There is a world where U.S. President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, U.K. Premier Rishi Sunak, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and others are saying that “Israel is going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities and freeing the hostages” and are supporting the Israeli massacre in Gaza. In another world, meanwhile, other leaders are pointing out the humanitarian rule that “even wars have laws,” saying Israel is not observing this basic human decency and calling for an immediate cease-fire.
In between, we have the “both siding” crowd, like former U.S. President Barack Obama: “Israelis further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies and undermine long-term efforts to achieve peace.”
Yeah, man! But when there will be no Palestinians left in Palestine, whose attitude would be hardened against Israel? Does it matter if you have some remnants of Palestinians wandering around in the deserts of Egypt and in the slums of Lebanon with hard feelings about the United States and some European Union countries?
Leigh Hunt, an English critic, essayist and poet, and the co-founder of The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles, said there are really two worlds: The world we can measure with line and rule, and the world that we feel with our hearts and imagination.
Neil Gaiman, the author of “The Graveyard Book” and many others, expounded the idea in his “The Books of Magic”: “There are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and another world, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide alternatives. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream and power; provide refuge and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus, they are all that matter.”
Israel has been creating a world in the Western imagination: In the state of Israel, there are regular people and there are "terrorist Palestinians"; Israelis would happily live in the land of startups, tech pioneers, agricultural innovations and raising kids in communities called kibbutz if there were no "terrorist Palestinians."
The people I know in the West, in Washington, D.C., for instance, never wanted to hear from those whom Israeli and American media called "terrorists": the real owners of those lands that Israel, step by step, has been invading with its settlers and their towns and farms.
Yes, Israel successfully created two worlds, the real world that millions of Palestinians are born into, a world of occupation in which your neighbor has armed guards pointing a machine gun at you and your kids; in one wrong move, for instance, taking two or three steps toward their gates after the sunset could have resulted in their death. Nobody is going to be held accountable to the authorities, for the authority is the murderer. And there is another world inside the Western heads. Philosophers and author of “The Books of Magic” say, “Fortunately for the most part there is a very close correlation between reality and our perception. But not in Palestine. Western perception of Israel does not correspond with the reality that Palestinians live day in and day out in the “occupied territories.”
Even the terms have lost their meanings. In a “normal” country there cannot be “occupied” territories; there were settlers in the Wild West when the white men were occupying the Native American territories after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the countries that have existed and had been occupied millennia ago! But not in a modern country. The entire Palestine had been settled ages ago. The earliest human remains in the region were found in Ubeidiya, some 3 kilometers south of the Sea of Galilee, in the Jordan Rift Valley. The remains are dated from 1.5 million years ago. It was settled in the Early Bronze Age (3700-2500 B.C.) period.
Pharaoh Narmer had sent an Egyptian colony all the way to Levantine coasts. The Canaanite city-states there had created trade and diplomatic relations with Egypt and Syria. After the withdrawal of the Egyptians, Canaan became home to the Philistines; and 3,000 years later, around 1209 B.C., the Israelites settled at the central highlands, a loosely defined highland region stretching from the Judean hills in the south to the Samarian hills in the north. Some 45,000 Israelites lived in poverty relatively isolated from the Canaanite city-states that occupied the plains and the coastal regions. In contrast to the Philistines, the Israelites did not eat pork, preferred plain pottery and circumcized their boys.
For ages and ages, people have lived in peaceful coexistence in those lands until scared, deeply wounded Jews of Europe, under the disguise of creating a homeland for them, had been exiled to Palestine from Europe. They had been exterminated in Germany in death camps (Nazis loved them so much that they named them "Vernichtungslager" ("extermination camp") and "Tötungszentren" ("killing centers")) as part of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” As its last marching order to the world, in part as reparation for what Germans did to them, in part as a civilized way to get rid of Jews from Europe, the British government sent European Jewry to Palestine. It was the third such journey of the people of Moses to those lands.
Fast forward to your imagery video player in your mind: Israelites were coming this time as guests of the Arab people who had been residing there. The British and Americans, as the new rulers of the so-called free world replacing the British, devised a partition plan of Palestine between the newcomers and Arabs. But the newcomers soon believed they were the real owners of those lands. Besides, “The G-d Yahweh had promised them these lands.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to invoke the Isaiah Prophecy about the promised lands: "With shared forces, with deep faith in the justice of our cause and in the eternity of Israel, we will realize the prophecy of Isaiah.”
The world as portrayed by the U.S. media never allowed the readers to empathize with the old dwellers of those lands. The people ruled by Biden, Macron, Sunak and Scholz, etc., do not know how it feels when someone else tries to settle forcefully in your home. Yes, I agree the only world we ever experience is inside our heads. No one can experience anything other than his own subjective experience. What Palestinians are experiencing is not what those people of Biden, Macron, Sunak and Scholz experience.
I don’t know how we could reconcile these two worlds before the world of Palestine is totally destroyed.
