The religious dimension of the open war between Iran and Israel has tended to take a back seat to other issues in analyses of the situation. The spotlight has favoured factors whose driving force, instead, is nationalism. Yet a look at the religious angle is instructive in that it provides two object lessons. Firstly, it shows how enormous religion can rear even today, in given situations, as a driver of international politics—and thus how restricted the progress of enlightenment that has been made. And secondly, it shows that the special level of bitterness—the venom—religion injects into the conflicts it is involved in remains as potent as ever.
The Middle East is steeped in wars of religion the way Europe was in the sixteenth century and beyond. Of course, those European religious contentions were likewise mixed up with clashing territorial ambitions and also dynastic ones, but it is with good reason that, overall, the struggles became known as wars of religion. So it is with the Middle East; and the proof follows.
Incidentally, it might appear rather surprising that religion should generally be spoken of less than other matters, given how blindingly obvious it is that Iran is a Muslim country and Israel a Jewish one. But that’s the result not only of the real size and importance of those other matters, but of a fairly conscious effort to dissemble the religious animosities at play. If, as suggested above, progress has been very restricted when it comes to reining in religious hatred, let alone in dispelling religious nonsense in itself, the haters have at least learned to shut up better about it, or to use circumlocutions, at least in public. Even Iran’s ayatollahs, who are not given to hiding their detestations, and who cannot bring themselves to even say ‘Israel’, when it comes to choosing what to call it instead, elect to say ‘the Zionist state’ rather than ‘the Jewish state’, which is what they at heart mean. They hate Zionism because it is Jewish; that they also find Israel useful as a foreign enemy is a side benefit.
The Iranian leadership hates the United States and Israel. Apart from specific grudges against the US, like the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in 1953 and the support Washington gave to the despised shah, it hates the West in general and all it stands for; sees the US as the heart of the West; and Israel as the cat’s paw of the US. But there is a crucial distinction in its treatment of its two great enemies. It may vociferously equate the US with Satan, yet it doesn’t issue insistent calls that the United States needs to be actually wiped off the face of the earth, as it does with Israel. What, then, is the difference? That Israel is Jewish. It could not be more evident that the difference is of a religious nature—which was the point being made.
A thought experiment, in passing: imagine if some other country X declared that any country Y should be physically eliminated, and its inhabitants thrown into the sea. Consider the tizzy the United Nations would be thrown into, the heated General Assembly condemnations, the energetic Security Council resolutions. Such an intent, they would declare, cannot be countenanced with regard to any UN member country, or even a non-member like Vatican City. Unless, naturally, country Y is Israel. If the subject is delenda est Israel, the world will nonchalantly shrug it off: it has been doing so for decades in the face of the ayatollahs’ annihilation threats.
A personal recollection that is very pertinent to Israel’s pre-emptive attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. I worked in the UN’s press area not long after Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s nuclear installations in 1981. On the anniversary of the Israeli attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor, the UN held a special meeting to condemn it, the reason being that it constituted a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty. (It should go without saying, but I will say it anyway, that it held no such sessions on anniversaries of anybody else’s violation of anyone else’s sovereignty.) Speaking in a corridor of UN headquarters with a member of the Israeli delegation to the United Nations, she told me something off the record, which I will now, more than 40 years later, nevertheless proceed to put on record. ‘You don’t know how many delegates from other countries’, she confided, ‘congratulate us, privately, on what we did. They say that we must understand that they need to denounce it pro forma [at the special condemnatory session], but they tell us, “Thank goodness you did it—can you imagine if Saddam Hussein got hold of nuclear bombs?”’
The question does arise why the countries involved, particularly the stronger Western ones, were so gutless, why they ‘needed’ to make the pro forma denunciations. Their speeches might have declared that while they decidedly opposed violations of sovereignty, if someone with such openly aggressive attitudes as Saddam Hussein got a comeuppance, the world was a safer place for it. Unless, just maybe, this wasn’t garden-variety gutlessness. Just maybe, what would have changed the colouring altogether would have been saying such a thing in relation to a comeuppance carried out by Jews.
If we now expand the picture from Iran vis-à-vis Israel to the Middle East as a whole, we gain the same view of religion’s role in creating and/or exacerbating problems. In this respect, it is interesting how the role of regional villains has changed over the centuries from Christians to Jews (and along with this switch, gone were the days when Jews were better treated in some Muslim lands than in Christian ones). Saladin has been dead for about 800 years. When what is now Israel came again into Christian hands—that is, when the British held a mandate over the area for 30 years—it made neither the Arabs nor the then-renamed Iranians apoplectic. Compare with what happened when Jews took over (famously, five countries invaded). And the violence that occurred throughout the years of the Mandate was, of course, sectarian—between Palestinian Arabs and Jews.
It may be argued that what the Arabs or others object to is not the Jews’ religion but other things about them; however, this does not hold up. People who take such exception—exception to whatever things about Jews that they object to—visibly and repeatedly react to them more strongly than they do about the same things when found in others, or done by others. So the legitimate question is, what is the common element behind the different things that trigger such an overreaction? And the clear answer is, the common element is the religion of those who exhibit them.
If the focus is now turned from Arabs in general to Palestinians in particular, the same general conclusion as above emerges even more clearly: the key role played by religion. Palestinians certainly deserve a land of their own; that’s a key point that must be underlined. In the event, they already had it allocated to them by the United Nations back in 1947, and they rejected it, along with the other Arabs—if it meant having people professing Judaism next to them.
Then a remarkable thing happened, which is scarcely taken note of today. In the ensuing 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Gaza Strip, which had been assigned to the Palestinians, was occupied by Egypt, and the West Bank of the River Jordan, which was likewise marked off for them by the UN, fell under the rule of Transjordan (which thereafter called itself simply Jordan)—yet the Palestinians made no fuss about it. Which shows that their bedrock issue, all protestations to the contrary, is not possession of the land in itself, but the religion of the possessors.
The rejection of coexistence with a Jewish Israel has had the unfortunate result of raining misery on the Palestinians themselves. When Israel was born there was within it a great diversity of opinion about what kind of state to construct. Initially and for a long time afterwards the country had labour-minded, lay-inclined governments, which over and over emphasised their wish to live peacefully with their neighbours and cooperate with them. Every time Israel was attacked, it has tended, in reaction, to instead bring to the fore the more right-wing sectarian sectors within it and give more political power to extreme religious parties that are comparatively small but hold the balance in Parliament. It can be said paradoxically that it is the Palestinians, not Israeli voters themselves, who ultimately decide Israeli elections, in the counterproductive direction: every assault on Israel has strengthened the fanatical elements within it.
In the current war in the Gaza Strip, the suffering there is truly heart-rending. In this regard, there is also hypocrisy to spare. While the people kidnapped by Hamas remain locked up in their makeshift Palestinian prisons, the European nations that call for the war to end forthwith, because enough is enough, seem to imply that if their own kin had been grabbed, after some period they would give up on them, on that stated principle that after a time, enough is enough. Meanwhile, in their calls for more aid to be let through to Gaza, they are recalling the way that, when they were fighting Germany, they of course allowed aid to flow in to alleviate the sufferings of the hard-hit German population… or is this a mistaken recollection?
When the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, the name did not refer to the liberation of the West Bank or Gaza. It couldn’t have: the founding took place in 1964—when it did not conceive even the possibility (nor did anybody else) that three years later Israel would take over those territories. What the name meant was the cleansing of Jews from Israeli lands proper.
The slogans painted on walls might as well have read ‘No Judaism here’—does that ring a bell? It is religion continuing to take its heavy toll on a humanity which cannot shake it off and largely does not want to try.
Related reading
An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain
Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard
Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch
Israel in Gaza: Humanity’s Canary in a Coal Mine? by Brian Victoria
US Election 2024: Yet Another Farcical and Costly Contest, by Zwan Mahmod
Israel’s war on Gaza is a war on the Palestinian people, by Zwan Mahmod
US Election 2024: On ‘Lesser Evilism’, by Ralph Leonard
Confronting identity politics, a breeding ground for division and dehumanisation, by Maryam Namazie
‘F*** it, think freely!’ Interview with Brian Cox, by Daniel James Sharp
Britain’s liberal imam: Interview with Taj Hargey, by Emma Park
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