History Repeats Itself in Palestine

There is nothing new under the sun in the way of tragic human conflict.  What is happening today in Gaza and throughout former Palestine is similar to so many events in the past.   There is little hope for reconciliation and the violence and heartache will likely continue for many years to come.

One sad parallel is the colonization of the USA.  People yearning to escape persecution or economic hardship (and also plenty of opportunists) come to a new land.  There are people already inhabiting the land, but the new people believe it is their right to take at least some of the land because the current occupants are ‘under-utilizing’ it.

 

The new people assuage their consciences (when their consciences are in distress at all) by making agreements that allow the other people to continue to use some of the land.  The former occupants react with anger and unmitigated hatred, attacking the new settlements, and in some cases, committing rape, torture and mutilation.  The new people, whose military might and resources are vastly superior to those of the former occupants, respond with a bloodlust that knows no bounds, vowing to exterminate their enemies, whom they no longer regard as human.  They justify further encroachments on the land and wipe out whole villages indiscriminately.

 

Sound familiar?  The use of the word colonization in referring to the current situation in Gaza and the West Bank has been condemned by Israel and much of the United States, but I don’t see how one can interpret the events in any other way.  The Zionists who established the state of Israel were well aware of the conflict they were creating and expected to eventually claim all of Palestine.  

 

In the wake of the horror of WW2, the tragedy of the Palestinians being forced to give up their land for a persecuted and traumatized Jewish diaspora didn’t seem particularly harsh to Western sensibilities, especially when compared to the long history of rapacious Western colonization.  But it was still unjust and tragic.

 

I don’t see a long-term solution of any kind.  Israel has severely damaged its moral status in the world, even if it still can count on military and diplomatic cover from the USA.  The disproportionate killing of 30,000 Gazans, most of whom are women and children, will no doubt create ten new recruits for every Hamas fighter and leader they have eliminated.  Israel will have less peace rather than more.

 

Hamas accomplished its goal – putting the Palestinian question back into the public eye and probably killing the trend toward Israeli/Arab détente in Saudi Arabia and other gulf states – but in doing so they may have made the fate of the Palestinian people even more precarious than it was before.  And sadly, the October 7^thattacks seem to have unified the Jewish population in refusing to consider future diplomatic overtures and sharing of the land. 

 

The tragic dynamic of human conflict is that violence begets more violence and hatred is long-lived.  Justifications of the Israeli and Palestinian causes and arguments about who is right and who is wrong become moot and there is little hope of avoiding a bitter future of attacks and reprisals.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I am.