Moral Clarity part 9: The history of it...not

I learned something from a podcast discussion between Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari and Sam Harris. Sometimes you've got to forget about history. Let bygones be bygones. Sometimes putting history aside is essential to dealing with the present, if you want to have a future. 

Harari was talking about the current conflagration in the Middle East, a place particularly obsessed with history. For his part, Harari has written some insightful books about history that provide wisdom and understanding about our past and how it reflects on where we may be heading in the future. I suppose this makes it all the more puzzling that he's saying history is not the answer to this current problem. In fact, he's saying it's part of the problem.

Harari's message resonated with me in relation to all of the commentary I've been seeing on YouTube, TV, and articles online, that emphasize understanding the historical context of the conflict. This conflict, if it suffers from anything, it's an overemphasis on history. Like Harari I've come to the conclusion that history has its limits. In the Harris interview, Harari says something like (I paraphrase), no political dispute in history has ever been settled by trying to right the wrongs of the past. By definition, a conflict has two competing views of history, and two opposing narratives which usually includes two sets of victims, and any attempt to reconcile them is doomed to failure. Politics is by definition the art of the possible. In order to arrive at a political resolution, and that's what we are after (as opposed to a military resolution), we must take the conflict out of the absolutist realm of moral claims (ie. Justice, punishment, retribution) and focus on present realities in order to be able to negotiate and compromise. 

From this standpoint, it's history that's the problem. The Palestinians are stuck in a mindset in which correcting the 'wrong' of the past (the so-called 'nakhba') is the prerequisite to peace. Unfortunately, that means Israel should never have been established 75 years ago, because it's the result of what they call a 'colonial' injustice. That's one dimension. Another, related to living in the past, is religious. A great many Palestinians live in a 12th century messianic Islamic dreamworld (admittedly there are Israeli types like that as well). We don't have much control over that. But those people are aided and abetted by guilt-ridden Ivory Tower academics and idealistic students who champion their historical claims, and in the process advocate (some unwittingly) for the extermination of Israel. It's an odd alliance in which 'enlightened' westerners end up supporting mass murdering dark-age jihadists, and turning them into heroes. A bit of a related aside: I've always objected to the use of the term 'Zionist'. Zionism was a late 19th/early 20th century movement that advocated for the creation of a modern Jewish homeland. Calling Israelis Zionists is like using the term "Whigs" - what the British Americans called themselves prior to the Revolutionary War - to describe Americans. The day Israel declared its independence in 1948 was the day Zionism had achieved its objective and ceased to exist as a project. The reason that Arabs continue to use the term 'Zionist' to describe Israelis is to delegitimize the State of Israel. It's a way of putting a doubt into people's minds that Israel is a fact (or that it should be a fact). Israel is not just a reality, it has demonstrated the strength and resilience of its existence repeatedly over the last seven and a half decades. The sooner the Palestinians, the Arab world (and their misguided western allies) realize that Israel isn't going anywhere, the sooner peace will be possibile. If history teaches us anything in this case, it's that sometimes you have to put history aside to move forward.