While the bombs fall in Lebanon, I’m teaching a two-week course in permaculture and regenerative, ecological design, with a schedule so demanding that it is hard to check e-mail, let alone watch the news. But it comes: pictures of dead children on the road. I feel horrified, angry, frustrated, powerless…all the things I’m used to feeling about the situation, but more so. I try to write something, but all I keep writing, over and over, is “Killing children is wrong.” That seems so self-evident and banal that I can’t quite bring myself to send it out.
While the Congress and Senate are voting their support for Israel’s actions, I am teaching systems theory and strategy, including an essay by Donella Meadows, “Nine Ways to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness.) The least effective way, she says, is by changing amounts. Please, General, can we drop fewer bombs? Could we scale down to killing just maybe two of their children for every one of ours, instead of ten?
The situation itself is a perfect example of what I call a self-reinforcing cycle — a situation in which the more you have of something the more you get, and the more you need. You kill some of my children so I kill more of yours, so you kill more of mine, so I kill even more of yours.
Self-reinforcing cycles are engines of change, for better or worse. They get more and more extreme, until some new constraint imposes a new equilibrium, or they crash. Hurricanes suck up energy from the heat in the sea and grow bigger, sucking more energy, which makes them bigger still, until they hit land and blow themselves out. Addicts keep taking more of what they’re addicted to, until they hit bottom, whether the addiction is to alcohol or heroin or military intervention.
This does not bode well–for the children of Beirut or of Haifa. As long as the U.S. is cheering the Israeli government on, no serious constraints will be imposed. And why shouldn’t we cheer them on, when Israel’s addiction to force as a solution is the mirror of ours? We’re the big guy and the small guy, standing each other drinks at the pub and throwing chairs at anyone who threatens us, until the place is smashed.
This self-reinforcing cycle keeps power in the hands of the neo-cons, whose answer to every fear is more force, which creates more fear, which generates more violence, which requires more force to keep down. As this system begins to spiral out of control and starts to break apart, the only solution you can see is more of the same. An alcoholic gets fired for drinking on the job, and drinks more to forget. Iraq is not working out well so expand the war to Lebanon, Syria, Iran.
You can’t change a self-reinforcing system by changing amounts.
Recovering alcoholics know this, generals and politicians don’t. Try to limit yourself to one drink at lunch, and somehow you end up behind the wheel of the car that careens into the bus full of schoolchildren on the road. Tell yourself that you are using a measured, limited response for well-thought out political aims, and you still end up with blackened torsos and the severed limbs of infants in smoking piles on the motorway.
Here’s some other things we know about these cycles–they are expensive. They consume resources, and starving every social program to fund our military. The policy makers are not cringing in tenements as bombs fall or crying over the bleeding body of their most beloved child. Nor are most of those who support the policies. Yet.
To change the system, you need to change the paradigm, the way you frame the situation and the deep assumptions that shape your viewpoint. It’s also a hard and painful process.
A new paradigm, a new construct of self and world, goes against everything we know and believe. If I’ve been telling myself I’m a fun-loving, party kind of a gal, it is painful to admit that I’m an alcoholic. If I’m justifying the deaths of children by telling myself that I’m bringing democracy to the region, or safeguarding my sister’s children in Hadera, or fulfilling God’s plan, how painful to look at the broken bodies on the pavement and say, “I did that. I have blood on my hands.”
I’m thinking about one of the many fruitless arguments I’ve had about the issue, this one with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s wife, shortly after I’d returned from doing solidarity work with the nonviolent Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the West Bank. I tried to describe to her what I’d seen in that bullet-riddled, shell-shocked land, the ongoing, everyday horrors and humiliations, the houses bulldozed, the farmlands confiscated, the lives blunted and stunted and blasted into oblivion, and at the end she said to me:
“But we’re good. So if we’re doing it, it must be good.”
There is nowhere to go from that pinnacle but down, no change we can make that doesn’t require us to face the possibility that, at the very least, we are good people doing some bad things. From that vantage point, of course any critique, no matter how measured, seems anti-Semitic.
While the killing escalates, I am teaching about soil. How to feed the life of the soil, how to encourage and nurture the worms and the beneficial bacteria and fungi and other soil organisms. How a healthy soil will grow healthy plants that can resist pests.
Industrial agriculture, in contrast, is based in the same paradigm as our Iraq policy. It was succinctly expressed in a bumper sticker my first husband put on his van shortly before we broke up: “Force, It Works!”
So, if corn borers are attacking your crop, blast it with insecticides. Kill the bastards! Are there weeds among the fields? Zap them with roundup.
Force–it works, for a while, but force is costly. And force breeds resistance.
And so insects that survive the onslaught of the pesticides breed young that are not affected. We up the doses, in another self-reinforcing cycle. The helpful insects that might have kept the pests in balance are wiped out and residues of poison remain.
Human beings are not insects or bacteria. Force breeds resistance in hearts and minds. So the bombing of Beirut breeds rockets falling on Haifa and more suicide bombs of the future, more death in retaliation.
The devotion to force is itself a toxin, poisoning the soil of Israeli society, starving its own social programs, warping the very soul and ethics of the religion it purports to defend.
If compost, worm castings and plants that feed beneficial bugs are the gardening alternative to chemical warfare, what is the political parallel?
From a self-interested, Israeli point of view, a policy maker coming from a regenerative paradigm might say: “We can never stamp our hatred, but let us nurture health wherever we find it, and create conditions that let those who favor peace flourish!”
In the nineties, Israel could have said, “We have a small window here, when the Palestinians have settled for less than they could have demanded. Let us move quickly to establish a Palestinian state, with true areas of self determination for its people. If the Occupation is a running sore, inflaming rage and hatred throughout the Arab world and undermining our moral credibility, how do we swiftly end it and transform the region into a place of opportunity and hope? How do we support the health of the region’s actual soil, the vitality of its crops, the abundance of its markets, the excellence of its universities? How do we create such flourishing abundance that this region becomes a shining model for the whole Middle East?”
Instead, Israel built settlements, began a long term program of encroachment on the tiny territory allocated to the Palestinians, and maintained an Occupation backed by force.
When Abbas was elected, Israel could have said, “How do we give him victories and real gains that will strengthen his own people’s allegiance? And if Hammas is winning over the people with its social programs, how do we feed a healthy economy so that they become unnecessary?”
Instead, Israel continued to build a wall which confiscates huge amounts of Palestinian land without compensation and destroys the very communities which historically have been most friendly to Israel.
There are a hundred other missed opportunities, but the longer the cycle goes on, the more damage is done, and the harder it is to stop.
Am I “blaming” Israel unfairly? Couldn’t Hezbollah stop shooting rockets, and the Palestinians stop bombing? Yes, they could, and children would live who otherwise would die.
When we’re caught in a self-reinforcing cycle, it’s fairly useless to ask, “Who started it?” Far better to ask, “Who is in position to stop this cycle?”
And it is Israel, the fourth largest military power in the world, that sets the conditions of the region.
I admit that I want Israel to act as the moral agent it claims to be. I’m a Jew who was raised with the dream of Israel as a refuge in that visa-denying world which sent boatloads of my people back to their deaths. A place where we could finally, after 2000 years, be ourselves, in our own home.
Because of the pennies I saved as a child to buy trees for the promised land, because of the songs I grew up singing, I have the right to an accounting from those who have replaced the God of Justice with the God of Force.
The place has a history of great prophets and lousy kings. There is nothing more Jewish than thundering at the policy makers, saying “Jahweh and Allah and all good-hearted people agree: killing children is wrong. Just plain wrong, and when you do it you have left the Path of Righteousness. The cost of force includes your soul.”
Even as the bombs fall, there are Palestinians of the villages where the wall is confiscating their farmland who choose nonviolent means of struggle, returning day after day to demonstrations in which they get beaten, tear-gassed, arrested. There are Israelis and internationals who cross borders to stand with them, saying, “We are not “Palestinians” and “Israelis,” we are people struggling against injustice. There are the Women in Black, who stand in silent vigil for peace, year after year. There are organizers of cross-cultural dialogues, soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories, youth who refuse to don the explosives belt.
That these people still exist, that they somehow grow out of the blasted, toxic soil of the Middle East, gives us hope. In spite of the million missed opportunities, the oceans of spilled blood, the escalation of stupid policies, the situation is not without hope.
But what can we do, we who are simply ordinary people of compassion. Every day people ask, “What can we do?”
And I can’t think of a damn thing. Never has political action felt so futile.
But I think about the advice the great war journalist Robert Fisk received, after surviving decades in Lebanon and other war zones. “Do something,” he was told. “Don’t do nothing.”
So do something. While we’re waiting for the effective thing, do something even if it seems small and futile.
Do something. We don’t know what the effective thing will be. We may never know. But if we do nothing, we will surely have no impact.
And what do we say? How do you stop a vicious cycle? Just stop. Stop now. Don’t wait until the enemy is utterly defeated, because your effort to defeat them strengthens the forces that created them. Just stop. Not tomorrow, when our position is stronger. The longer the cycle continues, the worse the crash will be. Just stop. Stop now.
Come from a new paradigm. Feed the soil of the Holy Land with something other than blood. Cherish all children, ours and theirs.
*Starhawk will be leading a workshop Dec 8-10, 2006.
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