Middle East

One fact sits unmolested in the centre of the Middle East storm  

Nothing is ever certain about conflicts involving Israel, and while so much is said about them, so little can actually be said

By kevin Potvin  

What can be said about the war in Lebanon that hasn’t already been said a hundred times? And disputed at least a hundred times as well? How far back in history does one go to find the original cause, the first provocation, that led to the unending series of responses and counter-responses? This is a retaliation for that. Ah, but that was a retaliation for this. But this . . .

How many sides are there in the average Middle East conflict? And then how many other world players have proxies in those conflicts? In the present one, we already have Syria, Iran, the US, and Russia.

Long before choosing who is right and who is wrong in this current war, the problem of even choosing what counts as a consideration toward the question of right and wrong must first be settled, but that’s more impossible yet. Do literary historical re-ferences from Mark Twain count? Do Biblical references count? Do tallies of UN resolutions count?

What’s worse is, the portrayal of the Middle East as an unknowable tangle of historical struggles is itself a position that serves the propaganda objectives of one or another side, depending on the minutiae in the present conflict. To even say one doesn’t know what to make of it all is to have unwittingly fallen on one side and not another. And yet, to therefore say nothing, to choose to erase the whole thing from one’s consciousness, is also to fall squarely in line with one and not another side’s objective.

To think nothing, or to say nothing, no less than to think something, anything, or to say anything, is to have embedded oneself into the conflict firmly on one side.

Once you resign yourself to that inescapable reality, you realize that anything you think or say, or do not think or do not say, can be effectively disputed by a barrage of arguments. No matter what you say or what you think, or do not say or do not think, you are wrong. You are wrong before you have even thought or said anything.

But for me to have said even that, is wrong, can be easily defeated by a hundred off-the-rack arguments.

Even by writing this conundrum out, by just describing the difficulty of thinking about the matter of the Middle East, even before one word has been written directly about the present matter of the Middle East, it is clear to one reader or another that I am obviously—as well as dangerously and woefully incorrectly—sympa-thetic to this or that side. And yet if I had chosen to not write about even the conundrum of writing about the Middle East, I would, I realize, with desperate exas-peration, have declared myself for this or that side.

But. Underneath the morass of layers of entangling arguments, there is one indisputable fact: a nation was planted where another already existed. If there is ever to be a resolution that settles the conflict, it will only begin with that opening “Whereas . . . ”