This one popped up in my feeds a little bit ago and wondered whether I should post it. I tried to verify its content (and listed links to the person quoted below). The quote spoke volumes to me about a lot of the binary thinking regarding Israel and the Palestinians. Centuries of ethnic hatred and bloodshed between peoples recorded in our earliest written stories, still deafen and cripple children and families whose only crimes are that they were born into this region and want to live. This past week I’ve been participating in a class studying the Old Testament stories about the Land of Israel, and here we are three thousand years later and one group is still trying to eliminate the other group. They’re still trying to finish Joshua’s Conquest of Canaan even though the original Canaanites are long gone. 

I get that having been thrown out of the land a little less than two-thousand years ago (by the Romans!) and then being blamed for everything wrong with the world a hundred years ago and then being hunted down and thrown into Concentration Camps to be exterminated 80 years ago is going to do something to you, to make you do anything to try to guarantee your and your people’s future existence. But how does leveling the cities in historic Gaza, cities that go back three-thousand years, how does that actually make things more secure or better? How does visiting the bloodshed and ethnic hatred on the Palestinians that was visited on you over the centuries fix anything? I understand the sentiment of Morag’s grandmother, having barely survived the Holocaust, she would not live in a house stolen from its previous owners and do to them what was done to her and her family in Europe. Why was that part of the story ignored? 

I know that that my own country’s history with the indigenous population was a horrendous injustice, but this business of kicking people off of lands that their families have been living on for over a hundred years, how does that make sense? There’s no justifying the October 7th attacks, but you have to wonder why Hamas thought that an armed conflict would go well for them? All of it is so wrong and tragic and pointless. I get why some of my friends hope that some random comet will do us all in so that some other species might have a chance to do a better job of living in harmony with the planet and with each other. I mean, it’s been over three thousand years on a very small patch of land and we’re still finding new ways to kill each other and fuck it all up. Not great. 

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Tags: Biblical Israel, Hadar Morag, Israel Palestinian Conflict, Not the Golden Rule, October 7th

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