I Heart BBC Worldservice

Our local NPR affiliate runs the BBC Worldservice late at night, and I am consistently impressed by the quality of their broadcasts. I'm not saying that American news companies don't amaze, but they seem to do it with much less frequency.

The other evening, they had a segment with some very interesting views on the Israel/Palestine conflict. It seems that, shortly before his death, Arafat spoke with Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Rajmohan Ghandi, and was apparently impressed enough to invite Ghandi to speak before the joint houses of the Palestinian Parliament. The BBC invited Rajmohan to talk about what he said, and he was advocating a non-violent end to that conflict. He pointed out that non-violence is not pacifism, nor is it simply turning the other cheek, but an active and dynamic approach to solving conflict. He mentioned that there are 50,000 Palestinian refugees living in Aman, and one demonstration could be to march those men, women and children back to their former homes. Is the Israeli army going to kill 50,000 innocent people? Probably not.

Rajmohan stressed that a non-violent solution is practical and necessary, as Palestine cannot win the war otherwise. Israel has the numbers, the army, the resources and backing of the US and other powerful countries. What's more, the bombings and other actions that the Palestinian people are using are being labeled, at least in western media, as terrorist attacks, so they're losing the moral battle as well.

Also, when discussing the differences between Judaism and Islam, Ghandi said that spirituality, in this day, has been reduced to ritual. People think that going to mass once a week or praying five times or twenty times a day makes you a spiritual person, when this is simply not the case. He pointed out that all religious texts in the world are based on themes of love, tolerance, forgiveness and understanding, and that we need to return to these themes.

What blew me away about the broadcast, was that after Mr. Ghandi left, they had on two other experts, to offer something of a counterpoint, from the Israeli and Palestinian points of view. They pointed out that it's very easy for someone to fly in from New York, shake their finger at Arafat and say, "You should stop this," when their not living in the refugee camps, or witnessing the suicide bombings at the Pizza Hut down the block from your house.

They echoed Rajmohan's sentiment that we don't need to reconcile the religions. Religion does not cause wars; religion finds reasons to justify war. One of the guests described Islam and Judaism as "practical religions. You don't start a fight, but if you are attacked, you defend yourself." One problem with this whole mess is that both Israel and Palestine feel they are the victim.

The BBC reporter asked if maybe that religion was more a cause of things then they suspected, as there are many religious leaders on both sides of the fence that advocate and endorse violence. Someone pointed out that people seem to have this notion that the spiritual leaders, call them scholars of Rabbis or Imams, are somehow removed from their culture and able to make completely objective statements. This is not true. They are in the thick of the culture, and they live with the hurt, and rage and the sorrow just as much as the every-man on the street. Just because your local preacher says something, does not mean that he or she is speaking from some high vantage point and can remove themselves from the situation at hand.

Also, they were not convinced that non-violence would work in this situation. One of the reasons non-violence worked so well in India, was that the British soldiers were not the sort of to kill a bunch of people sitting in the streets. There were those that advocated a Jewish non-violent response to Nazi aggression. That would have been a disaster, as the Nazis would have been content to run them over with a panzer.

It was an awesome, thought provoking segment, and it illustrated how complex this situation really is. The current hostilities began at the end of WWII, and the roots of it all go back thousands of years. I would be surprised to see a final solution, other than one side utterly annihilating the other, in my life time. But we hope and try anyway.