[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img] I was watching Richard Dawkins’ documentary/polemic on religion, “Root of All Evil?” the other night when I was struck by an interview with a young man who converted to a zealous Islam from a loose Judaism. The hatred that animated him – a hatred for atheists (of course), a hatred for infidels, a prediction that one day Islam would spread across the globe – was terrifying. It was even more terrifying given a context in which Israelis pursue their interests with a singular moral blindness and Christians struggle with a history of crusades and imperialism. This led me to think of a solution for the problem of who should have Jerusalem. Hint: It involves applying some rather twisted Solomonic wisdom.
You’ll recall the story in which two women come before Solomon, claiming motherhood of a baby. Unable to tell where the truth lies, Solomon asks for a sword and proposes to split the baby in two. One woman agrees, thinking it better that no one should have the baby. The other chooses to give it up rather than see it harmed, and Solomon wisely concludes that she is the true mother.
Jerusalem, of course, is the baby. With holy sites common to the Notorious Big Three – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – and a lot of territoriality (Muslims apparently won’t allow openly Jewish Jews on the grounds of the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is itself supposed to be on the Temple Mount), Jerusalem is a sticking point in achieving a peaceful co-existence between Israel and the Palestinians, not to mention the Middle East.
As I understand it, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine would have seen Jerusalem under international administration. That idea fell apart with the failure of the partition plan itself. In 1967, East Jerusalem, under Jordanian control, was taken over by the Israeli military and annexed to the Western part of the city, already part of Israel. As it stands now, the annexation is controversial, the city is subject to a power struggle on a number of fronts, and Jerusalem is a flashpoint of how arrogant religion can be.
‘Victim to Religious Arrogance’
And it is arrogance, as Dawkins points out, one that science, predicated on methodological doubt, evidence, falsifiability, verifiability, and so on, does not share. Arrogance to be so convinced that theirs is the only truth with an absolute quality that motivates killing, destruction and horror. This is perhaps the greatest problem with religion, this faith-driven conviction of truth. But perhaps the problem is deeper still, namely, in the willingness to kill. It’s one thing to be willing to die for one’s beliefs and causes. But to kill for them? Really? I am astonished by how people feel a need to do God’s work for him. They’ll strap the bombs to their chests, deploy the war planes, grab the machine guns, what have you, because, apparently, God isn’t capable of dealing with what displeases him on his own, like he could in the good ol’ glory days of the Old Testament.
But is anything really worth killing for, worth compromising one’s own morality? Oh, yes, it’s a much more difficult question than my rhetorical posturing would suggest. Yet it’s still a question worth asking.
Which brings me to how to handle the problem of Jerusalem: Why don’t we just evacuate the city and destroy it? That’s right, destroy it. All that history, all that supposed holiness that has come to represent hate and intolerance as much as anything else: to smithereens with it. If no one can share it in peace, if no one can live up to the supposed peacefulness of their religious tenets, then no one should have Jerusalem. I’m not kidding. Blow the whole thing up. After getting the people out, of course. Blow it up.
But Seriously…
Okay. I’ll admit that I’m not necessarily being serious about destroying Jerusalem, even if the prospect of losing valuable archeological and historical treasures would seem like an acceptable price to pay if it meant achieving a lasting peace. I use the example to raise a bigger question: How much are people willing to sacrifice for peace? We often hear about the need to sacrifice for war, for violence. Yet the idea that we should be willing to make sacrifices for peace is left out of the conversation. We condemn the thief who kills during a robbery, or the psychopath who tortures and kills out of pleasure. In fact, whether it’s the 10 Commandments or some other system, we have explicit injunctions against killing. Yet, human history consists of finding new ways to rationalize breaking those injunctions. The question is: At what point does the cost become too high? What will it take for people to say “enough?” Does it really take the threat of taking away something people hold dear, like the city of Jerusalem and its multiple holy sites, in order to change people’s behaviour? Maybe this whole business of keeping Jerusalem as the capital of an Israeli state, a stance parroted by President Obama, is the wrong tack, and there’s merit in considering a single-state solution for both Israelis and Palestinians with Jerusalem set up, not as a part of this State, but as an international protectorate.
Frédérik invites you to discuss this week's column and more at his blog (frederik-sisa.blogspot.com).
