JERUSALEM, THE UNHOLY CITY

December 7, 2017. — Another idiotic and unnecessary decision by the most likely mentally ill US president will now lead to new unrest, riots, violence, counter-violence, injuries and deaths in Israel. As always, his recipe for situations that exceed his intellectual and emotional capacity is radical reduction of complexity: to cut through the knot he cannot understand, let alone unravel. And smile complacently.

In order to somehow disentangle this Gordian knot, one has to got to the bottom of the impulses that led into this situation. And revise certain basic convictions that have not been called into question so far. I would like to go into some detail on this and, once again with the American philosopher Ken Wilber, suggest an approach that — as far as I know as the only one at all — covers every (!) aspect of a matter. In this way, it is the only truly holistic analysis and intervention that can change the whole and not just its parts. (I also use it throughout in FGB; it is one of the main pillars of the book.)

On the one hand, Wilber juxtaposes exterior and interior— exterior, the objective / behavioral area; interior the subjective / intentional / intellectual / psychological / spiritual… are. What is exterior / objective can be observed (and if necessary controlled) what is interior / subjective, cannot. And secondly, each of these two sides of reality has an individual and a social aspect, resulting in four quadrants:

Uppler left— interior-individual (thinking and feeling; in the following abbreviated UL),

Upper right— exterior-individual (behavior; UR),

Lower right— exterior social (structures, systems, laws; LR)

Lower left— interior collective (common beliefs and values, culture; LL).

Wilber’s approach is therefore not only in some nebulous way, but actually holistic (from the Greek hólon,”the whole”): it encompasses all four aspects a matter (there are neither more nor fewer!). Only together do they make up the whole — the hólon. No matter what I look at: it has these four sides that only together make up its entire reality. Any attempt to reduce it to less is reductionism. All Weltanschauungen (materialism, spiritualism, socialism…) that try to merge the entire reality of the four quadrants into the one that they prefer are reductionist.

The hólon “society” also has four different dimensions:

• The individual with its personal thoughts, beliefs, values, feelings, character traits… — the self (UL),
• its behavior, physical characteristics, everything that is perceptible, quantifiable, measurable, objectively verifiable… (UR),
• all laws and explicit rules, governmental and other structures (LR), as well as
• culture, nation, traditions, customs, implicit rules, unspoken norms, taboos… — the Us (LL).

These dimensions must be recognised and acknowledged in their diversity, for very practical reasons: Innumerable conflicts are triggered by transferring the immanent principles of one quadrant to the other. For example, theocracy. The composite itself says that there are two things connected here:

• GOD (theós) — religion, convictions, values…, individual (UL) as well as collective (LL), and this is what connects the people of a modern society with freedom;
• RULE (krátein) — laws, state, commands, hierarchies, coercion… (RU), as well as their power over individual behaviour (UR).

Enlightenment and secularization have separated god(s) and state in the Occident in the two sides mentioned above: “Left” are personal beliefs and religion, which means: “This is my private affair; this is nobody else’s business; — “right” is everything public, official, laws and state. Modern democracies are secular in nature: The state keeps away from religions and does not allow religious groups to intervene in its affairs. God and the state are incompatible like freedom and coercion, and therefore they must be strictly separated from each other.

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The four sides of religion — individual beliefs, individual religious practice, collective beliefs, implicit rules, taboos, and explicit rules / laws / politics / state / borders — are constantly interacting.

Judaism has always had not only a religious (LL) dimension, but also a political-social (LR) dimension. Both are not separated in the Judeo-Christian Bible (“Old Testament”). The religious leaders of the old Israelites themselves were both religious and political leaders and commanders: from the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to Moses and Joshua, from the judges to the kings (Saul, David, Solomon) and the prophets (as preachers of God’s will). They spread their religion in the name of God with the sword (political religion) and legitimized their politics as the will of God (religious politics). The concept of Israel has always been that of the “Promised Land”, given by God. Political religion and religious politics were and are inseparable for orthodox Jews, Muslims, evangelicals… Zionism is a logical consequence of the orthodox understanding of religion, since in this system of thought nothing must be withdrawn from the sphere of God, above all not society in its entirety and politics as a means of managing it. From the mythical beginnings of the people of Israel, political action — including conquests and genocides— was carried out by God’s direct commission.

Every fundamentalism pursues a consistent fusion of the left and right quadrants. It merges what needs to be separated in a modern society. One can clearly see at this point that the universalist claim of a secular state (strict separation of religion and state; unconditional primacy of the constitution) is incompatible with the universalist claim of an archaic religion (inseparable unity of religion and state; unconditional primacy of God’s mandate).

Jerusalem is considered a “holy city” by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Like the term “theocracy”, the term “holy city” merges interior — personal (UL) and collective(LL) –, perceived as sacred, and exterior: the visible, the material, the geographic-political sphere (LR). There is a term for this fusion of “sacred” and “matter”: idolatry — the dance around the golden calf.

This transfer from “left” to “right” is the root of the never ending conflicts in Palestine (just as it is the paradigm of the Islamic state). The same also applies to non-religious ideologies (nationalism, racism…) that transfer beliefs and values to an external, geographical territory and merge them with it (“blood and soil”). Cuius regio, eius religio (phrase from the Peace of Augsburg 1555: “Whose realm, his religion”) has turned to cuius regio, eius natio (“Whose rule, his nation”; cp. Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia). The paradigm of a “holy city” desecrates what it strives to sacralize. It makes Jerusalem an unholy city (cf. Uri Avnery).

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The Jerusalem issue therefore, on closer examination, turns out to go far beyond Israel and Judaism: It is a major challenge for human development in the 21st century. The challenge consists of becoming aware of the left-right transfer — the atavistic reflex that must and will otherwise lead to ever more conflicts, violence and (civil) wars.

Of course, a psychological reflex is nothing that can be checked from the exterior, let alone influenced (it is “located” in the upper left quadrant). But people’s behavior can be influenced by structures and laws. There is only one solution to the Jerusalem conflict in particular, and ethnic, religious, national… conflicts in general — the consistent separation of these two systems:

• Left and right,
• Interior and exterior,
• Religion/nation/identity and territoriality/state.

If these two large-scale systems are clearly distinguished and separated, they can organize themselves according to their nature without conflicting with each other.

• In everything that concerns my identity (religion, beliefs, values, convictions, sexual, cultural, national… identity) I need LIBERTY (without affecting the freedom of others).
• People’s rights, on the other hand, must be applied to all equally, with no regard of religion, belief, nation… , no matter what cultural, sexual or other identity they ascribe to themselves. There must be EQUALITY in legal life. In particular, no territory may be claimed exclusively by any majority group on the basis of its common identity. Territoriality must be seen and treated in an inclusive way.

The strict social separation of “left” and “right”, “interior” and “exterior”, social identity and state represents a paradigm shift that is not limited to Israel. If this separation is right and necessary there, it is right and necessary everywhere.

What does this mean in concrete terms in Jerusalem?

• Jerusalem must be open to all religions for their practice. Every religious practice must be possible there without restriction. Absolute tolerance is the top priority here.
• As far as the territory of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular, is concerned, all people living there must have equal rights, regardless of their ethnicity and religion.

If you look at the politics of the last decades in this light, you will see that all escalations of conflict since the founding of Israel have been triggered by the violation of these two principles (cf. above Avnery!).

This means for the present and the future: All decisions that contradict these two principles will lead to further conflicts. All decisions following these principles will de-escalate the situation and contribute to a peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians.

[A major part of this text has been copy-pasted from FGB. Only “Islam” has been replaced by “Judaism” (and I have made corresponding adjustments).]

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