Everything's All Right in the Middle East

A Mutual Solution to the Problem of Being Mortal
Originally published in 2002

(Author’s note: The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and Israel’s
reaction to it, exploded the premise upon which the following piece was
based. The dynamic I was trying to outline lasted for decades, but now,
in its absence, Israel and the Palestinians have been left to confront
the existential horrors, and the attendant consequence of
unconscionable, catastrophic violence, they had succeeded in at least
mitigating. R.L. 9/21/2024)

Can we, just for a minute, dispense with the hand-wringing and
acknowledge that the problem Israel and the Palestinians have with one
another is actually their mutual solution to the problem of being
mortal?

Of course to understand what I mean 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 death 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 reality tolerable, one example would be the
symbolic immortality we assure ourselves of by leaving behind a
scientific discovery, or a work of art, that will continue to have an
influence on the world. 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, end the
game and 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 Hamas, 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, for all the anguish it induces, remain at odds
because the enmity between them is their buffer against the specter of
oblivion.

The pain we are witnessing is a palliative. These are not the worst of times in the Middle East.