There was an election in Israel this week. The rather weak, ineffective left of center government of Ehud Baraak was resoundingly kicked out in favor of Arial Sharon, a right-wing hard liner. Sharon ran on a platform that totally rejected the Oslo peace plan that has been the basis for all negotiations for a decade or more. He made the statement during the campaign that Jerusalem will "be the undivided capital of Israel for all eternity." (Given the fact that many cultures in that region can trace their ancestry in the same general area back to about 4,000 BCE, the phrase "for all eternity" has a somewhat different emphasis coming from one of them than it does coming from a Southern Baptist preacher in Lower Alabama.)
In any event, the prospects for peace in that unhappy place are certainly not any brighter today. It is so easy for the extremists to push the buttons. Most recently, the Arab fanatics were able to almost effortlessly derail the peace process by terrorist acts whose stated purpose was to make it impossible for Baraak and Arafat to sit down together and talk about the issues. Now, Sharon and his merry men are in power in Israel, so both sides can settle back into hating each other with reckless abandon, just as they have for three or four thousand years.
Why do they hate each other? Of course, part of the tension comes from the fact that they are so tightly jammed together in their little countries. It is as if Macon, Lowndes and Bullock Counties were heavily armed enemies of Montgomery, Autauga and Elmore Counties. (Not all that farfetched, if you consider the demography of those two areas.) There was a report yesterday of Palestinians firing rifles from their village into an apartment complex in South Jerusalem. The two were only about 500 yards apart.
But the abiding conflict is over religion and race. The Israeli's call their god Jehovah, and the Arabs call theirs Allah, and neither side can find in itself any modicum of tolerance for that difference. Each believes that their faith is the only Truth, and that anyone who disagrees is a sworn enemy "for all eternity". That, to me, is the most dangerous aspect of the fundamentalist Christian movement in our country. It is not their religious beliefs that trouble me. I have no problem with their believing whatever they choose to believe. What gives me pause is their intolerance for my beliefs, their insistence on characterizing any disagreement as demonic. This is how 4,000-year religious wars begin.
Thomas R. Borden Montgomery, Alabama March 15, 2001