It’s been another bad week for humanity.
Why do some people want to kill each other so much? Why are so many children being killed? And is there anything we can do?
In 2001 I used to cover the Middle East, albeit from a studio in North London for a news agency which supplied a web service called America Online (AOL). I would phone a rabbi one day and an imam the next to try and achieve balance over time.
Lots of journalists love covering the Middle East, but I hated it. It was depressing.
I got a fairly equal amount of hate mail from Israeli and Palestinians – i.e. a lot. You could often work out what the interviewee was going to say from their surname.
Although the worst was targeted at people who broke out of their positions: they’d get flak from both sides instead of just one.
The hatemail, incidentally, tended to feature reference to dogs, pigs and incest suggestions, whoever sent it. A strange thing to have in common.
It seemed to be such a predictable stalemate. A bit like Northern Ireland. It seemed like the craziest 5% on either ‘side’ of the conflict were dominating proceedings and defining the news agenda.
I’ve subsequently worked in several areas affected by conflict; and learnt a lot more about its nature. If I knew back them, what I know now, as they say.
Because, as a colleague pointed out, most people cover conflict without knowing anything about its nature, like reporting a football match without knowing the laws of the game.
What we know about conflicts, and how they end, has the potential to be a very positive and powerful force.
It may be crass to be pointing this out as body bags, some of them tiny, are pictured amongst the rubble.
That we are less violent as a species than ever and even some seemingly unendable conflicts are a thing of the past is of no comfort if you are unlucky enough to be living in one of the areas currently experiencing invasion or shelling.
That you are less likely to die violently in 2014 than at just about any point in the history of the world presumably provides no comfort.
Importantly, we know much more about how violent conflicts end and – just as relevant – how violent conflicts don’t end.
You hear a lot that religions are the cause of all wars. I think I probably thought this at some point. Not least because the ‘God told me this land is ours’ argument is hard to overturn in people’s hearts and minds.
It is an apparently convincing – and comforting – argument. It offers an apparent solution. But there are some major flaws with this argument.
Conflicts do not end when everybody becomes atheist. Whilst many feature religion, several others do not.
From Hitler to Stalin, via Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide there have been several war-like non believers and violent conflicts that have nothing to do with religion.
Clearly there are people of all faiths who are non violent.
And a mass de-conversion of people who have a religions faith is not a practical option. There are one and a half a billion Muslims, two billion Christians, a billion or so Hindus… who will make everyone atheist?
It would involve people rejecting their entire belief systems, forcing people to go against the things they learnt as children from loving families.
Perhaps most importantly, tolerance of other people’s ideas beats turning people around to your point of view. This is a really important aspect of lasting conflict resolution.
It’s a logistical and practical fact in managing conflict: you will have to work with people who don’t share your outlook on things.
This presents a tough problem, because you don’t want to be tolerant of people doing very bad things. But generally this is not many people. The craziest 5% thing. The problem is that some people look at the craziest 5% and see them as indicative of the other ‘side’ and either become exasperated or justified in their own violence.
I keep putting ‘side’ in quote marks, because this can be a misleading term. We are used to thinking in a binary fashion. Mac versus PC, Left versus Right, Palestine versus Israel, Good versus Evil.
Possibly the idea that there are two sides in a conflict is part of the problem. Because what we do know is that conflicts end when people shift from their deeply entrenched, culturally-reinforced and often simplified positions, towards thinking more about their many more usually mutual interests which kickstarted those positions in the first place.
If two groups compete over land, a classic resource-based conflict, they often get lost in the ownership and flags, or the language and gods, issues rather than the benefits deriving from the land.
Resolution lives in this common ground: here both groups can agree that they want the economy to work and the schools to be good and freedom of movement – human rights basically.
Lots of things get in the way of this discussion, not least acts of violence themselves.
It’s unfortunate that conflict resolution through violence is such an enduring and successful meme, cinematically in particular. There is no relationship between military might and moral right, but we’ve got used to it. People feel paradoxically safer with more weapons in the world.
I had an interesting online discussion with an Israeli guy on Facebook about the Middle East early in the week. It had started out with a comment about the bias of the BBC made by a British friend who complained that there was bias, that the suffering of Israelis had not been mentioned enough.
I expressed my surprised at this, and we got into a conversation. It was a respectful discussion, even though we disagreed a lot, and it was interesting to hear an Israeli view. It was useful to hear this:
‘What is Israel to do? Just let Hamas get on with it and not retaliate because they may hit a nearby house?’
This is an interesting question. The idea that the only way you can respond to missile attacks is through more missile attacks which cause more missile attacks seems strange to me, as a pacifist.
I responded:
“If your child had been killed by an Israeli rocket, would you be a) more inclined to peace or b) looking for retaliation. If enough people answer b), then it’s the wrong thing to do. Given this started over the awful deaths of Israeli teenagers, lots of people will think b) So all the options I’d explore would not involve sending missiles. So I’d negotiate, I wouldn’t have sealed off Hebron, stop illegal settlements, I’d basically do the things that Amnesty International recommends…
“Sending missiles into Palestine does not work, it hasn’t worked in the past and it continues to not work. Once you think this it becomes a murderous act…”
It went on a bit longer than this, of course: and I hope I’m not being unfair in quoting out of context. But it’s weirdly easy to meet strangers from other countries, and it can be a good opportunity to meet people with different outlooks.
And maybe change your mind (or someone else’s) on world issues.
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed,” as the UN puts it.
The problem is that a lot of the ‘debate’ is so poor. I mentioned Macs versus PCs earlier not to be flippant, but I’ve observed that if you go online with a software problem it’s inevitable that, at some point, somebody will say that you should be using a Mac [or vice versa]. People pile in, it escalates. People have already made their minds up. Cycle forums get heated about helmets. It’s rarely a nuanced debate.
A lot of the debate about simply finding new ways to re-state one particular position: a viral going round amongst Israeli sympathisers will show schoolchildren being indoctrinated in Palestine. On the other side racist Israeli teenage tweets about Arabs.
In fact both are useful bits of data in understanding what is happening. But both are generally used to back up a position. Look at how bad the other side is.
I like the logical fallacies wallchart for plainly explaining some of the ways in which people justify their views:
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/pdf/FallaciesPoster24x36.pdf
People add a fact to their position and come up with an illogical solution. As in the following equation*:
F+P=IS
So here is a Fact:
“Some people in Hamas are happy to kill civilians.”
And a Position:
“We need to defend our land through violent means”
Which leads to an Irrational Solution:
“Lets send missiles into areas where there are Hammas even if it kills children.”
Or another way:
“Some people in Israel are happy to kill civilians.”
Plus:
“We need to reclaim our land through violent means”
Equals:
“Lets send missiles into areas where there are Israelis even if it kills civilians and they fire back.”
Of course if you add a ‘non’ to the violent, the range of solutions will increase. As a pacifist I tend to advocate non violent solutions.
Here are some facts:
There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country
Many Jews advocate for a peaceful solution in the Middle East (but some Muslims want to kill them anyway)
Many Muslims advocate for a peaceful solution in the Middle East (but some Jews want to kill them anyway)
Most Muslims don’t want to kill anyone at all
Most Israelis don’t want to kill anyone at all
Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era land grab and many of these places are in Muslim areas
The treatment of Jews under the Third Reich was a crime against humanity
Some people are horribly anti-Semetic
Some people are horribly anti-Muslim
It’s wrong to kill children
Many British people of my generation and older have been subconsciously brought up pro-Israel because of terrible things that happened during World War Two a conflict which had a huge cultural impact
[and so on]
And here are some different solutions or interpretations based when you add them to a position:
There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country (therefore kill all Americans and Jews because there is a Zionist conspiracy)
There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country (therefore lobby this group)
Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era landgrab and recent invasion and many of these places are in Muslim areas (therefore all Muslims are violent, it’s fine to illegally invade them)
Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era landgrab and recent invasion and many of these places are in Muslim areas (therefore all Westerners are bad)
Note that there are a lot of ‘somes’ and ‘manys’ in the truism list.
One of the unexpected benefits of travel is seeing the other side of people’s generalisations; I’ve been in countries where I’ve been blamed for US foreign policy because I was a Westerner (‘Why are you blaming me for things I’ve marched against?’)
Or I’ve had Westerners open up to me because I’m a Brit (‘they should flatten Iraq’ was one memorable comment from an American lady in 2001).
This is the category fail at the heart of how some people think about conflict. In my Facebook conversation with an Israeli, I added the word ‘some’ a lot.
“This is how Palestinians teach their children.”
(This is how SOME Palestinians teach their children)
“Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map”
(SOME Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map)
[And so on]
I think the ‘reindividualisation’ of the people on the other side of a conflict is important in order to short people’s positions. It’s achievable, and people are doing it on social media.
http://aplus.com/a/arab-jewish-couple
My New Israeli friend admitted that had no Palestinian friends [virtual or otherwise], and I think many of the Palestinians I’ve met don’t have any Jewish friends either. Certainly many of the people whose hateful comments about the Internet you see cannot have friends ‘on the other side’ because they couldn’t possibly generalise about them in such a way if they did.
If you’ve been lucky enough to live in cosmopolitan cities, you’ll know that knowing a wide range of people makes you less likely to generalise about groups of people.
Once you fail to see people as individuals but as units in a group you don’t like, eg Tutsis, it’s becomes easier to be violent towards those units.
category fail: someone sprayed this on the wall of my local mosque, presumably in order to offend the Muslims within who presumably he had never met. I imagine this is because a different Muslim somewhere else did a bad thing.
It’s why anything you do to dehumanise somebody is a very scary thing. Johan Galtung – a Norwegian mathematician amongst other things but most well known for being a founding father of peace studies talked a lot about cultural violence.
“Cultural violence” refers to aspects of a culture that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence, and may be exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science.”
It relates to ‘structural violence’:
“Avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs”
Which leads to ‘direct violence’ – and onto the topic of human rights. I mentioned earlier how ‘tolerance of others’ beliefs’ beats ‘getting everyone to believe what you do.’
Human rights seems to be the best system in place to manage the various different beliefs and needs.If you observe human rights, you get to believe what you want. You get to understand everyone else’s right to this as well.
There are lots of problems associated with the genesis of human rights – not least the fact that the UN is associated with an era that created the partition of Indian and Pakistan and the creation of Israel, for example, is something that many Westerners don’t get – or at least it took me several years to grasp.
With human rights nobody is perfectly happy: because you are essentially balancing my right to do X with your right to do Y.
There is a pleasing logic about this, but human rights are beaten by cultural, structural or direct violence.
Take away one group’s right to education [by structural violence] and people will start imposing their dogmatic views through violence of their own, for example.
Think about Boko Haram (BHM), then read this:
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
So BHM want to take away these rights, but the point is that they didn’t benefit from them in the first place.
Provision of education in Northern Nigerian was spectacularly bad. Now it’s getting worse. It’s easier to start a hateful sect based on narrow dogma where people are uneducated.
The denial of human rights in Israel seems spectacular, and to have lead directly to violence carried out by some people.
Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
If you buy anything from Israel, you are contributing to an economy whose government is spending money on missile attacks which are not achieving their stated strategic aims, whilst killing several innocent people.
The credibility of the notion of human rights, and bodies which set out to uphold these rights, is under attack whilst this (and the several other systematic acts of structural violence in the land which was – according to the UN Security Council – illegally annexed) continues
Hamas missile attacks are not achieving their stated strategic aims, whilst killing innocent people and drawing further attacks from Israel. Violent Anti-Semitic commentary by some Palestinian supporters is another barrier to peace negotiations.
I would seem to have got spectacularly off the point of defending Peace Studies.
So, in British broadsheets at this time of year, bright girls from posh schools get pictured mid air, clutching multiple A* A-level papers.
Most of them would not dream of studying Peace Studies at Bradford, of course. Nor their less photographed male counterparts. People prefer a ‘real degree.’
But wouldn’t it be good if the people who had most choices in life wanted to do something positive about ending violent conflict?
http://www.palestinercs.org/en/