Rodrigo Gonçalves
Economist and Political Affairs Specialist
We all have a past, and we all have our history. So it is with peoples in general and they have in the memory of history the inheritance of their ancestors.
In the case of the Middle East, this heritage seems very heavy in a strip of land that is central to three of the world’s major religions, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It was on that small strip of land by the Mediterranean that Jesus Christ was born, lived and rose again.
When you are born and live so close to a place with such a heavy burden and which is such a powerful symbol, you quickly realize that it is impossible for it not to affect all the inhabitants of that territory, whether they are Israelis or Palestinians.
But there are undeniable facts and in historical research, accessible to anyone who really wants to be informed, we find that during the two thousand years of the Jewish Diaspora, Israel never had rest and tranquility.
Slaughter after slaughter, they fled as best they could, always persecuted and unloved. But during these two millennia, Israel kept alive not only the hope, but above all the certainty of the return to the Promised Land.
Israel began to return and rebuild Jerusalem in the mid-19th century, but it took the Holocaust of 6 million Jews for Israel to finally recognize their right to rise again in their beloved and never forgotten Promised Land.
On the other side we have the Palestinians and the historical region of Palestine which was conquered by the Hebrews or Israelites (later also known as Jews) around 1200 B.C., after the withdrawal of that people from Egypt, where they had lived for some centuries.
But the successive foreign dominions, initiated with the capture of Jerusalem (587 B.C.) by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, started a progressive process of dispersion of the Jewish population, although the great majority remained in Palestine.
Palestine witnessed in these times the incursion of Emperor Titus who, in order to drive the Jews away for good, then helped Emperor Hadrian, who intensified the flight and forbade the Jews to live in Jerusalem, forcing them to spread throughout the world.
In 638 BC, the region was conquered by the Arabs, in the context of the expansion of Islam, and became part of the Arab world. Later, in the 19th century, Palestine came under the rule of the Ottoman-Turkish Empire, where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived. Most of the territory was Muslim, and the world saw its culture crystallize in the region.
It is in this context that this people grew up, ethnically Arab, mostly Muslim, who inhabited the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where much of the present territory of Israel is located today.
After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 (never accepted by the Arab states of the region), and with Israel’s occupation of much of the territories, many Palestinians eventually dispersed to neighboring territories, such as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
However, and with the Machiavellian opportunism of the fundamentalists, radical and extremist movements such as Hamas (in Palestine) and Hezbollah (in Lebanon) are emerging that confuse themselves with the Palestinian people and whose sole purpose is the rejection of Israel’s right to exist, whatever the cost.
This phenomenon has created even greater divisions between Israelis and Palestinians, leading to a conflict that has been one of the most difficult, complex and intractable for the Middle East and the world.
We have recently witnessed another bloody chapter in this centuries long conflict. The Hamas extremism that has erupted these days is caused by the worst kind of religious fundamentalism that does not serve the cause of the Palestinian people.
The current political power established in Palestine has been taken over by Hamas and it should be clear that it is a movement that will do everything in its power to establish a theocentric state, much in the style of the Islamic State.
Surely the Palestinians (those who are really innocent) do not deserve to be used as human shields and as mere puppets of groups that cowardly hide in tunnels and in which their leaders send them every day to death, but they, these “leaders” live, in a bourgeois way, in other countries (in the Arab world and not only) that pretend not to see what they feed and finance.
In this context, the Israelis have every right to self-defense and to ensure the security of their people in the face of the atrocious terrorist acts we have seen recently.
Of course, international law must be respected, but neither Israel nor the world can accept speeches that want to mitigate and cover up the actions of terrorists.
The conflict in the Middle East is reaching an unprecedented extreme, becoming increasingly polarized and creating fractures in the international community that are very difficult to break.
Extremists have a fertile ground here and this only helps to promote chaos, making moderation, common sense and balance nothing more than adjectives that can only be found in writing and not in the daily reality of the Israeli and Palestinian people.
The path for many seems obvious and one hears more and more that the two states have to coexist, my opinion is different and although I quite like a good utopia like Tommaso Campanella’s “the city of the Sun”, I do not think it is possible in this particular case.
This will not be the easiest time to restart talks to redesign the Middle East.
One thing is certain…the international community, just as it did and has done with Daesh, must unite to fight Hamas and any other terrorist force that joins them in spreading terror. This must be a reality, not a utopia.
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