We can’t let Israel’s leader divide the Middle East into “blessed” and “cursed” nations

In his most recent address before the General Assembly of the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in binary terms in which he invoked the ancient Jewish prophet, Moses.

“When I spoke here last year, I said we faced the same timeless choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years ago as we were about to enter the promised land,” he said. “Moses told us that our actions will determine whether we bequeath to future generations a blessing or a curse, and that is the choice we face today.”

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The Prime Minister held a map of the Middle East with some countries rendered in green. These, his nations of “The Blessing,” included Israel and some of its Arab-allied Sunni-Muslim countries: Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.

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Netanyahu claimed they form “a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Across this bridge, we will lay rail lines, energy pipelines, fiber optic cables, and this will serve the betterment of two billion people.” This map promises “a bright blessing, a future of hope.”

On a second map with some countries painted in black, Netanyahu showed “The Cursed” countries: the Shia- and Persian-controlled countries of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Of this map, Netanyahu sternly warned of “a dark future of despair”:

“It’s a map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Iran’s malignant arc has shut down international waterways. It cuts off trade. It destroys millions, destroys nations from within, and inflicts misery on millions.”

The binary of “good versus evil” erases people’s humanity

The human brain, through millennia of its evolutionary processes, has developed a capacity to categorize reality into easily digestible morsels, all in its attempt to absorb and make sense of a complex world.

We have seen the perennial theme, for example, of “Good versus Evil” surface throughout the human condition as far back as over 3,000 years ago in Zoroastrianism as valued by the poet-prophet Zarathustra. The theme has reappeared in literary and religious discourses ever since. In some monotheistic religions with the overarching theme of dualism, for example, the “right” side is seen as good, while the “left” is considered bad.

Nature, however, does not exist or act in dualisms, and reality does not fit into neat and simplified binaries as Mr. Netanyahu would have us believe, whether it relates to the nations comprising the Middle East, or any other region of the world.

Netanyahu claimed, however, that “the lines separating ‘the blessing’ and ‘the cursed’ could not be more clear.”’ and the cursed could not be more clear.”

So, for the sake of discussion, let us grant a dualistic view of the hostilities and actions transpiring in Netanyahu’s area of the planet, but with a different placement of “sides.”

Let us place “The Blessing” not as entire countries, but, rather, as the citizens of all the countries in the Middle East, the people who want only to live productive lives, to work so they may earn a good and noble living, to raise families, to tend crops, herds, and flocks, and to desire only peace and peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. These are the ones who promise “a bright blessing, a future of hope.”

“The Cursed,” on the other hand, comprise the leaders, those who require the hostilities, the destruction, the steadily increasing casualties of constant wars to continue in order for them to remain the beneficiaries of ever more powerful weapons and financial funding from their allies to remain in power. The leaders themselves present “a dark future of despair.”

The actions of Iran and its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis) and the Israeli government’s counter attacks and over-reactions in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Yemen have all resulted in tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths and injuries, while the people long for calm and a lasting peace.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu and the leaders of Iran and some of the Arab countries spoke primarily in binary terms at the General Assembly. Maybe rather than presenting their positions — we are good and they are bad, we are blessed and they are cursed, we want only peace and they want continual wars — in front of TV cameras playing to their country folks, try instead talking together to one another as diplomats.

Be viewed in history as the peacemakers rather than the perpetrators of death.

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