I am buried in books.
Trying to understand the whole Israeli/Palestinian fiasco may be a fools errand but I feel the need to try. Ghandi once stated the obvious when he said, “anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding” and he is spot on. Trying to unravel the tangled fishing line that is the Middle East is both time consuming and frustrating.
Contributing factors are multiple and nuanced but I came across a rough explanation in the book Once Upon a Country by Sari Nusseibeh that clears things up a bit . In a stay that is almost a parable, Sari says This: ” I quickly thought up another story to illustrate what historically in fact happened. I imagined a frightened Jews refugee fleeing Europe and parachuting into the Ramle area in search of safety. Gun in hand , as he floats down to earth he suddenly spots my grandfather in Arab headdress standing in the middle of a field gripping a shovel, looking terrified himself. My grandfather , shocked by the sudden appearance of a gun-toting , flying man heading down straight toward him , prepares to fend the man off with his shovel. Running scared from the hell of the concentration camps and the gas chambers , the terrorized. The European logically starts firing at the Arab with the raised shovel.”
Much is revealed in this tale. The best view of the Jewish mindset is gained at Yad Vashem. No people have experienced the bloody and horrific events of the Holocaust on the scale that is so intimately known by the Jews. The TRAUMA which is unique in world history for its horrors and magnitude will need some serious processing. The Jews, with a NEVER AGAIN mentality are bellicose, protective and politically aggressive at all times. This is understandable but it can also be wrong, exclusionary and blatantly violent.
The Palestinians view Jewish inroads as usurpation and a violation of their rights. With this in mind, certain manifestations of their outrage include the violence of Hamas, the desire for integration of Fatah and the mindless violence of recent Islamic Extremism.
With these broad strokes on the canvas the more subtle brushwork is laid on in the form of questions about land ownership, the two state solution, water and travel rights and a thousand other nuanced issues that these two people share. Machinations and second agendas are the order of the day on both sides. There seems to be a shared siege mentality.
Another factor is space . There is no American West for expansion by either side and in an area roughly the size of New Hampshire , the issues of religion, land ownership, free movement, and human rights roil in a limited space and they become raging rapids that are nearly impossible to navigate.
I will pull on the tangled lines in the coming days by looking at some factors of the conflict that I saw on the ground in this contentious place. Montequieu called intolerance the, “total eclipse of human reason” and boy was he right. I have jumped into the rapids and hope to capture some understanding.
Olio Folio 
It has always seemed to me that it is not a wise idea to remedy one injustice (the holocaust) with another (occupation of Arab lands). That having been said, there didn’t seem to have been any other solutions that were less problematic. By rights, any new homeland for the Jews should have been carved out from the perpetrators of the injustice, Germany. But I can see how Jews wanted to be as far as possible from the source of their persecution.
So, it is probably inevitable that the strongest instinct of the Jewish people would be to establish a self-governed state in the “Holy Land” and never again rely on anyone else for their protection. But that solution to one problem caused the new issue of Palestinian displacement. As long as the arguments center around what God promised or where our ancestors lived, the conflict will keep passing to the next generation.
LikeLike