I am a church-going Christian. At the same time, I am in fear for my earthly reputation and immortal soul because I have reached the conclusion the bitter conflict between the state of Israel and Hamas is the result of the propaganda of yesterday. Biblical propaganda.
Beliefs, more often than not, are engendered by skilfully constructed lies. I boldly doubt that Israel's right to exist in the place where it exists is a re-affirmation of the will of the one (and only) true God. I see the faith of Islam growing stronger worldwide, whereas Christianity, despite the profitable showmanship of fundamentalist churches, is in decline in Europe and North America. I wonder why so many people in North America accept the belief modern Israel exists in order to fulfill the plan of a divine being that they themselves reject.
I do understand why the American taxpayers have poured, and continue to pour, untold billions into the modern state of Israel. It has nothing to do with religion or with a moral imperative to recognize the horrors of the Holocaust. It is to uphold a faithful ally among the oil-rich states of the Middle East.
I also understand why extremists such as Hamas want to see the Israeli state obliterated. The hatred began with the Crusades where religion, expressed with bloodied swords and mounds of silent corpses, was in fact a fight for power and plunder. I understand the hatred still grows out of the United Nations decision to create a new Israel by dispossessing thousands of Arab landholders whose forbears had been in the Holy Land for a longer time than the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In 2012, refugee camps held over five million Palestinians, in four generations, who no longer had a piece of land they could call their own. I also understand that Arabs who expected to be rewarded for fighting against their Turkish masters after the Great War never became citizens of sovereign nations. Instead, the territories where they lived were mandated to Britain, France and Italy. It was no coincidence the British Navy at the time was converting from coal to fuel oil.
Ukraine, too, has endured a Holocaust. In 1932 and 1933, Ukraine was denuded of foodstuffs by the communists in Moscow. Ukrainians starved. Some sources place the death toll at 7.5 million. Further back in time, Ukraine and the Balkan states were buttresses against the incursion of the Islamic Ottoman Turks into Europe. The Turkish invasion was not about making Islam the religion of Europe. It was about wealth and power. It began with the seizure of the fabulously rich Christian empire of Byzantium and ended with the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1682.
The war that began in 1914 was, to my mind, the Great Unnecessary War. Although imbedded in moralistic justifications then and now, it was about empires and would-be empires gaining and retaining colonies. Millions of youths died in battle. Countless refugees died. Thousands of historic buildings were destroyed. Only the munitions makers profited.
The imperfections in the treaty that ended the First World War were the seeds that produced the second one.
The conflict in Ukraine is not about ethnicity or nationalism or even past events. It happened because Ukraine wants to align itself with Western Europe.
When I tell myself there would be fewer wars if there was only one religion or no religion at all, my reasoning is faulty. The shadowy people with their hands on the levers of power keep their own secrets. They would find another way.
