How to Solve the Middle East Crisis

What does Deus truly Vult?

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.

² “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.^[a]
3 I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.

-Genesis 12:1-3

In an earlier post, I made it clear that I Don’t Give a Fuck About Israel. This includes Palestine. This includes morons engaging in Masturbation Rage protests about GeNoCiDe, and it includes elected prostitutes attempting to deny American citizens their First Amendment rights.

You are all the agents of foreign powers. A plague on all your houses. Die mad.

But, having observed the way Israel has been the Gordian Knot of international politics its entire existence, and certainly for the whole of my lifetime, I have a fancy to cut the knot in the manner of Alexander. Israel and Palestine will never make peace, and they will never win, either of them. This ulcer is tedious; let it be excised.

Therefore, the solution is a Crusade.

It is necessary to understand that Israel will not stop being Israel. A wise and emotionally continent Substacker, Big Serge always lays out principles instead of passions:

First, Israel is an Eschatological Garrison State. This is a particular form of state which perceives itself as a sort of redoubt against the end of all things, and accordingly becomes highly militarized and highly willing to dispense military force. Israel is not the only such state to have existed in history, but it is the only obvious one extant today.

…

Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, founded in the shadow of Auschwitz, besieged on all sides by states with which it has fought several wars. Whether this justifies the kinetic aspects of Israeli foreign policy is not the point. The simple fact is that this is Israel’s innate self conception. It is an eschatological redoubt for a Jewish population that sees itself as having nowhere else to go. If one refuses to acknowledge the central Israeli geopolitical premise - that they would do anything to avoid a return to Auschwitz - one will never make sense of their actions.

However, the Eschatological-Garrison nature of the state is not the only way in which Israel is abnormal. It is also quite unusual in that it is a Settler-Colonial State in the 21st century. Israel maintains hundreds of settlements in soft-annexed territories like the West Bank, which are home to half a million Jews. These settlements constitute an effort to demographically strangulate and assimilate Palestinian lands, and cannot be described as anything other than settler-colonialism. Again, all sorts of religious arguments will fly as to whether this is justified or not, but the reality that all must acknowledge is that this is not normal. Denmark does not have colonies. There are no Danish villages being built in Northern Germany to extend Danish rule. Brazil does not have colonies. Neither does Vietnam, or Angola, or Japan. But Israel does.

“The Age of Zugzwang” -Big Serge Thought

This is the essence of the State of Israel, and it is Unacceptable to the majority of Muslims throughout the Middle East. Jerusalem is not less sacred to Islam than Judaism. To the Western observer, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is bizarre, based on a magic carpet-ride that Mohammed took from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence to the Seven Heavens, in one of the more fanciful Surahs. Whether this Night Flight occurred is beside the point. Muslims believe that it did, and furthermore, they understand the meaning of this account: that Mohammed is the Final Prophet, the completer of the cycle of Revelation, the sacred Third to Moses and Jesus. Jerusalem is God’s City, ergo, Mohammed could only ascend to heaven therefrom, ergo, Jerusalem is and must be under the Ummah’s control. If Islam does not control Jerusalem, then Islam is not what it says it is. This is non-negotiable. A Jewish state controlling Jerusalem is an act of war. Israel is an act of war.

These two realities cannot be reconciled. Even if Israel were to expunge every Palestinian from Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, it would not find itself any less at war with the rest of the Arab World. Indeed, the manner in which this would be done would make Israel a pariah state on a par with North Korea. And if the Palestinians had the capacity to drive the Jews into the sea, even with arms from Iran, they would have done so by now. Palestine is not a nation, but a fanged and tortured animal kept alive by ideological voyeurs, a fetish-object of the Egalitarian-Liberation narrative the Terminally Academic have been Fapping to since 1776. It’s Tibet for people who hate music and like bathing.

By the same token, Israel is a fetish-object of Bourgeois Democraticism, a Market Display of how Western Civilzation can make the desert bloom if it is but allowed to. Why, they tolerate gays and everything. Take that, you towel-heads!

Neither side will be able to win in a way that will bring peace to that portion of the world. The victory of one is a cry to arms to the other. There is no way forward. We have seen this for decades. We know it is true.

The Levant requires not defeat of Jews or Muslims but balance between them. And there’s only one source for such a balance: the other Abrahamic religion.

My proposal is as follows:

1. His Holiness the Pope should announce the creation of a new Military Order: The Order of the Peace of God. This order should be co-denominational, announced in coordination with His Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. This order will also be open to our Protestant brethren, of whatever confession, provided they accept the terms of order membership¹. This will be a military order, but not necessarily a monastic one: membership need not require vows of celibacy, nor even of permanence.

2. The purpose of the Order of the Peace of God will be to establish in the Levant, by whatever military or diplomatic meansare necessary, the State of Abraham, and too encourage Christians worldwide to settle there.²

3. The State of Abraham will be an inter-religious polity offering citizenship to anyone belonging to one of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The State of Abraham will be fully founded when both the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority are dissolved and cede their territories to it.

4. The State of Abraham will be governed by The Abrahamic Council, a body equally divided between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and having supreme authority over the laws, government, foreign policy, and other sovereign matters. The Council will govern according to three principles:

   1. The right of Jews to live as Jews within the SoA

   2. The right of Christians to live as Christians within the SoA

   3. The right of Muslims to live as Muslims within the SoA

5. The State of Abraham will take over all governance of holy sites within its territory, including the Temple Mount, the Churches of the Holy Sepulcher and the Nativity, the al-Aqsa Mosque, and others. The sacred traditions of these sites and the right of pilgrims worldwide to visit them and worship within them will be protected.

I trust the advantages of this proposal present themselves. The SoA will not be an Eschatological-Garrison State, nor a Jewish Settler-Colonial State, nor a Crusader State³ , nor a Muslim state. It will be a religious state founded on the purpose of creating peace among the Abrahamic religions.⁴ This will not be done by eradicating either Jews or Muslims from the lands they claim. On the contrary, they will be welcomed and respected, and all the have to do is respect their brother Faiths. The infusion of Christians into the land will put a wedge between the binary war that has been going on since 1948. No one religion will have the power over the others, each will have incentive to make common cause, to support the rights of the others.

In essence, the way to solve the Middle East Crisis is to create a state centered on Jerusalem in which no one is subjugated, no one is threatened, no one needs reach for the sword to secure the existence of their people. So long as it is a state divided between Jew and Muslim, one will be winning and the other losing. This dynamic must be changed.

Of course, there are many reasons the State of Abraham project might fail, or only succeed partially (which will be the same as failing), or succeed for a time and then collapse into murderous fratricide, as Lebanon did. But before you decided it cannot work, ask yourself why it is more likely to fail than the blood-and-accords pas-de-deux we’ve been engaged in for the last 75 years. And then consider the fruits of success: a city devoted to bringing Tanakh, Gospel, and Qu’ran together in respectful harmony, a place of holy scholarship and wisdom, a polity honestly founded on the desire to make peace for all, by giving power to all.

I do not pretend to have it all worked out. All I have is an idea. But then, for a long time, that’s all Zionism was. The world need not be what it has been.

1. Preference to be given to Nicene Christians. Mormons, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the like will require dispensation on an ad hoc basis.

2. Currently about 2% of Israel’s and 6% of Palestine’s population is Christian. More will be needed for this project to be successful.

3. Yes, the medieval Crusader States were majority-Muslim in population. However, the purpose of those states was Christian dominance over the Levant. The role of Christians in the SoA will be utterly different.

4. The status of Druze, Samaritans, Bahai, and other minor Abrahamic Faiths will be up to the Council to determine.