AEX                  Israel and the Lebanon

I am writing on 17 July 2006 when the latest flare-up in the Middle East is occurring.  It is a sad story once again.  When will the West learn that the Arab world only has peace when their society is run by a despot?  Just look at Iraq as an example of this dictum.

It is no coincidence that the standard greeting in both the Arab and Israeli world is "peace".  The word in both languages is nearly the same.  These peoples, of both cultures, wish for peace above all else.  If it means that they are under the thumb of a draconian government, that is to be preferred to chaos and eternal conflict.  If it were only the warring parties who were affected, I expect that the populace would not be too worried what the nature of their government was.  But, in practice, a lot of innocent bystanders get hurt when the rival camps squabble among themselves.

When working in Syria in 1980, there was a continual rumour of an impending coup. However, the President (the father of the present one) knew how to keep the lid on the country.  Had the insurgents had their way, all hell would have broken loose.  Those members of the population that I came into contact with, seemed to be content to live in a draconian dictatorship.

I reckon that the Israeli government knows the mindset of the Arabs better than we do in the West.  After all, they are the same people, but with a different religion.  It is this difference, I believe, that makes the two peoples so different.  Can you imagine an Israeli business man oversleeping and being late for a meeting, blaming his omission on "God's Will".  This, regretfully is the common attitude of the Muslim world.  The army personnel I worked with included a lot of Roman Catholics, and these men were very close indeed to our Western thinking.  One of them told me that to a devout Muslim, talking about the weather was heresy.  This part of the natural world is the province of the Almighty.  So we in Britain will be forever damned in the eyes of the Muslim world as we think about little else but the weather.  Heaven knows what will happen if and when we manage to control our climate.  We can control our birthrate now, and this is causing a storm in the Vatican.

Yes, perhaps the Soviets had something we could learn from on the subject of religion.