‘The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality’ – Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet.
Dark plumes of smoke rose in the air, heralding a doom of unendurable potency. Widow and Widower, Orphan and Vilomah, all formed in an instant – as a missile crashes into their building. They are the unwilling victims of a war they are not part of. As children cry for their dead fathers, and vice versa, who really cares about the idea of Palestine if it comes at a cost which cannot and should not be borne. Except there is no alternative. Palestinians would not hesitate to live in Israel, but they are not allowed. Persecution, oppression, execution: that is the only fate which meets those who try to cross those imaginary lines which mark Israel from Palestine. And for those imaginary lines, wars are fought, homes are ravaged and people, precious people who are born with one and only life, are killed, mercilessly, causelessly, and inhumanely.
Although many people mark this conflict as religious – something as old as the book from which they come – the essential conflict is between the Palestinian identity and Israeli identity. The Palestinians are majorly Sunni muslims, descendants of an amalgamation of ethnicities, predominantly Arab. The Israelis, as it so happens, are also descended from the same set of ancestors as the Palestinians. However, they also contain the children of a massive European Jew diaspora, making the Israelis mainly Jew. It is safe to assume that between the Jews and Muslims originally from Palestine, from many generations, there is no difference. Despite this clear symmetry, Arab Jews have been beguiled into the Zionist Israeli identity. Indeed, to draw a historical parallel which took place the same as this divide, one can imagine the division of British India into India and Pakistan, who do not have sufficiently different genetic or even cultural differences, but were guided to believe so by their (quite selfish and power hungry) leaders (and history appeared to repeat itself, about a year later).
So what is the real cause for this division? Why are the Israelis so unwelcoming to their genetic brethren? Fear. The Jews believe that if they unite with their Arab brothers, they would become a minority in their own country. The Jewish far-right finds this idea unpalatable. Despite the countless examples of countries where minority and majority have prospered together – Botswana, New Zealand, etc. – the Jews fear that they would be persecuted by the Arabs and forced into Holocaust conditions (hypocritically, they have done exactly that to the Palestinians). Albert Einstein once said, ‘It would be my greatest sadness to see Jews do to Arabs what Nazis did to Jews.’ Einstein must be turning in his grave.
Currently, the world grapples with a crisis of their own making, one which has happened before, and will happen again and again in the future. Israel has long coveted the West Bank, already technically administering it, while forcing the millions of Palestinian refugees out of their homes and into what is often termed the largest open-air prison in the world, the Gaza Strip. However, while Israel is attacking Palestine, Palestine is not attacking Israel. The official representative of Palestine at the international level, the PLO, has no representation of the unruly Sunni-Islamist group which controls the Gaza Strip with its terror – the Hamas.
The Hamas is not recognised as the Palestinian government by any country, though it controls the region de facto. The situation of Palestine here is quite like Afghanistan, where the country is really choking under the grasp of the Taliban while a democratic government functions as well. No one blames Afghanistan for it though, and neither should anyone blame Palestine for Hamas. They are two distinct ideals, incompatible at the basest level. While we blame the Taliban for carrying out the massacres of hundreds, and establishing crude and cruel laws enforced by a Draconian regime, we do not murder their civilians. An exception seems to have been made in the case of Palestine. The only difference between Afghanistan and Palestine is the religion of its oppressor. On one side it’s Muslim, on the other it’s Jew. And that has made all the difference (to the world).
The world’s incapacity to label the events going on in 2021 in Palestine as a war, a genocide, is proof of its failure. In its myriad successes in bringing peace and harmony, the United Nations has failed miserably in handling this genocidal conflict. Etched with the burden of repairing the torn world after World War Two, the UN will never change its stance on the issue unless its permanent members do – who do not have any Muslim representation (but Zionist support exists). Palestine will always fall, defeated by the ultimately superior technology of Israel; Palestine will always rise, incited by the ultimately inhuman treatment of her people. There is only one feasible way (and this is because we tried the other method and it failed) to end this vicious cycle: the State of Isratin.
Isratin is a controversial solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, since it involves the merging of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into a single nation. Advocates of this solution would propose a democratic multi-ethnic government in which Muslims, Christians, Jews and other ethno religious groups have equal rights and responsibilities. A state in which Arabs and Jews lose their previous identities in exchange for a unified Isratinian identity. Critics state that this would only lead to an apartheid state in which either Jews or Arabs will have limited rights. As it so happens, this is the case anyway. In most of the Israel-Palestine region, no group has equal rights in relation to the other. While in Israel this discrimination (against Arabs) is systemic, in Palestine it (against Jews) is the ground reality. In order to change the fortunes of its citizens and solve one of the world’s most taxing conflicts to peace and harmony, the UN must intervene on the behalf of Isratin and recognise its jurisdiction as the successor de jure of Israel and Palestine (After, of course, a proper model and government is developed).
The Jews are not an ethnicity and the Arabs are not all Islamic. It’s time that Israel and Palestine looked past their minimal differences and rejoiced in their similarities. It is time that the Zionist identity was dissolved, as was the Palestinian one, for the culminated Isratin. The only other option is death, destruction and defeat. After all, war does not determine who is right, only who is left.
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