The Clash between Medievalism and Modernity in the Middle East
Why Israel will never be at peace until the Muslim world is modernized
Of all the news stories that have received the most coverage over the years, the Arab-Israeli conflict should have concerned the world the least because that conflict is so obviously irresolvable under the prevailing conditions.
That’s not to say the conflict shouldn’t preoccupy the people who are directly involved in it, especially in the Middle East. But this should be one of the least interesting news stories to a general audience, assuming we keep ignoring the underlying issues.
The decades-long cold war between Israeli Jews and their Muslim neighbours is as inevitable as hot weather in a desert. Consequently, the perennial chatter about a “two-state solution” has been as sensible as expecting the Arabian Desert to suddenly turn freezing cold during the day.
Why fantasize about the impossible? Why bang your head against a wall?
What’s more interesting is the challenge of understanding why the conflict is inevitable, and why it will never be resolved, short of a sweeping series of revolutions in the Muslim world.
Israel’s options
Let’s look at what each side could conceivably do to resolve the conflict.
Israel could:
- (1) rein in its Orthodox Jews, stop building settlements in Palestinian territory, and give back the settled land (obtained in the Six-Day War) to Palestinians
- (2) stop retaliating militarily for Islamist terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, thus ending the inevitable collateral damage against Muslim civilians outside Israel
- (3) press for a two-state solution with Palestine, and allow Palestinians and their descendants to return to their ancestral homeland
- (4) stop sabotaging Iran’s nuclear weapons program
- (5) commit mass suicide or terminate Israel as a Jewish state
The only option here that wouldn’t pose an existential threat against Israel is (1), although even the settlements were initially undertaken for security reasons. Given Israel’s history of being attacked by its neighbours, Israel placed “Israeli civilians in certain areas to solidify Israel’s control,” and “sought to ensure that the territory’s political future would be consistent with the country’s perceived security needs. A civilian settler population could also act as the first line of defense against an invasion.”
However, “Over time, messianic Religious Zionist ideology developed as a significant driver of the settlement movement, based on the notion of a religious imperative for Jews to settle the entire Land of Israel. Settlements established as part of this religious movement were often placed in regions with a large Palestinian population in order to secure Jewish dominance over the territory, prevent a Palestinian state, and secure the entire West Bank for Israel.”
Suppose Israel gives up all its settlements of what the international community considers occupied territory, or else provide suitable land swaps. Would that end the Islamist terrorism against Israel? Would Israeli Jews be able to live with no fear of wars of aggression initiated by their Muslim neighbours? No, resolving this issue wouldn’t end the overall conflict.
Suppose Israel were to adopt a Gandhi-like policy and to refuse to respond militarily to Islamist attacks on its civilians. Would that policy of nonviolence end the terrorist attacks, or would it encourage more of them, threatening Israel’s existence as a Jewish state? I think the lack of a military response would embolden the terrorists and their state sponsors, such as Iran.
Of course, no country in the world would be expected to act in this way, to not defend itself when assaulted. But even if Israel sacrificed itself in this fashion like a collective Christ figure, allowing terrorists to pick off its Jewish people one after another, the overall conflict would remain. The attacks on Israel would continue.
Thus, neither (1) nor (2) would solve the problem. And notice that the other three options would indeed resolve the conflict, but only by effectively destroying Israel as a Jewish state.
The Palestinian right of return is the political position or principle that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees (c. 30,000 to 50,000 people still alive as of 2012) and their descendants (c. 5 million people as of 2012), have a right to return, and a right to the property they themselves or their forebears left behind or were forced to leave in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories…
Objectors to a Palestinian right of return contend that such a right would destroy Israel as a Jewish state as it would leave Jews a minority in Israel. In a two-state solution framework, this would leave Israel as a bi-national state with a Jewish minority…
As for a peace plan that doesn’t include the Palestinian right of return, Israel already offered that, and the Palestinians rejected it. For instance, in 2000,
The Israeli prime minister offered the Palestinian leader between 91% and 95% (sources differ on the exact percentage) of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip if 69 Jewish settlements (which comprise 85% of the West Bank’s Jewish settlers) be ceded to Israel…Arafat rejected this offer and did not propose a counter-offer. No tenable solution was crafted which would satisfy both Israeli and Palestinian demands, even under intense U.S. pressure. Clinton blamed Arafat for the failure of the Camp David Summit.
Why did Arafat reject the offer? Because the hardliners in Hamas would have killed him had he made any compromise that would have contributed to the further existence of a Jewish state in Israel, or they would have scuttled the compromise by conducting savage acts of terrorism against Israel.
Nevertheless, could Israel make a similar peace offer in 2023, and would this end the conflict with its neighbours? Indeed, Israel was about to enter peace negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which seems to have provoked Iran to commit Hamas to perpetrating its Oct 7 pogrom. Peace with the Arabs in Saudi Arabia and Palestine seems impossible without making peace with the Persians in Iran. And how likely is that to happen?
The Muslim world’s options
To answer that latter question, let’s first look at what Israel’s Muslim neighbours could conceivably do to end their conflict with Israel:
- (1) stop doing terrorism, the deliberate violent targeting of Israeli civilians
- (2) accept a two-state solution and accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (as a homeland for Jews that’s needed because of all the fervent anti-Judaism in the world that came to a head with the Nazi Holocaust)
- (3) modernize (secularize and liberalize) themselves to eliminate the many fundamentalist hardliners who want to see all Israeli Jews dead and Israel annihilated
The problem with (1) and (2), then, is that those options are impossible without (3).
You see, Israel has its Orthodox Jewish hardliners, too, but because Jewish society overall is classically liberal and modernized, the Israeli government could conceivably enact policies that go against this constituency’s interests. Republican politics are what make such compromises possible.
Granted, this would be difficult in Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, which was formed because of the failure of the peace process under liberal governments. But all democratic governments change with the seasons. Israel already went against its hardliners by offering Palestinians peace plans, and one Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was even assassinated for doing so. The same compromise isn’t possible in a country with less stable institutions that could stand as bulwarks against the radicals and fundamentalists.
There is no pragmatic, compromising republic in the Muslim world (although Turkey came close). Israel’s neighbours are explicitly or effectively theocratic, and that would be fine if Islam were as pragmatic as Judaism. But whereas Judaism was secularized long ago, as evidenced by its incorporation of the books of Job and Ecclesiastes into its scriptures, Islam hasn’t reckoned with modernity.
Jews adopted a functionally secular perspective on life not by choice but by force of history since they were conquered repeatedly and had to reckon with their inferior earthly status. They did so by exchanging dogmatic theology for a pragmatic will to endure. Likewise, the European theocracies of Christendom had to be forcibly converted to modernism, by the French and Russian revolutions and by Napoleon’s military campaigns and reforms of Christian medievalism.
Again, that hasn’t happened in most of the Muslim world. On the contrary, Muslims are informed by the imperialism of their early history, as Islam spread by the sword. Whereas Jews only fantasized that Joshua had conquered vast territories in ancient Canaan, the prophet Muhammad was a real conqueror. Thus, Muslim nostalgic pride contrasts with Jewish pragmatic humility.
And indeed, Muhammad was a Napoleonic figure in that he modernized the regions he conquered. Whereas the Western world began in a medieval, benighted state and was only subsequently modernized, the Muslim world started off relatively modern but fell into medieval squalor.
Let’s understand, then, what it means to speak of an end to the conflict between Israel and its Muslim neighbours. What this would entail isn’t just a peace treaty between, say, Israel and Palestine. No, it would entail peace between modernism and medievalism.
The reason Iran doesn’t accept Israel’s right to exist is that Iran rejects the modernity that Israel represents. Iran is a theocracy that dismisses the liberal principle that people have the right to rule themselves, such as via political representatives in a democracy. That modern way of life is blasphemous to the Iranian regime, and to many Muslims in the Middle East. According to Pew, even Muslims that want democracy want Islam to play a major role in public life, a view that conflicts with the liberal conception of democracy.
That, then, is what’s standing in the way of an end to the Muslim world’s conflict with Israel, that world’s resistance to modernity, to liberal humanistic values and to their expressions in the freedom of thought and in art, free markets, free politics, and in the freedom of technoscientific empowerment.
Due to its liberal, multicultural ethos, Israel’s willing to tolerate the existence of Muslim countries, but the latter don’t extend the same tolerance towards Israel because they don’t accept the logic of the liberal’s harm principle. According to liberals, we should be free to do whatever we want if we grant others the same right. For most Muslims in the Middle East, liberalism is just an excuse to sin. We’re obliged, rather, to submit to Allah and his commandments, not to forge ahead with an independent, secular society.
There are liberal Islamic reform movements in the Middle East, but their weakness and unpopularity are apparent from the failure of the Arab Spring movements in all but Tunisia.
Thus, Israel would eventually destroy itself in tolerating its medieval-minded Muslim neighbours since the latter don’t abide by the harm principle: the neighbours don’t want Israel to exist as a Jewish state because they reject all elements of modernity, including liberalism.
The medievalism of the Muslim world
Why do Muslims terrorize Israeli civilians? Why have they instigated wars with Israel since Israel’s founding in 1948? Why do they reject the reasonable peace plans that Israel’s offered? Why would Iran nuke Israel as soon as it obtained nuclear weapons (whereas Israel likely already has such weapons and hasn’t used them, despite its being surrounded by hostile countries)? Why do many Palestinians demand the right to return to their ancestral lands, effectively threatening to end Israel as a Jewish state, whereas there’s no such demand by the world’s millions of other refugees outside of the Middle East, refugees who have simply adapted to their new homes?
Ultimately, the answer is the same in each case: these Muslims don’t accept Israel’s right to exist because they reject modernism, and Israel is a modern state. This is the reason there won’t be peace between Israel and the Muslim world. It’s not because Jews are evil, and it’s not because the US weapons industry profits from wars. It’s because Israel is part of the modern world of human rights, free trade, and secular progress, whereas most Muslim countries are part of the medieval world of religious dogmatism, patriarchy, plutocracy, and mass poverty.
For instance, Muslims have won a total of 16 Nobel Prizes, as of 2023, and out of the 4 for sciences, 3 were won by Americans. By contrast, “at least 214 [Nobel Prize winners between 1901 and 2023] have been Jews or people with at least one Jewish parent, representing 22% of all recipients. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population, meaning their share of winners is 100 times their proportion of the world’s population.”
According to Carnegie, “About 250 million people out of 400 million across 10 Arab countries, or two-thirds of the total population, were classified as poor or vulnerable.” Moreover, ‘“Mass pauperization” in the Middle East makes the region the most unequal in the world,’ and “With governments in the Middle East unable to deliver basic services and opportunities, young people are turning to religious, sectarian, and ethnic organizations like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to fill the void.”
According to Freedom House’s 2022 report on the status of democracy in countries around the world, Israel is the only country in the Middle East rated Free, and “Some 93 percent of the [Middle East] region’s people live in countries rated Not Free, while 4 percent live in Partly Free countries and 3 percent live in a Free country.”
Countries that practice “sharia,” the classic Islamic, medieval law include Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Apostasy receives the same punishment in many of those countries.
As for the status of Muslim women in Saudi Arabia, for instance, “Under the male guardianship system, a man controls a Saudi woman’s life from her birth until her death. Every Saudi woman must have a male guardian, normally a father or husband, but in some cases a brother or even a son, who has the power to make a range of critical decisions on her behalf. The Saudi state essentially treats women as permanent legal minors.”
Similar conditions apply throughout the Muslim world. “Iranian women experience discrimination in law and in practice in ways that deeply impact their lives, particularly with regard to marriage, divorce and custody issues. Post-1979 compulsory hijab laws affect virtually every aspect of women’s public life in Iran.”
For the Arab-Israeli conflict to end, then, Arabs must reckon with the revolutions of modernity, with the rise of scientific skepticism, capitalism, democracy, secularism, liberalism, and so on. The Muslim world must be secularized for Israel to be at peace and existentially secure. Short of that, Israel must be Machiavellian in its dealings with its neighbours just to survive in that hostile environment.
The chain of recriminations begins here not with Israeli intransigence, but with the medievalism of the Muslim’s world’s theocratic dictatorships. Those Muslim countries are living in the distant past; therefore, they clash with modernity, as the latter is represented, for instance, by Israel.
The talk of real peace between Israel and the Muslim world is just boring if a blind eye is turned to the elephant in the room: much of the Muslim world is still punishing theft by cutting off the thief’s right hand, as ordered by the medieval sharia.
If medievalism could live side by side with modernity, Europe wouldn’t have gone through such a tumult in its transition from Christendom to secular republicanism. As long as most of the Middle East remains archaic in its mindset and in its religiosity, we can expect the conflict with Israeli modernity to continue.
The failure of the peace process, then, isn’t news.
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