On the Eve of the Gaza Pullout

The settlers are digging in. The Israeli soldiers are preparing to do what, for many, is long overdue, and what is for others unthinkable.

What keeps the hardest of the hard-core Jewish settlers in their tiny, isolated communities, surrounded by a hostile, colonized population? What makes non-resident Israelis flood into the settlements just before the military obliterates them? What gives the young children the bitter, entitled demeanor of battle-hardened adult militants?

Belief.

Belief in biblical prophesy. Belief in the historiographic ideology of "Greater Israel." Belief in the supposed intractability and universality of Arab hatred of Jews. Belief that, as almost every progressive American Jew has been told at one time or another in a conspiratorial whisper by a conservative American Jew, "There's no such thing as a Palestinian." Belief in that particular brand of enraged victimhood unique to oppressed peoples who obtain nationhood, so that policies of aggression get narrated as acts of self-defense. And belief that, when the moment arrives, their government, their soldiers, their fellow Jews, won't be able to bring themselves to go through with it.

What underlies all these beliefs is the core belief in the ethno-religious essence of Israel as a Jewish state, as The Jewish State. This unshakable, fundamental belief has made the two-state solution the outer limit of what most of us are willing to consider or even able to conceive. It's what makes the Security Wall seem rational. It's what justified the neocolonial policy of occupied-territory settlement, and it's what's now justifying the equally neocolonial terms on which Sharon is administering the withdrawal from Gaza.

And so a single-state, or binational solution - a democratic, multi-ethnic, secular state organized around the ethnic and religious diversity that already exists inside Israel, let alone in the Palestinian territories - remains beyond the pale. Is it naive to promote such an idea? Does even raising it disqualify one from being taken seriously? Perhaps. But at the end of the day it's not history, practicality or realism that rules out a one-state solution. What rules it out is belief - reactionary, exclusionary, essentialist belief.

We live in a time when belief has become an incredibly dangerous idea. Absolute, uncompromising, desperate belief legitimates a brand of fundamentalist terrorism that bears more than a passing resemblance to fascism. And that terrorism has provided an alibi for amping up a raft of other fundamentalisms - the Christo-fascism that now haunts the corridors of the West Wing; the rightwing Zionism that infects the Israeli settlements and much of American Jewry; the neoliberal colonialism privatizing water supplies and other life-essentials across the world in the name of the religion of the Free Market; and the xenophobic security paranoia that chews up civil liberties and calls for the formation of private militias to take target practice across the Rio Grande.

As a leftist living in these neoliberal times, I often feel I have nothing but belief, but conviction, but faith - in social justice and social equality. But as I wait for the inevitable press photos of Israeli Jews tearing each other to pieces to start zipping across the cyberwires, I can't help feeling that belief, no matter its content, is more likely to be our ruin than our salvation.

An op-ed in Ha'aretz suggests that Israelis on both sides of the withdrawal debate mourn for their fellow citizens, in order not to deny them their humanity. "Perhaps the most humanitarian and ethical way for any Israeli to participate," the author writes, "is to expose himself [sic] to these feelings of mourning, to attempt to confront them in all their unbearable contradictions."

By itself, mourning can't eradicate the plague of fundamentalism that besets us. But if it can interrupt the tyranny of belief, it might be a good start.