Suicide bombers in Israel remind us: fear of death makes civilisation. If we do not fear death, then we do not love life. Worse, if we actually revere death, we make nothing, protect nothing, value nothing, love nothing, plan nothing; we can possess no aesthetic, no ethic, no philosophy, no sense of future. It is in the absolute knowledge of death, in our fear of its looming certainties, that mankind's technological, artistic and moral creativities are rooted.
What binding treaty can be made with those who do not fear the ultimate consequence of dishonouring that treaty? What deal can be made with those who physically and intellectually believe that this present life is an irritating obstacle to paradise? What hope of a settlement can there be with people who have reached that condition of ecstasy in which self-immolation is a joy and a deliverance? One value alone triumphs when fear of death itself dies: that value is nihilism, the abolition of all other values - of human purpose, piety, goodness, faith, of hope and of charity.
So the real issue in the Middle East is respect, not for individual lives, but for the notion of life itself. And this takes us to that imponderable, impossible question: What deal is possible for Israel with fanatics who seek the destruction of the Israeli state by means of their own deaths? What is the middle ground between the moral absolutism of a suicide bomber exultantly murdering himself and his innocent victims, and the utter impotence of those he kills?
Passport to paradise
No threat can intimidate the suicide bomber. Death is his purpose, his raison d'Ωtre, his passport to paradise. Gunships cause no fear. The reprisal deaths of his family members, or the accidental deaths of true believers, are similarly passports to nirvana. And death for the infidel dispatches him or her to the flames of hell, where they deserves to be. All is inch'allah: the will of God. This is truly Ground Zero.
So what is Israel meant to do to placate Hamas and Islamic Jihad? These groups don't want to improve the lot of the Palestinian people. Their volunteers are poised on the brink of paradise; what worldly settlement is a substitute for that?
They seek the heaven of nihilism, where the corporeal and the temporal count for nothing, and where human flesh and human life and human hope are the diabolical enemies of the imminent and perpetual joys of martyrdom.
Even at this remove in Ireland, with much of the anti-Israeli self-righteousness of Irish life now largely gone, can anyone devise a programme by which would-be suicide bombers who passionately want to die could co-exist with their potential victims, for whom life is everything? These are not mere moral dysjunctions, simply to be negotiated away: they are fundamental opposites, matter and anti-matter, the fires of a thermonuclear sun amid the motionless molecules of absolute zero.
Decades of injustice
The history of this place of Israel, we know; of the despicable treatment of the Palestinians by the British and French, of their defeat at the hands of the Israelis, and of the decades of injustice and humiliation which followed. But we cannot undo the done. History is the story of what made us, and politics is the story of the present consciously trying to turn itself into a future history. Yet there can be no politics if we are commanded by those who have sense of neither present nor future, but only of the twin poles of chaotic nihilism today and of eternal paradise beyond.
How do we prevent those arctic infernos consuming the destiny of all those who share their meridian, and ultimately, of those far beyond? Well, clearly we in Ireland do not because we cannot, any more than we can return the Sioux to their plains of bison or the Algonquin to their greenwood hunting grounds. This is a world of paradise lost, one which has been lost for many others before - the loyal Germans of Alsace, Sudetenland, Poland and points beyond, the Muslims of Sberenice, the Serbs of Krajina, the Croats of north-eastern Bosnia, the Africans of a score of states and more, and many hundreds of thousands of people across Ireland.
And there is this other truth: two millennia after the great mass suicide of Massada, after many centuries of Hebricidal murder all over the world, culminating in the Holocaust, the Jews are back in search of peace in their first and last place of refuge; and now, once again, they are being murderously hounded - this time by the new heirs to the Massada complex.
A peaceful homeland. That is what Jews sought; nothing else. The original Zionists thought they would arrive as liberators of a backward land which they would make free and prosperous, for native and incomer alike. Other events, other forces, including their own unwitting arrogance and honest ignorance, contaminated that decent aspiration, and between them turned the creation of the new state into one of the great destabilising dynamics of the modern world.
Jews want peace
This is the paradox. Jews want peace. Even Sharon wants peace. Why? Because he is a Jew. His murderousness shows this. Jews are exhausted. They are desperate. The Jew-hunt has gone on for centuries around the world, and now it is back to where it began, at Massada's broken stones, below which Jews even now cannot safely hide.
Weep for the Palestinians by all means; but remember also the baffled and bloodied Jew, now standing at the final bus stop, with the suicide bomber also waiting there.