With so many ongoing conflicts worldwide, peace is definitely something that is hard to come by in the modern world. These conflicts did not appear out of nowhere – more often than not, we can always trace these conflicts back to a root cause, with one major starting point being ethnicity and identity.
The conflict between Israel and Pakistan has certainly been a long-standing one, tracing back to the 19th century, when a Zionist movement was created, largely in response to European anti-Semitist sentiments. The movement sought to create a Jewish nation-state within Palestine, a predominantly Muslim state. The fact that the fundamental differences between these two religions would clash was obvious. The British promising both the Jews and the Palestinians what was essentially the same plot of land only served to exacerbate the conflict, which still sees little resolution even after a century.
The establishment of a Jewish nation-state was of particular significance to the Jews. Having formerly been deprived of even the basic right to survive with the waves of Anti-Semitist movements, a state was crucial in supporting the Jewish identity. Ultimately, the official existence and recognition of a Jewish state would prove the legitimacy of the Jews’ existence, which had been consistently suppressed.
Even in Singapore, while the conflict or tension among different ethnic or religious groups is not as apparent in other countries whose people make it a point to pour out their grievances, or where the conflict escalates into full-blown violence, it does not necessitate the fact that such tension does not exist. The Singapore government all along has adopted the policy of “multiculturalism” to ensure harmony and peaceful co-existence among the different ethnic, racial and religious groups in Singapore, which might have been successful to a certain extent. However, it ironically served to create even wider awareness among the different groups by explicitly defining their differences.
Nevertheless, with this policy of multiracialism for the sake of peaceful co-existence and as a result unanimous social and economic progress, Singaporeans have grown to become tolerant of each other in spite of their differences, even if it encroaches on their values. One example would be a difference between the cultures of the Malays and that of the Chinese. While the Buddhist or Taoist Chinese make offerings to their ancestors or other worldly spirits, they would leave pork lying around on the turf of HDB blocks where they usually carry out such worship. While pork is a Muslim taboo, most Malays have grown accustomed to it – they condone such happenings, as do any other religious or racial group with regards to groups of differing (or even conflicting) values and traditions, for the government has come to advocate the accommodation of cultural and religious difference. As much as this may seem to be simply sweeping the dirt underneath the carpet, this accommodation of the differences among the many groups in Singapore has been effective, for the people just grow acclimatized to it.
As such, this has led me to wonder if the occurrences of conflict due to differences in identity and the scale of it would be greatly reduced if every government were to advocate such accommodation of differences. Perhaps it may, but as far as I can see, it probably would not work. What if George Bush were to suddenly espouse racial, ethnic, cultural and religious differences? He may be the most powerful man on earth, but that does not necessarily mean that Americans would all listen to him like how Singaporeans (mostly) immediately subscribe to LKY’s words. Bush, being the staunch Protestant that he’s all along claimed to be, may be branded a hypocrite even by his most loyal supporters and entrenched Republicans, whom I (in my opinion) feel are possibly one of the most ethnocentric groups around.
In addition, many countries are still at conflict with one another – you cannot take the concept of multiculturalism and try to impose it on the Israelis or ask the Arabs to accommodate the Jews, for they have such a long-standing history of conflict and violence. In other authoritarian states, accommodation is out of the question – dictators believe that integration or assimilation would do the job just as well. Even worse still, they simply just turn to genocide to achieve their means. With such issues in mild, it is hard to believe that conflict based on identity differences would ever come to a halt.
Identity
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