Israel, Palestine, and the Almighty Roadblock to Peace

In this religious conflict, we don’t talk enough about the role of religion—or how it stands in the way of peace. Let’s change that.

Israel and Hamas have finally come to a ceasefire, ending 15 months of bloodshed. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be the permanent end of hostilities. Hatred and distrust run deep on both sides, and both sides believe that the land has been divinely gifted to them.

What would it take to stop the fighting once and for all? You will likely hear of many proposals for how we can help achieve lasting peace as outsiders. Some say we should boycot, or vote certain ways, or pressure organizations to divest. Many such proposals are reasonable, as material and economic conditions are major sources of conflict. But one possible action is under-discussed: reducing our deference to religion.

In most conflicts, we could use game theory to find a cooperative solution. Both sides could forgive each other for mutual benefit. But this requires both sides to be amenable to reason and compromise.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, religious beliefs make lasting peace nearly impossible to achieve, and we in the international community prop up this intractability by being too “respectful” of such unevidenced views. So, let’s go there. Let’s look at how religion prevents peace and what we can do about it.

How dogma blocks peace

In normal disputes, we would attempt to resolve differences using reason. We would try to create shared goals between opposing groups. Usually, there is a way to give both groups some of what they want.

Not so in Israel-Palestine. This is because they have different ontologies (beliefs about what exist) that are mutually exclusive. Zionists believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, evidenced by the Israeli Finance Minister’s opposition to the ceasefire. Hardline Muslims believe Palestine is an “Islamic [endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day…it, or any part of it, should not be given up.”

How can anyone reason with such views? In the post on individualism, we briefly discussed the value of questioning one’s ontology. But religions use the concept of faith to prevent such internal questioning.

These immovable views turn the Israel-Palestine conflict into a zero-sum game, meaning one side’s win is the other side’s loss. Both Jews and Muslims believe they have divine right to control Jerusalem, so whoever doesn’t control it believes it is their religious duty to take it back. The zero-sumness makes it impossible for both sides to cooperate like in the prisoner’s dilemma.

Within Palestine and Israel, secular groups are more in favor of peace and cooperation. Unfortunately, according to one expert, “On both sides, the religious camp seems to be getting the upper hand.” So in order to actually achieve peace in this conflict, I argue that religion must be weakened. As Americans, we could have some effect on that weakening.

God Possess the USA

In our cultural melting pot of America, we have learned to tiptoe around religion. It’s impolite to criticize the religious views of others. Discussion of religion in workplaces and dinner tables is taboo. Even the idea of “separation of church and state” was intended to prevent the use of force against non-majority faiths.

So, out of respect, we let religions do their thing, and boy do they do it. American support for Israel has been unwavering. In public, politicians and pundits justify that support by saying we must support our ally, but more quietly, a whopping 82% of American evangelicals believe Israel was given to the Jewish people by God, and 55% of Christians generally. Influential televangelist Jerry Falwell said “To stand against Israel is to stand against God. We believe that history and scripture prove that God deals with nations in relation to how they deal with Israel.”

This is a major roadblock to changing US actions. Yet liberals who want to reduce US support for Israel overlook this religious dimension. They instead focus on economics and BDS boycotts. They call for divestment. They bang their heads against the unreasonable wall of American faith with little acknowledgment of the wall’s existence. Scrutinizing that wall would be too impolite and taboo, so they don’t, and they make little progress.

The other edge of this sword for liberals is that they also don’t recognize the unreasonableness on the Muslim side. Would dogmatic Palestinians really compromise when they believe God has given them the land? Notice that the popular hashtag is #freepalestine, not #freepalestinians. A Syrian group that shares this name explicitly opposes the existence of Israel and is led by a man who believes Israeli Jews are “pieces of human filth.” Hamas, the elected leaders of Palestine, would kill and exile Jews if given the chance. One writer argues:

“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms.

Although Americans using #freepalestine aren’t explicitly supporting this view, they are in solidarity with groups who hold this view, and the emphasis on freeing Palestine—rather than Palestinians—upholds zero-sum religious claims to the land.

Due to our touchiness around religion, we don’t push back on extreme religious views. As with “freedom of speech,” we let “freedom of religion” prevent us from creating more reasonable discourse. We allow religious exemptions for vaccines, weakening herd immunity. In the case of Israel-Palestine, we bemoan AIPAC and the ADL, meanwhile ignoring the tax exemptions that subsidize pro-Israel Christian churches and their dogmatic views. We allow faith to remain untouchable and attempt to tiptoe around unprovable religious claims, slowing progress or preventing it altogether. It is time to make a change.

#FreeThinking?

I have already tried and failed to make this change. Earlier in my life, I was part of New Atheism, a loose group of internet atheists who fashioned themselves after popular writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens. It was the early 2000s. America was still reeling from 9/11, and religious fundamentalism was under larger scrutiny. New Atheism found some purchase with the public, although it was largely among a single population: young, single men who were less-conformist than average.

These men (including me) stormed the internet, sharing videos of Hitchens DESTROYING Christians, meming about Catholic priests, pointing out logical fallacies, throwing around terms like Russell’s teapot and Occam’s razor, and obnoxiously parroting various atheistic dogma: “there are no atheist beliefs,” while believing dogmatically in naturalism and secularism.

This movement didn’t last long, having mostly petered out by 2017. What happened?

These atheists grated harshly against the rest of the country. On the right, conservative Christians obviously didn’t enjoy being attacked for their faith, so atheists became even more reviled to them, even if some wavering Christians were eventually deconverted. On the left, it is uncouth and cancel-worthy to attack the faiths of oppressed groups like Islam and Native Americans. In the middle, religious moderates with more reasonable positions felt unfairly attacked. So these vocal anti-theists quickly found themselves on the political fringes, unwelcome in mainstream thought, despite their dissent being (in my view) reasonable. Now much of the rationalist community has moved rightward, where they are less constrained in their speech. The other portion of New Atheists moved leftward and embraced a “respect all faiths” point of view, as that is the only currently acceptable way to be a liberal/progressive atheist.

The failure of New Atheism is evidence of two things. Firstly, how you speak matters. Part of the problem with “rationalists” is that they hold up rationality as an ideal and assume they can just deconvert believers with logic, completely missing the emotional attachments everyone has to their beliefs. They tried to berate and snark their opponents into submission, predictably failing. Nearly everyone on Twitter shares this problem (like the unmindful Trump resistance), but the atheist community struggled with it even more due to its ideological emphasis on reason.

Secondly, criticism of religions remains a major taboo in leftist politics. On the left, we can criticize Israel, but not Judaism. We can criticize Christian political views, but not Christianity itself. We can support Palestinians, but questioning their dogmatic religious aspirations is considered Islamophobia.

This taboo is a major roadblock to progressive goals: gender equality, LGBTQ rights, scientific literacy, and #FreePalestinians. So what should we do?

Gently pushing through the taboo

I don’t expect you to finish reading this post and go out and criticize religions. Maybe you will be more receptive to religious criticism. Maybe when that Grammy winner or sports star praises their god, it will strike you as a little more strange. Maybe you will be a little less encouraging of your nephew’s church attendance. Maybe your support for Palestinians will be a little more nuanced with respect to their goals. For a taboo this strong, softening is still progress.

If you want to do more, actively pushing for secularization is a great way to achieve positive change. But we must be careful. New Atheism failed because its criticism was too untactful. It alienated religious minorities and historically marginalized groups, which progressives have aligned with. It smacked of Western colonialism and “punching down” when applied to non-Christian religions. So any criticism of religion must walk a careful tightrope: forceful enough to break through the taboo, but gentle and focused enough on belief to preserve the dignity of the believers.

Here, you may be thinking religious identity doesn’t necessarily mean rigid dogmatism, as numerous Jewish and Muslim groups do advocate for peaceful coexistence and sharing the land. While these groups show admirable flexibility, religions still require faith in unprovable claims that can conflict with human wellbeing. Even when individual believers find ways to reconcile faith with reason on specific issues, the core requirement to accept untestable beliefs without evidence remains a barrier to fully rational discourse.

It will be tricky for our discourse to even reach down to religious beliefs. Just as atheists learned to soften their criticisms, religious believers learned to couch their dogma in secular-seeming wrapping. Evangelical Christians will continue to publicly say we need to support our Israeli allies, while hiding their Zionist beliefs. Abortion opponents will continue to claim there is a scientific basis for human life beginning at conception, despite that not being their real reason for opposition. As long as we try to fight these insincere views, we fail to address the religious roots of the problem.

We must be willing to push past the insincerity and ask deeper questions. Why must Israel be our ally? Why must human life be defined that way? Believers will resist such inquiry, but it is necessary to continue pushing. Don’t allow unreasonable beliefs to hide. Reasonable politics requires people to speak within the same plane of discussion, based on what we can all agree exists: humans and our plights, not Gods and their ancient decrees.

But we must push gently. It is easy to incur backlash, as we saw with the New Atheists, and as we are seeing now in politics. If we try to cancel or belittle or berate, we won’t make progress. And besides, we aren’t trying to win a fight; we are trying to reason with others.

To do so, we need interpretations of ancient religious texts to be open to reason. Believers need to be able to question whether the scriptures are literally true, or whether there is room for error on the parts of the human prophets, scribes, and interpreters. If all believers came to such a position, there would be more room for negotiation and compromise in many political disputes.

This could also lead toward the long-term goal of secularization, and it is likely already happening due to the shrinking gaps within which gods could conceivably hide. The question is whether it is happening fast enough.

Why we should push

If we hasten secularization in America and the rest of the world, we will be more able to use reason in our most unreasonable conflicts, like Israel-Palestine. From the American side, we will be less blindly supportive of inflammatory Israeli practices like religiously-motivated West Bank settlements. We would be more focused on the crimes of unreasonable religious extremists like Hamas and have less difficulty separating them from the larger Palestinian community.

In this way, our secularization would pressure Israel and Palestine to act and speak in more reasonable ways, giving power to the more secular, reasonable sects on both sides. This would be a way to aid secularization to Israel-Palestine, which is necessary to shift the conflict away from a zero-sum game toward a non-zero one in which both sides can win. Both sides may become less focused on religious exclusivity and more willing to coexist. There could be more reasonable conversation, and that conversation could focus on humanitarian and nationalistic concerns, which are still difficult but more tractable than religious demands.

This is all part of my larger hope in creating a more reasonable world. In politics, we too often talk past each other because there is little disagreement on how to define “good” and “just” and “right,” and it becomes even harder to agree on these topics if we can’t even agree on what exists. How can we reasonably craft our systems to prioritize the well-being of humans when a large proportion of our global society holds unreasonable faith in souls, which they believe our Earthly systems should prepare for afterlife? How can we reasonably share land and resources if two different groups believe their unverifiable gods gave it to them?

My claim is that religion makes this difficult or impossible. So my call is to hasten its disappearance, respecting the believers but not the beliefs.

Do you disagree, or have suggestions for how to bring about secularization? Let’s discuss in the comments. And please consider sharing this post with others to widen the conversation.