Unilateralism Versus Mutual Trust:  The Sentinal Issue for the Twenty-First Century
by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

  The “outing” of the Israeli lobby by Mearsheimer and Walt on March 23rd in The London Review of Books has been likened to a seismic event.  Sheila Musaji’s articles and article archives in The American Muslim are providing a running commentary. 

  One critique is still missing.  These academicians fail to provide a principled alternative for Jews and Muslims, who are now like two scorpions in a bottle.  Despite the service that John Meirsheimer and Stephen Walt have done in surfacing the unmentionable in polite society, they have done a disservice as members of the realist persuasion by failing to offer solutions based on a paradigm of justice. 

The power of the Israeli lobby is more a product of a modernist unilateral mindset than its origin, which is why the triumphalist utopia of imposing order on the world is more of a threat to peace through justice in the new millennium than any radical Jewish nationalism could ever be.  There is an alliance between the two forms of autistic utopianism because they both derive emotionally from the same existentialist fear of destruction by forces beyond their control.  An important difference is that the ideological utopianism raging for some years now in America has the potential to become a metastacizing pandemic like Communism, whereas the Israeli lobby has no appeal beyond its nationalistic origins. 

Fukuyama is leading the pack of ex-Neo-Cons in reaction to their first failure in Iraq by trying to backtrack through his announcement that he has been converted to Wilsonian realism.  This is somewhat of an oxymoron, though it might make sense if ethics is considered to be a factor in public policy, and if ethics would be expressed in a search for justice.  Justice can be convincing on the street only if it is based on traditionalist religion, not on secular pragmatism, and certainly not on the apocalyptic triumphalism that passes as religion among so many Christians, Jews, and Muslims today. 

Enlightened religion, based on the interfaith processing of scripture into a framework of human responsibilities and rights, is the only cure for injustice.  This is the only effective counterbalance to the special pleading by special interests who now threaten to bring on the end of civilization by trying to protect the status quo with all of its injustices.  Faith-based justice is the missing dimension of American foreign policy, because it is the only framework of thought and action that has universal appeal.  More than anything else, the future of the world will depend on reeducation of their own peoples by traditionalist Jews and traditionalist Muslims who trust each other enough to make the effort.

The recent elections gave a decisive majority to Hamas, which has demanded end solutions before rather than after it officially recognizes Israel’s existence in international law.  This is putting the cart before the horse, because mutual recognition logically should precede the development of mutual respect based on common identities, and such re-identification is the first step to overcome existential fears of the other.  This transformation of self-identities must begin through education from the ground up, not in the form of threats and counter-threats from the top down. 

How does one do this?  One approach is to envision an Abraham Federation, perhaps as it was developed by The Center for Economic and Social Justice partly in response to President Ronald Reagan’s sponsorship of the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, which was part of his call for a Second American Revolution in both domestic and foreign policy.  This proposal was published by Norman Kurland on August 25, 2002, under the title “The Abraham Federation: A New Framework for Peace in the Middle East”, in The American Muslim.  This solution even as a framework for policy, however, can never be more than a product of a prior spiritual, emotional, and political breakthrough. 

  Such a breakthrough is not only possible, but already well underway.  The details of cooperation between traditionalist religious leaders among Jews and Muslims, namely, Orthodox Jews and Islamist as well as Sufi Muslims, must remain confidential, but one initiative from this movement is to prepare the way for a revision of textbooks throughout the Holy Land. This preparatory initiative includes the filming of a movie on the cooperation of Jews and Muslims during the Inquisition in Andalucia (Spain), when their survival depended on trusting each other.

The copy-righted plot and script for this movie, with both Jewish and Muslim poetic folk music as a backdrop, is described below:

The Glance of Recognition:  The movie opens with footage of current day Plaza de Mayor in Madrid, fading into the huge 1683 painting of the inquisition “Auto Fe in Plaza Mayor” by Francisco Rizzi (displayed in the Prado), zooming in on different scenes in the painting including the priests attempting to elicit a confession from the condemned, entertained spectators sitting on the balconies that to this day surround Plaza de Mayor and a bored Church official sleeping in his chair.

Part II is at http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/unilateralism_versus_mutual_trust_in_the_holy_land_part_ii/009174