“Before we continue our argument, can we check if we’re talking about the same thing?”
My parents hosted guests for dinner a lot. I thought at the time that this was ordinary, and maybe in the 1970s and 80s — before Netflix — it was, but today I don’t know anyone who hosts as frequently as my family did back then. My parents’ guests routinely talked politics, but I don’t remember the kinds of heated debates that are tearing up families and groups of friends today. I also don’t remember a single dinner guest who was registered in a political party different from my parents’, so there’s that, too.
Until I went to college, the dinner table was my Political Science classroom, and a main topic of conversation was war in the Middle East. This was partially true because my mother is first-generation Lebanese-American, and her passionately pro-Arab brothers were often part of the mix. But it was mostly true because the Middle East was torn apart by violence, then as it is now, just over different conflicts.
I remember adults talking about the yellow ribbons people tied around their trees during the Iran hostage crisis. We talked about the Iraq-Iran war a little, and the Lebanese civil war a lot. As for Israel and Palestine? “It can’t be fixed!” my father would cry out. He had an idea for an Israel-Palestine version of the Marshall Plan that he trotted out every time that crisis came up in conversation. It became like the oft-repeated joke that made my sister and me roll our eyes when he got started. I can practically hear him saying, from beyond the grave, “I told you so.”
I was in college before I took a course on politics in the Middle East, and I didn’t even take it in the US, but rather while studying abroad in France. “Le Moyen Est” surely offered me a different perspective than I might have found in an American classroom, and I drank in all that I learned about the historic roots of tensions we see today.
I take courage and comfort when I hear from students today that they want to understand those histories better. My own daughter, not one ever to want to talk politics, asked me to walk her through how Palestinians and Israelis came to be in chronic and constant conflict. Her curiosity gave me hope that there are some who are ready for more light than heat.
Why do we see dinner table conversations descend into angry accusations when people talk about politics and religion? In part because people are either talking about the wrong things, or they think they’re talking about the same things, when they’re actually using words differently from each other. Consider the typology below:
My most memorable takeaway from “Le Moyen Est” was that conflicts between nation states in a post-nuclear age are often proxy wars, where small and fragile political movements play out tensions that originate in empire. The empire not only allows but encourages proxy wars, as they enable the empire to sustain control and, when necessary, wash their hands of conflicts when the going gets tough. Deep, historic conflict between the West and the Anti-West are playing out in Gaza, and Gaza functions as the parking lot where the gangs rumble. When I was a kid, the same thing was happening in Lebanon.
I tend to call Israel and Palestine the location of the war that “began” October 7. Yet to call the current conflict one between Israel and Palestine; or even between conservative Israeli politicians and the military they control, and Hamas forces operating from Gaza; doesn’t capture reality. To leave out empire is to dramatically underestimate how much the world is going to need to change for peace to prevail in the land Jews, Christians, and Muslims call holy.
We get into conflict when, in an attempt at dialogue, we find ourselves talking about different things at cross-purposes. I say something critical about conservative Israeli politicians, and an American Jewish person — who’s grieving, worried, and vulnerable — hears anti-Semitism in my words. You refer to Hamas as brutal murderers, and I make a false comparison between their actions October 7 and the actions of the empire of the West.
I’m not suggesting that families print out the chart above, laminate it, and use it as a place mat guide for dinner conversations that might get political. I am suggesting, however, that we take the time to define our terms, which means slowing down our dialogue. Real change in the Middle East is going to require deep understanding over the long haul, and conversations that get too hot to touch between loved ones doesn’t bode well for needed negotiations between political rivals.
When asked whether an adulteress ought to be put to death, Jesus scratched some kind of image in the dirt with a stick (John 8:6a, 8). Was he buying time? Was he making a calculation? Was he creating a typology that broke apart the categories of “sin” and “sinner”? We’ll never know for sure what he drew, but we do know that Jesus constantly bemoaned the fact that people talk about all the wrong things. They should be thinking about the kingdom of heaven — namely, the kind of world God wants us to build — but instead they focus on petty competition over who gets to sit where.
Jesus knew a lot about empire. He said to just pay our taxes to Caesar, because who has time to worry about stupid old taxes when a cosmic war between good and evil is at hand? At his trial, he got a more sympathetic hearing from the colonial occupier, Pontius Pilate, than he did from his own nation-state’s political and religious authorities.
If only we took time to determine whether we were talking about the right things in the eyes of God, and focused our conversations there, we might find we have energy available to stick with even the hardest conversations not just through a three-course meal, but until peace prevails.
