Peace Don't Seem To Go Well With Certain Things

 

Is everything that exists in the Universe good, or does the Universe contains options, for us to choose between good and bad things, good and bad actions? I think we believe we must choose, right? That’s what life is about…

So, there is good and bad. Right and wrong. Some people seem to think that, if we believe solidly in right and wrong, we are lacking empathy, we are failing to see the other’s point of view. But why should we try to have empathy? Because it’s more fair than being blind to the other. “Fair”… or, in other words, “the right thing to do”.

So how to solve this paradox? Well, I think of empathy as seeing something of yourself in the other. Looking for familiar things, things that are common to all mankind. If you show me a picture of a muslin woman holding her baby child, that is familiar to me. But if you show me a terrorist invading a house to burn a family alive, sorry, that doesn’t belong to my world. I will not accept that. It’s not part of the common things we must see in all human beings.

Think. We have a right to believe in something. A right to believe certain things are wrong. We all have things we believe are wrong. And we have a right to talk about it. Of course we must always seek for the essential, avoiding cheap moralism, but yes, we can, and should, talk about right and wrong, otherwise we can’t use our vision of the world to build anything bigger than ourselves… How can we build things if we can’t convince other people of better ways to do things?

And when it comes to people with different cultural background? Do we have a right to talk with them about our vision of right and wrong? Well, if not, we must forget other countries, only try to do something good where we live and be indifferent to the pain in other places of the World.

But of course, if people protest in America and Europe about things that happen in the Middle East, for instance, if people in South America can join north American protests against racism, it’s because we believe all human beings must have something in common, so we can have an opinion about things that happen outside our country.

So why it’s so hard for so many people to have empathy with Israel? Why it’s so hard to look at dictatorships and see responsibility for wars and tragedies? Why is it so easier to blame a modern democracy? The extremist Islamic justification for their deeds come from the idea that Israel shouldn’t be there. I’m definitely not one to go defending everything England ever did along the centuries, but the division of the British Mandate of Palestine seems right. There were too people who claimed the land, both had their reasons, there was space for both, and the land was divided in half. And it was voted by the UN, and everybody voted yes.

So why so much bias against Israel? Some people say Israel is “Imperialist.” Well, obviously you can’t say that it is wrong for Israel to be there because they are Imperialists, and they are Imperialists because they are there wrongly, that would be a circular thought. You say Israel is there for Imperialist reasons, they say they are there because it’s their Historical Land, the only place they ever had a country. It is indeed a land historically connected to Israel, there are ancient documents that proved it, and they indeed were persecuted everywhere else and always prayed to go back there. You can study their prayers, they do say that.

As for the alleged “Imperialist reasons”, when did Israel ever had an Empire? When was Israel anything other than a small country that live by their own resources?

I think people label Israel “Imperialist” simply because they associate Israel with the “Western World”. Well, a lot of Jews went to America, where they prospered more than in any other place during their exile, and they obviously have ties with that country. Also, they try to have good relations with the Democratic World. Nothing strange or criminal in that.

And why would anybody consider all that is “Western” wrong? Mozart wasn’t the Fuhrer, Descartes wasn’t Napoleon. People in the Western World suffered under tyrants, and also found ways to seek freedom.

It seems that there is something in the “Western Culture”, as a whole, in all aspects, that a lot of people consider “Evil”, especially people in the Human Sciences. It’s as if all cultures that are “non-Western” were legitimate expressions of their people, and the Western ones were “artificial” greedy cultures. There is nothing artificial in the Bible, it’s an ancient religious book – good and bad things were done with different interpretations of it – as with all ancient texts – or are the modern aspects of Western Civilization that bother people?

But we are all in the modern world, aren't we? And anyway, no culture, nobody's religion, is a pure manifestation of primal instincts, they are all attempts to direct our energy towards something higher. Also, no culture had, five hundred years ago, ready easy answers to all our modern problems. The challenge is to connect to our essential principles and derive new answers.

Israel is a great example of a nation that respects the old and tries to get the best of the modern world, that respects the spiritual identity of the people at the same time that it builds a democratic and tolerant country.

We shouldn't be conniving with nations that try to impose an old World that can't change even in the smallest detail. That refuse to use reason to dialogue with other nations, to learn with other people's experiences. That will never be tolerant with their own people or consider other nations truly deserving of consideration. That always go in the opposite direction of peace.

The result of not considering those tyrannies wrong is that now we have dictatorships attacking a democracy and we can’t stand firmly on the side of the democracy, because we don’t want to accept the fact that in our modern world there is still a justifiable war to be fought.

Hamas made a diabolic attack on oct 7th killing more than a thousand people in the most horrific way and is still holding hostages. The Houthis attacked with missiles from Yemen, same as the Hezbollah from Lebanon. The world failed to eradicate this terror groups. And now their main financier, Iran, directly attacked Israel with 180 missiles in one day.

But because Israel built a defense system and collaborates with America to neutralize missiles, and built safe bunkers and shelters for their people, and evacuated their northernmost cities, they were able to protect themselves from the worst consequences of the last attacks.

The other side is not so worried, they will not build shelters for their population, only for the leaders. They will not evacuate the areas that will be attacked. In fact, Israel sent thousands of messages telling the population of Lebanon to leave the South because they were going to attack the terrorist bases in the area, but the leaders of those places encourage the people not to leave. Then, obviously, the civil casualties will be higher than we would like, no matter how ethically Israel works.

But most of the press doesn’t seem to be seeing all that is happening, they just count the dead. And people either blame Israel for existing and say that they deserve all the horror, or just want it all to stop, want the world to go back to a peace that never really existed in the middle east, a peace that they never bother to check if it’s really there, and don’t actively work for.

Because we should defend freedom. As I said before, of course I don’t want any third World War, but we must state clearly that we consider dictatorships, tyrannies, simply wrong. Otherwise we are just letting the evil grow, and crying for an easy imaginary peace when it all explodes.

We should face the truth, there are countries that are directing their energy and resources to the destruction of others , that always say No to peace.

I wish we lived in an universe where the civil population of countries ruled by violent leaders was safe from harm, but obviously, in reality, this is very hard to achieve, especially if the World turns a blind eye.

Why is it so hard to take a stand against these tyrants? Well, some of the people bought an ideology sold by teachers who spend all the times seeing only the bad things in Western Society.

Some other people seem to like to imagine that the peace we have in the Western world is the “normal”, and the wars in other parts of the world are aberrations, and it would be very easy for everybody to just have the peace we have here, in an instant.

These people don’t give the proper weight to the news of authoritarian theocrats gaining more and more power, or even to armies of terrorists growing. How come that after two World Wars in the beginning of the 20^th century, the Cold War, we so quickly forgot that this world is dangerous, at least while we have violent tyrants with power?

Even seeing all that happened to the Jews in world war II, and seeing antisemitism gaining force in the Arab World, how did we slipped so fast to a kind of a dream where all we have to do for peace is say “I don’t like War”? Sometimes it seems this people just want the “bad news” to stop so they can go back to sleep…

And the fact that now these two groups of people, the ones that hate the Western World and especially Israel, and the ones that just want all to “just stop”, a lot of times seem to be marching together, signals that something strange is happening. Like “peace” marching side by side with the ones that hate peace the most.

I too want peace, I pray it comes as soon as possible. But if we want peace, leaders that swear death to other countries, government that finance terrorist groups, must be our bigger enemies. There is nothing wrong in being their enemy, you are not harming the population of those countries. On the contrary, you should wish for them the same freedom you enjoy. The freedom that those leaders will not give, now or ever.

We cannot use “empathy” as an excuse to be silent about what we know is good, and what we know is bad, what we wish for ourselves and others, that should be the same, and what we don’t. Tyranny is bad, and there is nothing wrong in having a clear vision of right and wrong, good and bad. That’s what we need the most.