The Israeli-Palestinian is a conflict that has been thriving since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and it has fostered numerous sentiments and theories about the vital role that religion plays in the conversation. Many have attempted to evaluate the situation in hopes to find the origin of the conflict and to try and enlighten world leaders on how to resolve this conflict, but there seems to be no way of putting an end to the warfare. This essay will examine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it relates to René Girard’s theories of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism and explain that each of these theories plays a significance in the conflict how they are intertwined with religion. In order to express the …show more content…
Girard’s theory is an explanation of human nature and how their desires lead to violence (Stirling, 2004, 11). The train of Girard’s work offer three topics that can be related to the Arab-Israel conflict. The topic of mimetic desire, mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism. These topics at first glance seem similar because they all tie into one another to paint a explicit picture. As stated by the Philosopher himself, “the subject thus looks to the other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being” (Girard, 2005, 145-146). Essentially what Girard means by this statement is that humans envy the possessions others have and as an extension, the more envy that comes with an item, then the more value it has. Humans desire something not due to its inherent value but due to what their peers’ …show more content…
The answer lies in the source of the conflict. The source of the conflict between the Arab nations and the Jewish nation is over the land that is deemed as the promise land according to the holy books of the Torah and the Qur’an. Land in which the Palestinians were removed from in order to form the state of Israel both sides give value to. In Genesis, the first book of the Torah, it says “ The whole land of cannan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you, I will be your God”( Genesis 17:8). In this quote God is speaking to the Prophet Abraham. Now, the argument is who the descendants of Abraham are and the answer to that question is the both of them are. Abraham had two sons the oldest being Ismael and the second being Isaac. Now the Jews are descendants of Isaac and the Arabic- Muslims are descendants of Ishmael. Therefore, both sides are descendants to the land not by religion though, it is by their bloodline. Both parties want to claim the land the land because both sides value it as being the Promised Land hence displaying the mimetic theory of desire as proposed by Rene