Last Saturday, my cousin asked me a rather general question about the prospects for peace between Israel, Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza and all of their neighbors. This started a long semi-rambling discussion whose thesis was related to something Thomas Friedman said in his Feb, 07 “Rules for the Middle East” op-ed piece. Rule 14 said that the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”
I found it funny that the next day, the NYT’s Sunday Magazine’s featured article titled “The Politics of God” had an intro paragraph which is very related to what I was saying that night and what I have been saying about tribalism in general. To the average American, the Middle East is simply full of Arabs. To me, it is fully of Persians, Egyptians, Alawites, Hashemites, Druze, Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, Jews, Bedouins, Bahá’ís, Yezidis and many more sects, nationalities and/or tribes. The Middle East’s tribes are completely intertwined with religion so I do not mind intermingling say Persians, who are mostly Shi’ites and who live primarily in Iran, with Kurds, who have no nation of their own and who generally practice Yazdanism. While many of these sects or tribes believe in in the same deity, their Hatfield versus McCoy differences often can prompt extreme cases of violence. Over the past few years, I seen that common religious beliefs are not strong enough to overcome tribal differences. For example, look at how in Iraq the Sunnis and Shi’ites are wantonly destroying each other’s mosques.
I also see that Middle Eastern tribalism is closely related with religious theocracy and dogmatic thought which is why I am linking this term with the article. Tribes are not made up of individuals who are the free thinking Westerners that you and I style ourselves to be. I do not believe that the Western world understands how tribal some parts of the world still are and the intro paragraph neatly sums up this thought:

“We in the west find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions and from political ones, that political theology dies in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It’s we who are the fragile exception.”

Keeping with this tribal theme, although incredibly modern in terms of its society, economics, government and culture, in the end, the modern State of Israel is simply a gathering of the biblical 12 tribes of Israel. Zionism can be considered rooted in tribalism because it is a term used to describe the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Speaking about Israel, an extremely provocative recent New Yorker article titled “The Apostate” is about how one of the country’s foremost Zionists has lost faith in the future and his thoughts on the situation there. I found some of the reasons behind his pessimism very true and compelling and other parts actually quite deplorable. Here is one part which shows the provocative nature of the article:

Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority.

In another part, Burg talks about the 3 things that lead to the founding of Israel and how since they have been met, there is great stagnation in the society. Again, interesting food for thought:

Burg said, “after some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives. I asked myself what was the alternative. This was a long process of thought. I didn’t feel that the political system in Israel was trying to renew its thinking.”

Neither of these articles provide answers. For the most part, they only raise questions. However these questions might be ones that you have not pondered as of yet. The more we think about the possibility that maybe we, the Post-Tribal world, is “crazy” and the rest of the world is “sane” the more we might get somewhere closer to peace, in whatever form that concept exists to tribes.