Is A Major Middle East War Inevitable?

Exploding Pagers? Could Israel BE More Provocative?

Hey Folks. This isn’t going to be one of my usual posts. I want to get your opinions about what is going on in the Middle East. The exploding pager attack seems like it can’t have come from anywhere except Israel. And that shocks me.

The reason that we’ve been such supporters of Israel for all of these troubled years, is because their values are aligned with ours. But watching them blast Gaza back to the stone age for almost a year has been a real challenge to my feelings about that scrappy little country.

Yes, the attack of October 7 was a horror. Yes, it called for a military response. But how much is too much?

I’ve always been divided in my feelings about Israel. I’m not a religious man. And so the whole idea that a ‘people’ can claim a homeland based on the supposed revelations of a supposed deity made thousands of years ago … is foreign to my thinking.

I don’t feel any affinity at all with the idea that any of the people over there have an eternal right to ‘sacred’ sites or regions, simply because they grew up being indoctrinated into the same beliefs that their parents and grandparents were also required to believe.

I won’t pretend to know a whole lot about the history of that region, but this much is clear to me. Both sides in the dispute over the so-called Holy Land, have failed to reach compromises because of their religious tribalism.

And as a modern, hopefully rational human being, taking either side without question just feels wrong to me.

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As I said, our support for Israel has hinged on shared values.

But where are those values now? I’m ashamed and embarrassed at our own political tribalism. My primary reason for talking politics at all these days is to make the case for greater understanding across our divisions.

This has to do with fighting back our evolved-in suspicions of ‘the other’. Media profiteers want to deepen that suspicion so that we’ll keep listening to them and lining their pockets with advertising dollars.

Our divisions are natural to humans. Civilization is not. Orderly societies like ours, and like Israel’s are what humans of good-will adopt in order to suppress our natural tribal impulses. It takes work. It takes constant vigilance. It takes an understanding that not just ‘those people’, but also our people can be easily lured backward into less civilized versions of ourselves.

It seems to me that we’re now seeing ‘tribal warlords’ on both sides of the fence over there.

Think for a minute about the mental processes necessary to explode pagers all over Lebanon. Where would those pagers be? Well, they would likely be in a pants pocket. Right at the place where a man’s leg would be joined to his pelvis. Right where his genitalia sits unprotected.

Not only that, but who else would be nearby? Perhaps that man’s small son or daughter. A child holding Daddy’s hand, maybe looking up at him … with his or her face inches from a device about to explode.

I am not forgetting the monstrous attacks upon innocents that set this current war afire. I’m not excusing Hezbollah’s opportunistic attacks on Israel, or it’s long-standing desire to eradicate our own long-standing ally.

But the desire to defend modern values should never cause us to abandon those values. This attack feels to me like a war crime.

Perhaps having spent a fair amount of time around young parents and their small children of late, has made me more sensitive than usual. But when I think of an Israeli general or politician green-lighting a plan that will likely castrate men while blinding and disfiguring their children … I want to throw up.

So let me just ask all of you to share what you think about this attack, and also about our current commitments to Israel, and whether you feel, like I do, that a much wider and more vicious war is about to erupt across the Middle East.

Just at a time when The United States will probably have elected its first female president.

How will that land with the iron-age tribes of modern-day Mesopotamia who still believe that women should not speak out of turn - let alone wield awesome military might in support of their sworn enemies in Judea? Will electing Kamala Harris as the planet’s most influential leader cause an eruption of toxic masculinity across the Islamic world?

Comment on any of this, or anything related. Whatever you’ve got to say. The floor is yours.

Thanks in advance for your comments. -Dave