Israel’s troubling path: Reflections on history and moral challenges

No aphorism is more apt for our time, as the horrors in Palestine and Lebanon pile up daily one on top of the other, than that which counsels us to “study the historian before we study the facts”. And what better historian to study than Arnold Toynbee, the 20th century’s pre-eminent philosopher of history?

The unifying theory (known as Challenge and Response) in Toynbee’s magisterial 12-volume A Study of History, published between 1934 and 1961, which described the rise and fall of 23 civilisations, is that the fate of polities, across time and culture, is determined by the nature of their response to the challenges facing them.

One of the groundbreaking discoveries Toynbee made in his research was that polities, be they big or small powers, start to “decay” when they “lose their moral fibre” and begin to break down, often imperceptibly, as a result of “commission” by them of the “sins of arrogance, hubris, overweening pride and self-confidence”, sins manifested in things such as nationalist fervour and swaggering militarism — all accompanied by the gradual transformation of these polities’ rulers from a “creative” to a “reactionary” elite.

This is a posture, Toynbee concludes, that brings its own retributive justice, or what he called “nemesis” — decline and fall. Thus, he tells us, “civilisations die from suicide not from murder”. In short, the societies we live in are living, breathing organisms that can go, much as human and other sentient beings can go, stark raving mad — not mad in the hyperbolic but the literal sense of the word — and drive themselves, much like crazed lemmings, off a cliff.

Madness unleashed

You will not, I say, find in our time, anywhere in the world, a more sharply delineated example of this phenomenon than the polity called Israel, one that the European-based Zionist movement founded in Palestine, against the will of the indigenous people, around three quarters of a century ago.

You have to admit that the madness Israel is today manifestly possessed by, namely the madness it began to unleash on Gaza close to a year ago, and to unleash on Lebanon more recently, is of the kind that clinicians speak of when they speak of cognitive breakdown in the mind of a person unable to distinguish between moral and immoral and rational and irrational.

You bomb a little, 142-square-mile strip of land packed with well over two million people back to the Stone Age?

You supply pagers to people intended to explode while these people are having dinner with families, riding a bus, standing in a checkout line at a supermarket and accompanying their kids to school, ripping out the limbs, eyes and intestines of thousands of innocent men, women and children, leaving survivors maimed for life?

You drop deadly “bunker-buster” bombs on the heads of countless people found in high-rise buildings, refugee camps and schools in order to kill one “terror suspect”?

Widespread, systematic violence

This is the kind of madness, or “nemesis”, that Toynbee alluded to in his epic study of the social, political and moral collapse of a decaying, self-destructive social system.

You see, a state that afflicts itself — and does so by design — as Israel has afflicted itself, with that madness is a state that effectively chooses to be less human than other human beings, a state that chooses to lose its reason, and thus its raison d’etre — a fate that not in the too distant past befell Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union, which were, like Israelis today, notorious for their engagement in widespread, systematic violence and atrocities, including genocide, acts that chipped away at the very constitution of their “moral fibre” and finally led, inevitably and predictably, to their demise.

What Israel is sowing may lead to future challenges as it continues to drag itself inexorably into a bloodthirsty wonderland — a wonderland whose morals get “curiouser and curiouser” per day — at odds with the norms of a world that has increasingly come to view it as a pariah state.

Sow hatred and you reap hatred. Choose to be inhuman and your inhumanity will become the seed of your self-destruction.

It happens, for the benefit of this column’s argument, to be so written, not altogether coincidently, both in the history books as in the holy texts.


— Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile