Alan Zendell, September 26, 2024

War is humanity at its worst. Things that happen during wars are so terrible, we had to invent new definitions for war crimes, since killing and maiming, which would be capital offenses in civilian life, are routine and accepted in warfare. We even have rules of war and a Geneva Convention, but they’re only followed when doing so serves the propaganda purposes and convenience of the combatants.

Attempts to humanize warfare only make it easier for wars to start. They accept a reality in which war is inevitable and attempt to impose a veneer of civilized behavior and values on something that is neither. If that’s true, why do nations choose killing each other as a knee-jerk reaction rather than reserve war as a last resort when everything else fails?

The answer depends on the conditions that spark the fighting. Wars of revolution against oppression we understand. Wars of desperation fought by people watching their children starve or succumb to preventable diseases are also understandable because those who fight believe they have no other choice. The same is true for the other side of the coin. An autocrat’s first priority is maintaining power and control. Thus, countries like Russia and China launch pre-emptive wars against their own rebellious provinces. These things we abhor, but we understand them.

But there is major cause of war that is beyond rational comprehension: religion. Religious differences may be responsible for more bloodshed and killing than anything else in the history of the world. Millions of indigenous people were murdered in the name of Christianity by early European explorers like Christopher Columbus. Catholics and Protestants went to war against each other for centuries in Europe. The American colonies were settled mostly by people attempting to escape religious prosecution. And, historians tell us there has been an ongoing war between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world since the time of Mohammed, fifteen hundred years ago…

…which brings us to the Middle East. The war over the Holy Land has been raging since the time of Christ. The introduction of Islam to the conflict, six hundred years later, only made it more deadly and intense. Religious extremists are responsbile for every problem that has occurred there in the last hundred years.

In 1920, the League of Nations issued the Mandate for Palestine, which gave Britain stewardship over what is today Israel and Jordan. Included in the mandate was the Balfour Declaration, which required the British to find a homeland for Jews who had inhabited the region for two thousand years. For reasons which today seem inexplicable, the Palestinian people, who had resided there as long as the Jews, were left out. Palestinians are as entitled to their own homeland as Jews, but in World War 1 era Britain, the Zionist movement pressed for a Jewish homeland, while no such support existrd for Palestinians, nor has one ever existed in the Muslim world.

Muslim nations are mostly kingdoms or some form of autocracies. It has never been in the interest of Arab leaders to recognize the rights of Palestinians. Thus, when Israel was created in 1948, the Palestinians were relegated to protectorates in Gaza and the West Bank, then part of Jordan. The Zionists had been offered a home in what is now Uganda in East Africa, but religious fervor demanded that any Jewish homeland contain Jerusalem. Since equally militant Christians and Muslims claimed Jerusalem as their spiritual home, the creation of Israel as a nation amidst neighbors that outnumbered it a hundred to one and vowed its destruction from day one set the stage for the war raging in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon today.

Everyone has the right to worship or not as they please. Freedom of religion, as defined in the First Amedment to our Constitution is a universal human right. But organized religion’s unholy connection to governments and politics may be one the most dangerous threats to today’s world.

The nations of the ancient world replaced polytheism with monotheism, but they all had their own ideas of who the one true deity was. This single distinction has kept conflicts simmering in the Middle East since 1948. They erupted into war every couple of decades, as the situation was exacerbated by foreign actors who used Israel and its neighbors as surrogates during the Cold War. Today, however, saner heads must realize that killing thousands of people over whose God is the right one is un-Christian, un-Jewish, and un-Muslim. All three religions advocate peace, yet when it comes to each other, they’d rather fire rockets than co-exist.

This has gone on far too long, and the reason is religious extremism. Right-wing militant Israelis who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government are as guilty of prolonging the seventy-six-year-old conflict as Muslim extremists. The common denominator in all this is the institution of religion that is more interested in its own power and influence than the lives and health of its people.

It’s time we grew up and weaned ourselves off the crutch of religion. If we don’t, it may destroy us all.