What is modern Israel has been for millennia a land of many races and tribes coexisting. From the days of Moses we hear, the different tribes the caananites, Moabites, Pelitines, coexisting there. The prolonged tribal wars had let the Israelites move out to all over Europe and Russia and were a small minority in the very place where now Israel stands. They suffered the pain of ‘homelessness’.
1917 Belfour declaration promised them a ‘national home’ inconclusively. The Britain’s withdrawal in 1948, from what was then known as ‘Palestine’ gave rise to Arab-Jewish violence and the birth of modern Israel.
The irony of time, the natives of the land were driven to periphery, into an ever shrinking land. If the trend is any indicator, soon ‘Palestine’ will become a history. It should not happen, not to the native Palestine, and to any people on Earth. If the modern Jewish community remembers what it means to be ‘homeless’ which, I am sure, they haven’t forgotten, they should not drive any other to similar despair.
Violence in the troubled territory is no excuse for Israeli aggression. Driven to the wall Palestinians, for that matter anyone, would tend to fight back, not because they love blood, but because they love the life of their children, women and every one alive among them.
Israel has to rise to the occasion to reach a permanent solution. It is not an impossibility. There is hope. The gun wielding PLO came for peace, one does not forget the Oslo Accords, and ready to form civil government. Promises are to be kept, matured governments do it. When they fail, as the Israel did unilaterally many times, it will give rise to violent factions, the birth of the likes of Hamas, Fatah, and movements like intifada (Palestine uprising).
The last century has given us much hope on coexistence. We tasted freedom, independence, democracy, and also experienced the fruitfulness of nonviolent solutions. Colonialism and imperialism could be brought to end without raising guns. Racial discrimination, gender disparities are overcome with mutual love and care. The postmodern globalization is sociologically a promise of diversity cohabiting with mutual regard.
The sufferings of Palestine, is the suffering of humanity; because what is suppressed is not just a group of people, but the very ‘humanness’ that sustain the whole humanity. Injustice anywhere is a denial of justice everywhere, as Martin Luther King said, is not a rhetoric. It is a caution. Let us rise to the occasion, learn from the history and recognize for one another the rights of existence.
