The Science God

Gaza: digging for bodies

(credit: Associate Press website: Nov. 17, 2023)

(https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-buried- rubble-airstrikes-89c0e8d0934d573d94d2fbfeba44d933)

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Today, I’m offering a post that is not part of the piece I’m currently working on. A small departure. I feel driven to air some thoughts on the mess in the Middle East that’s flaring out of control now in 2024. Again.

I have thought for many years that one indicator of when I am getting closer to the truth on a subject is seen when I’m infuriating parties on every side. In short, too often, I know I’m getting closer to the truth the more I piss people off.

But damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. Truth doesn’t need the approval of anyone, no matter how important they seem in the “corrupted currents of this world [where] Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice”. (Hamlet)

What you’re saying is making people mad? Good!

So?

What have Bettin’ Yahoo and his ilk demonstrated over the last few months? That fanaticism leads to the most painful of ironies: you become the thing you thought, at the outset, that you hated. He has made Israel into a genocidal state. There isn’t one rationalization that he and his cabinet have given for their actions in Gaza over the past 11 months that hasn’t been used many times before, including by the Nazis. He has become the monster that he said he set out to destroy.

To preserve their culture, the people in Gaza have died in numbers at least thirty times those of the Israelis just in the last year. And finally, those Gazans are showing signs of collapsing? Hah! Not one bit. If anything, their resolve is hardening. Yahoo is learning he can’t “make Israel secure” by inflicting pain. No one can. In fact, the more suffering his troops heap onto the people of Gaza, the more determined the people of Gaza become.

To Israelis, that patch of dirt is land promised to them by Yahweh in the Torah in – what they see as – the beginning of time. To Palestinians, that land has been theirs for just as long. They are the descendants of the Philistines of the Bible.

Archeology says they’re both wrong. There were other tribes on that land before both Israelis and Palestinians. Which matters to – apparently – no one.

The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Gita – all the “holy” texts – are not legal documents. But to the fanatics of a hundred faiths, “man’s law” is irrelevant. Each has its book and its fanatics. Its "law".

Let’s review a few more of the arguments.

Balfour promised that land to the early Zionists of modern times in 1917. Answer: The land was not his or his country’s to promise.

The Jews of Europe were the victims of the worst crime in history: the Holocaust. The world owed the Jews a land of their own. Answer: If we even entertain that possibility, we immediately must concede that those same Jews, mostly of Europe, have far more right to a piece of central Europe than they do to Palestine. The Germans and Poles were the nations that most miserably failed the Jews in every moral sense. Maybe, what was East Germany should have become the Jewish Homeland.

Furthermore, the Palestinian people had zero to do with the Holocaust. In fact, every recognized nation of those World War Two times was far guiltier in the matter of the Holocaust than the Palestinians, including all the free nations of the West.

The Jews were a people without a land who found a land without a people? Utterly false. There were people already there. Thousands of them. Yes, they lived in a technology well behind that of the West. No, that did not give anyone in the West or anywhere else the right to say they could be evicted from homes and lands their families had occupied for centuries.

The first people in modern times who called themselves ‘Israelis’ fought for and won that land against massive odds at the founding of Israel. So what? That ethic would endorse Nazism. Violence makes you right, say the Nazis. Winners write the history texts. Yes, they often do, but no, that does not make them right. Genghis Khan was a scary guy. His conquests still awe us. But no one wants him back. He became a monster. Like Hitler.

On the other other hand, (in logic, we have a lot of hands), the early Israelis did want to live together with their Arab neighbors and get along. It was Arabs who said “No deal. Get out!”

The Jews truly had suffered beyond any people ever during the Holocaust. They have a moral right to a homeland. If as a people they have resolved to trust no nation to look after them ever again, who can blame them? Six million - probably a low estimate - dead. Never again.

I could go on, but the point is that all this is explainable by Social Science and none of it has to be this way.

Every tribe, not just Jews and Arabs, has its own culture. Every culture teaches its young when they are most impressionable that their way of life is the one truly human way. Almost always as well, the programming tells them that the divine power that their people have always believed in is real and has endorsed one way of life above all others.

I say such programming is all lies.

What the universe favors over the long generations and centuries is pluralism. A lot of different kinds of people, different in gender choices, creeds, skin tones, cheekbones, abilities, disabilities, and so on. A social ecosystem in which human rights protecting every minority and every individual are enforced by a democratic rule of law.

As long as you don’t try to force your way of life onto anyone else, you’re okay by me.

Unfortunately, there are a lot more tribes than just the Israelis and the Arabs who have the way of life and who are patiently, so patiently, waiting for the rest of the human species to see the light.

(We say we are God’s chosen people because we are. Why can’t you get that?)

The Jews, much of the West, in fact is actually saying, in simple modern terms, to the Arabs, “Get over it.”

The Arabs, in fact much of the Developing World, are actually saying, in simple modern terms, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?”

Oh, the patience of them all! The righteous anger!

But if Sociology is telling us that every tribe thinks its way of life is normal, natural, human, and right, does Sociology say that our warring and our eventually annihilating our species is an inevitability? Not quite.

Send your kids, all of them, to well-funded, well run, quality public schools in which no one faith group dictates what every child will study. The curriculum must be secular; a separation of church and state, for the schools are an arm of the state, which should be faith neutral.

If the first wave of modern Israeli education had put all the kids on that dirt into such schools, quietly endorsed science, not German science, art, not European art, history, not Islamic history, music, not Jewish music, and so on – if parents then had had the will and the vision to say ‘We shall raise citizens of the world, not good little Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus … or any others of the sects that put their holy books’ authority above the human rights of every citizen, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

Furthermore, as long as we allow schools in which such ‘higher authorities’ are being endorsed and taught, the suffering we’re seeing now will go on.

So I’ll ask again: if you want your kids to go to schools that endorse and teach some holy texts of some ancient tribe over science, world literature, and history, then do you like this stuff? Screaming kids, screaming parents, ripped limbs, shattered bones, and slumped dead bodies being dug out of rubble? Do you like this stuff?

If you choose any form of religious schooling for your children, this is what you ultimately are choosing. In the actions that speak so much louder than words, you are endorsing endless conflict. Maybe, the end of our species in not too long from now.

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