The Israeli - Palestinian Conflict: What's Wrong with this Simple Solution?
Could it really be barmy enough to work?
Well its back in the news again isn't it. Not that it's ever absent for very long; Palestinians and Jews having at each other again, both claiming the very same land and each absolutely determined not to tolerate the other. And to me at least, they're both behaving like stubborn but stupid monkeys, just banging their heads against a wall, day in decade out, as they pursue an violent agenda which in that form has no solution, no possible winners, and no life for their children to look forward to except more of the same.
Here I would like to draw your attention to a simple solution, so simple that it's almost barmy. Now many variants of this idea have been put about in recent years, but I can't find anywhere the actual solution described below.
But first things first -- how did this conflict come about? I decided to clue myself up by doing some digging into the histories...
Well apparently it begins not in Palestine/Judea at all, but in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians, pretty much in common with everyone else at that time, were polytheistic, meaning that they worshipped multiple gods. But then, in the 13th century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten (Amunhotep IV) introduced sweeping reforms and abolished all the gods except one (the sun disc which they called the Aten), thereby introducing monotheism, the worship of a single god.
Well this went down like a lead balloon, and when Akhenaten died his successor, young Tutankhamun, hobbled on that club foot and gammy leg of his into the throne room, quickly reversed the situation and returned the country to its old gods.
However, there remained a small group of Egyptians who had become quite taken by the idea of a single god, because it resonated very conformably with the notion of a single tribal chief, and with the psychological security which seemed to accompany that, rather than having many leaders as in some kind of inefficient, insecure feeling, deitic coalition. They chose the god Jehovah*, and then they separated themselves from the general population -- and the mutual animosity between them on the one hand, and the rest of society in general (and pharaoh in particular) on the other, quickly landed them in bondage, which was hardly surprising as the polytheists, comprising almost the entire population, would have done the same to Akhenaten himself if they'd had the bottle.
This group of monotheistic Egyptians became known as the Jews. Be in no doubt, though, that in terms of DNA they were no less Egyptian than anyone else there.
Meanwhile, what is now known as Israel was inhabited by the Canaanites, a group from whom the modern Palestinians descend (they also descend from the Ottomans who, in the first millenium CE, interbred with the indigenous Canaanites to create the Palestinians). The Canaanites had lived in this land for about three thousand years, and by the time in question they had pretty much become the Philistines, from which the words Pillistine, Palestine and Palestinians derive.
Well a couple of generations after Akhenaten, his 18th Dynasty gave way to the 19th, and their pharaoh Seti I made the Jews' lives an even more complete misery, as did his son and successor the famous Ramesses II. But the trouble with keeping hundreds of thousands of slaves is that you have to feed and clothe them, and when a series of blights hit Egypt in Ramesses' reign, which were probably due to the environmental knock - on effects of a powerful volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean at that time, he had to let them go.
Their leader, Moses, who may or may not have been Thutmose, a well connected, living strand of the old 18th Dynasty, quickly saw that he couldn't take them west, east or south (unless they knew how to eat sand), and so he led his people northeast, into and eventually through the Sinai, and thence into what is now Israel which, being yellow and green instead of just yellow, had gained an overblown reputation for being remotely fertile.
Now its one thing to go marching into a territory which can't support many people, and whose indigenous population depends on it for their survival, but quite another to expect the said indigenous people to allow you to do so, to the detriment of their own liberty, autonomy and the food in their childrens' mouths. And so the Jews soon collided with the Philistines/Pillistines/Palestinians, and off and on there's been trouble ever since. Telling the Philistines that their Jewish god told them they could have it, didn't really cut the mustard (don't try that one if you ever go running in a bank with a big trumpety gun waving and a floppy bag to stuff the money in -- when you tell the cashier to hand over the money because your god said you could have it, it might not work), and the Philistines tried all they could to chuck them back out.
But the Jews in the main were better organized and by the 10th century BCE they had managed to link together their city-states under David and Solomon, and establish what was essentially the first unified Jewish State.
This lasted for several centuries until, beginning in 63 BCE the Romans began subjugating them and, just as the Philistines had stubbornly resisted the Jews in their time, so the Jews in their turn showed such tenacious resistance to Roman rule that, after the Jesus -- bar Abbas insurrection of 36 CE, followed by the larger Jewish Revolt of 66 -73 CE under Eleazar ben Simon, and then the Simon bar Kokhba rebellion of 132-136 CE, all hell-bent on expelling the Romans, Caesar finally drew on his vast resources, sent in troops from all over the empire, and chucked almost every Jew out, causing them to be resettled all over occupied Europe.
And with that the Philistines, once again, had their ancient land pretty much to themselves -- except of course that they didn't because they too had the Romans to contend with.
But the sands of time drifted on, Rome passed into history, as did the Ottoman Empire which in those parts followed it, and the Philistines began to quietly enjoy their lands (I will now begin calling them Palestinians), while in Europe the Jews were gradually turning from olive skinned to white, but were still in the main keeping themselves as a separate sect with communities in almost every city. Enter World War 2.
Well we all know what happened next: Adolf Hitler rounded up and murdered six million of them, in an attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race, after which the survivors earned the empathy of the whole world, whereupon the cry went up that they deserved -- and should have -- their own homeland. And so in 1947 the newly formed United Nations voted, without consulting the Palestinians, that the state of Israel should be established upon the land of the old Judea.
And since then, of course, there's been nothing but war, with major ones in 1948, 1967 and 1973, all direct confrontations between Palestinian and Jew as the history of the first arrival of Moses' people began to repeat itself. Again the Jews had shown up, and again the Palestinians weren't having it. Nothing new there then.
Now this has been a bit slow to dawn on each side, but this ongoing problem does not have a military solution. If the Jews chuck the Palestinians out, they'll face the perpetual wrath of the Arab states, while if the Palestinians ever manage to chuck out the Jews, they incur the almighty wrath of the West. And so, for as long as people with guns rather than people in suits have anything to do with this problem, both sides will spend the rest of eternity just banging their heads against each other, without even the modicum of intelligence and foresight which would enable them to see their folly, while generations as yet unborn will march off to their pointless deaths in its futile pursuance.
A Simple Solution?
So what's wrong with this: Suppose the West Bank, Israel and Gaza were all one, homogenous nation, no borders. And we have two nations of people, the Israelis who carry Israeli ID cards and have their own laws, and the Palestinians who carry Palestinian ID cards and have their own laws. The Israelis ignore Palestinian law, while the Palestinians ignore Israeli law.
Now -- sit these two societies on exactly the same land. From this point onwards, all that Israelis and Palestinians need to learn how to do, is simply walk past each other in the street. Naturally all the armed forces will have to be disbanded and replaced by UN forces, paid for with the monetary savings on both sides which come from having no militia, established or terrorist, to pay for, but the stabilizing thing here is the clear message to hostile Arab states that if they invade Israel-Palestine now, they attack the whole world. We could even have a mutual agreement between the two nations that if an Israeli and a Palestinian marry, they live tax free as soon as their first child is born. This invests in a future where there will no longer be two peoples, but one.
Now I've searched the internet, and asked many Jewish friends of mine too (I don't know any Palestinians), and although there are many similar ideas floating around, all called a Dual State, they all seem to geographically separate the two peoples, which is bound to cause trouble because both peoples have holy sites and shrines all over the place, not to mention the localities where individuals and their families grew up and may be forced to leave.
This idea, which I've called a Single State Dual Society, doesn't do any of that. Instead, Jews and Palestinians can go where they like, live where they like and do what they want.
Israeli's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shakes hands with
Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasser Arafat.
--- Michael Alan Marshall
Notes:
Conflicting laws.
There will have to be a very basic Mutual Constitution between the 2 states which operates just to
prevent more outrageous laws from being made by either side. Suppose for example
that the Palestinians make a law saying its ok to kill a Jew? There has to
be a higher doctrine which forbids such laws. The good news is that the
propounding of such laws is indefensible by any reasonable person and can
therefore be quickly sorted.
Most differences between the laws of the 2 nations, on the same matter, don't really conflict. All the serious crimes - murder, rape, robbery - are equally unacceptable to both sides. But many less serious offences which may appear to be conflicting, in fact aren't. Take speed limits for example. Suppose the Palestinian limit is 30 mph and the Israeli limit is 40 mph. An Israeli and a Palestinian both drive their cars down the same road at 35 mph. The Palestinian gets a ticket from the UN cop, the Israeli doesn't. Different laws but there's no real conflict.
A slightly more intriguing situation might be the age of consent. Suppose the Israeli age is 16 while the Palestinian age is 18, and an Israeli boy of 17 has sex with a Palestinian girl who is also 17. He's not in trouble but she is, and to this point the situation seems straightforward enough. However there's an interesting question here, of whether he should be prosecuted for having sex with an underage girl; after all he could have charmed her into it. He is not breaking his own Israeli law, but he does violate Palestinian law -- for which he is not answerable. Perhaps the Constitution could cater for this too, by making it a Constitutional Offence to have sex with any person who by any law in this land is underage.
But it can all very definitely be sorted and none of it is rocket science.
* Jehovah was originally married to a goddess called Asherah. But he got jealous and ordered some Jews to bust up all her statues and shrines, so at that point I guess we could call him single again.
Asherah:
God’s Forgotten Wife | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)