill for a conservative.

The second story, on December 29, concerned—ironically enough—a Kurdish woman in Iraq, who proudly orchestrated a subterfuge to carry out the genital mutilation of her own 7-year-old daughter. In a brutally refreshing moment of honesty, she explained, “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.” In other words, don’t think, just do what you’re told…another key requirement of conservatism, be it secular or religious.

Oddly, it would seem that the essence of conservative ideology is best summed up by the William S. Burroughs character in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Naked Lunch: “Exterminate all rational thought.”