Hezbollah Town vs Israel United

After comparatively quiet and peaceful times in the Middle East (presumably they were all pre-occupied with watching the World Cup), the good folk of Israel and Hezbollah have gone back to competing in their favourite sport; savagely murdering one another. And, as with every other bout of brutality in the Middle East, the rest of the world have watched with a mixture of media sanctioned outrage and of rooting for their chosen side in the conflict. I'll just repeat that last part; the killings of innocent Israeli and Lebanese people is being treated as a scoreboard where pro-Israel and pro-Hezbollah commentators can tally up who is winning.

Am I getting overly sensitive here, or has everyone else become so jaded about the killing of innocents that we can best deal with it by picking a side in a conflict and supporting them in the same way I support Newcastle United? Every single comment or opinion I've read about the current tit-for-tat atrocities being committed seems to have a "My Team; right or wrong" aura to it. For example, whilst discussing the matter briefly with a left wing friend of mine, I made the point that although he was condemning the bombing of Lebanese civilian targets by Israeli planes, he made absolutely no comment or criticism of the launching of rockets at Israeli civilian targets by Hezbollah. This was because, apparently, there is "no moral equivalence between the two."

Words actually failed me when I tried to articulate just what a vast pile of rapestained cocksludge that statement is. My friend, a man whose opinions I have a lot of time and respect for, was actually telling me that the murder of an Israeli citizen was completely excusable whereas the murder of a Lebanese citizen was a crime against humanity as a whole. What's more, a lot of people with similar opinions to him couldn't see that their mantra was no different or any more excusable than that of the pro-Israeli commentators (the ones who seem to make up the majority of the media, certainly in the US and UK). You know; the ones who make the rather laughable claim that any and all Lebanese deaths are the fault of Hezbollah because they're the ones who started it (am I the only one who reads these tissue thin justifications for murder as a variation on "Ooooh, miss…MISS…he started it miss, it wasn't me!"?)

Perhaps this is all a part of our desire for things to be simple and easy to classify; there is a conflict between two sides, so there must be a bad team and a good team. If that is the case, then what confuses and concerns me is that everyone is so fixated on the result and cares not a damn about how the game is being played. But what I do find rather bizarre are the tangled and sophistic lengths people will go to in order to convince everyone that THEIR team are in the right and EVERYTHING they do is justified.

For example, the supporters of Israel will point to the kidnap of 2 of their soldiers as the spark that ignited this particular shitstorm. Anything before then, they will tell you, is irrelevant. Whereas the pro-Hezbollah team prefer to concentrate on events such as the shelling of a Palestinian family on a Gaza beach by Israeli warships (allegedly; Israel deny responsibility), or Israel's continued occupation of parts of Southern Lebanon after their withdrawal from Beirut in 2000. These arguments have one thing in common; they are entirely arbitrary and are picked by the supporter only to show their team as the wronged victims in the conflict.

Fact is that the murders have been going on since Israel's creation. You could go back and blame Israel for taking land that was not theirs and displacing Palestinians whilst doing so. You could blame the various Arab states for attempting to wipe Israel from the map. You could blame Lord Balfour and the British for their cack-handed creation of Israel from the British Palestinian Protectorate. You could even blame blobs of sentient purple goo that have used Israel as an interdimensional toilet where they've mindshat negative emotions onto an unknowing populace (in fact I think I'd prefer it if you did; at least it'd be original). But to do any of these things would be pretty much pointless in any respect other than playing to your teams’ gallery. The current murder spree is much like all the ones that preceded it; an aggregate of decades of misinformation, mistrust, violence, and struggle for power. You can sum up every single heart wrenching set of murders in one phrase; Come on boys! Let's commit an atrocity in revenge for the atrocity that was recently committed against us".

It doesn't take a genius to realise that, as long as that phrase is the justification for every act of war committed by either side, then the bloodshed will continue. The only solutions would seem to be either lasting peace (which is impossible whilst both teams' cheerleaders insist that two wrongs equal a right, just so long as one of the wrongs is committed by/against Israel) or mass genocide (which won't happen for the rather unsentimental reason that there are simply too many people on either team for them to all be killed efficiently). Unfortunately, being as both sides' appetite and energy for murder seems undiminished, then innocent people will continue to endure atrocity after atrocity.

Which leads me onto my final point; just why is there such an appetite for this constant cycle of revenge in the Middle East? Vendettas take up a lot of time and energy to pursue; I used to think I was an Olympic Standard Grudge Bearer until I turned 30. Now I find it's just too much effort to maintain bloodcurdling hatred for any length of time. For instance, I was at a friends wedding recently and I found myself in the same room as a man I'd once sworn to emasculate with a rusty carving knife before kicking a petrol-soaked pineapple up his ringpiece and lighting it up. All of this wholly balanced ill feeling was due to something that happened 3 or 4 years ago now. And when I came face to face with him…well, he was civil to me and I to him. Why? Because to maintain a grudge with the distance of years between the reason for it was just too much effort. Neither he nor I could be bothered, and it was much less hassle to smile politely and try to forget we hated each other. By the end of the evening I think we were both pretty much neutral about one another (perhaps even quite pleased to no longer be wishing one another dead). We're now both free to expend our energy on more important things (such as brand new feuds with a wholly different set of greasy little mongfuckers).

I realise that a feud between two individuals cannot realistically be compared to a feud between two nations (or two different power blocs to pre-empt the ever-pedantic supporters of each team), but surely it's easy to see that if they're not spending their time trying to wipe one another from the map, they can perhaps concentrate on improving things for their own people? Well, I think that the reason why this isn't happening is because of something I briefly mentioned earlier; the struggle for power.

This struggle isn't for power over each respective team. It's about power over their own people. What credence would be given to the murderous old men who make up the leadership of either side if both sides were at peace? Why would anyone allow them to hold onto their positions of privilege if they stopped worrying about their demonic enemies and started to take a long, hard look at what their leaders have actually achieved other than lowering the average life expectancy of their people? And in the young generations of Israelis and Palestinians, you have a endlessly energetic and (most importantly) easily led resource to prosecute your needless and pointless wars for you. The easiest way for the leadership of each side to remain in authority is by ensuring that they ensure their people fear and hate their enemy. If they didn't…well, they may have to come up with some plans to actually improve the lives of those whom they lead. And whilst it's difficult to effectively plan and implement an coherent set of policies that will enhance the quality of life of ones people, it's a piece of piss to order a plane to bomb a village or a rocket to be launched at a city. As long as that is the case then not only will we not see peace in the Middle East, but we'll not see it anywhere.