- The Observer,
- Sunday March 31 2002
Fundamentalists, however, do not just exist in the realm of religion, embodied in the Hamas suicide bomber or the DUP Bible-basher. It is easy to caricature all fundamentalists as fanatics who embrace death with a smile on their faces. There are other fundamentalists who live in the secular world and by virtue of their unshakeable faith in their convictions are prepared to argue that 2+2 = 5.
Twentieth-century totalitarianism, both fascist and communist, was the extreme terminus of secular fundamentalism. Its slave camps, mass deportations, industrial-scale slaughter and organised lying helped cast out the snake from the idyll. For Utopia could only be built after the expulsion of all those Jews, socialists, kulaks, Trotskyists, liberals, homosexuals whose presence on the earth was an unwanted reminder that humanity is complex, flawed and multifarious.
Milder forms of fundamentalism prevail among even those who are repelled by old-time religion or totalitarianism. These soft-focus fundamentalists constantly seek out a narrative of good guys and bad guys while par roting every conceivable cliché about any given conflict.
A classic example of this was last week's Irish Times . A front-page report from the West Bank concentrated on the case of a suicide bomber. The article repeated the hackneyed ahistorical analysis that such bombers are the products of recent desperation. What these accounts ignore is that even in the most optimistic phase of the Middle East peace process, the years after the Oslo peace accord in 1993, suicide bombers were killing Jews in Israeli streets. The suicide bomber is not only the child of the Al Aqsa intifida and Israel's hamfisted response. The uprising certainly accelerated the rate of suicide attacks but they operated long before Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's peace plan, thus stampeding the Israeli public into the arms of Ariel Sharon.
It is worth remembering that organisations that send these young people out to blow themselves up are dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad regard Israel as an affront to Islamic dignity, an abomination that has to be erased forever from the planet. For some inexplicable reason, you will rarely read about this in the Irish Times. Nor will the old lady of D'Olier Street tell you about the schools on the West Bank and Gaza were children are indoctrinated to hate the Jews - not Israelis but Jews in general.
Moreover, you will not be informed in great detail about the fact that Mein Kampf is a residual bestseller in the Arab world, or that Arab newspapers in countries even inclined to peace like Egypt publish vile propaganda about the Israelis spreading Aids among the Palestinian population or Satanism throughout middle-class Egyptian youth.
Irish Left-leaning liberals, especially those in the media, feel a mix ture of guilt and loathing towards Israel. Guilt because it is Western aid and diplomatic support that helps prop Israel up. Loathing, especially from the hard Left, because the Israelis happened to be on the winning side in the Cold War. The latter have never really forgiven the Jews, whatever their rhetoric about being anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic, for creating their own state and for burying forever the lazy double-stereotype of the Jew as either rootless cosmopolitan or eternal sufferer.
There are, of course, dangerous, deranged fundamentalists within Israel - 'Hizbollah in skullcaps,' according to that nation's greatest living writer, Amos Oz. Sharon is a bully and a thug who knows no more than to lash out in all directions, endangering everyone every time Islamist suicide bombers blow up Israelis. But the so-called 'Arab street' we hear and read about so much has never been educated to accept peace with Israel or even the existence of a Jewish state on their doorstep. Instead, they have been raised to believe there is only one solution to the Israel problem, an eliminationist one.
'They do not exist,' was Golda Meir's reply when challenged about the Palestinians' plight. Reading the Irish Times and listening to RTE's coverage of the Middle East you could be forgiven for thinking Meir's contemptuous dismissal of the Palestinians' existence now applies to the complex, multilayered, democratic society that is modern Israel.
henry.mcdonald@observer.co.uk
