Brett Stephens wrote in the NYT on 10/9/24 that it is in everyone’s best interest that Israel win its wars with the Iranian proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis. Without victory, he believes, there can be no hope of an enduring peace in the Mideast, with amity between Israel and the Arab states and security for Palestinians.
He made it sound persuasive and given his education and experience as a journalist, including time as an editor in Jerusalem, his opinions have to carry some weight. At the same time, I wonder if he can name any war in history that has ended with the kind of peace and mutual friendship that he envisions for the Mideast. World War II does not count, but if someone insists that it has to be included, remember that the eventual resolution was dependent entirely on the Marshall plan in Europe and the rebuilding of Japan’s economy in Asia. Moreover, we have endured 80 years of wars and other armed conflicts that are echoes of World War II.
There cannot be victory in the sense that Stephens envisions unless there is a workable plan for rebuilding and reconstituting the peoples of Lebanon, the Gaza strip, and an independent Palestinian state. The rebuilding will have to overcome the horrors of so many thousands of people killed, wounded, displaced, and the destruction of everything they had known as home. That will not be easy to do.
No one has forgotten the unforgivable events of October 7. Neither can anyone overlook the Israeli response that has created pain and suffering for so many people. It is hard to imagine that it hasn’t created a sense of unrequited hatred of Israelis for Palestinians and Palestinians for Israelis. Healing will be more than difficult but what may not be possible for humans is possible for God, and we should not forget that. It is, after all, the holy land. Throughout its history God has acted when all seemed lost and always through leadership ordained and empowered to act as agents of healing and restoration, not revenge.
The military capabilities of Israel’s local enemies might be degraded to the point where they can no longer mount any significant military threat to Israel. The force behind the enemy resources is, however, an ideology backed by religious and nationalistic fervor. It is resistant to military defeat. Defeating ideological convictions requires something entirely different than military might, and I do not believe that Netanyahu has any idea what that might be or how to do it. Take our own Civil War, for example. It took nearly 100 years to defeat the conviction that defending the “lost cause” would enable the South to rise again. Germany has experienced an uncomfortable moment when old-time Nazis seem to have recovered some political power. We have our own brand of the same thing on the ballot this November. Ideologies have staying power and can be defeated only with more persuasive values and virtues offering a more secure and promising life.
It is very hard to defeat an evil ideology, In the Middle East it is even harder when each side is guilty of committing evil on the other without any sign of repentance by anyone. What should be done? I am in no position to offer useful ideas nor do I have wisdom to share. I only know that the victory leading to peace Brett Stevens hopes for cannot be achieved through military action, and in the Middle East it cannot be achieved without God.
You are speaking truth, friend. As a friend says, if this situation doesn’t break your heart, you aren’t paying attention; and there is blood on everyone’s hands.
Amen Steven, nicely written and carried to a thoughtful question. I would only want to amplify on this sentence:
“Throughout its history God has acted when all seemed lost and always through leadership ordained and empowered to act as agents of healing and restoration, not revenge.”
Having been studying the Psalms the last couple of years, I’m amazed at how often the Psalmist solicits God’s killing off all the “enemies” of God’s people. That makes the point of how necessary the New Testament message is and will always be. David B.
I want to further amplify Steve’s insight into the nature and history of ideological violence, or as I’d rather put it given the Middle East, the variations of Messianic violence on “both sides.”
The key to Messianic violence is the relation of means to ends. If the end of any action is in “the life after death” (however this is conceived), then that end justifies the use of *any* means necessary in *this* life.
Military action however it imposes death is necessarily restricted to being a means to impose death in *this* life. And that imposed death cannot affect an end that is itself rooted in “the life after death.”
Messianic violence is the promise that death imposed in this life will be redeemed in the life after death. There cannot be a military “solution” to such a promise. And this sense of promise is perpetually resurrected by each side in the very long history of Messianic violence in the Middle East.
So Stephens is strangely naive for a man of his experience and intelligence. The notion that the Nazi ideology was unconditionally defeated at the end of World War II simply refuses to pay attention to its slow but sure resurrection in parts of the former East Germany, a resurrection that is accelerating with the acceleration of immigrant migration from the Global South.
The only way out of Messianic violence, at least as far as I can see, is a radical change in how the relation of means and ends is conceived. The clue to such a radical change is in Incarnation within the Christian tradition, and here it is telling that Incarnation is alien to the Islamic tradition.
So Israel may well impose a military “solution” on Gaza and southern Lebanon, but it will become only a variation on the ongoing moral disaster of the Occupation of the West Bank unless there is an alternative to the promise of the *next* life in the Middle East. What could that alternative look like now in *this* life?
This is really a tough one. At a minimum the fighting needs to stop, but beyond that, it’s difficult to see any light at the end of this tunnel, In my opinion, Netanyahu only adds to the problems. His right wing mentality and refusal to even consider a two state solution in the future only exacerbates an already desperate situation. Bob.