Best Of

In this post I will claim that it is excellent to intellectually see all groups neutrally but that for many (most?) of us - even as we claim to see this way - in our hearts the us/them dichotomy remains active on a deeper level. Exorcising this deeper level through spiritual practice is highly commendable, even though difficult.

Here is the shortest version of my personal example: I grew up in a war-zone, a normal part of the day was to watch war-related news, my city was bombed, I went to bomb shelters, etc. It was always "the Serbs" which were vilified, and "the Croats" which were sanctified. I never knew any Serbs but as a young leftist and student of political science took great pride in not harbouring any ill-will towards them. In every debate on the issue I would argue along the lines as has been argued in this thread - that there are no "Serbs", just various individuals.

At around age 20 I participated in an international youth camp and met the first Serbs I ever met. To my great shock and dismay, my first reaction was one of - fear! My later life-long Serb friends told me that they felt exactly the same way and had exactly the same views before our meeting.

I don't know who cracked the first joke, but the way in which we loosened and transcended this fear was to call each other the worst nationalistic names we could in a humoristic and endearing manner: I called them "Četnici", they called me "Ustaše" (basically, a Nazi). Through this humoristic approach, without avoiding the underlying tension, we quickly became best friends and did everything together during the camp and remained excellent friends to this day. A decade later I was gladdened to see that our "method" is endorsed by Slavoj Žižek, a world-famous Slovenian philosopher.

I thought I had this cracked. Then, one day, I realized that STILL whenever I heard the word "Serb" there would be a low-level fear response in my body. I asked my Serb friend whether she felt the same when she heard the word "Croat", and she said yes!

I became really, really pissed off and decided I would not tolerate this for one more minute. I meditated on this issue for three hours, had a realization, and the fear went away. I tested myself on various youtube videos of Serbian singers, politicians, etc., and was sooo happy that it went away.

However, today I find that this fear has crept back in, so another meditation might be in order. I believe it is due to the continuing Serb-villification in my surroundings.

What I'm trying to say is: we can have one view intellectually - and it is very good to have a good one - but still harbour the reverse in our "pain-body". The real work, to my mind, is working with this pain body, to align it with a better state of being.

The suffering of the Palestinian people breaks my heart, and it fills me with guilt that my country has been complicit in the violence inflicted upon them and has sustained their oppression. And I feel powerless to do much to stop it.

The attack on 10/7/23 by Hamas isn't something I condone; but as this article points out, the imbalance of power between these two sides is staggering and the violence is unproportionate as well. In the words of legal scholar Noura Erakat, "It becomes about a 'cycle of violence,' despite the fact that Israeli military and settler attacks on Palestinians aren't cyclical at all but constant. What we witness during specific periods of escalation is just an intensification of such attacks."

While one can obviously blame segments of the population in Gaza for adding fuel to this violence, the nation-state of Israel has created an apartheid state for Palestinians and is currently engaging in systematic settler colonialism and war crimes by punishing everyone in Gaza with, in the words of the UN, "indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza ... [who] have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars."

Gaza is an area that's smaller than Portland, OR, with twice the population, half of which are children. And they have no freedom of movement, let alone control of their own borders, water-ways, air-space, or their supply of water and electricity. It's an open-air prison.

Peace will only be possible when Israel's government stops its inhumane policies, gives equal rights and autonomy to Palestinians in their shared homeland, and truly gives them a choice to live as one people. Because the only other option is continued displacement and ethnic cleansing until the Palestinian people cease to exist.