History repeats itself with mind-numbing regularity. I had just put down Canadian General Romeo Dallaire’s account of his failed United Nations peacekeeping mission to Rwanda in 1994 when another war exploded in the Middle East, and yet another feeble UN mission donned their blue berets and stumbled into the line of fire between the belligerents.
Within days, one of their observation posts had been blown apart by supposedly wayward Israeli precision bombing, another surgical strike in South Lebanon, four blue berets dead and the perpetrators denying everything. Just a mistake, they said. Besides, the so-called peacekeepers, like the Lebanese civilian population, should have known better than to hang around in a war zone. Especially when the Israeli army and air force are in the vicinity. The soldiers of Zion allow nothing to block their vengeful path.
The whole world, once again, appears to be sitting on its hands as the innocents are slaughtered. “War is hell,” as Marvin Gaye gently wailed in his album What’s Going On? What’s going on indeed?
War, from all angles, seems to be senseless, except to the politicians and generals who insist on making it happen. Condoleezza Rice looks on, apparently unmoved, as the remains of babies, women and children are removed from the rubble in makeshift body bags. The tears of hysterical men tearing through the chaos go unheard. So much for the feminine touch.
But what’s the war all about? And could it be, as all the signals seem to be saying, that this is a war that is not going to end — that indeed we are seeing the beginning of World War III, with no one announcing that hostilities, in this conflagration that will ultimately consume us all, have indeed been initiated.
Not that I want to scare anybody. Not that I want to scare myself. But that seems to be the way things are heading.
The problem in the Middle East, as my old friend Sacha, who happens to be Jewish, never stops reminding me, is that it is a lethal confrontation between cousins. The Arabs and the Jews are all Semites and neither side can claim exclusive right to that title. But this itself seems to be the reason for claiming exclusivity and ultimately for lobbing bombs and rockets at each other. A broedertwis (brotherly conflict), as we might say in South Africa. Except that it has been going on for an unconscionable time. Several thousand years, to be precise.
The rest of us get tired of this nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that the killing, the outrageous destruction of the infratructure of sovereign states such as Lebanon, the roughshod treatment of other people’s native lands, stops.
The Muslim community of the world is unanimous about where it stands — it is an unacceptable Israeli invasion. The Jewish community across the world, and no less in South Africa, is divided. To pray for Israel or to condemn its excesses. In the end, politics is the problem.
All this seems to smack of a central problem of crisis of identity — what and who you choose to identify with. Many Jews are terminally defensive of the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist at whatever cost. These include Jews who also choose to defend the right to be part of countries such as South Africa, excercising rights of citizenship in two places at once. Why not? It’s useful to carry two passports sometimes. Belt and braces, as the old folks used to say.
But in identifying with one thing, are you not condemning the other? South Africa, ancient site of implacable identity clashes turned rainbow nation, has finally officially stuck its neck out and condemned Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Under these circumstances, can any of us straddle the fence and support both sides of the war at the same time? Can we be both pro-Israel and its wrath, and have sympathy with those innocent civilians who fall in the way of that fiery holocaust from the sky? I don’t think so.
And what does Hizbullah stand for? It stands for another kind of identity — the profile of the oppressed, seeing itself as permanently at war with a colonising power, in this case Israel, and its supporters (big guys walking softly, in their own words, and carrying big sticks) and a powerful, post-Crusade world that seems to talk in profane language. This cannot be brushed over.
And so the rockets rain down on the Holy Land. Holy to all the sides that have historically existed there for centuries. In the streetside cafes of Beirut and Haifa, people talk to each other like brothers and sisters, almost touching cousinly noses across a great religious divide.
But in the bigger picture, those same people are ranged against each other in implacable opposition, based on ancient issues of identity and man-made belief. Cousin Jew is inbred to hate Cousin Arab, even though they drink the same coffee and eat from the same field of wheat and lambs brought to the slaughter, sometimes even out of the same dish.
The walls go up, the bombs rain down. Where to now?
It is worth noting that these issues of identity, among others, will be the subject of an exploratory debate at the inaugural session of the Saturday Club, Melville Grill, 7th Street, Saturday August 5, Melville, Johannesburg, at 3 pm. Who are we? Who do we think we are?
Not that I am allowed to advertise any such events. But it will be well worth looking at what we think of ourselves as South Africans, Africans and citizens of this war-torn world from that relatively neutral space. Be there.