Democracy Matters (13 page)

The bloody conflict in the Middle East is too often viewed in terms of an interminable clash between the Israelis and the Palestinians or Israel and the Arab world. Rarely do we acknowledge the role of imperialism run amok in having set the conflict in motion. The roots of the conflict go back to the shadows
cast by the British empire, the cold war struggle between the Soviet empire and the American empire, and now the central presence of American imperial support for the Israeli state as well as the Egyptian and Jordanian states. In fact, the very term “Middle East” was coined in 1902 by a leading American imperialist, the U.S. naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan, to name the geographical space between India and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire in an article he wrote about the interests of the Great Powers in the region. In the past, terms such as “Western Asia” or “Turkish Asia” had been used. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire after World War I and the popularizing of the term “Middle East” by the
London Times
, it caught on, and we seem now to be stuck with it.

The popular understanding of the conflict, especially in the United States, has been grossly simplified, and it is rarely viewed through the democratic lens that brings the dire plight of ordinary Israelis and Arabs, Kurds and Turks, Iranians and Iraqis into focus. The very terms of the debate have been disproportionately shaped by the most zealously driven power players, be they in the U.S. government, Islamic states, or Israel. These elites engage in a willful disregard for uncomfortable facts, both historic and current, as well as outright distortions of crucial subtleties of the arguments made by their foes. If there ever was a place and time for the unleashing of deep democratic energies in the region, it is now.

We must begin with the primary concern of all elites in the region—the quest for access to oil. The conflict cannot be understood without acknowledging this fundamental fact. And the crisis cannot be solved without keeping track of the effects of the elites’ power plays to secure oil. These effects hamper efforts to put forward
deep democratic identities in both Israel and the Islamic countries. Yet there are gallant voices in Jewish communities in America and Israel and in the Islamic world that call for just such democratic identities and practices, and they have yet to be heard with the force they deserve. Democracy matters require that we hear these courageous voices and help them to become more prominent here and on their home turfs.

The legacy of the imperialist quest to secure access to oil in the region is threefold. First and foremost, as the Achilles’ heel of U.S. foreign policy in the region, the need to procure oil drives a shameful disregard of the radically undemocratic character of oil-rich autocratic Arab regimes, which remain hostile to Israel’s very existence. Second, the ugly thirty-seven-year Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and subjugation of Palestinian peoples violate international law and any code of humanitarian ethics. The linchpin to any resolution in the region is an end to this unjust and ineffective occupation. Third, the wholesale guarantee of Israeli security against barbaric Palestinian suicide bombers that murder innocent Israeli civilians is necessary. These three fundamental challenges—lack of democracy and presence of anti-Semitic bigotry in oil-rich Arab states, justice for Palestinians, and security for Israel—rest upon promoting deep democratic identities in the region.

This cannot be done with the prevailing American attitudes and policies in the region. For example, in the deeply flawed planning for the postwar period in Iraq, the Bush administration has revealed an appalling lack of either understanding of or concern for the internal situation in the country. The administration has also shown an irresponsible lack of commitment to the regime it set up
in Afghanistan. A more genuine approach to inspiring and nurturing democracy in the region will require the United States to resolve deeply hypocritical contradictions in our dealings with Middle Eastern regimes. We tend to prop up some tyrants while deciding to take out others unilaterally. We look the other way about hypocrisies in Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, and display an inexcusable lack of understanding of Palestinian views in our efforts to design a peace plan. We helped install and sustain Saddam Hussein himself, and before him the tyrannical shah in Iran. These unprincipled U.S. power plays backfired when they produced not only regimes hardened against us but also a more general anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. Because of our undeniably crucial role in the region, efforts to forge more authentic democracies and to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must start with the U.S. government and public developing more enlightened views of the complexities of public opinion versus elite power players’ positions in the region. At the moment both Israel and the Arab world are currently under the thrall of extremist thinkers and power players. Hence, instead of making deals with these myopic elites, the United States must respect and encourage the democratic voices being stifled in both worlds.

Just as the arrogant, unilateralist views of the Bush administration have marginalized the deep democratic voices in America in the view of the rest of the world, so have the corrupted and extremist elites in the Arab world and in Israel thwarted the democratic energies within those societies. But democratic energies are there, and we must learn to appreciate and support them in helping to forge new democratic identities in the region. These identities
must not only cut through all forms of tribalism and parochialism but also cast a limelight on everyday Israelis and Arabs who shun bigotry, desire peace, and yearn to be more than pawns in the power games of Israeli, Arab, and American elites. This goal may seem quixotic because the polarized situation in the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is so intransigent and may even seem intractable. Surely, loosening the constraints to peace will require a herculean effort, but enlightened U.S. policy conjoined with the energy of democratic social movements committed to peace and justice must be stirred. Within Israel and the Arab world, there are strong traditions to spur this change of the prevailing consciousness.

Let us begin with the long and rich prophetic tradition among Jews, past and present. There has been a long struggle within the Jewish community, both in the American Jewish community and in Israel, about the moral hypocrisies of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, with progressive Jews arguing that the Jewish prophetic tradition requires a more robustly compassionate and democratically just approach. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of
Tikkun
magazine writes in his powerful book
Healing Israel/Palestine
(2003):

The barbarity of the terrorism launched against Jews in Israel first by the Arab states and now by the suicide bombers is real and should never be explained away—as the zealots on the Palestinian side do—but the dominant Jewish stance has become so hardened by the pain of this suffering, and by the feeling of being so reviled by enemies, that the Jewish community has been losing touch with its own rich prophetic tradition.

We recall that the Jewish invention of the prophetic, to be found in the scriptural teachings of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk, not only put justice at the center of what it means to be chosen as a Jewish people but also made compassion
to human suffering and kindness to the stranger the fundamental features of the most noble human calling. The divine covenant with Abraham, the divine deliverance of enslaved Jews from Egypt, the divine pathos against injustice in Amos, and the divine promise of salvation in Isaiah all speak to the core of the prophetic: the distinctive Jewish refusal to allow raw power to silence justice or might to trump right. At the heart of the prophetic in the Hebrew scripture is an indictment of those who worship the idol of human power. According to the scripture, since human beings cannot be divine—and often act quite devilishly—prophetic voices must remind Israel of what God requires of them: “To do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). The very covenant—not contract—between God and Israel is predicated on God’s love for justice and Israel’s charge: “To keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice” (Genesis 18:19). The prophetic figures in Israelite history—Jeremiah, Micah, Amos, Isaiah, and others—give voice to
divine
compassion and justice in order to awaken
human
compassion and justice.

Prophetic witness consists of human deeds of justice and kindness that attend to the unjust sources of human hurt and misery. It calls attention to the causes of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery and highlights personal and institutional evil, including the evil of being indifferent to personal and institutional evil. The especial aim of prophetic utterance is to shatter deliberate ignorance and willful blindness to the suffering of others and to expose the clever forms of evasion and escape we devise in order to hide and conceal injustice. The prophetic goal is to stir up in us
the courage to care and empower us to change our lives and our historical circumstances.

The Jewish prophetic tradition is central to democracy matters because the perennial question for any democracy, especially for imperial nations, is always, how is the public interest informed and influenced by the most vulnerable in our society? The Jewish invention of the prophetic put a premium on this query in an unprecedented manner. Rabbi Michael Lerner, following his teacher, the great Abraham Joshua Heschel, is representative of this Judaic prophetic tradition.