Religion and Real Estate.
The guilt of cruising the Aegean as an American and as a Jew while fellow Jews are undergoing the most gruesome assault since the Holocaust makes me wonder why people pray to God. They thank God for good things and call it “providence,” and dismiss the bad, as though some beneficent entity is controlling their lives.
Islam arose around 624 AD, after the much older Jewish monotheism arose in the levant some 3-4,000 years ago, depending upon which source you believe. Early Jewish religion had elements of polytheism, worshipped goddesses and a cult of mother goddesses, according to historian/anthropologist Raphael Patai. In the 300,000 or so years since homo sapiens emerged in Africa, organized religion has only existed for about 4,000 years, a flash of light in terms of the 4.5 billion years in the history of Earth.
Before organized religion, primitives danced around fires and assumed direct relations with the spirits. Shamans then arrogated for themselves the sole ability to communicate with the spirits and therefore control over the populace. “Only I can communicate with God.” Sound familiar? You had to go through them to be safe. Some grievance politicians do the same. Get the picture?
Scientists have predicted that in another 250 million years the sun will incinerate our planet. Meanwhile we are doing a pretty good job of doing it ourselves. We had better hope Elon Musk’s plans for moving humanity to other worlds works out.
So, let’s share a little perspective on the Arab-Jewish/Israeli wars.
People have circulated maps showing Palestine as it was before the time of Christ; true believers rely on that map to justify claims on the land. They say Palestinians did not exist at that time and therefore, Jews have a superior claim. There were Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Egyptians and of course, wars over the land among clashing empires and tribes.
The troubles began with the rise of monotheism, which automatically dismissed other faiths, all of which are constructs anyway. Ours is the only way to God, they say. Death to the others. Let’s take their land.
Israel is supposed to be a homeland for Jews. Well, it has been a very inhospitable homeland ever since partition. When the Ottoman empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the Versailles treaty created the conditions for what followed—another war, even worse than the first one. And the carving up of the British and French colonies and mandates at the end of World War II perpetuated the conditions for what is happening today, by promising the same land to two different tribes.
Are the territorial disputes tied to religion or are the religions tied to the disputes? Or is it a distinction without a difference? Or is it simply about real estate? Pretty complicated stuff.
New surveys say that approximately 26% of Americans do not believe in a supernatural being that can change the course of history or respond to the pleas of a suffering humanity. Evangelicals are among the strongest supporters of Israel, because in the end of days, Christ will return or some such other theory. And the theory involves the Holy Land being in possession of the Jews. It all sounds, excuse the term, Medieval. One wonders if a professed Atheist can ever be elected to political office in America.
No one denies the soothing aspects of a religious undertaking, and I suppose that is reason enough to feel some comfort that after one dies, they will go to some either defined or undefined place, heaven or hell, purgatory, or some other destination conceived by priests, or those others who need to provide an explanation for the inexplicable. But religion should not justify demands for real estate and competing claims for land over which bloody wars have existed for millennia.
There are only three countries in the Middle East that have been around for centuries: Persia, which has devolved into a fanatical, theocratic Iran, Egypt, which is a military dictatorship, and Turkey, a putative democracy, the remnant of the Ottoman Empire and the selection of the wrong allies during
World War I. The rest are political creations arising from colonial enterprises, and a Jewish tribe with the greatest present date moral claim on a small part of the land (because of the Holocaust.) Israel is so small compared to its Arab neighbors.
Why can’t they just leave her alone?
Unfortunately, in historical terms, the comparatively new remnants of the colonial empires’
division of the land in the most awful, blood-soaked 20th century, the situating of Israel between the former empires of Persia and Egypt and the bloody competition for a relatively small strip of land is arguably the result of tribal imperatives which have no end in sight, fueled in great part by religious imperatives.
