“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

— Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 16 October 2023 [translated from Hebrew]

Netanyahu was reaching back into the Old Testament, linking the ancient people of Amalek (massacred by mythical King Saul) to present-day Palestinians in Gaza. He’s right about “children,” at least on the Palestinian side, in the open-air prison known as the Gaza Strip. Of Gaza’s two million inhabitants, about half are under 16 years old. (The median age in Gaza is 18 compared to 28 globally.) Most Gazans are descendants of refugees driven from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in what is referred to, in Arabic, as al-Nakba, the disaster.

By characterizing the “war” between Israel and Hamas in terms of light and dark, Netanyahu is acknowledging that this is a religious conflict. No wonder! Jews have been persecuted for millennia, beginning in the 6th century BCwith the Babylonian captivity when Jerusalem was sacked, and Jews — at least the leaders — were marooned far from their homeland. Since then, they’ve endured discrimination, pogroms and the Holocaust. Ironically for a people who know suffering, how little empathy they have for the descendants of the very people they forcefully displaced during the establishment of the State of Israel. Nearly half of Israelis polled last November said that Israel should “not at all” consider the “suffering of the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza” in response to the brutal Hamas attack of October 7.

I blame religion for encouraging such extreme views. Not just Jews vs. Muslims (99.8% of Gazans are Sunni Muslims living under ultra-conservative Hamas, while Israel is increasingly dominated by extreme forms of Judaism). When it comes to wars, it’s hard to avoid seeing most of them as essentially conflicts between competing religions. For instance:

• Balkans, 1991-1999: Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians and Bosnian Muslims
• Sri Lanka 1983-2009: Buddhists vs. Hindus
• Iran-Iraq 1980-1988: Sunni Muslims vs. Shiite Muslims
• Indonesia (Timor) 1974-1999: Muslims vs. Christians
• Northern Ireland, 1969-1998: Catholics vs. Protestants
• Nigeria 1967-1970: Muslims vs. Christians
• Sudan 1955-1972, 1983-2005, 2023-present: Muslims vs. Christians
• WW2 1939-1945: Christians vs. Christians; Christians vs. Shintoism & Buddhism. Britain, the US and Japan were empires in which religious nationalism played a major role. For Britain and the US, Protestant Christianity was put in the service of the war effort (and it helped China’s cause against Japan that Chiang Kai-Shek was Christian), while both Shintoism and Buddhism were central to Japan’s wartime morale. Germany wasn’t exempt: Adolph Hitler (“Providence has chosen me to lead the German people to resurrection”) was regarded as a messiah by many Germans (even though he was Austrian) to right the vengeful terms of the Treaty of Versailles following WW1 (Christians vs. Christians, mostly)
• European Religious Wars, 1517-1712: Protestants vs. Catholics
• Crusades: 1096-1291: Christians vs. Muslims

Need I go on? I’m not naive enough to believe that religion is the only cause — or even the main cause — that enabled these conflicts, but religion has certainly been harnessed, time and again, to justify making one’s cause noble while demonizing the enemy. Without religion, the world would be a much safer place.

Reaching back to last week’s sermonizing about kindness, I’m reminded of Nietzsche’s observation: “There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.”