To give fiction some facts: I had just returned from 2 months in Israel and Jordan the day the first missile was fired, and had only 24 hours before, stood from the Israeli side of the Metulla fence looking beyond the gorge “tanoor” into the Lebanese valley and actually, yes, actually thought, “Hm, perfect place to buy a villa. High in the mountains, great clear air, incredibly inexpensive housing prices, peace and quiet. And quiet. So quiet. Just the place to invest and buy a house to write my next book. I even climbed between a gap in the neglected fence to chat with some men who were fixing up a leak in one of the last of 11 bridges that crossed the river that separated the two countries, and kicked aside an old green road sign that read, “Halt, Tatzor. Border! Forbidden to cross.” I took a picture. One man posed and said, “Nothing happening around here, not for 6 years.”

And then I have been reminded of pictures that can be interpreted any way you decide works for you: When I lived and worked in Amman, Jordan as the only Jewish/Israeli graphic designer and writer for the Jordan River Foundation under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Noor and the then Princess Rania, I discovered a brilliant woman photographer named Jan Kassay, whose work we ultimately exhibited in our Jebel Amman showroom. Jan and I became great friends until one evening, while sipping cool minted lemonade on the terrace of the Hyatt, Jan told me just how cruel and evil my people were, how they were born to be occupiers and killers. Stunned, I asked her what she was referring to. She dug a black and white photograph out of her handbag and pushed it squarely beneath my nose. “See –you Israelis only want one thing”. I stared at the photo and there were soldiers, teenagers, barely able to shave, boy-soldiers who could have been my cousins, my brothers, my own children, standing nervously in riot formation holding off an anschluss of stone-throwing Palestinian teenagers and kids, and yes, sure enough, written across their helmets in English (not even Hebrew!) were three horrible words “Born to Kill” in black magic marker.

“You see!”, Jan said, immensely satisfied to be proven correct, ‘they are taught to kill us from the cradle”. I scratched my head, confused. Propaganda? There were many interpretations I could have tried to bring to the table, to smooth the provocation. Did Jan know how many soldiers, how many refuseniks, how many young boys might have written those words “Born to Kill” in homage to Golda Meir who made famous that one line, “I can forgive the Arabs many things, but not for teaching our sons to kill.” How many boys, how many sons, how many brothers, fathers, husbands feel that they have only been born to be fodder for the Israeli Army because there is no other choice if they want to keep their wives, their mothers, their children, their sisters, their farmlands one bullet away from living like a normal person? And this is just one interpretation: I read the words on the helmets and heard their cynical voices, the futility, a thrust of the middle finger to the government of Israel that had just put a bullet in Rabin’s head. Jan read the words on the helmets and saw bloodlust and dead children in uprooted olive groves.

So yes, whatever were those parent’s in Kiriyat Shmonay thinking when they let their little girls with cute pigtails write love notes to the Darth Vader of Evil? But the scorecard is unfortunately pretty well even– I’ve also seen little children from Ramallah and Amman and Khan Yunis parading with toy guns and flags and suicide belts screaming with nationalist furor, as I’ve seen Kitah Aleph (first grade) Israeli kids from Kibbutz Ginosar play acting kissing their “husbands” goodbye and sending them off to war, and I am frightened by all of these children….because eventually they do grow up and the game becomes real.

Deborah van Rooyen

July 26, 2006

“the kids were scared out of their minds and they had been told over and over that some man named Nasrallah was responsible for their having to cower underground for days on end…� but not perhaps for the obvious reasons.

It reminds me of the simplistic explanations all children receive from their parents, simplistic explanations that typically finger “a man named (so-and-so)�.

When I was a child, the “man named so-and-so� was Khrushchev, who ‘owned’ the terrible atomic bombs whose threat made the air raid sirens in our neighborhood go off periodically for drills. My parents could hardly take the time to explain to a four- or five-year-old the complications of history, technology and, above all, conflicting ideology that was the real driving force behind the air raid drills.

Likewise, Israeli parents can hardly explain fully to their girls the role of the “men named Syrians�, the “men named Iranians�, the “men named Hezbollah�, and the “man named Mohamed� whose words, quoted here – http://www.campuscrosswalk.org/2005-winter-13.html – is the original agent of this confluence of influences that finds its current operative nexus in the “man named Nasrallah.� Such explanations are, after all, the stuff of college courses.

Humans evolved an instinct to presume that actions in the world have behind them conscious agents: Did that tree limb overhead sway from a gust of breeze, or because of a crouching panther that’s studying a prospective landing place on the back of my neck? It’s safer to assume agency: that way you can take appropriate precautions. And these same instinctual presumptions of agency that allowed our forebears to flourish despite their comparative weakness and lack of bodily claws, fangs, and turtle-like armor, also gave rise to our beliefs in supernatural agents. These beliefs have over millennia evolved into litanies of scriptures, all proclaiming to represent “divine truth�. Books like Leviticus. Books like the Koran. All these scriptures, regardless of their provenance, share, at root, the human presumption of agency at large in the world.

This instinct for presuming agency is much easier for a parent to utilize when trying to explain why their children’s lives are in danger: the agent is the “man named Nasrallah.� Comprehending that doesn’t require a college course. Children easily intuit agency: elves, goblins, demons and devils, and the bogeyman lurking under the bed. Nasrallah (or Khrushchev), in the mind of a child, is simply a bogeyman with real-life bombs.

But is he really the reason the girls’ lives are in danger? Only in a very simplistic sense that focuses merely on the end link of the current chain of cause-and-effect.

Is it then Mohamed, whose putative possession by ‘God’ preached Islamic world conquest and death to unbelievers? Well, sure, he’s certainly culpable. But not ultimately.

The real bogeyman is our current human ‘politically correct’ unwillingness to empirically distinguish which agents are real and which are mere fantasias, and to abandon belief in the unverifiable agents. Do we still believe that diseases are caused by ‘demons’? Then why should we believe that our wars are caused by ‘gods’? Think I’m overstating the case? I’m not—read the Koran and Hadith: Allah, Mohamed informs us, is allowing unbelievers to flourish in the world only to punish them more sternly, and to give His believers ample opportunity to earn divine reward in Paradise.

I’m reading Sam Harris’s controversial The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason – http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-0393327655-0 – and I recommend it to everyone. It bookends nicely with Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon – http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-067003472x-3 – which I recommend just as strongly.

A caveat: the Dennett book is much less scathing in tone than the Harris. But both books should be ‘mandatory reading’ in this seemingly endless era of religiously-inspired war and violence. Especially now, and especially for people who care about the people inhabiting the so-called ‘Holy Land’.

Anyway this comment touched me most:

http://ontheface.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/7/20/2142505.html#678761