More about Israel and Palestine

I want to follow up on my last posting, and the comment by Dima.

I wonder whether peace and prosperity are not necessary conditions for developing and maintaining the strong ethical health of a people.

I am concerned about the moral effect of the long running conflict on the people of Israel. All Israelis go into the army, and are trained not only to defend Israel against foreign aggression, but to carry out the duties of an occupying military force. Indeed, they all continue to serve in the military, and most apparently spend time in the occupation forces facing angry and dissatisfied Palestinians and enforcing the rules that those Palestinians dislike so much. The people whose recent ancestors escaped from European ghettos are now keeping Palestinians walled in. The schools in Israel must produce children ready to live and serve in this system. The citizens of Israel live with the knowledge that their government has for generations defied international law, and either are fully aware of the suffering of Palestinians or are willing to live in ignorance of that suffering.

I am concerned with the moral effect of the long running conflict on the Palestinian people. Millions of them continue to live in refugee camps, in conditions which can not be conducive to the moral growth of the majority. Hatred not of injustice, but of those judged guilty of unjust behavior appears to characterize many Palestinians. Many Palestinians are willing to kill innocent Israelis, many more must support the militants, and still more are unable to find policy alternatives to terrorism that they are willing to support. Schools are a mess, and kids are being educated by teachers who have themselves suffered from injustice for decades. While a moral giant, such as Ghandi, can occasionally emerge from a poor, dispirited, subject people it seems to me more likely that those conditions are more likely to be conducive to the production of criminals and immorality. (Indeed, Ghandi was himself the product of a high status family who was educated to become a lawyer.)

Europeans fought war after war for generation after generation, but now seem to have found a way to live together in peace, perhaps as a result of their prosperity. Canadians, Americans, and Australians seem to be learning to live peacefully in multi-ethnic societies, and their immigrant populations to live in peace with the remnants of their indigenous peoples. I hope that such examples can continue to exist and to proliferate. The Irish or Balkans experiences suggest, however, that peoples can continue to hate each other for centuries, continuing internecine violence for extremely long periods of time. I hope that Israelis and Palestinians can avoid that fate, and that the peoples of the United States and other countries can encourage and help them to do so.