Is the Enemy of Your Enemy Necessarily Your Friend?

Molotov and von Ribbentrop 

During his speech to congress Benjamin Netanyahu said, “When it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.” His notion is that ISIS and Iran have similar millenarian goals. They’re merely rivalrous siblings, with the same murderous objectives--the control not only of Islam but of the world in general. But Netanyahu’s idea is interesting in an almost Halachic way, to the extent that it turns over obvious assumptions. Perhaps we have been lulled to sleep by the Sunni and Shiite conflict. The Nazis and Russians were enemies until they signed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of l939. Of course they would become enemies again. It’s comforting to think of Iran as our silent and strategic partner in the Mideast due to the conflict with the Sunnis. Netanyahu’s point is that the US and Iran are strange bedfellows, maybe like Norman and Marion in Psycho. Will the animosity between Sunnis and Shiites take precedence over the conflicts with the West? Amidst all the threat of terrorism there has been a comfort in imagining a strong Iran as a bulwark against what has seemed like the far more threatening extremism of both al-Qaeda and ISIS. And Netanyahu’s speech gives little credit to the huge divide between Iran and other countries in the Middle East. Iran’s relatively cosmopolitan society and culture is a far cry from Syria, Iraq and it’s certainly Egypt. Still two negatives don’t necessarily makes a positive. How many times have we armed insurgent forces only to find our own weapons eventually being used against us?

The Sound and the Fury

“Ozymandias,” the famous sonnet by Shelley, underlines the futility of human endeavor. “All is vanity,” says Ecclesiastes. Macbeth reiterates the sentiment when he describes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Faulkner called his novel about the Compson clan of mythical Yoknapatawpha County The Sound and The Fury. Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus to describe the absurd condition of man, forever losing his footing, slipping two steps back for every one step forward, as he attempts to move his boulder up an impossible incline. The announcement about the reigniting of talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel by Hillary Clinton also brings to mind the notion of futility. Everyone wants peace in the Middle East, and yet in the face of repeated failure, the body politic becomes like a disappointed lover who has lost faith that his or her partner will ever stop cheating. In the face of repeated trauma, the body goes into a state of shock in which it’s impossible to care or feel. Meaning-making is a little like artificial numbers in mathematics. There is logic and sense to certain types of math—like the question of the square root of minus one—even without the existence of any referent, anything in reality to reify the thought process. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction,” yet there seems to be a reverse process of spontaneous regeneration by which human history slogs forward in spite of wars and failures, and there is a new generation of peace-keepers to replace the generalissimos of the past. Netanyahu and Abbas may surprise us and turn out to be unlikely bedfellows, but if it isn’t them, it’s going to be someone else who will finally tame the monstrous cycle of retribution and realize the two-state solution, so that Palestinians and Israelis can get on with their lives.