Peace Is in the Eye of the Beholder

I do not like Hamas.
I detest religious fundamentalism and the use of suicide bombers. I
find the group's anti-Semitism and ruthless silencing of internal
Palestinian opponents repugnant. The rocket attacks on Israeli
civilians are a war crime. But this does not negate the legitimacy of
Palestinian resistance to the long Israeli siege and occupation of
Gaza.

The moral scum of any society rises to the
surface in war. Those who have a penchant for violence and an access to
weapons dominate the landscape. It was the criminal class and gangsters
who first organized the defense of Sarajevo. It was the thugs of Gaza
who took control to confront the Israeli army. This is nothing new in
wartime. Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it
regardless of the cause. But there are moments when a people face the
terrible tragedy of resistance or obliteration. This was true in
Sarajevo. It is true for the Palestinians. It does not make it pretty
or good. It is what happens.

The condemnation of the Palestinians for
the use of force ignores the long violence of Israeli occupation. Those
who call on the Palestinians to embrace nonviolence preach an airy
utopianism. Reinhold Niebuhr,
who argued that the rise of fascism in Europe had to be countered by
force, broke with liberal humanists over the issue of pacifism. He
attacked pacifism as "simply a version of Christian perfectionism." And
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolence during the civil
rights movement, never finally claimed to be a pacifist, although he
understood and warned about the moral contamination of violence.

"If we believe," Niebuhr wrote in his essay
"Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," "that if Britain had only
been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent
of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler's heart would
have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a
faith which no historic reality justifies."

"Yet most modern forms of Christian
pacifism are heretical," Niebuhr wrote. "Presumably inspired by the
Christian gospel, they have really absorbed the Renaissance faith in
the goodness of man, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as
an outmoded bit of pessimism, have reinterpreted the cross so that it
is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a
simple victory over the world, and have rejected all other profound
elements of the Christian gospel. ... This form of pacifism is not only
heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is
equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence. There
are no historical realities which remotely conform to it. It is
important to recognize this lack of conformity to the facts of
experience as a criterion of heresy."

Pacifism, in times of war, always falls
swiftly out of favor-indeed it is often branded as a form of
treason-and the myth of human advancement, backed by war and violence,
becomes the dominant ideology. The myth of human advancement is
ironically often kept alive by pacifists in peacetime. This myth is
used to feed the aggressiveness and cruelty of those who call for the
use of violence to cleanse the world, to borrow a phrase from George W.
Bush, of "the evildoers." The danger is not finally pacifism or
militarism. It is this latent aggressiveness and cruelty, wedded to the
poisonous belief in the possibility of collective moral progress, a
belief that defies human history and human nature. The belief that we
can use violence to advance the world morally becomes especially
dangerous in a crisis when human beings feel, or are made to feel,
threatened and afraid. It informs and enlarges our innate human
aggression. This is our disease. It is the disease of most Israelis.

This aggressiveness, as Sigmund Freud wrote,
"...waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some
other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder
measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental
counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also
manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to
whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien."

It is fear, ignorance, a lack of
introspection, a failure of empathy and the illusion that we can create
a harmonious world that lead us to sanction the immoral, to embrace Immanuel Kant's "radical evil."
This is what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is what we are doing in Iraq
and Afghanistan. And pacifism, ironically, subtly feeds these
illusions.

The American and Israeli doctrine of
pre-emptive war, disproportionate force and ruthless occupation to
bring about peace and harmony is a fantasy. Such a doctrine
regurgitates the old arguments for 19th century European colonialism.
Violence and force will not make Israel, or us, safe. It will not turn
foreign cultures into carbon copies of our own. It will not make
possible our perverted and narrow ideal of human advancement. The
violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans will only
ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the
language we speak to them-violence. The rockets fired into Israel are a
response to the siege and occupation. They are a response to the
language Israel uses when it addresses the Palestinians. And as long as
the siege and occupation continue, as long as Israel speaks to the
Palestinians through explosions and airstrikes, so will armed
resistance to Israel. Once the dogs of hate and force are unleashed-and
it is we and Israel who unleashed them-armed resistance is inevitable.

The Palestinian reaction to Israeli occupation should be familiar to Israelis. Tzipi Livni,
Israel's foreign minister, says that the Israeli government will have
no dealings with Hamas terrorists. But Tzipi Livni's father was Eitan
Livni, the chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi,
which fought against the British occupation of Palestine. The
underground Jewish group set off a massive bomb in the King David hotel
in Jerusalem, a blast in which 91 victims were killed, including four
Jews. These Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and
booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang,
massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Tell
me the moral difference between Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Stern gang and
Hamas. I fail to see one.

Israel hopes to cut a deal with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah.
But the Israeli government squandered the chance to make a deal with
Fatah. Israel once could have negotiated with the Fatah leader, Yasser
Arafat, but it steadfastly refused. Arafat's life ended with him
surrounded by Israeli troops and unable to leave his bunker in
Ramallah. Hamas, because of Fatah's corruption and incompetence, won
the Palestinian election in 2006. And all the bombing and shelling will
not make Hamas, or some even more radical version, go away. Israeli
will have to negotiate with Hamas or with no one.

War always opens a Pandora's box of new
problems, new disasters, increased suffering and dilemmas. It becomes
its own culture. It radically alters reality through massive acts of
industrial slaughter. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. Hamas is a
distasteful and morally bankrupt organization. But the utopian project
to bend Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan by force to our will has created a
hell on earth for Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians and only enflamed
these conflicts. The killings carried out by the United States and
Israel dwarf the massacres carried out by Saddam Hussein, including his
genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shiites. We have become
terribly efficient killers and the most potent recruiters for the
region's jihadists.

The echoes of Israel's ruthless slaughter
in Gaza, and our slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan, will reverberate
in the months and years ahead in expanded acts of terrorism and a new
implacable militancy by the Palestinians and the Muslim world. There is
a cause and effect. And those who tell the grieving families in Gaza or
Iraq or Afghanistan to use moral suasion and nonviolence to counter
tank blasts and airstrikes in crowded neighborhoods are as self-deluded
as pro-war Israeli and American politicians who think they can blast
their way to a solution.

The military occupation of Gaza, Iraq and
Afghanistan has failed. It has furthered the spread of failed states.
It has increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and
anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies-the Islamic
terrorists-and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate
and plot against us. It has nearly scuttled the art of diplomacy. It
has left us, like Israel, an outlaw state creating more outlaw states.

The rise of militarism is a familiar path
taken by collapsing states. Militarism arrests social decay. It shoves
this decay underground where it cannot be challenged by critics and
social movements. Those who launch crusades hold out beautiful
fantasies of freedom, liberation and peace. But the impossibility of
these utopian dreams always turns these projects for human advancement
into squalid justifications for atrocity. Realism, as John N. Gray writes,
"requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture
that prizes psychological comfort above anything else, and it is a
reasonable question whether western liberal societies are capable of
the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of
world-transformation."

It is realism, an unflinching acceptance
of our stark and severe limitations and an end to self-delusional
utopian visions-those that embrace force and those that do not-that we
must accept if we are to survive as a nation and finally as a species.
We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.
We have to stand in the shoes of those we brand as the enemy. We have
to see ourselves as others see us. Israel must negotiate with Hamas and
end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to secure a lasting peace.
We must withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and negotiate
with those arrayed against us to find stability. Until this happens we
all remain trapped on a merry-go-round of death.