Huntington's name became synonymous with the "clash of civilizations." This Huntington, it appears, won't die. He is connected to a life-support unit; he needs to be disconnected. The life-support unit Huntington-the-Clash-of-Civilizations is connected to is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, Huntington-the-flesh-and-bone was already being nourished intellectually from this conflict. The world he foresaw was the Israeli-Palestinian microcosm on a macro scale. Huntington regarded Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia as "lone" countries. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in his understanding, was a "fault line conflict" -- a local conflict between adjacent states belonging to different civilizations or within states that are home to populations from different civilizations. Huntington believed that fault line conflicts had the potential to turn into "core state conflicts," when major states of different civilizations became involved. What Huntington missed was the resilience of the fault line conflicts and the potential of the fault line conflicts to produce myths, perceptions, conspiracy theories, typologies and finally transmissible cognitive mechanisms for use in the global market.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a local conflict with global implications. From the simplest level of spreading pessimism about the nature of human beings and the future of the world, to the most complicated level of ideology formations, inter-organizational relations and newly invented transferable ballistic technologies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fueling several other conflicts around the world.
These "inspired" conflicts need not be in the same civilization lines: Those who adopt Palestinian tactics need not necessarily be of the Arab-Muslim-Eastern civilization, and those who re-stage Israeli atrocities toward a separatist-minority-economically backward population need not necessarily be of the Judeo-Christian-Western civilization, or a "lone" state as Huntington would suggest. The ideological and training-wise relationship between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and certain Palestinian organizations settled in Lebanon and Syria at one time is well known to us. Indian soldiers in Kashmir have allegedly used Israeli tactics against the Pakistan-backed separatists in Kashmir in the recent past. The fact that the first suicide bombing during the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq took place before the invasion started, whereas the first suicide bombing on the Palestinian front came after 25 years of denigration and helplessness, is evidence to a reorientation of hatred that was accumulated in the Israeli front.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a "clash of civilizations" on a micro scale. There, there is the reality of occupation vis-à-vis a perceived existential threat. But a permanent conflict utilizes all the resources of a nation, including culture, religion, values and even the sense of civilization that nation possesses. And that utilization creates its own language, or loads new meanings to the already existing linguistic constructs, which are added into the global vocabulary of conflicts. The term "shahid" has attained a Palestinian dimension, and this dimension has become a part of the global usage of the term, even if the originator of the term does not acknowledge this. The term "retaliation" has an Israeli dimension in a similar manner. Any intellectual production about the nature of conflicts worldwide necessarily uses these terms with their new meanings. We think in those terms, and write and communicate with them.
Even after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over, it will take a long time for the intellectual paradigm to cleanse itself from the impact of this conflict. Huntington-the-Clash-of-Civilizations will live for some time because even though it has no external existence, it is already a reality that absorbs the linguistic and cognitive product of a real conflict.
