How to vanquish an enemy: Make him into a friend

Hunkering down under blasts from Hamas rockets, I ought to be thinking about my safety.  But hellish images of old people being tortured, young girls being raped, and babies being beheaded have commandeered all of my emotional bandwidth.  

After asking myself a thousand times what can be done about this bitter enemy, a statement made by Abraham Lincoln eventually came to mind.  “The best way to destroy an enemy,” he said, “is to make him a friend.”  

Friendship requires empathy and appreciation. After a thousand years of enmity and misapprehension, starting with the Teutonic Knights’ decision to crush Islam and the West’s refusal after the Crusades to extend a hand in search of reconciliation, that is a pretty tough bill to fill. But it must be filled, because this backdrop, as much as any disagreements about land, has fueled the current tragedy.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly twenty years ago, it was naïve to think that simply handing over the land would open an era of peace.  This isn’t the first time such a thing was tried since the Palestinians were first offered a state in 1947, only to reject that and subsequent offers in 1967, 2009, and 2020.

More than the replacement of land, the issue has been the absence of reconciliation, which has filled a historical vacuum with hatred. 

Opportunities for conciliation and friendship have been standing as pillars of Islam for ages. This includes the Islamic duty to be kind (to people and animals), to give generously to charity, to forgive, to control anger, and to be honest, patient, and just.  Just as the West neglected these opportunities and permitted itself to believe it had won (or at least not lost) the Crusades, there were those within the Islamic world who countered that conviction with what has emerged as warped and brutal intolerance. 

That intolerance is unsurprising, given that it has taken decades for even the most enlightened and moderate Islamic leaders to abandon this culture of rejection and recognize a Jewish State as one of brothers rather than aliens. However misguided, it is easy to see why those committed to Israel’s destruction will not readily abandon beliefs that have been a millennium in the making.

In conflicts between cultures, there are many ways to win. Over the last two centuries, the West has done its winning through economic, technological, and imperial force. But in the end, the key to an enduring victory is acknowledgement that Islam’s monotheistic beliefs are based on our own and that in spite of our differences, we must have the courage to advance relations on the huge common ground we do share. 

Civilized people are enraged by the recent atrocities that the perpetrators claim are fundamentals of their Islamic faith. Over the coming months and years, managing that rage will be an enormous challenge. No matter how difficult the task, anger mustn’t be allowed to undermine the mission to defeat hatred. 

Winning means opening a new page in a thousand year old chapter marked by the failure to understand and genuinely respect a world view to which we do not ourselves subscribe. That is how we can both honor our victims and vanquish our enemy.  As Voltaire, an outspoken opponent of religious fanaticism once said, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” 

Ron Katz, who resides in Israel, is President of the Tel Aviv Institute.  He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.  He can be reached at ronkatz@tlvi.org