Intra-Religious Honour, Respect
Would it not seem reasonable that people who claim that those outside their religion owe theirs honour and respect, and in turn they would behave in a similar manner? Do unto others is a maxim, both temporal and sacred held in the highest esteem by all creeds and religions. Or so we are led to believe by highly respected spokespeople representing the various religions and cultures which this world of ours hosts.People of good will are everywhere, they are represented in every corner of the earth, they are members of every religion known to man, and those who embrace no religion; they exist in free societies and repressed societies. They represent those among us whose ardent desire it is that people should live together in peace and harmony, to be neighbours to one another, whether living in close geographic proximity, or viewed from afar, on other continents.
There is that portion of humanity whom we would like to believe are the majority. And then there are the others, countless others. The former quietly go about their business, living their lives, acknowledging the presence of others, wishing harm to none. The latter are raucous and unruly, a rabble anxious to declare to the world at large their deep dissatisfaction with anything at all that happens to irritate their idea of the rightness of things.
These are the people among us who find fault incessantly with others' orientations, cultures, religious adherence, deeming them vastly inferior to their own, and who feel themselves to be superior in every way imaginable. These are the people whom the reasonable, thoughtful and quietly practical among us dread and shun, until such time as they can no longer be ignored, and must be faced.
People of differing backgrounds, ethnicities, religions can and do live amongst others whose life experience and ideologies don't reflect their own. Each learns that the other poses no threat to their own way of living, and in so doing discovers too that they share more in common than those things that set them apart. As they interact however lightly, they may also develop a respect for one another. But to do so requires an open mind and tractability of opinion.
Sometimes it doesn't take much more than a group of disaffectedly angry individuals representing either of the groups who defame and slander the opposite group to garner to them the like-minded who then conspire to influence the opinions of others against the acceptance of differences in other groups. It becomes easy to forget what you've learned when your own group insists the truth is that the others represent a danger to your own group - all gather for protection, and shut out the other.
There is now so much suspicion, enmity, anger and frustration between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East that it has engendered an all-consuming and completely unreasonable backlash of hatred. Many Jews become convinced that the dream of openness between the two solitudes can never become a reality, that the tribal hatred of Arabs has closed their minds completely to the possibility of living in harmony with another nation. The long struggle for equality and recognition in the area appears to have been doomed by the implacable resistance of Islam to the acceptance of another religion.
Jews and Arabs who formerly lived together in peace appear no longer able to do so. Religion and culture teaches respect for others, but somehow the teachings become invalid when one is confronted by others so totally alien in culture, religion and historical traditions. For the most part the resistance appears fairly one-sided, although a history of perceived unfairness in the resolution of land ownership was the incendiary spark that led to the current firestorm.
Now, of all times, when both solitudes are at a critical crossroads, where daily strife cannot conceivably become more serious, the ongoing war of attrition between citizens of the State of Israel is becoming more deeply ingrained, more difficult to control. There is the example of the city of Acre, where a Yeshiva was desecrated with swastikas and the slogan "Allahu Akbar" (Allah is great) written in Arabic - classrooms trashed, the sacred books of the Torah dumped everywhere, equipment stolen.
This is in Israel, but starkly reminiscent of events that occurred in Nazi Germany. A band of roving Arab youths attack and beat a Jewish girl. Arab youth harass students from local Yiddish schools. It's completely couner-intuitive that grossly violent acts of vandalism and beatings of Jews could take place in the State of Israel, the very country founded to ensure a safe haven for Jews from around the world.
This, it begins to appear, is yet another front opened in the war against Jews and the State of Israel by its Arab neighbours whose most dearly-held aspirations are to destroy the Jewish State and its Jewish citizens, to expunge it from the Middle East. This is yet another manifestation of "resistance" against "the invader", undertaken by citizen groups, those among the Arab population who hold Israeli citizenship who have allied themselves with the methodologies and the mindsets of terrorist Palestinian groups.
It becomes a personal declaration of resistance, of steadfastly working toward the creation of an independent State of Palestine, one which would incorporate all of the territory which Palestinians claimed as theirs before the United Nations and the world at large saw fit to honour the history of Jews in the Middle East by accepting their right to form a nation, a sovereign country in that geography.
This is a trend that appears to be spreading, with Arab organizations stridently encouraging Arab populations in Israeli cities to incite for more power within Israel, including the "right of return", a certain formula for State-suicide where the Arab population would handily exceed that of the Jewish population - creating at first a bi-national state, then complete absorption of the Jewish state into the larger Arab community of states.
It seems there can be no peace between the populations; to attain peace both sides would have to want it, and that simply isn't the case, nor will it be, it seems, in the near future.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, December 04, 2006
<< Home