Israel and Palestine: Taking a stand for complexity and workability
“For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is wrong.”
— George Bernard Shaw
First off, I’d like to identify myself as a 33-year old middle class White Anglo-Saxon Buddhist man living in the San Francisco Bay Area who cares about the lives and dignity of the people of Israel and Palestine.
A few days ago my father asked me to read Sam Harris’s post, Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?, so we could discuss it during our upcoming video-chat. Although Harris criticizes Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state, he strongly takes the “side” of Israel’s government in regards to Palestine.
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. . . The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields.
Statements that begin with “The truth is that everything you need to know…” strike me as irresponsible and misleading.
I believe that “the truth” about Israel and Palestine is more complex than any of us can know. If we reduce it to a few factors and disregard all others we‘re supporting simplistic narratives that can serve as a foundation for further injustice.
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I’m so grateful to have read Peter Coleman’s book, The Five Percent: Finding solutions to seemingly impossible conflicts. Coleman studies the five percent of conflicts that don’t improve with time, in fact they seem to resist efforts to problem-solve and “suck us in” to conflict escalation. Often times the people in these five percent conflicts tend to be deeply saturated with simple “we’re all good and they’re all evil” narratives. One of the many practices the book identifies as being helpful in these five percent conflicts is to acknowledge and circulate a sense of complexity into the conversation. Coleman’s research demonstrates that people who have a sense of the complexity of the situation are less likely to dehumanize each other and justify committing atrocities. Here’s an animated example of the road to peace in a conflict in Mozambique.
Citizens of the world can help by studying and circulate historical examples of groups developing peace in the midst of “good versus evil” ways of thinking. We can join the legacy of the bishop of Mozambique in the video above who worked for peace in a seemingly impossible conflict.
My friend Elijah recently posted the following story on Facebook:
I still remember to this day a girl finding out I was “Jewish” at a party, and because she was dating a Jordanian guy (she herself was not middle eastern), running after me. The first words out of her mouth to me were literally “so what do you think about Israel and Palestine?”
My answer was my standard “well, it is quite a complicated situation.”
At which point she just walked away from me without any acknowledgement.
It seems to me that someone saying, “well, it is quite a complicated situation” is a great starting place for a conversation. Given that it’s complicated, what points are important to be included?
Rather than jumping to take the side of Israel or Palestine, what if we prioritize taking the side of complexity over simplicity? What if we take the side of humility over certainty? What if we stand against dehumanizing narratives of any people? Instead of reducing complex conflicts to a few “root causes” and saying that they are “everything you need to know”, why don’t we ask what‘s constraining change towards collaborative peace? Why don’t we ask what important perspectives may be missing or distorted whenever we hear a simple one-sided argument?
When we go public with the sense of complexity that we see, we are taking a stand against the dominant simplistic narratives that constrain a collaborative peace process.
