War in Gaza?

It appears the inevitable has happened.

Why, if most Israelis and most Palestinians genuinely yearn for peace, is there this constant violence between them?

Perhaps the biggest driver of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither Israel nor Palestine. It's all their neighbors. Perpetuation of this crisis is an essential part of the bread-and-circuses approach of oppressive governments in the Middle East. These countries spend many millions of dollars each year exporting illegal arms and militant propaganda into Palestine, because the often overbearing reaction of the Israelis to Palestinian resistance diverts the attention of the Arab street from more immediate oppression at home. Jews have been highly valued as scapegoats throughout history, after all.

Similarly, Christian Dominionists provide various forms of comfort and aid to proponents of Greater Israel as a way of immanentizing the eschaton. Supporting insane strategies to blow up the Dome of the Rock or reclaim Hebron fits well with some Evangelicals' apocalyptic dreams of total war in the Middle East. And of course for the Neo-Cons, having a regional ally completely beholding to American support can only be a Good Thing.

But foreign interference is not enough to explain this endless bloodshed. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have come to the seemingly rational conclusion that their opponent is insincere in expressing the desire for peace. And there are indeed reasons for perpetuating this conflict on both sides, though it costs both societies unrelenting suffering and global condemnation.

One of those reasons is now emerging, in a way I've predicted would happen for years. The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, though bloody and awful, has been necessary to the survival of both societies. Without the pressure of an immediate external threat, internal frictions would by now surely have led to civil war, as is currently happening in Gaza in the face of Israel's unilateral withdrawal.

There exists an internal dynamic in both Israeli and Palestinian societies with enormous destructive potential. Like the world as a whole, the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a Clash of Civilizations. But this clash isn't between two peoples or two cultures, as usually represented. The real clash is between the secular, liberal, globalist vision of civilization as an arena of human freedom and self-determination; and the fundamentalist, reactionary, tribalist vision of humanity as pawns in a cosmic war of good and evil.

This war is being fought not between Muslim and Christian, nor between Palestinian and Jew, but between moderate and fanatic. The war is not between Bush and bin Ladin. They are instead allies on the side of apocalypse, two heads of a single beast, bent on dragging the rest of the world into their nightmares. In the real War on Terror, "We have met the enemy, and they are us."

Israeli and Palestinian societies are both split into two major camps. One is a basically made up of people not that different from us, or the Europeans, or Japan. Call them the regular guys. They are the salt of the earth: people who just want to do their jobs, raise their families and worship their gods in reasonable peace, prosperity and freedom.

And then there are the other guys: the fundamentalists, the bad people. They are romantic and revolutionary dreamers, radicals of the sort who seemed like just another lunatic fringe until one day they had a strangle-hold on public policy. In Palestine they are best represented by Hamas, in Israel by followers of Rav Kook and other members of the religious settler movement I briefly joined in the 1990s.

Since that's the perspective I know best, it's the one I'll speak from. This side of the story is much less well-known in America. A river of ink has already been spilled on the parallel insanity among Palestinians, Syrian and Iranian manipulations of Hezbolah and Hamas, and the use of Saudi-funded Madrasas to indoctrinate youth into the cult of martyrdom.

Let me explain my take on the situation by means of an anecdote:

Most of my friends by now have seen my "schtender," the wooden book-stand I use when I'm translating something. I bought it at a shop in a part of Jerusalem called Mea Sharim, a little slice of 19th century Poland on the edge of the desert. At the entrance to the borrows and alleyways that make up the heart of the neighborhood, a huge sign hangs over the gate. It mentions the rules of modesty observed by religious Jews and asks visitors not to violate their community's standards. The only rule it specifically mentions is that women should not wear pants.

As I was walking into the shop, I saw a curious sight. A "secular" Israeli couple, dressed in shorts and tee shirts (as befits 110-degree weather), were trying to walk down the one major street running through Mea Sharim. A chasid, dressed in a brightly striped full-length topcoat and fur-trimmed hat, was darting back and forth in front of them, screaming insults and spitting on them. They probably felt as bewildered as I did the day I got lost in Kidron, and Palestinian children started hurling rocks at me.

By the time I came out of the shop with my new schtender, there was no longer any sign of the Israeli couple. There was instead a mob of about 50 chasidim, gathered into a tight circle, at the center of which was something akin to a schoolyard fight. The chasid who had accosted the couple, along with several of his friends, were defending his actions against a contingent from a different faction of chasidim, who accused them of sowing senseless hatred between Jews. Blows were exchanged; there were torn robes and bent spectacles, and a few bloody noses, but it was clearly a brawl between two gangs of nerds.

t was a war of words I was seeing, a dispute over the correct interpretation of Jewish law. It was like the dispute over whether it's okay to throw rocks at cars on the Sabbath, if you set the rocks aside specifically for that purpose before the Sabbath begins. Collecting rocks is clearly a forbidden form of work, but throwing them at passing drivers may be acceptable according to some interpretations.

When I returned to Mea Sharim a week later, all the roads were blockaded by border-guards, and the smell of burning tires was everywhere. Riots had broken out in religious neighborhoods across the country over the disinterment of an ancient graveyard to make way for a bypass. The soldiers, in their heavy green flack-jackets and riot-gear, even looked the part of Vogons. The symbolism was unmistakable, an almost apocryphal example of the conflict between tradition and progress, Jihad vs. McWorld.

Most religious Jews in Israel know the real fight is not against the Palestinians. After all, victory and defeat are in God's hands. The true war is being waged against values of the "hollow men," the secularists, a sinful and corrupt majority whose rejection of God's law leaves Israel exposed to foreign invasion and terrorist attack.

For years, the religious minority has manipulated the Israeli sense of tribal loyalty and exploited the systemic weaknesses of parliamentary government, in order to hold the majority hostage to a host of dangerous and ineffectual policies. The epitome of this is the practice of building illegal settlements expressly so that the army must come defend them, thereby extending the reach of the military into the West Bank and Gaza. And for years, in the name of national solidarity and fear of exposing weakness to the outside world, secular Israel has let this abusive relationship continue.

The nadir of this relationship came with the assassination of Rabin, a calculated and successful attempt to undercut the emerging dialogue between the Israeli government and the recently-formed PA. Subsequent rhetoric about avoiding a witch-hunt, combined with the stolid refusal of the Israeli religious right to accept or assign blame for an act clearly engineered by a handful of incendiary leaders, guaranteed that justice would not be done. Israel faced a crisis of conscious, and its failure to address this split in society contributed in large measure to the subsequent collapse of the Left and the rise of the Neo-Cons, led by "Bebe" Netanyahu. But the only alternative was civil war.

Two things you can be certain of: First, in the eyes of the settlers, Pat Robertson was exactly right: Sharon was cut down by God for betraying Israel to her foreign enemies. Second, if Olmert goes through with his plan to withdraw from the West Bank, there will be blood and bodies. There may well be bombings and IEDs. There could even be civil war, though that is an extreme scenario.