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Date Posted: 22:19:22 08/07/08 Thu
Author: ga
Subject: bush

>Can we, just for a minute, dispense with the
>hand-wringing and acknowledge that the problem Israel
>and the Palestinians are having with one another is
>actually their mutual solution to the problem of being
>mortal?
>
>Of course, to understand what I'm talking about it is
>first necessary to recognize that it's not love or sex
>or money that makes the world go around but the fact
>of death; that what drives virtually everything we
>believe and do is the need to reduce, to at least a
>manageable degree of fear, the terror and panic the
>anticipation of extinction causes us. (If you can't
>quite grasp this notion, if you have to be reminded
>that terror and panic constitute the human default
>condition, then whatever you're believing and doing is
>working for you.)
>
>Of the myriad subtle and blatant ways we've come up
>with to make living with an impossible given
>tolerable, one example would be the symbolic
>immortality we assure ourselves of by the making of a
>scientific discovery, or a work of art, that will
>continue to exercise an influence on the world after
>our departure. Another is the accumulation of
>inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great sums
>of money buy enable us to feel not just superior to
>the common man, but less vulnerable to the common
>fate. Still another is getting "high," which is about
>getting ABOVE the body that we know will one day be
>our undoing.
>
>And then there's our invention of an afterlife.
>Presenting us with a chance to survive death--if we
>honor the pronouncements and follow the dictates we've
>assigned to deities of our own fashioning--it's this
>immortality illusion that's at the heart of the
>Arab-Israeli conflict.
>
>The Arabs are qualifying for eternity by doing what
>they've determined to be God's work, which is to make
>war on those who, ignoring or questioning His
>authority, are undermining His plan for the planet.
>And Israel, dropped in the Arab's midst, its diverse
>culture implicitly challenging the validity of Arab
>beliefs, provides the Arabs with the infidel they need
>to carry out their mission. For Arabs, it's not about
>killing Jews, per se. Jews are simply a fortuitously
>placed means to a purchase on heaven. (You could say
>that their culture being, by all appearances, limited
>in its repertoire of immortality illusions to the
>resources of Islam, suicide is the only instrument of
>self-perpetuation available to the Palestinian
>terrorists.)
>
>On the other hand, the Arabs afford Israelis an
>opportunity to continually certify their biblically
>bestowed "chosen" status--AND TO ASSURE THEMSELVES OF
>THE POST-CORPOREAL REWARDS IMPLICIT IN THE
>ANOINTMENT--by constantly threatening, but never
>accomplishing, Israel's destruction. Persistently
>testing Israel's exalted designation but never
>disproving it, enabling Israel to be embattled AND
>remain intact, the Arabs are every bit the blessing to
>Israel that Israel is to the Arabs.
>
>It follows that the violence each side visits on the
>other must be measured; balances and proportions need
>to be kept. For one side to win, after all, would be
>for both sides to lose; would, that is, return BOTH
>sides to a contemplation of the Void. We might call
>this aiding and abetting of one another's immortality
>illusions--the cooperation and the accommodations it
>requires--the deeper definition of the "social
>contract."
>
>So we can engage ad infinitum in the most earnest
>discussions about anti-Semitism, about Arafat, about
>Sharon, about territory and occupation, and forever
>miss the real dynamic of the situation. The
>Arab-Israeli problem is, again, a solution to a more
>pressing problem, to what is, literally as well as
>figuratively, the mother of all problems. And what
>accounts for the tenaciousness of the conflict is the
>ongoing success it's enjoying in the service of its
>underlying agenda. As long as this holds true, Arabs
>and Israelis will, on one level or another, be
>enemies. Because for all of the horrors hostilities
>between them cause, they cause a more acceptable, a
>more BEARABLE species of horror than the fact of
>oblivion does.
>
>The pain we are witnessing is a palliative. These are
>not the worst of times in the Middle East.

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