I enjoy documentaries. But historical documentaries are sometimes sharper than I’d like, by which I mean they reiterate the many pieces—the chain of bad decisions—that have lead to the human world as it exists today.
With the current violence in the Levant (but is there any time when there isn’t violence there?!) I am particularly aware of how we got from A to B.
Jews were expelled from Palestine by Empires, not in a single swift action but gradually as the territory was conquered and colonized, rinse and repeat, leading up to an ignominious obliteration of the center of Jewish religion, the Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE. Doing so forced Judaism to evolve into a different form as the elaborate temple worship was no longer possible. And still isn’t.
Over time, the Roman Empire split into two, and the Byzantine half controlled Palestine which took on a gradually Christian majority until Muslims conquered the Levant in 638 CE. After that, Arabs began migrating to the area.
But who are the Jews? Who are the Palestinians? What about the Samaritans? To largely oversimplify the question, they are all descendants of the Canaanite people who lived there a long time ago. Much of the region’s population share common genetic makeup (with the possible exception of those Jewish communities whose genetic origin lie elsewhere).
All of this historical rambling is to make the case that Jews, Samaritans, Druze, Palestinians et al are all the indigenous people of the area. While modern Israel was forged with the blunt tools of Anglo-American imperialism, in part to encourage Jewish migration out of the Eurosphere, it’s irrational in my opinion to claim that only Jews (which inevitably excludes the other extant Israelites, the Samaritans) or only the Palestinians have a claim to the land.
I argue that they all have a right to be there, and to live without fear, violence, oppression, and war. There is literally no reason for it to be otherwise. There is no logical argument for one group over the other. When we prioritize the values of human rights above ethnicity, culture, race, religion, etc. we naturally create a place for all people to thrive. There has never been a reason for Israel to antagonize the Palestinians, who only slipped out from Ottoman rule in 1917. Why not construct a modern democracy for everyone in the former Mandate territory? Why do humans have to create stupid barriers?
God of grace, hear our prayer.
We pray for our suffering world. For enmity and strife between nations. For inequality and poverty that is affecting people of various backgrounds. We remember the victims of violence, discrimination and persecution — like the Yezidies, Muslims, Jews and Christians and LGBTQ people — in all forms in our world today. May the nations embrace that which we all aspire to: ‘nations shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruninghooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war or the strong dominate the weak any more’… but rather be compassionate and supportive to one another making peace as their ultimate goal.
From Remembering Genocide , modified.
#RootAndSource
