A New Beginning: Separate But Equal
In the winter of 2002, I met with my Republican Congressman to discuss several issues that concerned me and my listeners at WCUR. My Congressman at the time was a member of the Armed Forces Committee and bragged about his foreign policy knowledge. I asked him if America should be involved in trying to create peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people. He told me that it wasn’t America’s concern and that they can handle their own problems. Two weeks later, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict exploded to front page news on almost every newspaper in the world and it continued to grab the headlines for the months that followed. This conflict is still the central conflict in the so called “war on terror.”
There is no doubt that Al Qaeda gets a large amount of recruiting mileage out of claims of hardship and struggle suffered by the Palestinian people at the hands of “evil Israeli oppressors.” And so the stage was set for Barack Obama’s big Cairo speech on Thursday. After listening to his hour long speech, I understood what he was doing. Obama’s speech was an attack on Osama bin Laden and sought to seriously limit the ability of Al Qaeda to recruit more foot soldiers. In fact, Obama’s speech may even cause some of the current members of Al Qaeda to loose faith in the Al Qaeda mission and to defect (possibly providing us with valuable intelligence).
In that context, it was a good speech. I however had wished that he had mentioned other religious aside from the Abrahamic faiths when talking about diversity. It would have also been nice if he had talked about those who don’t hold faith-based beliefs. And while I am glad that our President quoted from the Treaty of Tripoli, I wish he would have reiterated what he said in Turkey about how America is not a Christian nation. Instead, it seemed from Obama’s speech that America is a Christian nation, Israel is Jewish nation, and the people of the Middle East are Muslims. This perception only reinforces the Crusade mentality which we are trying hard to dismiss.
But my biggest issue with Obama’s speech was this continued insistence to “stay the course” with the “two state solution.” When I first heard about the two-state solution plan, it seemed reasonable enough, but after much conversation with those in and out of the military and a great deal of though on the topic, it became clear that such a solution would only escalate the problem after a short respite. Instead of a conflict, we would be setting the stage for a war between two nation-states.
When two groups of people have such hate and distrust for each other, separating them out for anything less than a brief cease-fire only serves to foster distrust and hate. Only with a one state solution in which the Israeli and Palestinian people are forced to live side by side as neighbors will they be able to get to know each other as people who have the same hopes and needs as they do. Such a bold plan would certainly be more difficult, but it would also have a more long lasting effect which would create stability in the region and in the world.
Another aspect of this conflict that Obama failed to approach is that there are lots of people in the world that don’t want there to be peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people. There are religious fanatics in the world who believe that war between these two parties is a sign of the End of Days. And while most reasonable people might see the end of the world as a bad thing, these religious extremists on both sides see it as a glorious day in which their savior (Jesus or Mohammad) will return to take all the “real” Muslims or “real” Christians to Heaven. Osama bin Laden is one of those extremists and so he does not want peace. Al Qaeda does not want peace and neither did the Bush Administration.
Filed under: Current Events, Politics, Religion
