Future Discount: Israel and Palestine

We have almost all had some experience with the concept of future discount: the snooze button now versus the good things studying harder for the test might make possible in the future. The exhilaration and social cachet of your own car now against the future advantages of having saved up and taken the bus. For too many people, future discounting means weighing the escape the pill, the pipe, or the needle offers now, versus the chances for the uncertain possibilities of a better future.

Few forms of future discounting have the seductive nature, or pose the dangers, of apocalyptic religious belief. A coming apocalypse justifies gratifying the present at the expense of the future because God will call an end to the world. The righteous, whether they provide for the future or not, will receive their eternal reward. In that system, imprudence does not look like self indulgence, or as a pursuit of pleasure with consequences others may have to pay for. Rather, it appears as as an affirmation of faith.

 All of this brings us to the current, fragile peace between Israel and Palestine, a peace we all pray holds on and grows. To encourage that fragile hope, it might help to understand why so many people manifestly do not want peace. 

Start with a simple proposition, amply justified by demographics: the part of the Earth bounded by the Jordan River to the east, and the Mediterranean coast to the west, can be any two of: Jewish, democratic, united. A united and democratic nation in the area between the Jordan and the sea would not be Jewish, at least not in the way many Jewish people, both in Israel and the diaspora, want it to be. A country in that space that allowed only Jewish voters would not, in any meaningful way, qualify as a democracy. Only dividing the territory offers any hope for a Jewish, democratic state.

If the demographic realities of the region do not make the results of any other course clear, the events of the past three years certainly ought to. Yair Rosenberg has written about the dilemmas of Israeli and Jewish life in these times; so has Peter Beinart. As someone outside both Israeli and Jewish life, when I consider the road ahead for Israel, I think of two phrases. Thomas Jefferson invented a vivid metaphor to describe the problem of living with someone to whom you have done a great wrong, to: "have a wolf by the ears". The other phrase comes from an economic analysis of the war between Japan and the United States in the Combined Fleet website: "capacity utilization". In the original context it applies to the utilization of material economic assets, but it also applies to human potential. Any examination of most of the Muslim majority countries of Western Asia, whether political or educational, will show how much unused potential these countries have. The long term prosperity, if not the survival, of Israel depends on an equitable solution to the current conflict. 

Why, then, do so many people in the Israeli government disdain the one negotiated outcome offering the hope of preserving Israel as a Jewish, democratic state? Why do so many people with the power to sway opinion in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities reject the only clearly viable path forward? 

Religious traditions in Judaism, Christianity and Islam all include predictions of an apocalypse, a sudden revealing of the divine plan and an end to the corruption of the world. Too many people find in these texts an attractive alternative to facing the painful realities and dilemmas of our age. For many Jews, Christians, and Muslims, these problems include the profoundly difficult and painful process of building two states able to live in peace in the same tiny slice of land. A good future on the other side of this process depends on lawyers and politicians doing their jobs with clarity, realism, and compassion. Their work depends on religious leaders and popular figures of all kinds working for reconciliation. The path to this future, in other words, depends on the same chances as the narrow and terrifying climb to a sustainable climate, a just economic system, and a revitalized political environment.

Compared with this uncertainty, the simplicity and conviction of apocalyptic beliefs offers an illusion of comfort. It also makes the actual path to reconciliation much more difficult. The apocalyptic intransigence of Hamas rightly terrifies many Israelis. The people in the Israeli settlement movement with messianic attitudes, and their allies in the Israeli government, aim to thwart a Palestinian state. In doing so, they have made it impossibly reckless for any Palestinian leader to accept terms similar to those offered by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak for the foundation of a state. Both sides can easily point to powerful political and religious leaders pledged to veto any compromise. On both sides, refusal to reconcile, to create a future for the children of the region, can look like both a rational response to the fanaticism on the other side, and an act of faith in the ability of God to sort out the problems we create.

Despite the reasons to refuse to believe in a future of reconciliation, refusing to take responsibility for the future does not affirm the supremacy of the Divine in human affairs. It amounts to a refusal to act as the servant of the peace the scriptures of all three religions affirm.