First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

The Gaza strip: a failure to find common ground

It’s just what Barack Obama doesn’t need as he prepares to take his oath of office as the 44th president of the USA: another Israeli/Palestinian war inflaming passions anew all over the Arab world—and much of the Muslim world outside too, from Iran to Indonesia. What will his middle name, Hussein, count for in this intense firefight?

Well, maybe something, but only if he moves rapidly to change the long-standing American emphasis on supporting, by both word and deed, the Israeli side at the expense of the Palestinian. It is as simple—and as complicated—as that. After the Bush years, during which the ”clash of civilizations” became the de facto interpretation of American, and to some extent European, policy in the region, the West quickly needs to de-escalate its fixation with what it often sees as the rabid policies of the Muslim world. And it must restore a sense of humility in dealing with a great world-wide civilization, albeit one with its share of bad apples.

Comparison, even in the time of Al Qaeda, does not always work in Christendom’s favour. The West cannot overlook its near-conquest by the Nazis, whose attempt to eliminate the Jews came out of a country that was in many ways the fulcrum of modern Christianity. Nor can we ignore the inroads that atheistic Marxism made in Europe; or indeed an everyday crime rate in western nations that far exceeds that of any Muslim country, especially those in the middle east.

”It is human to hate” wrote Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, who died last week, in his too influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. “In this new [post-Cold War] world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilization. The rivalry of the super powers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.”

Huntington spent many of his book’s pages attempting to persuade his audience that ”the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. IT IS ISLAM, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

It is not surprising that so myopic a conviction led him to see a future where the West would end up in an all-out nuclear war with Islam and its apparent ally (and another perennial antagonist of the West, as he saw it), Synic civilization.

There is little historical evidence for Huntington’s views. Although, as he does, one can argue convincingly that Islam almost from its beginning was a religion of the sword, Christianity, once the Emperor Constantine converted, was absorbed into the militaristic culture of the Roman Empire. In succeeding centuries there was indeed, often and regularly, a clash of civilizations. But there was one spectacular difference between the two religions. Islam, by and large, was a tolerant religion, that respected the ”Peoples of the Book,” giving them always when it ruled over them a great deal of autonomy. (The Ottoman Empire was even more tolerant than the unusually benign Hapsburg Empire.) The Christians were rarely tolerant, always angling to recapture Jerusalem—which they considered part of their heritage—and unable to come to terms with Islamic and Jewish minorities in their midst.

Since 1914 the West, now in the ascendancy, has inflicted one grievous blow after another on the Muslim world; particularly on the peoples of the Middle East, but also on Afghanistan. It should have come as no surprise that there was an almighty reaction, even if no-one could have imagined quite the ferocity that al Qaeda brought to bear. Yet without the equally almighty reaction of President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair it is quite possible that with more temperate policies al Qaeda would have withered away, as its Egyptian roots already have.

The West lives in a cloud of self deception, and Huntington was only a part of it. The war with Iraq is now being hailed as close to a victory. But intimidation by continuous superior firepower is no victory, as the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon demonstrate. The US has found its own kind of Petains in Iraq who, as he did, are trying to preserve their land from further destruction. But we shouldn’t mistake them for the true leaders of opinion. Over the long run, the Iraqis will hate the western world.

All might have been different if the West had remained true to the precepts of its own Greek and Christian founding and the wise notions of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, with their emphasis on the importance of reason and their enthusiasm for human rights and the substitution of dialogue for war with people we disagree with.