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“Everyone Has His Reasons”
 More
war in the Middle East, and it can only
get worse.
Asked why
his great film The Rules of the Game had no villains, the
French director Jean Renoir said simply, “Everyone has his
reasons.” It was a wise, humane, and tragic observation, eternally
relevant.
I’ve
always been strongly anti-Communist, yet when I read about World War I
some years ago I understood, for the first time, why many well-meaning,
intelligent people — from Albert Einstein to Charlie Chaplin —
might have reacted against it by putting their hopes in Communism. In their
place, at that time, I realized uneasily, I might have done the same myself.
I hope I
would have had second thoughts when the grim truth about Communism in
practice came to light during the Stalin years. Many former Communists and
sympathizers did, and some became strong anti-Communists. But it can be
extremely hard to let go of an idea you’ve become attached to, even
when it has betrayed your hopes.
In the same
way, we should be able to understand why so many Jews in the twentieth
century became attached to Zionism. It was a beautiful idea: a homeland of
their own, where they could be normal at last. For many years it had my full
sympathy. I regarded the state of Israel not only as the fulfillment of a
Jewish dream, but as a valuable ally of the United States in the Cold War. I
was willing to overlook Israel’s murderous 1967 attack on the USS
Liberty; at the same time I recoiled from Arab terrorism.
But by
1982 I was having second thoughts for many reasons, of which Menachem
Begin’s brutal invasion of Lebanon was only one. I’d also come
to see that the Arabs deserved some sympathy too. Then came revelations
of Israeli spying on this country. My feeling of betrayal was profound.
Looking
back, I can regard Zionism only as naive, as Communism originally was; as
political dreams always are. Of all the places to found a Jewish state, the
Muslim world now seems — obviously — the least propitious on
earth.
![[Breaker quote for "Everyone Has His Reasons": Why intervention is futile]](2006breakers/060713.gif) Even
so, I have never been able to regard Israel as an enemy of the United States;
I’ve come to see it as an “ally” we didn’t need,
because American support for it would make Israel’s enemies our
enemies too. We should simply have heeded our forebears’ warnings
against “entangling alliances” with foreign countries, not only in
the Middle East, but everywhere.
You’d
think two world wars would have given Americans some
second thoughts about those “entangling alliances,” and more
respect for their Founding Fathers, but today such wisdom is dismissed as
“isolationism” — an absurd misnomer for simple prudence.
It’s not that foreign countries are always wicked; if you condemn
Israel, what are you going to say about a genuine hellhole like North Korea?
But when it
comes to war, “everyone has his reasons.” Nowhere is that
more vividly illustrated than in the Middle East, where everyone seems to
have his reasons to hate everyone else, where one side’s
“liberation” is the other’s “terrorism,” and
both agree only on the necessity of war.
Why the
United States should dive into that boiling caldron is beyond me. In addition to
the mutual enmity of Jews and Muslims, we are now bedeviled by that
between Sunnis and Shi’ites as well. It’s a deadly game in which
even the (heavily armed) referees are apt to be killed. Yet we are told
it’s not only our interest but our duty to intervene until the whole
region is democratic and peaceful!
That will be
the day. Everyone has not only his reasons, but also his dreams —
chiefly the dream of destroying his enemies. All these dreams collide in
violence, which serves only to make the endless mutual hatred deeper.
And
American intervention has proven worse than futile, further aggravating the
situation. A generation ago, an American diplomat urged Jews and Muslims to
settle their differences “like Christian gentlemen.” Excellent
advice, if only anyone were disposed to take it.
Today our
advice is to adopt democracy: “Put down your guns and vote!”
Yes, surrender to the referees, and take the chance that your deadly
enemies will come to power peacefully — and then destroy you. Given
that prospect, everyone has his reasons to keep on fighting.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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