How to Stop Seeing the conflict through colonizers' eyes…
One looks at the conflict between Israel and Gaza and sees that, once again, things have come to a head. This unceasing battle between roommates has been going on for thousands of years. The Gazan’s descendants of the ancient Sea Peoples came to this land and settled, and shortly thereafter, the tribes that would eventually seed the nation of Israel also sojourned and settled in the same land.
Land is important here. This isn’t a fight between their Gods; they worship the same God and share the same Patriarch, Abraham. No, this is a neverending battle for land fought under ancient rules that have existed for thousands of years. Because those of us in Western society have received inadequate educations in global history and anthropology coupled with equally poor formation in Bible and Ancient Near Eastern history, we bring OUR values, history, anthropology, systems, virtues, and institutions to a geographic area and a conflict devoid of them.
And that’s the issue right now, isn’t it? This assumption of the American and Western European worldviews being “right” and universal. Unfortunately, the world keeps proving this worldview not only wholly inadequate but naive!
We must stop our ethnocentrism and begin to see global conflicts more locally and within the anthropology and historical contexts of the area where the conflict occurs.
If we do this in the Israeli-Gazan conflict, we would quickly understand how complex and ANCIENT this warfare is and how it fits the context in which it is being waged. Each side has tribes within it that ally independent of the West. Israel has Samaritans, Arabs, Bedouins, and even Palestinians who fight under their flag. The Jewish nation draws to its ranks soldiers from the global diaspora. A diaspora that first began with the fall of the First Temple in 586 BCE! Israel sits on the land equivalent of three-lane superhighways between many historical global powers and now sits in an area of immense wealth powered by technology, arms, medicine, and agriculture.
The Gaza Strip historically has been, and hopefully will be again, a busy deep-water port area linked by sea to Asia, Africa, and Europe. It’s an ancient port that has existed since antiquity. Similar to the Israeli, the Palestinians are an amalgamation of ancient tribes that identify as Sunni-Arab. This area has most recently been subjected to varying occupation levels by varying countries for over 100 years. They have not possessed self-determination since the late 19th century. The area is governed by HAMAS, an organization that began in the 80s from Mujama al-Islamiya or Islamic Centre, which was an Egyptian charity partially funded by Israel itself. Gaza is, in essence, an open-air prison suffering under collective punishment for the terrorist actions of a few people. They are subjected to a policy of limited food, water, electricity, and goods. They are not permitted to have a deep water port or an airport and cannot fish beyond 6.7 Kilometers from their shores. Their industries consist of Agriculture and limited offshore natural gas production. They don’t have freedom of movement globally or with their neighbouring countries.
These two nations have fought bitterly against each other for thousands of years. Fighting in the Near East doesn’t have rules of engagement. It is an all-out form of conflict with no rules. This is vastly different from recent Western combat, which engages under the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Where we are naive as Americans and Europeans is that we think that we control the rules of the world, including rules for combat. We are shocked that all over the globe, countries routinely ignore our rules and fight in ways that are considered immoral by our standards.
The key thing here is “our standards.” Western Civilization needs to dissuade ourselves of the notion that the world operates at our beck and call and to accept that most of the world operates independently of us, using their values, institutions, etc, to govern and justify their actions. This includes combat. Historically, in the holy land, there has been a tradition of wiping out ethnic groups as a means of bringing peace to the land. By our standards, it is savage genocide and wrong and against the laws of war. By the standards of the rest of the world, this is standard warfare. Israel has used its version known as Harem since ancient times. It is noted as a means of combat in the Torah and is considered sanctioned warfare.
Islam has adopted this tactic, with HAMAS having a stated goal of wiping Israel off the face of the Earth. HAMAS doesn’t recognize Western rules of combat like much of the Near and Middle East and views using humans as shields and weapons within their boundaries of combat. They are prone to using Western values not only against Israel as a military tactic but as a form of moral terrorism against the West.
So what is to be done? First, the West needs to dissuade itself from binary thinking. There isn’t right and wrong but gradations of it. There isn’t black and white but many shades of grey. Doing so will allow the West to understand better its failures over the decades in this part of the world and others and adapt its tactics to fit the anthropology of the political, military, and market-based battlespaces. We must teach a complete history of the world that is less Eurocentric and more realistic of the world that our children will face. Finally, our religious institutions need to cleanse ourselves of spreading Western culture and values globally and instead adapt our tactics, theologies, and mission to the unique circumstances we face.
Where is God in all of this? God is present in the pain of God’s people. Some will ask why doesn’t God do something about all of this. God has done something. God created all of us!! We are empowered to speak, pray, and act on behalf of the innocents and to seek peace among the rulers of the world. We are not helpless babes but adults with the power to act. We must decide what we believe is true and valid and live out our values. For some, this will involve giving money to charities and organizations that match our values. For some, it will mean giving time to the organizations actively doing something. For a few, though, it will mean going to where the pain is and standing and praying with those who suffer from the egos and wrath of the wealthy and powerful powers and principalities of this world. God is love, and love is a verb; it is something we do. We must live our love through how we act, or else we are simply part of the evil through our willful blindness.
The conflict between Israel and Gaza is ancient and is not Western in culture, tactics, values, or anthropology. The West has better get used to this and prepare our people for the types of warfare that we will experience on our screens over the next 5 to 10 years.