Recognition

A world of law may not guarantee peace, but it certainly ought to yield organization. We are taught from birth to learn what is ours and what is not. We learn ways to eat and good hygiene. And we are taught violence in the defense of right.

This morning the Iraqi ambassador informed an NPR interviewer that Iraq is aligned with the Arab League and thus does not recognize the state of Israel. That sparked the synapses aware that Jimmy Carter has kicked up a bunch of internal controversy in the Carter Center with a new book sharply recommending that Israel stop oppressing Palestine and take the lead in establishing a just peace. Jimmy used the word apartheid.

We are born with buffalo blood on our hands. I carry a certain amount of birthright guilt, weighted by several tons of outrage at the European conquest of the Americas. Manifest destiny incenses my definitions of justice, and I remember the Alamo was a fight for the freedom to hold slaves.

Along with this romantic sense of liberty, I expect international relations to have created an architecture for the honest and fair acquisition of property. If indeed the Jewish diaspora deserved a nation in their ancestral homeland, it would seem that people displaced by such migration would at minimum be fairly compensated. It would seem that the ancient importance of Jerusalem would make it an international city. We are a species of laws – we should know better ways to organize things than seven-generation wars.

Citing Israeli oppression does not explain or excuse Arab terrorism. A hopeless Army resorts to suicide bombing and such weapons because they lack the technology to confront a standing army. Revolutionary American armies could be called terrorist by the British because they hid in the woods instead of marching in columns, the "civilized" ways of war developed by European armies. The Huns defeated the Romans by also discarding "accepted" means of warfare.

However, Gandhi demonstrates that freedom is best won by nonviolence. Suicide bombs, car bombs and other attacks on civilians do not make a cause for freedom and independence. The Palestinian state cannot be realized until Palestinians form a cohesive, stable society with an independent economy and the power to keep its word in peace negotiations. Terrorism only enrages, and allows Israel and America to justify continued oppression and a violent stalemate. Islam could achieve peace and security without firing another shot. In fact, the world will not find peace until its nations cease fire.

I will write often and earnestly to muse about what it will take to gain peace in the world. I am convinced, as you will see, that an evolutionary advance must occur to bring the species to a point that violence is not a valid solution to anything. And while I have never gotten much from talk therapy, I think that communication around the issues that keep us in war is the way we slowly unravel the need to blow each other to bits.

I don’t see us solving this in my lifetime, I’m just adding a few bits to the stream. Do your part, and I’ll keep doing mine.