Faith & Knowledge

Faith Before Knowledge

By Roy D. Follendore III

March 29, 2002

Another teenage girl from Palestinian blew herself up today. She could not live with what was happening to her people. Saudi Arabia has now defined the terms for Arab peace. "Give back the land taken from Palestinians" they say. America keeps sending back the same Marine General to discuss peace. What does a Marine General know of the fine political art of negotiating peace? What did this communicate?

American politicians and Jews keep pumping money and arms to Israel. Jews keep stealing land and property. They go and come with tanks into refugee camps and bulldoze buildings. They kill police who try to resist tanks with rifles. Israel continues to ignore the fact that their decisions drive young men and women to suicide. The machine mankind has created keeps grinding out terror and the Israel General that was in charge of the failed Lebanon invasion that killed so many is in charge again.

Who are the terrorists? How do we define terrorism. Are the Israelis or Palestinians terrorists? Why are Israelis still allowed to take the homes and land of the Palestinians? After all of these years, why are the majority of Palestinians still living in refugee camps? With all of the obvious corruption taking place, why would anyone want to move to Israel to live?

I frankly don't have a clue.

What I do know begins with history after World War Two. Israel was established without the consent of the people who owned the land of Palestine at that time and that fact is the beginning of the deadly poison of the fruit of this tree. But this problem began with far more problems which has come to haunt the 21st century. Israel is a country that was founded from the monstrous remnants of a German society who had rejected the concept of the Jews very existence. The Jews were a people who knew terrible hardship and poverty first hand because the Nazi Government did their best to kill their race. By surviving, the Jews from Germany became a people who inherited the systematic German and Soviet military ways of dealing with social and religious dissidents.

Bad things do rub off on good people. The Nazi and Soviet way of winning wars is to crush the enemy, to put all enemies including entire families into prisons and concentration camps, and to destroy all hope and to sustain the power and authority of the ruling minority. For the Nazi it was a means to obtain world domination. For the state of Israel it is national policy established out of the object of their fear. Every issue of Israel's identity involves some aspect of that fear. It is the fear of some loss of Jewish existence or the fear of the loss of their identity as a culture. It may be considered a strength of eternal vigilance to some, but it is also a psychological weakness. Out of this weakness the identification of an enemy, anywhere in the world has become the primary objective. The principle problem is that the greatest enemy of this philosophy becomes change. The creation of enemies by seeking them out, combined with the idea that is OK to win any and all battles at any cost and keep the land gained can both create and propagate the very kinds of losses that one is trying to avoid.

What the resulting armed camp of Israel seems to have lost sight of is part of their own history. It is the simple fact that the result you get when you take away everything from a society is a hardened enemy willing to die for their cause. Hitler understood that if you are willing to go so far as to destroy all hope for a civilized people, you had better destroy all people in the society. Otherwise there is no end to the violence. This was the reason it was called the final solution, and when that decision is made it is the moment when you lose what is remaining of your soul. There are some Jews within Israel who recommend this option today, and it has come to be seen as the only option outside of truthful and faithful negotiation. Truthful and faithful negotiation risks everything and fear raises it ugly face again.

Israel is obviously the stronger military power in terms of weapons, but both Israel and the Palestinians appear at least equal in their resolve. If Israel continues on a non-negotiated path, unwilling to use their weapons to exterminate all of the Palestinians, then their only option is to continue with this cycle of terror. For the current Israeli government, it is a no win situation in which the Palestinians risk everything on the fact that this path too will eventually destroy Israel.

The single peaceful option that can take place from this conflict is a single state of Jews and Muslims in brotherhood. Where human rights are equal without prejudice to religion. Where people vote equally. Where settlement must be made for compensation of property, including those who no longer have proof of injustice. Where money, jobs, shelter and opportunities to prosper exist for Arabs and Jews. To coexist will require far more than the mere delivery of lands and the creation of separate states. It will require the opening up of hearts and minds of Jews and Muslims. It will require the existence of a state of personal loyalty to honor above the state of the government. And it will require the willingness to change old ideas and old ways in order to embrace the new future of a new civilization.

Without all of these things, the murdering machine of terror will relentlessly and mindlessly continue to take lives. People of the middle east need to work this out for themselves so that a just conclusion is reached. It may require the last of the warring generation to die of old age before this can happen. One thing is certain. Someday there will be peace and when that happens all of the violence will be seen as waste, just as it has been with all other wars. In the mean time and regardless of the decisions made, it makes no sense for the United States to continue to support a mindless machine of terrorism.

"Faith must come before knowledge."

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