Curses

Lately I've been having a random preoccupation with Middle East related topics. I never took a class that formally dealt with Middle East history post middle school (got AP Euro and AP US history instead), so reading about it now as an adult feels pretty eye opening in a way.

When I was on vacation and the cable news networks were all covering the the UN school shelter bombings in the Gaza conflict...

Me: I'd like to visit Israel at some point... when it's less chaotic over there.

P: It'll never be peaceful over there. Those people are cursed until the end of the world.

It was striking to me to hear this opinion spouted out, to go so far as to call a whole people cursed. Yes, it's a way of simplifying understanding the conflict there, and in this case I believe a view informed by an interpretation of that's region's history probably not uncommon in some Christian circles, something along the lines of either:

A. Jews being cursed for having a part in killing Jesus (and hence their lack of stability in their nationhood ever since).

B. Arabs being cursed to always be in conflict ever since Ishmael (as the story goes, ancestor of the Arab peoples) got displaced as an heir by Abraham in favor of Isaac (ancestor of the Jews). Also perhaps tied to why America, the "Christian" nation, always seems to favor Israel over everyone else in the Middle East.

C. Palestinians being cursed for allegedly being descendants or modern day equivalents of the Canaanites, who were themselves apparently cursed to be displaced from their own land by the Israelites ever since Noah cursed his grandson Canaan.

While there doesn't seem to be any real simple or easy solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict, which has lasted longer than our lifetime, calling the people involved cursed does more to make the situation worse:

- It's way of saying that there's no point in trying to fix anything, because this is just how things have always been and this is how things always will continue to be, because those people are just destined to fight till the end of time.

- It's using an interpretation of history, one that quite frankly likely isn't entirely accurate, to justify a terrible status quo- on the same level as 19th century Americans who used the Bible to justify the enslavement of African or black people for being descendants of Ham, which itself is a misunderstanding of the original story (it was Canaan who got cursed, not Ham) in the first place.

- And ultimately, it's robbing a people's right to self-determine their own future for the sake of fulfilling a story... which is how I feel about a lot of the narratives in Genesis (Noah's sons; Lot's daughters; Abraham's sons; Jacob's sons; it goes on and on).

Taking such a view also leads to turning a blind eye to actual historical and present-day injustices and ignores a reality that is much more complicated. The rise of Zionism, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and European geopolitics in the last century have had more of an impact on the present day situation in the Middle East than any curse so to speak listed above... and that's just part of the story. Let alone the human rights violations being committed on both sides by Hamas and Israel today.

Sure, it's easy to attribute everything that's happened to curses. Curses are satisfying to people because the stories behind them are easy to comprehend, and they're vague enough such that it doesn't matter how events play out so long as they end badly for whoever is related to the one cursed. And to be honest, I'll admit that they actually do have power- but not because they actually happened, considering that these stories are often collected centuries after the fact. It's because people believe in them and use them to justify past, present, and future actions that otherwise would be considered injustice today... and indoctrinating that kind of belief in a population is a terribly effective method of coercing them into accepting otherwise atrocious behavior- just look at ISIS/IS today.

It feels weird to formulate a whole thought process about an idea that feels so outdated and irrelevant to the present-day situation in the Middle East, but these beliefs exist, and it feels disturbing for me to see how it's influenced attitudes in people I know towards the news and current events in that region. It's something I've felt self-conscious of more often lately, having grown up in an environment where the only source of information about the Middle East that I was aware of essentially came from the Bible... which only provides one aspect of that region's story and in a context far removed from what's actually happening today.

(and for the record, this is why I would never put my kids through a private Christian school.)