Palestine

We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians

Nelson Mandela

The Fight for Freedom

Imagine someone came into your home, assaulted you and forcefully dragged you out so they could live there, and all that was left to you was to throw a stone at the closing door in desperation. Palestine has no army, no way of protecting themselves and keeping their homes. They are up against a powerful military which has killed civilians and committed war crimes for decades, creating nothing less than an apartheid state, and are powerless to resist.

They can’t even retaliate – Israel has the most advanced missile defence system in the world, with a success rate higher than 90%. The stone may get through the gap but it is unlikely to hit anything. Rockets alone have killed over 4000 Palestinians and 32 Israelis since 2000.  From 2008 to 2020, 5590 Palestinians and 251 Israelis were killed (United Nations) and these figures don’t even include the deaths from this year, the most violent in a decade. Who are the real terrorists?

Israel, who have been making further inroads into Palestine since 1947, long before Hamas were founded in 1987, then claim they are bombing apartment buildings housing Palestinian families in ‘self-defence’. All they are defending is their ‘right’ to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, which Zionism, the belief that ‘Israel’ is God-given, encourages. They call Hamas ‘terrorists’ in order to justify levelling the buildings and taking the land for themselves, forcefully removing the Palestinians because the story of reaching the ‘promised land’ can only be coherent if they encounter no resistance.

The world is finally beginning to see through this lie and in response, yesterday they went a step further and destroyed a building accommodating media and news agencies, in order to stop their coverage of what is happening on the ground and escalate their offensive. They did this on the pretext that Hamas were operating there, but have given no evidence to prove this and never will, because there is none. Across the world they are being shown as the oppressors now and their narrative is no longer theirs to shape. What better sign of guilt than the need to silence the truth?

Fragmentation of humanity

We divide ourselves race by race, nation by nation, religion by religion, sect by sect, through even further derivatives until the fact of our shared humanity becomes irrelevant. It becomes ‘us’ vs ‘them’, as if we were somehow constituted a different way. We fail to see that our belonging to a particular group is superfical in a way that our being human is not. Yet we identify with these groups, feeling affinity with those we share them with, and so long as this continues there will be no unity. Until we can see all of humanity as our group, as like us, there will be no peace because we ruled out that possibility the moment we began to see in colour, nationality and religion, to justify our difference and raise a mental barrier between us and the rest of the world.

The fragmentation of humanity arises because of the difference between the ideas each group holds and the extent of this chasm even leads to war when it is pronounced enough. For peace to be possible we have to give up the ideas we divide ourselves by and come to regard other people as equal to us by virtue of being human. If something so simple and in line with reason seems beyond us, it will be the world itself that we burn down in flames.