Public Comment

In 1965, a Time magazine cover asked an unsuspecting America, in lurid pink letters on a black background, 'Is God Dead'? hiWhile the country stewed over this, the Middle East--from whence He first showed--was fairly calm, by today's low standards even placid. God may have approved; who'd know?

Today, Israel and Hamas--if the latter is seen as an explicit agent of a sovereign power (Iran)--may provide the ultimate examples of the separation of Church and State originally guaranteed in our Constitution. [The Separation Clause refers to an established national church, not freedom of worship.]

Both states are historically and culturally undergirded by religion, with strong adherence to triumphant faiths which embrace codes of earthly moral conduct. Such conduct, however, is strikingly absent in the current conflict between the two being played out in Gaza. A slaughter of innocents is ongoing by both camps, which also deny them sanctuary anywhere. They just happen to be in the way. Both sides claim the right to exist as the basis for willful atrocities, an understandable end for which the means are morally void. 

Would their sources--or the Source--approve, if they chose to speak once again? Perhaps He has, albeit through a remote voice always dependable for calls for peace: the Pope in Rome. Even so, unheard are appeals by the warring sides to those desert-god sources for guidance--even for victory. There are no scriptural evocations of the rightness of the cause announced from any podium. Even as an afterthought. 

Meanwhile, the citizens of that forlorn strip may as well be inmates of an open-air prison where two hostile factions of armed guards have decided to go at it, begun when some of one faction crossed 'over the wall' to harry the neighboring countryside. 

What is it about the Middle East, the former Eden? Both states lay within this region, contested by military savagery since Akkad subdued the city-states of Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago, the victors often citing some god's will rather than say treasure or water rights. To this basin of deep spiritual development, descendant outsiders like the Crusaders have shown up only to leave any moral pretense at the shore and incite new massacres of just-folks. 

State aims which toss aside humane preconditions, beginning with common decency, may win temporary victories at the cost of their national 'souls'. In pressing state policy, Israel and Iran have clearly abandoned their spiritually-originated moral values over a small piece of land .. not just Gaza, or partner West Bank, but the Holy Land itself.