Crawling from the Wreckage (7 page)

The surviving half of the former Christian world subsequently spread its faith and its genes across the Americas and Australia, while Islam conquered much of southern Asia (and the two religions divided Africa between them). Together, they account today for more than half of the world’s population, so the old family quarrel affects a lot of people.

Muslim-Western disputes are so emotional precisely because they are between family members: neither of the estranged twin cultures brings the same amount of reproach and resentment to its occasional disputes with peoples who belong to entirely different traditions. But the fact that they do share so much history and so many values—they are all, as Muslims put it, “peoples of the Book”—means that the possibility of reconciliation is also ever present.

The most interesting statistics in the Pew survey are those about Muslim minorities living in the West, who were interviewed as a separate group for the first time this year. Muslims elsewhere may see Westerners as disrespectful of women, but Muslims who actually live among Westerners say the opposite—by a 73 percent majority in Germany, a 77 per cent majority in France, an 82 percent majority in Spain. Even in Britain, despite the police harassment that has alienated so many Muslims since last July’s bombs in London, a narrow majority agrees.

The same phenomenon is evident across a broad range of issues—and the huge non-Muslim majorities in Britain, France and the United States also have largely positive views of the Muslims in their midst, despite all the old history and all the recent clashes and controversies. To know them may not be to love them, exactly, but it does seem to breed tolerance, and maybe even solidarity.

What a respectful non-believer, I can hear a few of you murmur. He must be a deeply spiritual person despite his inability actually to believe
.

Well, no, actually. The sociology and the political behaviour of religions is interesting to me. Even the various competing theologies have a certain weird fascination: how can people believe that stuff? Especially, how can they believe it just because they were born into families and communities that believe it, when they
know
that other people, just as intelligent and
well educated, believe equally weird but entirely contradictory things because they were born into different families and communities? Isn’t anybody paying attention here?

If I had a magic wand to wave, I would expunge all religion tomorrow: not just the institutions, but the whole body of superstition and fear of the unknown that underpins religion. I do not have such a wand, so I will only call your attention to the following article. Suspicions confirmed
.

They published an opinion poll in Britain recently in which 82 percent of the people surveyed said that they thought religion does more harm than good. My first reaction, I must admit, was to think: that’s what they would say, isn’t it? It’s not just that suicide bombers give religion a bad name. In “post-Christian Britain,” only 33 percent of the population identify themselves as “religious persons,” and if you stripped out recent immigrants—especially Polish Catholics, West Indian Protestants, Pakistani Muslims, Indian Hindus—then the number would be even lower.

So that’s what the British would say, isn’t it? In the United States, where over 85 percent of people describe themselves as religious believers, the answer would surely be very different, as it would be in Iran or Mexico. But then I remembered an article that was published a couple of years ago in the
Journal of Religion & Society
entitled (sorry about this) “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look,” in which Gregory Paul set out to test the assertion that religion makes people behave better.

If that is true, then the United States should be heaven on Earth, whereas Britain would be overrun with crime, sexual misbehaviour and the like. Paul examined the data from eighteen developed countries, and found just the opposite: “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, venereal disease, teen pregnancy, and abortion,” while “none of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction.”

How interesting. Now, to be fair, only one of the eighteen countries examined (Japan) was not Christian or “post-Christian,” so this might just show that high levels of
Christian
belief correlate with a variety of social ills. There’s really no way of testing that, since, apart from the countries of East Asia, there are no non-Christian countries where the level of religious belief has yet fallen below 60 percent.

There’s not even any way of knowing if other religions will eventually experience the same decline in belief as the people who used to believe in them get richer, more urban and better educated. Even in what used to be Christendom, the United States didn’t follow that path, after all. But the question is not whether religion will continue to flourish. It is whether religion makes people behave better, and the data say no.

Even within the U.S., Paul reported, “the strongly theistic, antievolution South and Midwest” have “markedly worse homicide, mortality, sexually transmitted disease, youth pregnancy, marital and related problems than the North-East, where societal conditions, secularization and acceptance of evolution approach European norms.” As the most religious country of the eighteen surveyed, the U.S. also comes in with the highest rates for teenage pregnancy and for gonorrhea and syphilis. (A sidebar: boys who participate in sexual abstinence programs are more likely to get their partners pregnant, presumably because they are in denial about what they are doing.)

What are we to make of this? I never thought that religion really made people behave any better, but apart from the occasional pogrom or religious war, it hadn’t occurred to me that it would actually make them behave worse. But there may be a clue in the fact that the more religious a country is, the fewer resources it puts into social spending, perhaps on the assumption that God will provide.

There is a very strong linkage between how secular a country is and how much it spends on social welfare and income redistribution. There is an equally strong correlation between high levels of social spending and a good score in Paul’s survey—which makes sense, as all the ills he measured, from homicide to high infant mortality to teen pregnancy, are far more likely to affect the poor than the rich.

It’s not that religious people choose to do bad things more often—indeed, they are probably more likely to get involved in charitable activities. Maybe it’s just that when they talk about transforming people’s lives,
they don’t think in terms of big state-run systems—and if you don’t, lots of people fall through the cracks. Whereas the Godless, all alone under the empty sky, decide that they must band together and help one another through large amounts of social spending because Nobody Else is going to do it for them.

Or maybe there is some other reason entirely. But the numbers don’t lie: the more religious a country is, the worse people behave in their private lives. Thank God they didn’t do a survey on the correlation between strong religious belief and war.

Amen to that
.

I’m beginning this section in the middle, so to speak, because 2007 was the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War, and that was the event that changed everything for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. If you want to understand what’s really going on in the region, you always have to start in 1967
.

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a pre-emptive war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In six days, it annihilated the Arab air forces, defeated the Arab army and conquered the Sinai Peninsula, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. It seemed like a decisive victory at the time, but forty years later the outcome is still in doubt.

By June 10, 1967, the amount of territory under Israeli control had tripled. Most of it was the empty desert of the Sinai Peninsula, which was returned to Egypt eleven years later in exchange for a peace treaty. The Israeli government also decided in principle in 1967 to give the Golan Heights back to Syria in return for a peace treaty, although that deal has still not happened. But no decision was ever taken to “give back” East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

From the start, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been about demography and land. If Israel was to be a Jewish state, then most of the Palestinian Arab population had to be removed, and that deed was accomplished during the independence war of 1948–49. Some of the Arabs fled and others were driven out, but by the end of the war, the Arab population of the land under Israel’s control, which had been close to a million, was only two hundred thousand.

As Benny Morris, the doyen of the “new generation” of Israeli historians, put it in the
Guardian
in 2004: “Pillage [by Jewish fighters] was almost
de rigueur
, rape was not infrequent, the execution of prisoners of war was fairly routine during the months before April 1948, and small- and medium-scale massacres of Arabs occurred during April, May, July and October to November. Altogether, there were some two dozen cases.” So, by 1949, Israel was an overwhelmingly Jewish state.

David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, noted in his diary: “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.” We would now call this “ethnic cleansing”—no matter why refugees flee, if you don’t let them return home when the shooting stops, that’s what you are doing—but it was vital to the project of founding a Jewish state in former Palestine. And for twenty years, it worked.

Before 1967, Israel was militarily insecure but demographically triumphant: 85 percent of the people within its frontiers were Jewish. Then, with the victory of 1967, it showed that it had become militarily unbeatable, a fact confirmed by the last full-scale Arab-Israeli war in 1973. But the conquests of 1967 also revived its old demographic insecurities, for most of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 were now back in the same political space as the Jews, that is, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Many Israelis saw the danger, and urged that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip be handed back to the Arabs (though almost no one was
willing to give back East Jerusalem). A few brave souls even argued that the occupied territories should become the Palestinian state promised in the United Nations resolution of 1948, which partitioned Palestine and created Israel, but most succumbed to the lure of the land.

Jewish settlement in the West Bank began almost immediately, and now, forty years on, there are 450,000 Jews in former East Jerusalem and the West Bank (plus another 17,000 in the Golan Heights). None of this settlement growth could have happened without the 1967 victory, but it’s also true that the separation of the populations that happened in 1948 has been undone.

All the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is effectively a single political territory, as Israel ultimately controls all of it. There are now ten million people living in that space, but only a bare majority of them are Jews: 5.5 million, versus 4.5 million Palestinians, and because the Palestinians have a much higher birth rate they will become the majority by 2015.

This is what Israelis call the “demographic problem,” but it is really a political and territorial problem. If they want to hang on to the land, then they are stuck with the Palestinians who live on it. If Israel is truly democratic and grants all these people the vote it will cease to be a Jewish state. If it chooses to remain Jewish by excluding them, then it is no longer democratic. And yet it cannot bring itself to let the occupied territories go.

The 1967 victory has brought Israel two generations of military occupation duties, two Palestinian uprisings and a chronic terrorist threat. It has also brought it an existential political threat, because 1967 essentially reunited the Palestine that had been divided in 1948. What if, one day, the Palestinians simply accept that fact?

Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s prime minister, put it bluntly in an interview with
Yedioth Ahronoth
in 2003. “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘We have been won over. We agree with [extreme right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor] Lieberman. There is no room for two states between Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote.’ The day they do that is the day we lose everything.”

Now rewind a couple of years, to an event that only makes sense if you understand the dilemma that 1967 created for the Israelis. As a commando
leader, as a hero general in the 1973 war, and as a deeply controversial defence minister, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister in 2004, had established a reputation as an efficient and enthusiastic killer of Arabs and the godfather of the settlement movement. So why was he now planning to close down the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and hand the land back to the Palestinians?

The way his enemies and even his allies are talking, you’d think that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had suggested giving the country back to the Arabs. In fact, he accused his critics last Wednesday of trying to spark a civil war in Israel, so extreme are their condemnations of his plan to evacuate Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip by the end of next year.

Early last week, seventy thousand people, including many members of his own Likud Party, rallied in Jerusalem to denounce him as a “traitor” and a “dictator.” His chief rival within the Likud Party and the government, former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has demanded a referendum on Sharon’s Gaza pullout plan. And a settler-rabbi, Yaël Dayan, has announced that he is prepared to put a death curse on Sharon.