The Middle East Debate Is Above Our Level of Discourse

And why we need to promote nuance over noise

Photo by Ahmed Abu Hameeda on Unsplash

As a Jew who’s been to Israel, it might be expected that I have a lot of thoughts about what’s going on right now in the Middle East. But the truth is, it’s because of the time I spent there that I only feel qualified to wade into this controversy on rare occasions. I have a better understanding now of just how much I don’t know. There are rabbis, imams, priests, and scholars all infinitely more entitled to their opinions than I am.

And yet, it’s because the public discourse around the topic has been commandeered by people with even less understanding than myself that I can’t help but feel compelled to offer my two cents again now.

One of the most valuable features of traveling is being able to put faces to ideas and conflicts. To see the truth behind textbooks and news reels. It’s one thing to know on a surface level that what’s going on right now in the Middle East is complicated. It’s another to set foot on that soil and talk to people on both sides of the conflict — to palpably understand how deep it runs, and just how immovably entrenched people are in their belief systems.

There’s a quote from professor and intellectual Noam Chomsky that I often think about when I hear fellow Americans discuss current events.

“… I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports…. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.”

Not only do we lack the capacity to discuss current events and prospective leaders, but our ignorance extends to foreign countries tenfold. Most of us don’t have a clue what’s going on outside of our nation’s borders, and yet, there’s a reflexive belief among Americans that we ought to have opinions on the Israel and Palestine conflict. We can name more Simpsons characters than branches of government, yet are conditioned to weigh in on the Gordian knot that is the Middle East.

And more often than not, it’s the people who keep up with the Kardashians rather than their leaders who dominate the conversation about what’s right for people overseas. The Dunning-Kruger effect is in full force; many of those with the least claim to anger, and the least knowledge to back up their convictions, are the ones who are the most indignant. Meanwhile, it’s the experts who are the very most qualified — who’ve spent their lives studying this turmoil — that are so routinely drowned out.

On one hand, America and Israel are closely allied, and what happens there affects us. But on the other, there’s a deeply embedded element of American exceptionalism in the idea that we can just keep playing global matchmaker and disruptor.

Some would argue that the injustices we’re witnessing are so great that our objection is more important than that we understand precisely what we’re objecting to. They make the point that, in the face of genocide, we have civic duties as humans to stand behind the people of Palestine.

But to tell an Israeli that what their nation is doing is akin to genocide is a non-starter in almost any debate. The accusation strikes so far from how many Israelis understand the conflict that it registers for them not just as wrong, but malicious. They see their government’s actions not as a campaign of erasure, but as defense — however misguided or disproportionate that defense may be. Yet, there remains a dwindling faction of Israelis who still stand behind Netanyahu after everything his government has done. And the broader world has trouble disassociating the state from its people and grappling with the diversity of opinions that exist within the country.

From a humanitarian perspective, the actions of the Israeli government are difficult to defend. Jews both in and outside of Israel are among its harshest critics.

The contradiction may be a lot to grasp, but it’s possible to be simultaneously horrified by the religious extremism of Hamas, protective of the people most directly threatened by it, and appalled by the scale of suffering inflicted on innocent Palestinians in a Pyrrhic attempt to quash it. That kind of moral complexity gets drowned out when the language becomes too binary. But absolutes can seldom be applied to the intricacies of the modern world. It’s why the discourse around this conflict is so broken.

Another component of this chaos that much of the international community struggles to address in their conversations about this war are the differences between religions. There’s a naivety in the idea that religious freedom is an irreproachable virtue of the world, and that each belief system deserves to be addressed with the same vocabulary and level of understanding. But when church, mosque, or synagogue is umbilically tied to state, it’s a problem not only for their citizens, but the world at large. And because religious texts differ between sects, what happens when people subscribe to them varies widely.

What most Israelis want to combat is the belief that being born Jewish is a crime worthy of death. And a hard truth the nation may need to accept soon is that the goal will never be accomplished.

You can’t wage a war on a way of thinking.

The attacks of October 7th were carried out by people who don’t believe Jews should be allowed to live, and who very much feel that extermination is the final and only solution for us. I wish it were possible to argue that these beliefs were only harbored by extremists. When Islamic scripture dictates the law of the land, government-sanctioned rape becomes routine and entire families are imprisoned for slights against their “supreme leaders.”

But so much of the danger of religion — whether Islam, Judaism, or Christianity — is that it rests largely on faith-based beliefs. Peoples’ convictions stem not from verifiable truths, but from passed down scriptures.

Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens once said, “In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.” For a “child of Christ” to chant that “God hates fags,” it takes the very same indoctrination that is at play in the millions of Muslim children brought up to believe there’s no greater use of one’s life than to squander it bombing a synagogue.

It’s not fair to paint Islam as the only religion that can result in violence. The Crusades were notoriously brought on by people who purported to be doing “God’s work.” Nor can it be denied that these suicide bombings are a problem that’s statistically unique to Islam.

Extremism isn’t inevitable where faith is at play, and there are scriptures that close the door to the types of moral perversions we’re so accustomed to seeing from the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the world. Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris often cites the example of Jainism, where scriptural literalism only leads people to be less violent.

“The principal tenet of Jainism is non-harming. Observant Jains will literally not harm a fly. Fundamentalist Jainism and fundamentalist Islam do not have the same consequences, neither logically nor behaviorally…. we will under no circumstances have a problem with Jain suicide bombers no matter how we mistreat the Jains. The Jain religion really is a religion of nonviolence, and the more deranged you get as a Jain you become less and less violent.”

No war or bombing campaign will ever erase an ideology. But that doesn’t mean we can cast the belief system that dominates so much of the Islamic world as one that’s compatible with humanity at large.

It’s hard to reconcile the violent beliefs that run rampant in Islamic regimes with the notion that more missiles will only serve as napalm on a fire that’s been burning for millennia. It’s much of what makes this conflict so complicated. When people subscribe to the most extreme tenets of the Islamic religion, the threat they pose is unique. But the world has never found a viable way to confront that conundrum.

Even if extremism manifests differently between different religions, that certainly doesn’t mean Israelis are blameless. If all sides could set aside the notion that they’ve been granted the same land by the same god, I suspect that this tension would have fizzled out centuries ago. But just so long as people harbor these incompatible, faith-based beliefs, I fear that all attempts to compromise will succumb to grim and Sisyphean fates. Just so long as people fail to see this issue in all of its gradients, and protest before we process, we’ll keep pouring gasoline onto the inferno.

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