Hard Hearts: Reflections on Human Nature in the Context of the Gaza War

KING LEAR: Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
— The Tragedy of King Lear, III:vi:76-77

The Tragedy of King Lear is one of several plays by William Shakespeare to address the subject of human nature and moral folly. As in all great literature which examines moral conflicts, it grapples with the central theme of the nature of nature. It is the contention of this essay that normative nature is rooted in the Sacred, and that the source of evil – not as suffering, whose existential source is privation, but as sin, which is the transgression of the soul – resides in the metaphysical deviation from that norm which binds humanity to the sacred order. It is a spiritual failing, modeled in the egoic disobedience of Iblis to God’s commandment to bow to Man, and in the disobedience through temptation that led to Man’s Fall and expulsion from the Garden.

The unfolding events in the Middle East call to mind Lear’s great question about nature and evil: Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts? It is a recurring question in literature, history and scripture.

Much evil has indeed been carried out in the name of religion, though many such actions conflate ideologies of political violence with religion, and are in fact defamatory of the true spirit of religion, which is founded in the Sacred and is based on a respect for life and human dignity. But religion itself, like reality, can be interpreted in ways that lose sight of the universal bond of the Sacred, focusing instead on narrowly defined interests. The current war in Gaza, for example, is driven, in part, by far-right Jewish extremists, pursuing a Zionist ideology that seeks to assert sovereignty over the “Greater Israel,” lands it views as promised to their Biblical forbears, the Israelites, by God, and referred to as “the Promised Land.” We will examine this claim in more detail later. Other examples of religious violence include nationalistic and retributive wars in the Balkans, which were blessed by some Church authorities, and which led to ethnic massacres; jihadist wars by organizations such as ISIS, and the establishment of theocratic regimes in Iran and Afghanistan, which have engaged in coercive and repressive policies in the name of Islam; the oppression of Muslims by Hindu fundamentalists in India and by Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar. These, and other similar examples, raise legitimate questions about whether religion itself is to blame.

Yet, many other conflicts that have led to atrocities have been rooted simply in political and ideological differences and secular power-struggles with no overt religious impetus. Examples include Nazi fascism, which led to the profound human tragedy of the Shoah; Stalinism, which led to the death, torture, and imprisonment of millions in the dreaded Gulags, about which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has written; the Cambodian genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the Pol Pot regime; and the ethnic cleansing of Tutsis by Hutu militias in the Rwandan genocide. These were not religious, but ideologically driven, conflicts.

Ideologies are often offered as the justification for inhumane conduct because they value ideals over humanity. The ends are claimed to justify the means, forgetting that (to paraphrase Frithjof Schuon) the ends can never justify the means if the means vilify the ends. Ideologues, by reducing reality to abstract ideals removed from the sacredness of life, become morally blind. Refusing to “love one’s neighbour,” to be one’s “brother’s keeper,” creates a moral blindness in which it becomes possible to dehumanize the “other” and ourselves from the love that connects us all. The “other” is then either to be removed or to be used in the service of the greater ideal. This is the basis for the dehumanizing social engineering experiments in the pursuit of Utopian ideals, such as the man-made famines created in the former Soviet Union and China under Stalin and Mao, respectively, or the notorious medical experiments in pursuit of the eugenic goals of Aryan purity under the Nazis, and their diabolical logic of the efficiency of the gas ovens.

Names like Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Deir Yassin, Hiroshima, Rwanda and Srebrenica, dates like “9/11,” “7/7,” or “October 7th,” and monikers like the “Holocaust” or the “Nakba,” and now “the Gaza War,” all attest to human conflicts and tragedies whose impacts are still raw. They point back to Lear’s question.

If that question is not being asked more urgently today, it is not because of moral apathy. There is also a sense of powerlessness in the face of the juggernauts of power which appear to have been wrested away from the reach of ordinary humans and vested instead in impersonal bureaucracies and soulless and predatory technologies directed by algorithms that polarize opinion. Even consciences nowadays have to contend with the effectiveness of propaganda. Modern technologies not only facilitate mass killing and torture but also provide mechanisms for their concealment. In many cases, despite the evidence of the horrors that stare in our faces, we rationalize them because perpetrators of evil use political machinery to deny, deflect from and camouflage their responsibility for crimes against humanity, and to whitewash their evil deeds. Justice in such cases is seldom to be found. As Lear observed, “Robed and furred gowns hide all.” (see King Lear, IV:vi:180-183)

Although international institutions have been created, and laws enacted, to prevent or regulate conflicts and to ensure conformity to universal humanitarian norms, the lack of political will or power to implement these protective laws does indeed contribute to a sense of one's impotence, even apathy. Bulwarks against abuses are cynically manipulated to permit brutal aggression and self-interest, ignoring the common good. Ironically, this is done often to further the exploitation of some in the name of nationalist and tribalist aims instead of promoting equitable and humane coexistence. In this climate, one's principles are given no more than lip-service, and are all-too-often abandoned in a miasma of “spin” and double-standards.

Human conflicts hold up a mirror to humanity, demanding us to anatomize not only those who commit evil acts, but our own natures.

Evidently, religion and ideology are not the causes but the pretexts for evil. Is there, then, something in human nature which is the actual cause of evil? Is nature inherently evil itself, one may ask, knowing even as we pose the question that our consciences do innately discern right from wrong, however we might seek to rationalize our unconscionable desires. We can see this because even perpetrators of evil often resort to justifications for their transgressions, couched in language that rationalizes unethical behaviors as necessary for some greater good. Utopian ideals of ‘Progress’ or utilitarian justifications, for example, are used to sanitize a multitude of sins. Inevitably, politics dictates that the interests of the powerful eclipse the common good, seemingly in the name of some other good. Regulation based on humane norms to reverse the effects of environmental degradation, or to prevent the proliferation of potentially harmful technologies and weapons, becomes a contest between powerful economic or political interests and humanitarian values. While debates over such priorities can and do involve appeals to the greater good, they often engage in a calculus that ignores the need to sacrifice selfish interests for the common good. At root, the choice of priorities involves ethical questions that require an exercise of political will, and the choices we make and the integrity with which we make them may tell us something about human nature.

Human conflicts hold up a mirror to humanity, demanding us to anatomize not only those who commit evil acts, but our own natures. While the outer motives of conflicts are often analyzed psychologically or in ideological terms, they also have deeper inner causes that bear examination. The Gaza War does indeed have much to do with matters such as religion, ethnicity, power, and colonialism, but these are based on choices informed by one's vision of reality. Evil acts have more to do with hardened hearts and spiritual forgetfulness, and the consequent neglect of the empathetic bonds that bind us to one another, than with the ideologies themselves. This essay contends that political or religious ideologies are unsustainable unless they conform to a pattern of order rooted in the sacred ground of primordial human nature. To understand that ground, we turn briefly to Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear.

King Lear, Nature and Moral Folly

One of the principal themes explored by Shakespeare in King Lear is that of the nature of nature. It demonstrates that the Outer Man (selfishly craven and desiring power) possesses an egoic nature which is at war with the Inner Man (conformed to his spiritual, loving core or Heart).

A brief metaphysical explanation: The Scholastic Latin maxim ‘duo sunt in homine’ refers to two contending natures in Man, one represented by the spiritual inclinations of the Inner Man, and the other by the worldly and egoic inclinations of the Outer Man. Far from conceding a Manichean dualism at the expense of the spiritual integrity that is taught by the wisdom traditions, the maxim references the spiritual contest between the “two natures” of the soul – one receptively compliant, the other rebellious – and so, between remembrance and forgetting, between conforming to one’s integral nature or opposing it. This is the battleground of the contest between the Inner Man who is Self-aware and centered in the Sacred, and the Outer Man who is distracted, disintegrated or Promethean. The soul must make a choice in this contest because “No man can serve two masters.” (Matthew, 6:24)

The scriptures teach that Man is the Imago Dei because the soul possesses a Primordial Nature (al-fitra, Holy Qur’an, 30:30), the sacred ground which is the inner prototype of natural order and the criterion of objective Truth and moral conscience. The Inner Man places the soul in alignment with the Divine Will by operating within the remit of Heaven, the Norm or limit recognized by her moral conscience, and one which accords with her Primordial Nature. The Outer Man does not do so, seeking instead to rely on “self mettle” to pursue his own desires and to feed his own appetites even if it harms others. From the point of view of the Outer Man, the moral scruples of the Inner Man to use power for selfish ends amounts to folly, while from the point of view of the Inner Man it is folly to barter one’s soul for the world. Those two perspectives constitute the central contest of the soul in the world.

By the time that Lear asks his question about what creates “hard hearts,” both he and the Earl of Gloucester have experienced betrayal and cruelty from their respective families. Each of them has misjudged his own children. Lear, succumbing to the flattery of his two “unnatural” daughters, has divided his kingdom among them, reserving to himself only the right to be cared for by them. He has repudiated his loving daughter, Cordelia, who, as her name suggests (Coeur de Lear), denotes his own cardial centre, his Heart. He has disowned and disinherited Cordelia for her refusal to flatter him in a public spectacle he has staged as a display of how much he is loved by his children. Upon receiving their public flattery, he plans to reward them by dividing his kingdom among the three daughters.  Cordelia’s refusal to make a public display of her love to accommodate her father’s charade ("my love's/ More ponderous than my tongue") (“I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth”) (King Lear, I:i:77-78; and 91-92) prompts Lear to liken her non-response to a lack of true love. Lear chooses to judge only by its outward appearances of nothingness and silence, stating "Nothing will come of nothing" (King Lear, I:i:90). Looking only with his outer eyes, not with his inward eye, he misses that nothingness and silence are the qualitative markers of something beyond the worldly measure he vainly prizes. Love’s abode, its true core, which Cordelia represents, is the metaphysical "nothingness" or "Nihil" and loving receptivity in which Nature’s true spiritual substance rests. Lear’s moral blindness and self-assertiveness cuts him off from perceiving the true quality of his favorite daughter’s love, seeing in her silence a rejection of his due as king and as father. He demands that she voice her love (Lear is seeking a measure and public display of something beyond measure and mere show) and when Cordelia does not accede, he disowns her, thereby closing off his Heart from the sap of her nourishing love, setting in motion the tragedy which unfolds.

Soon after this spectacle, Lear discovers that Goneril’s and Regan’s displays of love for him were indeed false. He is cruelly cast out by them, left to spend the night on the heath under a pelting and pitiless storm, while the daughters plot to kill each other and take over his entire domain. Reduced to an abject state, Lear is an outcast in his own kingdom. By the time he poses his question about why hearts can harden, his wits have begun to turn and he is on the verge of madness.

In a parallel unfolding, Gloucester, Lear’s faithful courtier, is deceived by his bastard son, Edmund, who has schemed to convince his father of the villainy of his innocent brother, Edgar, Gloucester’s legitimate son and heir, in order to rob him of his rightful inheritance. Like Lear, Gloucester disbelieves the evidence of his own heart, and thereby both Lear and Gloucester become prey, in a world of pretense and “seeming,” to evil contrivances and scheming.

Goneril and Regan violate the norms of nature which govern how a father or a King (who is the symbolic head of the natural order) should be treated. By effectively turning Lear away from their homes and their hearts, they have broken both their natural bond of love and filial duty, and their contracted bond with him as their paternal and symbolic regal authority. Subverting nature, they drive Lear to madness, making him, in the words of Gloucester, a “ruin’d piece of nature” (King Lear, IV:vi:134); in a world where the Outer Man supplants the authority of the Inner Man, the natural order represented by the King is reduced to disorder. Gloucester, himself, is physically blinded in a heinous act of treachery by Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, an act in which his own villainous son, Edmund, was complicit. Gloucester’s physical blindness reflects a spiritual blindness remarked in his words, “I stumbled when I saw.” (King Lear, IV:i:19)

When Lear is at his most pitiable, abandoned by his daughters, sheltering from the storm in a hovel with his disguised servant, Kent, his court Fool, and the fugitive Edgar in the guise of a Bedlam beggar, he despairingly asks the question quoted in the epigraph, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” The idea of petrified hearts anticipates what he says later, when his beloved Cordelia, who has been murdered on Edmund's orders, lies lifeless in her father's arms. At that point, Lear utters these harrowing words at the injustice of it all, calling the murderers and onlookers “men of stones.”

Howl, howl, howl, howl!
Oh, you are men of stones.
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever.
I know when one is dead and when one lives.
She’s dead as earth. (V:iii:314-318)

When Goneril’s husband, the Duke of Albany, learns of how the evil daughters have mistreated Lear, he strongly disapproves of what they have done. In a key exchange between Albany and Goneril (King Lear, IV:ii), he likens his heartless wife to a “devil” and a “fiend” (lines 59 and 60), and refers to her as a “self-covered thing” (line 62). She has repudiated her humane nature by covering it up with her false self, her grasping ego. Albany remarks that her deformed nature is self-centered, cut off from its vital soil, and from the sap of grace that can only flow from its natural connection. Fearing his wife’s disposition, he apprehends that such unnaturalness will, like a withering branch, “come to deadly use” (see the lines 32 to 36, quoted below):

That nature, which contemns its origin
Cannot be bordered certain in itself.
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.

Goneril scoffs at her husband’s preachiness: “No more. The text is foolish” (line 37). The “text” is an allusion to the scripture which teaches of the Tree of Life. Like any ordinary tree in the natural world, which is sustained only by the soil from which it springs, and the sap which sustains it, Man has an intrinsic dependence on God. Man is not bounded in himself but is rooted in the sacred soil of Transcendence within a larger cosmic and spiritual order to which he must conform. It is folly, therefore, to act as though one’s existence was independent of its sustaining source. To do this would be unnatural, a violation of the natural order.

Calling the text “foolish”, Goneril also accuses her husband of being “a moral fool” (line 58). In a play where Shakespeare uses the trope of “Fool” to denote, among other things, the natural conscience of the spiritual Man, the term bears some examination. In the eyes of one such as Goneril who possesses no moral scruples about engaging in villainy to pursue worldly ends, her husband is indeed a fool, a “moral fool” for having such scruples. She calls her husband a coward, a "Milk-liver'd man!" (line 50), too paralyzed by pity for Lear to pursue his own advantage. Clearly, conscience, for such “self-covered” creatures as Goneril, is an inconvenient truth best ignored or concealed.

But are moral scruples truly foolish? Shakespeare’s language poses a deeper spiritual question (adapting Hamlet): to be or not to be the moral fool? Is it better to suffer a metaphysical death or “sacrifice” for a greater Good? The answer to this depends on one’s understanding of the underlying nature of nature.

As we have seen, Albany depicts human nature as intimately dependent on its nurturing elements. This is contrasted with the self-bordering and deracinated nature which rejects its sustaining Origin, disbranching from its life-giving moral source, prompting and enabling it thereby to commit selfish, unnatural acts which upset the natural order and the Heavenly Norm. Albany foresees that when people act only from unbridled freedom, forsaking natural love, humanity will prey on itself like monsters, a condition which only a restoration of the natural order can restore. Thus, he states (lines 46-50),

If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses,
It will come:
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.

Those, like Goneril, Regan and Edmund, who seek worldly power and self-advancement at the cost of their souls, operate from a spiritually illegitimate understanding of Nature. The deformed vision of nature is epitomized in Edmund’s soliloquy (King Lear, I:ii:1-22) which ends with the lines that reveal that the “base,” illegitimate brand of nature, unconcerned with moral scruples when engaged in subverting the natural order, pursues its own legitimacy by any means of self-assertion in order to "prosper":

Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow: I proper:
Now, gods. Stand up for bastards!

Albany recognizes that the unbound freedom which results from a Promethean rebellion against the Transcendent order is unnatural. It separates humanity from the metaphysical order and operates outside the remit of Heaven. “If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” claims Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, but freedom unconformed to the Divine Will dehumanizes Man insofar as it licenses not only wantonness but monstrous predation. As Shakespeare’s play shows, it leads ultimately to self-destruction.

From Goneril’s perspective, whosoever hesitates for moral reasons to grasp the brass ring of worldly power is indeed, in a certain sense, a “moral fool.” But the price for such spiritual folly is, from Albany’s perspective, to become a devil, to be a deluded “self-covered thing,” and to lose one’s soul in the exchange. This is the choice which lies at the heart of the Faustian bargain, and about which the “text” is clear: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark, 8:36, KJV)

The Inner Man connects to a metaphysical order that respects natural bounds. Human integrity and dignity are rooted in a respect for the sacred ground that connects all life. Its life-giving sap of wisdom and love is vital for the soul’s spiritual sustenance, which grows in the Heart, the receptive core of Man.

In Shakespeare’s play, this core, symbolized by Cordelia (the Heart of Lear), represents the love beyond measure, which is whole, and which can only be intuited through empathy, receptively. The Inner Man seeks to keep open the aperture of the Heart and thereby to live in accord with the Heavenly Norm, acting in ways that respect the inherent dignity of all. Cordelia never stops loving her father, but until Lear goes through a spiritual awakening, he is not ready to perceive this. Blinded by vanity, he is not receptive to true love. In worldly terms, Cordelia too is a moral fool because she refuses to conform to the demands of display in order to prove her love to her father, and Shakespeare in fact has Lear refer to her at her tragic end as “my poor fool” (King Lear, V:iii:306).

The Inner Man connects nature to a metaphysical order that respects natural bounds. Human integrity and dignity are rooted in a respect for the Sacred ground that connects all life.

Hard hearts are not natural. The natural state of the Heart is soft and loving. Only a pliant Heart is receptive to its sustaining Source, and is conscious of its true spiritual Origin and End. The soul is called upon to be receptive to its spiritual nature, and to cultivate this pliancy and loving nature through remembrance and conformity. Remembrance: that “the soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love… By its very nature, it must seek God, who is love.” (Mechthild of Magdeburg). Conformity: to submit to the Spirit instead of adopting the veil of the ego and bartering love for lust and worldly riches. The Spirit responds only to the soft Heart, to the receptive soul of the pining Lover who seeks the Beloved, ever-mindful that “God guides him who wants to be guided, and He is fully aware of who would let themselves be guided” (Holy Qur’an, 28:56). Pliant Hearts belong to souls “who would let themselves be guided” and not to the obstinate who let themselves be led astray. By the grace of the Spirit, receptive souls become like “stones out of which rivers gush forth” (Holy Quran, 2:74). By contrast, a soul that distractedly forgets or pridefully scorns her true nature, becomes calcified. The Light does not reach those who willfully turn away from it. God is not responsive to those who are determined to go astray, who harden their own hearts by following their own whims in defiance of their consciences. “So, if they fail to respond to you, then know that they only follow their desires. And who could be more astray than those who follow their desires with no guidance from Allah? Surely Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people” (Holy Qur’an, 28:50).

An example of this principle is expressed in the scripture, “And he hardened Pharaoh's heart, that he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had said. And the Lord said unto Moses, Pharaoh's heart is hardened, he refuseth to let the people go.” (Exodus 7:13-14) One must not misinterpret this to absolve Pharaoh of responsibility. If God caused Pharaoh’s heart to harden, as the Book of Exodus states in several instances (for example, see also 9:12), it is not because God is the originator of evil. The great Midrashic scholars, like Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi) and Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Ramban), have pointed to the sequence of the Ten Plagues unleashed by God against the Egyptians, noting that in each of the five initial instances, the scripture explicitly attributes to Pharaoh the hardening of his own heart. Only when Pharaoh repeatedly rejects God’s commandments, ignores the opportunities to act humanely by freeing the enslaved Israelites from bondage, dLes God take over, stiffening Pharaoh’s hard heart in order to display His signs. Only then did God command Moses to “Go in unto Pharaoh: for I have hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might shew these my signs before him” (Exodus, 10:1, KJV). It is only humanity’s own repudiation of virtue that shuts the soul off from grace. A soul that transgresses the Heavenly Norm but is repentant is always capable of spiritual transformation.

By the time Lear asks the question about hard hearts, he has undergone an outward experience which readies him for his spiritual transformation. The King has been stripped bare of his regalia, his pomp and accoutrements of vanity. Thus abased, in a Job-like state and exposed to the elements, he begins to empathize with the “poor naked wretches” of his kingdom who have no protection from the storms, and he realizes he has taken “too little care” of their needs (King Lear, III:iv:28-36). He also appreciates that the vanities he had previously prized are not enough to satisfy one’s “true need” (King Lear, II:iv:264-271). Reduced by circumstances from being a "sophisticated" man to being an “unaccommodated man” (King Lear, iii:iv:103-109), realizing that the excesses of the Outer Man are superfluous, he can now look at himself and others with the Eye of his Heart. He can begin to assess humanity by a different standard, through empathy.

Like Gloucester who had initially misjudged the moral qualities of his own children, but had reformed his vision after being outwardly blinded (his physical blinding is the catalyst for Gloucester’s own spiritual transformation), Lear too now sees the world in a truer way, in Gloucester’s language, “feelingly” (King Lear, IV:vi:149). Their experience teaches them that men are not what they seem. Most are flatterers, deceivers, unjust and untrue. Lear himself had misjudged his daughter Cordelia’s own true worth. Unlike the Duke of Burgandy, who rejected Cordelia as a bride when Lear rashly denied her a regal inheritance as a dowry, the King of France took Cordelia as his wife, noting “She is herself a dowry” (King Lear, I:i:241). France prized Cordelia for her inner qualities, with regard to which her outer poverty was irrelevant: "Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;/ Most choice, forsaken; and most loved, despised!" (King Lear, I:i:25-251). The play points to the need to look at the world with true spiritual insight, by which the true Inner Man is distinguished from the false Outer Man. To access that place of insight requires the soul’s egoic shell to break. The suffering of Lear and Gloucester serves as a spiritual death of the ego, and the transforming rebirth of the soul in the Spirit; it serves to mortify the Outer Man and to revive the Inner Man through a spiritual rebirth and redemption.

One answer to Lear’s question about what makes “hard hearts” is: spiritual blindness or the loss of the Sacred. When human beings look into the Gorgon-like mirror of the world, they become blind to their true natures, and their hearts consequently harden. No mere laws, rules, human ideologies or institutions can then save us from ourselves. People in positions of power will not necessarily act conscionably, in a way that reflects their innate nature. On “this great stage of fools,” Lear tells Gloucester, the “great image of authority” is that “a dog’s obeyed in office” (King Lear, IV:vi:157-159). True authority derives from the Font of all authority, the sovereign Spirit whose seat is the Heart, and not from the worldly idols and apparatuses of authority. As we know all too well from horrors that have been depicted by Kafka, Orwell, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, among others, even though we may establish courts and laws and outwardly legitimate means of human governance, if these are not operating with the wisdom of the Heart, neither truth nor justice will prevail. Governments and institutions will not necessarily work as they are meant to in a world peopled by "rascal beadles," "usurers" and "scurvy politicians." In such a world, justice favors the powerful, not the right (King Lear, IV:vi:160-172):

Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it.

One needs to look beyond the offices of authority and influence in society to discern the true natures of human beings, to understand how inner failings cause tragedies. This means cleansing our own souls to be able to see what is humane and what is not.

The remedy (“physic”) lies in ourselves, in our own pride (“pomp”), which requires a dose of empathy to remain “human” (King Lear, III:iv:33-36):

Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

It requires us to search our hearts for the moral wisdom of what is happening around us and, when our leaders and institutions fail us, to have the moral courage to “speak truth to power” or, in Albany’s words at the end of the play, to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (King Lear: V:iii:325)

Lear had allowed himself to be flattered by his wicked daughters, not comprehending their deformed natures and not realizing that their showy words did not match their true inner feelings. He ignored the intelligence of his own Heart by rejecting Cordelia because she had refused to participate in his charade of speaking what she “ought to say” in order to draw a share “more opulent” than those of her sisters. And he also ignored the wise counsel of both the plain-speaking Earl of Kent and the honest Fool who acted as a check on his rashness. This failure of Lear’s insight, his inability to understand the nature of the people around him and to heed true counsel and conscience, is what permits the tragedy to unfold.

The Tragedy of King Lear reminds us that the world is a spiritual battleground between the contending natures of the soul, the one compliant to the Spirit, and the other the usurping ego that rebels. Our failure to be governed by the norms of integrity, dignity, respect for the Sacred, will lead ultimately, as Albany warns, to humanity preying on itself like “monsters of the deep.” The implication is that we must, each of us, work to restore the natural order by becoming its “visible spirits,” the Light that shines in the darkness of the disordered world.

“And the Light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John, 1:5, KJV)

The Spiritual Struggle: The Need for Chivalry

With this backdrop, we turn to a few reflections about war generally. If the aim of religion is inner and outer peace and harmony, one may ask: To what extent is warfare compatible with religious principles?

Wisdom literature is replete with teaching stories, myths and symbols depicting inner warfare in outer terms. One finds this, for example, portrayed as the struggle between the forces of Light (Ahura Mazda) and darkness (Ahriman) in the Zoroastrian tradition, between the Jews and the Pharaoh in the Old Testament, or the struggle for self-domination typified by Arjuna on the Battlefield of Kurukshetra. These depict the soul’s struggle with the demonic aspects of the ego (often depicted as a dragon, as in the examples of St. George, Beowulf or Tolkien’s Smaug) to prevent the false self’s ascendancy because, if unchecked, such a demonic force can “come to deadly use.” This is why Jesus, the exemplar of love, also said that he came “not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew, 10:34, KJV). To vanquish the dragon, it is necessary to do battle with the evil tendencies within our own corruptible natures and with their malign forces when they threaten us.

The inner struggle, the greater jihad, and its outer counterpart, the lesser jihad of outer warfare when permitted and necessary, must always be “in the way of God” (Holy Qur’an, 2:190). They must aim at a restoration of inner and outer order.

The metaphor of warfare, then, is commonly used in spiritual traditions, to refer to self-dominance... chivalry is humane, founded on humanitarian norms whose spiritual ground is the moral foundation for human rights.

In the case of the inner struggle, the first requirement for the spiritual warrior is purgation or self-emptying in order to become a vessel for the Spirit. Purgation opens the soul, by the workings of grace, to receive knowledge and love, qualities of illumination which must be nurtured within the Heart through prayer (the “sword of gnosis”) and virtue (the “love that melts hearts”). The goal is to tame the egoic soul to conform it to the Spirit, the exiled soul’s natural home. Through spiritual disciplines and struggles, the soul strives to overcome its deviant tendencies, those outer attachments and lustful appetites that tend to rust and calcify the Heart, so that, in a state of detachment, the soul can be readied to receive the gifts of the Heart: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, which radiate through the pure soul as Light.

In the struggle for the soul’s freedom, detachment is achieved through an egoic death which is the occasion of the soul’s rebirth into an awareness of her spiritual ground of being, her true or Primordial Nature. By shedding the veil of illusion, the soul dissolves into Light. As the Sufis say, the moth, immolated in the burning candle, becomes the Flame. The soul assimilates into her spiritual ground. The ontological Reality we participate in, the Divine Breath in us (Genesis 2:7), is the Sacred Presence all human beings are covenanted to witness in themselves and in creation; this is the Qur'anic Covenant of Alast (Holy Qur’an, 7:172) which is the basis of the Shahada (discussed below). Our Primordial Nature (al-fitra, Holy Qur’an, 30:30) is rooted in this ground, and so the Sacred is the Presence of the Spirit in Reality. Our Primordial Nature is therefore both the integrated prototype of natural order (as Oneness or Wholeness) and its objective criterion (as Truth). Its operative presence (as Love and Moral Conscience) is our Heart, and is the basis of our humanity.

The metaphor of warfare, then, is commonly used in spiritual traditions, to refer to self-dominance. To strive “in the way of God” requires both masculine elements (such as spiritual discernment and egoic renunciation and detachment) and feminine qualities (such as gentleness and receptivity). Spiritual chivalry comprises a complement of these qualities, which include love, loyalty, nobility, integrity, honor, dignity, valor, altruism, magnanimity, championing just causes, particularly in the interests of the weak or oppressed, and fighting for truth and justice, in God's way, with forbearance, prudence and merciful restraint. Such chivalry is humane, founded on humanitarian norms whose spiritual ground is the moral foundation for human rights.

Qualities of chivalry are celebrated and esteemed in many cultures. Examples include King Arthur, Lancelot, Gawain, and Parsifal (of the Arthurian legends), Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, and Robin Hood (of the medieval courtly traditions), Rustam, Hatim al-Tai, and Majnun (from the Persian and Arab cultures), and Lord Rama (in Hindu lore). In Islam, the futuwwa traditions associated with the Holy Prophet and his son-in-law, 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, relate to the Sufi ideals of javanmardi, linking chivalry to its spiritual roots. The Sikh tradition, too, in many ways exemplifies the model of the warrior-sage as an embodiment of chivalric culture.

Two brief examples of chivalry will illustrate the way of the warrior-sage. There is an anecdote from the life of 'Ali ibn Abi Talib who had refused, in the heat of battle, to strike an enemy who had spat upon him because he would have been retaliating in anger. It was important to 'Ali not act out of a brutish nature but out of restraint and self-control.

A more recent example of spiritual chivalry, both on and off the battlefield, is provided by the life of the Algerian Emir Abdelkader al-Jaza’iri (1808-1883), a Sufi scholar who found himself dragged into an unwanted war against France’s colonizing forces. An exemplar of the warrior-sage, he became renowned worldwide for his chivalry and noble character. At a time when there were no institutionalized norms for waging wars, the Emir meticulously adhered to a humanitarian ethos of humanity, proportionality, and non-aggression towards civilians and non-combatants. He refused to emulate or be provoked by the enemy’s barbarity. His own humane conduct of war are well documented by historians, and his qualities of nobility, valor, justice and mercy, won over the enemy. In later years, when in exile in Syria, he exhibited those noble and chivalrous qualities again by intervening, at great personal risk to prevent a massacre of Maronite Christians by their Druze Muslim neighbors in Damascus. The Emir was widely praised and greatly admired for both his chivalry and his humanity. His former enemy conferred on him the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur, the Pope awarded him the Order of Pope Pius IX, and President Abraham Lincoln gifted to him a pair of his favorite Colt pistols. There is also a town named after him in the USA (Elkader, Iowa).

Unity and Diversity: Dealing with the “Other”

Despite our innate sense of underlying unity, conflicts will inevitably arise in a world whose very outer structure is diverse. This is because difference is seen through an outer lens that divides rather than through the Eye of the Heart that perceives our underlying ontological unity, the Oneness of Being. The scriptures teach that the purpose of diversity is knowledge of our Heavenly Nature, which is intrinsically One. For example:

O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Acquainted.
(Holy Qur’an, 49:13)

In the above passage, we are taught that diversity, a condition of human existence, is for the purpose of teaching us a deeper truth – of our intrinsic spiritual origin and interconnected complementarity. According to the Hadith of Creation in the Muslim tradition, God underlines, “I was an unknown treasure and I wished to be known. So, I created the creation in order to be known.” Since only God is metaphysically Real, the different creatures are merely His signs (ayat). While God's Essence is not humanly knowable, God can be known through his Qualities and Attributes, which are referred to as the Beautiful Names of God, and are manifested in creation. The knowledge enjoined on Man is therefore the knowledge of the Reality signified by those signs, and not of their outer forms, whose different manifestations and images veil Reality. The signs point to the Transcendent Reality to which all souls must, by nature, conform.

In short, the knowledge of our intrinsic connection and caring are essential to embodying our humanity. They are the foundations of spiritual and ethical literacy, and enable us to engage in this world in humane ways conducive to order and harmony. It is through spiritual literacy that we attain ethical literacy. Through spiritual kinship, and its concomitant ethical behavior of righteousness, one can embody the noble qualities of chivalry; hence, the Qur’anic verse cited above states, “Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you,” and lest there be any doubt that the font of this sustaining knowledge is God, the verse continues, “Indeed, Allah is All-Knowing, All-Aware.”

The ability to know the Sacred ground of our unifying being is affirmed by all the faith and wisdom traditions. Therefore, Man is called upon to know his true nature so that such knowledge can be reflected in how one chooses to live one’s life. One finds this imperative in, for example, the maxim of the Delphic Oracle, “Know Thyself” (Gnôthi seautón); it is a directive found in all traditional schools. Self-knowledge is the basis of the two Biblical Supreme Commandments: love of God (spiritual literacy) and love of the neighbor (ethical literacy), and of the Shahada in Islam. The first part of the Shahada (“There is no reality except God”) affirms the all-encompassing nature of spiritual Reality, and the second part (“Muhammad is the Messenger of God”) refers to human perfectibility exemplified by the Logos or the Prophetic Norm of the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil). The Commandments and the Shahada each signify the ontological truth that our spiritual kinship entails caring for the “Other” as for oneself.

Self-knowledge entails love. The idea is expressed in the following beautiful verse (the Bani Adam stanza from the book, Gulistan) by the Sufi poet, Sa’di of Shiraz:

Human beings participate in an all-encompassing Reality
Having sprung from One Nature and Soul.
They are as limbs from a single body, and so,
Just as the whole body is distressed if one limb is in pain,
No one can remain unmoved by the suffering of another.
Whoever remains unmoved, is unworthy to be called “Human.”

Some, however, do remain unmoved by the suffering of others. These possess the “hard hearts” that Lear refers to, the petrified rock-like natures of which the Holy Qur’an speaks. Hence, the importance of cultivating spiritual consciousness which, in Sufi terminology, is called “taqwa.” It is a quality whose importance is repeatedly emphasized by the Holy Qur’an. It refers to the state of God-consciousness, an awareness of the Sacred which impels love and beauty denoted by the Arabic term “ihsan,” a word which therefore signifies both beauty and virtue. For Christians, this awareness is sometimes referred to as being “Christ-conscious,” embodying a state in which one sees through the Eye of the Heart, the spiritual center or “le point vierge” in which only God lives. For, as the scripture states, God “has put eternity into man’s Heart.” (Ecclesiastes, 3:11) This "centering principle" is also the "ordering principle," and it is based on the remembrance (“dhikr”) of our sacred ground.

All conflicts, at root, have their basis in some form of spiritual forgetfulness or rebellion, which then stimulates the baser nature to sin and vice. When hearts, through spiritual forgetfulness and self-covering, become deformed and hardened, diabolical and inhumane behaviors can manifest. The traditional masters therefore repudiate egoic self-will. This traditional stance is in contrast to that of certain Modernist views expressed by the likes of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Ayn Rand ("Modernism" here refers to a philosophical outlook that rejects the Sacred foundation of Reality, and not to modernity itself). In the traditional understanding, therefore, transgressive behavior springs from the repudiation of our intrinsic humanity, from our loss of the sense of the Sacred.

The loss of a unitive vision creates a delusion which inflates the separative “self” and places it in opposition to the “Other” who is no longer viewed as spiritual kin. By failing to remember our common spiritual foundation, we lack the basis to actualize the love that spiritual remembrance entails. One of the chief causes of such forgetfulness is pride, or the lack of humility. The term “human” (highlighted by Sa’di), which is etymologically related to the term “humility,” like the term “humus” (nurturing soil) or its cognate “Adamah” (the word for the lowly clay from which “Adam” or Man was made), should remind us of our intrinsic “poverty before God” (in the language of the Beatitudes) (Matthew, 5:3). It is only through humility that the soul can place God above Man, and the neighbor on par with oneself in accordance with the Golden Rule.

Individualism, founded in a lack of spiritual humility, is a source of much of the conflict in the modern world. When individualistic goals cluster into affiliations of narrow identities (based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, politics, and so forth), individualism becomes tribalism and loses the pluralistic core intrinsic to spiritual kinship.  It is important, however, to distinguish between individuality and individualism. “Individuality” refers to the fact that each human being is graced with certain of the Attributes of God which define us uniquely as individuals, and which are on loan to us in limited measure from the Divine Treasury (Holy Qur’an, 15:21). “Individualism” results from misappropriating those loaned attributes, thinking of them in an entitled way as one’s own possessions and pridefully associating them with one’s ego. While individuality, supported by a pluralistic ethic, enables collaborative enterprise and therefore helps build communities, individualism is spiritually corrosive and societally destructive. It causes us to veil our spiritual nature and become cut off from the Sacred. This is the etiology of individualism and of alienation: the separation of the egoic self from the “Other.”

Tribalism is the rejection of cosmopolitanism. It is so mired in identity politics that it cannot look beyond its narrow lens to embrace a broader vision of a common humanity working collaboratively for the common good. Its narrow interests fray the bonds of society because they tribalize, perceiving not the underlying harmony but only the ideological or tribal groupings of “us” and “them.”

As with all things, the best way to understand how to view and treat the “Other” is found in God. Although God is supremely the “Other” [for He is Transcendent, beyond our grasping, and “there is none like unto Him” (Holy Qur’an, 112:4)], yet He is also the most intimate ground of our being [“closer than our jugular vein” (Holy Qur’an, 50:16)]. God is both mystery and intimacy. But, though we can never grasp God in His fullness, God can reveal Himself to us in accordance with the metaphysical principle that “the greater must reveal itself to the lesser.” But such revelation requires the effort of self-emptying and receptivity, for only the pure vessel can receive the Spirit. If we have eyes to see and the love to give ourselves to the Spirit, we can discover that God, the Transcendent “Other,” resides in our Heart. In the words of the Sacred Tradition in Islam, “Neither My Earth nor My Heavens can contain Me, but the Heart of a true Believer, can.” This teaches that we are not to alienate the “Other” but to open ourselves to it, “to know each other” as spiritual kin, for all creatures have been created with equal dignity, and are made in the finest stature (Holy Qur’an, 95:4); in short, we are to come to know and love our neighbor because, in response to Cain’s insolent question to God (Genesis 4:9), we are indeed our “brother’s keeper.” In practice, this means we must perceive our intrinsic kinship and so treat all creatures with dignity and respect.

Responding to Ignoble Behavior: Is War an Option?

However, people do not always act in noble and dignified ways which model spiritual chivalry. All too often, people behave heartlessly, ignobly, even aggressively. They kill others, forcibly deprive them of life, liberty and property and they violate their person. What should one do in those circumstances?

The obligation to act virtuously is paramount. It is important to understand that goodness is its own reward because our intentions and character attaches to the soul and records our spiritual destiny. The point is to strive in God’s way, but not simply in the expectation of a worldly reward. If all good works were to receive their rewards in the here-below rather than in the hereafter, we would be in a world where spiritual and ethical choices of faith-based love would be redundant, replaced by a simplistic regime of spiritually Pavlovian rewards and deterrents, making God no more than a substitute for Heaven and Hell instead of being our ontological Center. Recognizing this, the 8^th century Sufi saint Rabia al-Adawiyya prayed:

O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
  and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.
But if I worship You for Your Own sake,
  grudge me not Your everlasting Beauty.

As virtue is, spiritually speaking, its own reward, one must therefore enquire what it means to be good in the face of violent aggression. Jesus’s sermon proclaiming that it is better not to retaliate but to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) has a counterpart in the Holy Qur’an:

The good deed and the bad deed are not of equal worth. (So) Repel evil by that which is more beautiful, so that your enemy may become (inspired by this and be won over) as a devoted friend.
(Holy Qur’an, 41:34)

But very few, as the Holy Qur’an notes in the very next verse (41:35), are capable of doing this. People like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, are rare, though their memories inspire us to this day. If one can live without violence, it is of course better to do so. But this is not always an option, especially where the oppressor might seek one’s extermination.

In 1939, at the outset of the Second World War, when the ruthlessness of the Nazis was not yet fully known, Gandhi had written: “A single Jew bravely standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees will cover himself with glory and lead the way to deliverance of the fellow Jews.” (Harijan, 1-7-39) At the end of the War, when the evidence of the Holocaust and of the Nazis’ killing machine was clear, Gandhi responded in a 1947 interview with Louis Fischer that “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife” because satyagraha or non-violent civil resistance “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.” Many would say, based on the evidence today, that Gandhi was wrong and idealistically naïve.

Clearly, the silence of most of the world today, in the face of the inhumanities occurring today in the Gaza War, are reason enough to question whether Gandhi’s approach was right. No voluntary acts of self-immolation (such as by Aaron Bushnell, the young US soldier who, in sympathy with “what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers,” set himself on fire in front of the Israel Embassy in Washington, DC, on February 25, 2004) or self-sacrifice (such as by heroic reporters and humanitarian aid workers who have repeatedly risked their lives and paid the ultimate price) have resulted in significant policy changes to reverse the tragic genocidal war in Gaza and its underlying injustices. We will discuss this in more detail in the next section.

Gandhi’s scruples were, in a sense, those voiced by Arjuna at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita (a scripture much-loved by Gandhi) when Arjuna, understanding the evils that would inevitably result from fighting a war, expressed his reticence to do so. He saw on both sides of the drawn battle-lines, his friends and family, and he was loathe to kill or harm them or for them to be killed or harmed. Counselled by Lord Krishna (Arjuna's charioteer, or symbolically his Intellect) to do his “dharma” (sacred duty), he was persuaded in the end to fight as a spiritual warrior in a righteous cause.

When there is an existential threat and all reasonable non-violent interventions have failed, it may not suffice to simply “speak Truth to power.” The adversary may be spiritually deaf and implacable, as was Goneril in the face of Albany’s reminders. In certain circumstances it may become necessary for Truth to confront evil force with force.

When war is unavoidable, one must then act in a spiritually responsible way to combat the demonic enemy (in the Bhagavad Gita they were represented by the Kauravas, who had rejected all reasonable attempts at diplomacy). Lord Krishna revealed Himself to Arjuna as the Logos, teaching him that the Spirit alone subsists through the medium of existential manifestation as Atman. The outer forms are in this sense illusory. It was therefore Arjuna’s duty to take up arms to exorcise the demonic forces who would otherwise have destroyed or subjugated the righteous and innocent (represented here by the Pandavas) and perpetuated their unjust rule.

The Jewish theologian of dialogue, Martin Buber, once incarcerated by the Nazis, wrote to Gandhi in 1939, disputing Gandhi’s position regarding the use of non-violent means, satyagraha, against the demonic force of the Nazis. Buber stated as follows:

“An effective stand in the form of non-violence may be taken against unfeeling human beings in the hope of gradually bringing them to their senses; but a diabolical universal steamroller cannot thus be withstood.”

Diabolical wars of aggression or of extermination are sometimes initiated by malign forces against innocents who do not have the luxury to offer themselves passively to the butcher’s knife or be inspired by “moral fools.” It may therefore sometimes be necessary to take up arms to defend oneself against diabolical forces aimed at one’s destruction, subjugation or oppression. But even in such exceptional circumstances, there are rules of warfare which should be observed, according to chivalric and humane norms such as those displayed by Emir Abdelkader.

At the end of his life, Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, thought the problem of how the Jews should have responded to Hitler to be not resolvable. No doubt, he viewed it as a challenge to the principle of satyagraha he had championed, but sometimes, as the scriptures portray, the Truth (satya) may need the virtuous sacrifice of a spiritual warrior to reassert itself against a demonic force – but only if Truth remains wedded to Goodness and Beauty, and not an abstract ideology disconnected from the Heart. This is a message that is echoed by fabulists such as C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Rowling, and one that is important to remember.

The Gaza War

With this backdrop, we will briefly offer a few comments on the current war being waged in Gaza and the Occupied Territories, from a humane and not an ideological lens. The principles described earlier require any war to be conducted only out of moral necessity, and then, only according to norms that do not violate human dignity.

The historical circumstances leading to the Gaza War are well known. The Zionist agenda in the late 1800s aimed to establish a homeland for the Jews in the Holy Land, a territory revered by the three Abrahamic traditions. The “Holy Land,” from a metaphysical perspective, refers to the Heart, the peaceful and loving domain of the Spirit (the true “Promised Land”), and not merely to a piece of real estate or a geographical territory over which to spill blood in ways that profane its sacred significance. This metaphysical interpretation is not accepted by those – including radical Zionists – who assert that God had promised as an inheritance to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob the actual physical lands that extend beyond Israel’s present boundaries in the Southern Levant. The political project of the “Greater Israel,” an expansionist expression of Zionism, therefore claims its legitimacy from this fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, which is not embraced by the majority of Jews, though (importantly for our understanding of the recent history) it is promoted by the far-right elements who hold the balance of power in Israel, and whose political support is required by the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu to maintain power.

The British imperial occupiers of the territories in question (formerly ruled by the Ottomans until the British took over at the end of the First World War) imposed a partition on its mostly Muslim Arab inhabitants to create a homeland there for Jews who were being displaced due to persecution and pogroms taking place in Russia and Europe and other parts of the diaspora. (The Zionists had considered Uganda as an alternative, which speaks to the priority being to establish a secure home as a colonial settler group, through the patronage of Britain, rather than reoccupying the Promised Land.) Through a series of well-documented events, the British initiative resulted in the formation of the State of Israel in 1948. The partition was a politically-imposed graft onto the lands and territories of a largely unwilling Palestinian Arab majority population, which then included a growing Jewish minority population whom the British had allowed to immigrate there. The Zionist government of the newly minted state of Israel had expansionist needs and ideals, which were backed by powerful factions in the USA and Britain. The imposition of this new state on, and colonization of, the indigenous people by the Jewish settlers was not universally accepted by Jews themselves, and several prominent intellectuals voiced their opposition or doubts about the Zionist project at its inception, including Albert Einstein, Erich Fromm, Primo Levi, Isaac Asimov and Hannah Arendt. Levi, himself an Auschwitz survivor, put it thus: “Everyone has their Jews. For the Israelis, they are the Palestinians.”

Following the creation of Israel, Zionist expansion and terrorism were avidly pursued by the early settlers (Deir Yassin being a notorious example of a massacre documented by Jewish historians like Professor Benny Morris, based on records in Israel's own archives, released after a 50 year embargo). The threat of ethnic cleansing by the Zionist precursors of the modern Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), Haganah and its offshoot, Irgun, resulted in the flight of some 700,000 terrorized Palestinian Arab inhabitants from their homes, who became international refugees – an event termed the “Nakba.” Following a series of wars won by Israel, it occupied other neighboring lands including the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and the Golan Heights. The resulting boundaries of Israel (recorded in several resolutions of the United Nations, notably Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338) remain a matter of dispute. Israel's sovereign claims over the Occupied Territories, its non-recognition of Palestinian sovereignty over an independent Palestine, the status of Palestinian refugees, and the control of Jerusalem, a sacred city for all three Abrahamic faiths, are all contested matters. Israel has continued to retain control of its conquered territories and, in fact to expand its settlements on and beyond the occupied lands (in the latter case, for cited security reasons). The Occupied Territories, moreover, have been governed by Israel in ways that have violated human rights and created simmering resentment among the Palestinian Arabs towards their Israeli occupiers, resentment which has boiled over from time to time into intifadas and wars.

The “Holy Land,” from a metaphysical perspective, refers to the Heart, the peaceful and loving domain of the Spirit (the true “Promised Land”), and not merely to a piece of real estate or a geographical territory over which to spill blood in ways that profane its sacred significance.

Attempts at peace, notably the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt (which were made in contemplation of discussions aimed at settling the Israel-Palestine issue) and the 1993 Oslo Accords (where proposed divisions of land were seen by Palestinian leaders as potentially continuing the subjugation and exploitation of the Arabs while offering them sovereign territory, and were therefore rejected by them) never resulted in peace. The United States played a major role in trying to broker peace, but it has not been viewed as an honest broker according to accounts from prominent Jewish critics such as Noam Chomsky (see “The 'Honest Broker' is Crooked”), Norman Finkelstein, and Ilan Pappé. One reason for this non-neutral role has been (according to the Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy) the extensive lobbying by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In his keynote address at a National Press Club conference in Washington, DC, in 2015, on the topic “The Israel Lobby: Is it Good for the U.S.; Is it Good for Israel?”, Mr. Levy spoke candidly about the “corrupting friendship” between Israel and America. He stated that “Israel is occupation-addicted” and that the U.S. was being a poor friend by feeding Israel the "drug" instead of sending the "addict" to the rehabilitation center. He criticized AIPAC’s role in weaponizing Jewish victimhood to enable “the immoral and systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians” in the Occupied Territories (“we treat the Palestinians like animals”). A year later, Mr. Levy, speaking again of U.S. and Israel at the National Press Club, lamented that “To be a man of conscience today is almost in each society to be a traitor.”

The oppressive condition of the Palestinians, while officially denied by Israel, has been acknowledged by many Jews. Three prominent examples are cited below:

• On October 3, 2023, Jewish author and Israeli resident, Nathan Thrall, documented the intolerable and inhumane conditions of the Palestinian Arabs, and the systemic discrimination meted out to them, even within Israel, in an account of the wake of the crash of a school bus with Arab Palestinian children. The book, titled “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” was published before October 7^th, and won the 2024 Pullitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
• On December 9, 2023, Jewish intellectual, Masha Gessen, published an essay in the New Yorker (titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust”) comparing Gaza before October 7^th to Jewish ghettoes of Nazi Germany.
• In December 2023, the film, “The Zone of Interest” was released in the USA, having premiered a few months earlier at the Cannes Film Festival. Made by Jewish film-maker, Jonathan Glazer, and based on a novel of the same name by Martin Amis, it depicted the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, and his family. Their residence was shown as being adjacent to the concentration camp which was portrayed as being simply a “zone of interest,” an inconvenient truth to be disregarded so as not to interfere with the family’s mundane life. The film won critical acclaim, including the 2024 Best International Feature Academy Award. During his acceptance speech for the Oscar, Glazer aroused controversy by stating that his own Jewishness and the memory of the Holocaust itself were being “hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”

The condition of the Palestinians has also been critiqued by independent observers, international humanitarian organizations, and NGOs, as constituting a violation of human rights. It has been likened to Jim Crow in segregationist America (this was the observation of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2024 book, The Message) and to apartheid (in former President Jimmy Carter’s 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid).

Prior to the Hamas attacks of October 7th, Mr. Netanyahu inflamed tensions by reasserting the hardline Zionists’ expansionist goal by provocatively holding up a map at the 78th session of the UN General Assembly (New York on September 22, 2023) that placed the West Bank and Gaza within the sovereign boundaries of Greater Israel.

This, then was the backdrop to the Hamas attacks. The current war, therefore, did not begin on October 7th, though its new phase did begin with those contemptible attacks led by the Al-Qassam Brigades, in which some 1200 people were killed and over 250 hostages were captured. The attacks, even if provoked by the immoral Occupation, were not themselves conducted according to any laudable or humane norms. There was indiscriminate killing and abuse of civilians, some of whom included Jewish humanitarians and peace activists. People were vilely mistreated. Most of the hostages taken were non-combatants.

In response, there was understandable outrage among Jews and non-Jews alike, and a moral justification was claimed on the part of Israel to respond. From the beginning, however, no serious attempt was made by the Israelis to resolve matters through negotiation or to seek a genuine diplomatic political solution. The mood was to seek vengeance. Therefore, the goals set were military in nature. An opportunity to resolve matters in a more peaceable manner was unfortunately never seriously brooked.

The government announced two retaliatory goals: the elimination of Hamas, a group it branded as a terrorist organization dedicated to destroying the state of Israel; and the return of the Israeli hostages. In terms of the first stated goal, there was no clarity on what was meant by the elimination of Hamas, in particular whether the goal was to destroy its military capability and leadership (both achievable goals) or to destroy Hamas’s ideology of resistance and opposition to Israel (not a credibly achievable goal).

Israel’s military response, backed by the U.S. and several of its allies, was crushing and, according to Amnesty International, it was genocidal. Amnesty is one among several prominent credible international bodies and countries, which have expressed concerns that Israel’s response has been disproportionate, has deliberately or recklessly targeted civilians, including women and children, has destroyed protected sites such as hospitals, schools and refugee camps, has decimated the infrastructure needed to sustain life and civil society in Gaza, has denied journalists and humanitarian aid workers fair access, and in fact has deliberately targeted them and created and exacerbated an otherwise preventable situation of famine and disease.

The International Court of Justice in the Hague has ruled that Israel has plausibly engaged in war crimes, and warrants have been issued for the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister and its Defence Minister.

Amnesty International’s Report issued on December 5, 2024, titled “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians In Gaza”, states, in part, as follows:

On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration. Since then, it has carried out relentless aerial and ground attacks, many of them with large explosive weapons, which have caused massive damage and flattened entire neighbourhoods and cities across Gaza, along with their life-supporting infrastructure, agricultural land, and cultural and religious sites and symbols deeply engrained in Palestinians’ collective memory. Israel’s military offensive has killed and seriously injured tens of thousands of Palestinians, including thousands of children, many of them in direct or indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. Israel has forcibly displaced 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, many of them multiple times, into ever-shrinking, ever-changing pockets of land that lacked basic infrastructure, forcing people to live in conditions that exposed them to a slow and calculated death. It has deliberately obstructed or denied the import and delivery of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid. It has restricted power supplies that, together with damage and destruction, led to the collapse of the water, sanitation and healthcare systems."

Israel maintains that its army, the IDF is the “most moral army in the world” and that it has acted morally. The facts belie those claims. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (the latter’s Report of December 19, 2024 found that Israel is engaging in acts of genocide) suggest that the IDF is intentionally violating humane norms and international law. The use by the IDF of artificial intelligence (AI) (with the “Habsora” AI system in combination with the “Lavender” database) to generate targets at a rapid rate, has been widely condemned for promoting indiscriminate killings. While claiming to engage in "surgical strikes", the IDF has used large-tonnage bombs, weapons of mass destruction, in civilian neighborhoods and refugee camps and off-limits properties such as hospitals, schools and places of worship and sanctuary. Other disturbing acts by the IDF include its attacks on marked neutral persons (such as journalists wearing the blue “Press” vests, or on UN personnel, registered doctors and aid workers, as in the World Central Kitchen convoy attack), and its organized mass deportations of civilians (particularly under the “Generals’ Plan” to forcibly evacuate northern Gaza of civilians and make the areas available to Israeli settlers). All these actions have raised enormous skepticism about Israel’s motives and methods, which transgress humane norms and acceptable practices for the conduct of war.

Many independent international organizations and observers have expressed concerns that the conduct of the Israeli government is consistent with ethnic cleansing and genocide. This appears to be corroborated by documented statements from some of Israel's senior officials, and the nefarious intentions were ominously foreshadowed in the Greater Israel map displayed at the UN General Assembly by Prime Minister Netanyahu prior to October 7th.

The U.S. government's support for Israel (despite expressions of dissent from time to time) has remained consistent. So, for example, the U.S. has continued to supply lethal weapons known to be used by the IDF to kill indiscriminately; while expressing reservation on some of Israel's violations of humanitarian norms, the U.S. has been reticent to call Israel out for its transgressions; it has vetoed or blocked key UN resolutions for peace; and it has refused to apply its own Leahy Law (a law designed to block military support to foreign actors who violate human rights with impunity) to sanction Israel.

Critics of Israel’s transgressions and of the U.S.'s support for Israel in these circumstances are routinely accused of being “antisemitic” and are threatened or attacked. Most prominent critics of Israel’s policies are in fact Jews (in addition to the several examples provided earlier, one could cite individuals such as U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Jeffrey Sachs, Naomi Klein, and Peter Beinart; and also, groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Against Genocide, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network). But Jews critical of Israel are routinely branded as “self-hating Jews.” The Israeli strategy of conflating Zionism and Jewishness has not surprisingly, and sadly, resulted in blow-back against Zionism being misdirected against Jews generally. So, the strategy in fact fuels antisemitism while purporting to condemn it. Not everyone understands the distinction, which plays into the strategy.

Protests, such as the campus protests in the U.S., are dismissed as anarchic and thuggish expressions of antisemitic hate, even when their avowed intent is stated to be humanistic. Slogans such as “From the River to the Sea,” though frequently promoted to support Jewish and Arab coexistence within a single state to be located between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, are characterized by Zionist supporters as possessing genocidal intent by the Palestinians. In contrast, the Jewish slogan “Never Again,” intended to remind people that humanity should never again behave inhumanely, is claimed to apply only to transgressions directed against the Jews, the Chosen People, and not to others. That slogan, associated with the Holocaust, like the term “Holocaust” itself, as Norman Finkelstein has argued in his book, “The Holocaust Industry” (2000), has been intentionally weaponized to justify a non-normative Jewish exceptionalism based on a narrative of victimhood. Tribes of propagandists and lawyers collaborate to create laws to define “antisemitism” and “hate speech” according to non-humanistic norms to support special groups and ideological interests. Insofar as these laws are based on or encourage the conflation of anti-Zionism or anti-Israel aggression with antisemitism, they simply compound the problem.

In this Orwellian climate, it is difficult to speak truth to power, but there are many who continue to do so, despite attempts to silence their voices. Among the Arab Palestinian voices, the humanistic spirit of the intellectual Edward Said and the poet Mohamed Darwish to combat the exile and erasure of Palestinian history and culture, continues to resound in the voices of the human rights lawyer Noura Erakat and the poet Refaat Alareer. Israel continues to jail potential Palestinian leaders like Marwan Barghouti, but other political voices of conscience, like that of Mustafa Barghouti, nevertheless continue to try to be heard.

While Israel was able to achieve some success through negotiating with Hamas (it secured the release of a few hostages in this way), it all but abandoned negotiations in favor of exercising its military muscle. In July 2024 it engineered the assassination in Iran of Hamas’s principal negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh (after Israel murdered multiple members of Haniyeh’s family, including three of his sons and four of his grandchildren who were traveling to attend Eid festivities). Later, Israel staged the diabolical pager and walkie-talkie attacks, claiming to have done so preemptively and defensively, against Hezbollah. These actions were criticized by many in Israel and internationally, who saw them as an obstacle to peace and to the safe return of the hostages.

During the U.S. election campaign of 2024, the candidates and parties tried to outdo each other in voicing their support for Israel, while mere lip service was paid to promoting justice and peace in the region, and the war continues without any “day after” planning. In this climate, the Gaza War has not only continued but has spread into neighboring regions like Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, because they have attacked Israel in view of the mistreatment of the Palestinians. At the same time, Israel’s unlawful settlements have expanded and its aggressive conduct continues, backed by the U.S. The United States’ policy actively supports Ukraine, claiming it was attacked by an aggressive neighbor coveting its sovereign territory. Inconsistently, the U.S. is backing Israel's disproportionate retaliatory acts as an arguably genocidal aggressor against a defenseless Palestinian Arab population housed within its internationally recognized borders. This exposes a double standard that has been pointed out by many commentators but is simply ignored.

Propaganda in this climate has taken on a huge significance. Despite the attacks on journalists within Gaza, the truth is emerging from the evidence of courageous reporters and from individuals with cell phone technologies to refute disinformation. The alarming atrocities being suffered, pictures of which fill our TV screens daily, are called out by international organizations set up precisely to check these transgressions, but those very organizations are now being attacked by Israel, with the support of, and deafening silence from, the U.S. and its allies. The UN’s Palestinian Refugee Agency, UNRWA, has been accused by Israel, without any tangible evidence produced to date, of complicity in the Hamas attacks, something the Agency has repeatedly denied. Even though the Agency took immediate steps to dismiss the accused staff, it has been denied access by Israel to provide essential humanitarian services to Palestinian refugees.

One person who has stood out for exhibiting remarkable moral courage in these circumstances is the UN Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the Italian international lawyer Francesca Albanese. Even before the Hamas attacks, Mrs. Albanese was critical of Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian Arabs, was documenting Israel’s human rights abuses, and her 2022 report characterized the Israeli government as “an intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive regime designed to prevent the realization of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination.” She has since issued several reports condemning Israel’s activities. In July 2023, she informed the UN Human Rights Council that Israel was mistreating the Palestinians, holding them in what she characterized as “an open-air prison”. Israel has banned Mrs. Albanese from traveling to Israel and to the areas of her mandate, and has rejected her findings as motivated by antisemitism. That accusation has been rejected and refuted by Mrs. Albanese. In her report from October 2024, she condemned Israel’s actions as genocidal and colonial erasure. The UN Special Rapporteur has been repeatedly targeted by Zionist groups, and threatened and vilified by Israel and its supporters, but she continues to be a prominent voice of conscience.

Religion and the Spiritual Lens

Not surprisingly, despite the support of the far-right religious orthodox groups for the Zionist expansionist agenda of the government, there is considerable debate within Jewish circles about whether Zionism in this form is compatible with Jewish norms. In one interpretation, Zionism is seen as a political extension of Judaism’s divinely ordained right of return to the Promised Land. Israel, and in particular Greater Israel and its settler colonialism, is no more than the expression of that goal. Others favor a view of Judaism which decouples the goals of the state of Israel (understood as a secular entity) from the religion. They therefore claim they have the right to criticize the state’s actions, including the goals of Zionist expansionism set by their far-right co-religionists, without being fairly accused of antisemitism or abandoning Jewish religious values.

There are also secular and religious tensions within Israel. One example is that ultra-orthodox Jews have claimed exemption from active military service on the grounds that participation would violate their Haredi identity. Although, in the summer of 2024, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that there are no exemptions from service in the army, this remains a controversial issue. The statistics relating to conscientious objectors in Israel are currently unavailable.

In view of the claim that Zionist goals are central to being Jewish, the question remains: What are the values exemplified by Judaism in relation to the conduct of the Gaza War?  

The Talmud teaches human beings to value life as sacred, and to respect human dignity. This is the basis of the Commandment not to kill (the Sixth Commandment). The precept of “an eye for an eye” is not therefore a prescription for vengeful retaliation but, consistent with the Talmud's fundamental respect for the sanctity of life, is better understood as expressing the principle of proportionality. The Israeli response to the October 7th attacks has been more driven by vengeance than by proportionate retaliation. As many have observed, it has even been characterized as being genocidal.

Thus, to “blot out” the Amalekites from the Promised Land can be interpreted as a commandment to exorcise wickedness from the sanctum of the Heart, similar to Jesus’s sermon to “cast out” the beam in one’s own eye.

In the same vein the “Amalek” reference made by Prime Minister Netanyahu days after the Hamas attacks, to justify the killing of Palestinians, needs context. In the Bible, the Amalekites are the enemies of the Israelites who are commanded by God to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy, 25:19, KJV) in retribution for their taking over the Promised Land. Some Rabbis (for example, Rabbi Israel Hess in an article published in Hebrew in 1980, titled (in translation) “The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah,” has used the scriptural commandment as a license to exterminate the Palestinian Arabs. The 1994 slaughter by Baruch Goldstein of 29 Muslims at a mosque in Hebron was inspired by this controversial interpretation. Some members of the far-right faction in the current Israel government, for example the Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, also adopt this same interpretation. Other Jewish interpretations interpret the scripture metaphorically, not literally. Thus, to “blot out” the Amalekites from the Promised Land can be interpreted as a commandment to exorcise wickedness from the sanctum of the Heart, similar to Jesus’s sermon to “cast out” the beam in one’s own eye (Matthew, 7:5, KJV). The “damnatio memoriae” or erasure from memory, when interpreted esoterically, refers to erasing from one’s Heart the deluding distractions of the world in order to remember the Spirit that lives in all. It is not a license to commit genocidal acts or to erase the memory of Palestinians from history.

The Talmud teaches human beings not to steal another’s property (the Eighth Commandment). We have earlier argued that the “Promised Land” does not refer to a piece of real estate promised to the Jews, but rather to the "inner sanctuary" of peace promised to the pure of Heart. This interpretation is linked to the esoteric meaning of the narrative of exile and return of the Chosen People. The return is to the sanctum of God. It is a metaphor for inner peace, not a literal mandate to justify the forced displacement of Palestinian Arabs to further the expansionist goals of a Greater Israel.

The Talmud teaches that one should speak out conscionably against human injustices, even over one’s nationalistic, tribalistic or personal interests. Thus, we read in the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b:

Whoever can protest against the injustices of his family but refrains from doing so, should be punished for the crimes of his family.

Whoever can protest against the injustices of the people of his community, but refrains from doing so, should be punished for the crimes of his community.

Whoever is able to protest against the injustices of the entire world but refrains from doing so, should be punished for the crimes of the whole world.

Many Jews have acted with good conscience and have protested against the excesses of the Israeli state. "Not on our name" has been a rallying cry of Jews worldwide to protest Israel's atrocities purportedly carried out on their behalf.

One example of an analysis of Judaism that rejects Zionist fundamentalism is the book by Peter Beinart, titled “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” (2025). He argues that being Jewish requires adherence to humane norms which are central to Judaism. In a chapter titled “Korach’s Children,” Beinart describes an incident from the book of Numbers in which Korach accuses Moses and Aaron of elitism, of wrongfully proclaiming themselves as holier than other Jews in the community. God vindicates Moses and Aaron, making the point that holiness was conditional on righteous conduct, not simply on being Jewish (as Korach implied). Beinart comments, the Jewish kings’ “authority does not come from any innate superiority. It stems from their willingness to follow God’s law. … The Talmud says the difference between a good and a bad king is that the former both 'judges and is judged.'” Beinart is critical of Jews placing the state above God’s commandments. He views Israel’s inhumane destruction in Gaza as a violation of Jewish values which, in his interpretation, affirm human solidarity. He writes, “The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself. … If you support a Jewish state no matter what it does to Palestinians, then you are treating it as infallible. You’re walking in the footsteps of Korach.” While noting that it is not idolatrous to support Israel, Beinart regards the placing of the Jewish state above Jewish values as a form of idolatry, a violation of the essence of being a Jew. He cites the words of the Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, which remind us of the universal humane values that transcend a racial vision of Jewishness by linking those values to a vision of a common humanity:

To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity.

It is therefore increasingly important, in these cynical times, to remain clear-sighted, spiritually and morally literate, and to keep the aperture of the Heart open. It is essential not only to being Jewish, but to being human.

In a war that has (so far) left more than 6% of Gaza’s population injured or dead, a war in which the state of Israel has (in Beinart’s words) “built an altar and thrown an entire society on the flame,” silence would be complicity. It takes moral courage, like that of Albany in King Lear, and at the risk of being branded a "moral fool," to speak out against "vile offenses."

There is a risk to acts of moral courage. Even His Holiness Pope Francis, who has repeatedly called for humane restraint, has been criticized in an open letter by a senior Rabbi of the Chief Rabbinate Council of Israel for "stark bias," "incitement," lending "papal authority to modern antisemitism," and for creating "a false moral equivalence between a democratic nation defending its citizens and terrorists who perpetrated the most barbaric massacre of Jews since the Holocaust."

Despite the risk of speaking out against rationalized inhumanity, thankfully many decent people are protesting against moral injustices and what Primo Levi and Alan Paton, among others, have referred to as "man's inhumanity to man," by placing their consciences ahead of expediency, ideology or tribalism, and are using their voices to speak up for a greater sense of humanity, and are expressing (paraphrasing Shakespeare) what their consciences feel rather than what their loyalties dictate they ought to say.

Conclusion

Looking at the unfolding tragedy, it is important to recognize that we are all implicated in it. To look away from it is to look away from our own humanity. To remain silent is to empower evil. To act out of anything less than our common humanity is, as Heschel has noted, to participate in its destruction. The true war is not outside us. It is within. And so too is its remedy.

Hearts harden because we choose to let them. Ethical blockages result from spiritual blindness and from the corruption of the soul that we permit. The antidote is the moral insight of the Heart which perceives our common humanity, and therefore engages with our fellow humans with empathetic caring.

While conflicts are inevitable in a diverse world, wars are often avoidable. But to resolve conflicts requires goodwill, a spirit of collaboration aimed at the common good. The use of deadly force is inimical to mutual coexistence, and is contrary to human dignity. On those exceptional occasions when it becomes necessary to combat aggression through force, such force should be used sparingly, and then only in accordance with the codes of spiritual chivalry.

Looking at the unfolding tragedy, it is important to recognize that we are all implicated in it. To look away from it is to look away from our own humanity. To remain silent is to empower evil. To act out of anything less than our common humanity is, as Heschel has noted, to participate in its destruction. The true war is not outside us. It is within. And so too is its remedy.

The worst atrocities are always preceded by the aggressor demonizing the "Other." It is therefore important to avoid doing this. In an age where propaganda and disinformation are powerful tools for those intent on evil, and truth itself is under attack, one must be on guard to seek out truth. Media literacy is therefore an essential adjunct to spiritual and ethical literacy.

The events that continue to unfold in Gaza, like the forgotten wars in Sudan, and other moral injustices in today’s world, hold up a mirror to our humanity. While there are many ways of analyzing their causes and solutions in terms that employ merely an external lens, the deeper roots of our problems are in fact spiritual. Those who look into the mirror and see only their own personal, tribalistic or ideological grievances or who divide the world into “us” and “them” instead of seeking the common good and humane outcomes, are likely to miss this. More importantly, if the institutions we empower are corrupt and corrupting, they are unlikely to change from within. There will be a spiritual and moral transformation required before the impetus for practical change and political action can occur. This will require patience, the one quality that Lear cried out for as his "true need" (King Lear, II:iv:298-299).

It is not too late to change course. But it is important to remind ourselves that there is the danger of arriving at a point of moral lethargy – which must be avoided. As Macbeth says, “I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that should I wade no more./ Returning were as tedious as go o'er” (Macbeth, III.4.136–8). But to “go o'er” is to abandon the inner struggle, to cross over to the party of the Devil, to forsake the Kingdom of Heaven.

The disorder of the world reflects the disorder within us, within our own contending natures. The world reflects back to us the inhumanity and injustices we ourselves permit. The battle in the end is to free the Heart from its bondage to its egoic vanities and insalubrious appetites, to reassert our better nature against our own corrupting nature. Like Arjuna on Kurukshetra, we are spiritual warriors called upon to do our "dharma," in a war against spiritual blindness, for the restoration of our own humanity.

We, in the final analysis, must repair our broken bonds with our sustaining Being and thereby become (in Albany’s words) the “visible spirits” – or Light – of Heaven which can purge earth of its “vile offenses.” May it be so!