Social media reminds me that very large numbers of us believe nonsense. In this short essay I expect to offend almost every reader, because we all believe in some nonsense.
It is my contention that humans prefer nonsense to reality & that we create fantasies as our preferred beliefs.
That having created fantasies, some of us fervently adopt these fantasies to the point of being willing to go to war and kill in their name.
The first example of human created nonsense of the most intense & extreme form we call religion or simply faith.
There are many religions in the world, and those who believe this special form of nonsense tend to be assured that they are the lucky ones who happen to have been taught the true religion, whereas all the others are unfortunately mistaken.
Many such believers happen to believe what their parents told them to believe & which was reinforced by general society.
None of these faiths has any evidence in support of their beliefs and so they have to use force to try to impose it or ban other equally nonsensical baseless competing faiths.
That nonsensical baseless belief is very powerful, very popular and has shaped society for millennia.
If you have read this far and not spat at the screen, well done.
The topic that stimulates this essay is what is happening on a small patch of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Naming the region implies taking a side in the dispute. Which name is used for this disputed region determines what side you tend to support.
I see two fantasies competing for world acceptance. (I could flip a coin to decide which to describe first, but I will start with both together…)
Both sides have competing religious fantasies over what an imaginary supreme being wants to have happen. Oddly, this divine, all powerful, all knowing entity is too lazy to make it happen, but does like telling humans what it wants. This seems indistinguishable from humans fantasising about the supernatural, but those humans are willing to kill over these fantasies, and they hate anyone calling them out.
One side fantasises that the supreme being promised them this land & that it is their right and duty to inhabit & be in control of it. The other side fantasies that the supreme being doesn’t like that side, and wants them driven out of the region.
Those fantasies are not conducive to peaceful coexistence.
The first side does have some historical relationship, two or more thousands of years prior, to controlling and inhabiting the region. Why that is relevant today, I don’t understand, but it is at least partly true.
The second side has an amusing fantasy, a very modern concoction that because they have adopted an English name for their group, and that English name used to be printed on English maps of the region, this proves that their group own the region.
It is a very clever marketing trick, which seems to have won almost universal acceptance.
It is, nevertheless, a fantasy.
Naming your current group to match the foreign name of the territory is a very odd proof of being indigenous. It would be odd if the Cheyenne or Apache in America changed their name to “Indians” so that they would have a better claim to territory marked as “Indian territory” on old maps.
This territory was, for some centuries a region of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Several centuries of actual control is arguably a bigger claim than either of the two current claimants have. Those centuries were then replaced by 30 years of control by the British under a mandate from the League & later the United Nations.
If claims were to be listed in order of priority perhaps we could have:
Turkey
Britain
Those Arabs & Jews who lived there pre-1948
The United Nations
But, why would such claims have any bearing? If we were dealing with lost property or empty land then ancient or modern claims may be relevant, but we are dealing with a much stranger situation.
There is a functioning state with an elected government, tax collection, health services, and an army. All of the parts of a successful democratic law based society. This already exists on about two thirds of the territory. One side wants to destroy this in the name of being free.
It is ironic because that State is already mostly free. It does have religious restrictions, but it is at least as free, and probably more so, than the neighbouring countries. Those who call for it to be free, actually don’t like freedom & mainly wish to impose more restrictions. The idea that this is about freedom is a fantasy.
Next to that functioning State is a deeply troubled area which has the armed forces of the existing State, but a complicated patchwork of authority & separate legal systems based on being a citizen or not of the existing State next door. There is a considerable amount of distrust & hatred between the two sides.
That area could benefit from freedom, but neither side wants it to be free.
Social media has many very dedicated and opinionated commentators who have adopted one or other of these fantasies about the region. Some are passionate supporters of one or other of these fantasies. They insult each other as monsters for not believing one or other of the fantasies. They argue the historical minutiae at the root of the fantasy.
One of the stranger claims is that those who reject the fantasy are “dehumanising” the people.
Currently there is terrible suffering in a small part of this region. Humans are dying in war. There are terrible mutilations. Children have lost limbs. It is horrific.
Similar events have taken place recently in Yemen, and in Syria. Large scale bloodshed has also happened in Sudan. Murderous rampages in Nigeria. Invasion, flattening of cities in Ukraine. Going back longer Iran & Iraq bombed & slaughtered each other. Russia destroyed Grozny in Chechnya. USA & UK invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
I wish this type of suffering were not now happening to the residents of Gaza.
The source of this suffering is those two great conflicting fantasies which are at the root of this dispute.
Trying to piece together the reality we have a functioning state surrounded by people who hate the fact that it exists. They hate it because of one of their fantasies over imaginary supernatural beings.
They resent that a group of mainly immigrants has created a flourishing state while the majority of the residents have not.
Instead of admiring this and trying to emulate it, they want to destroy it. At an extreme they could have done what they did for hundreds of years.
For hundreds of years the locals accepted the rule of foreign empires.
The solution, if there were no fantasies involved, would be to request that the functioning state grants them citizenship. This would be hard to do now after so many years of murderous hatred, and of course:
Expecting people to abandon their fantasies, is a fantasy.