The holy land cannot be a sacred space exclusive to a single faith. It belongs to all Abrahamic faiths — Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
The holy land cannot be a sacred space exclusive to a single faith. It belongs to all Abrahamic faiths — Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
The Palestinian Nuclear Option
Contrary to the common perception, US President, Donald Trump’s controversial decision to transfer the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem could have an unintended consequence that could profoundly alter the current one-sided dynamic. So far, this decision has revealed to the world that U.S. is not an honest broker and that the so-called Israel-Palestine peace process is the mother of all scams. However, whether or not this would undermine the U.S. national interest in the Middle East and beyond is a debate for another day.
Distorted narratives energize toxic polemics from all sides. Historical or faith-based contexts are deliberately manipulated to keep any joint claim fluid or frustrated. The unholy competition for the holy land is in full force.
And though Palestinians have been compromised, if not betrayed, by their conventional supporters, their case has never been stronger and their cause never been more legitimate. Ironic as it may sound, a solution has never been closer ever since the nuclear option of nonviolence was set in motion.
Second Coming Bullet Train
Right-wing evangelicals are inspired by misinterpretation of Biblical verses (Genesis 12:1, 2, 3) in which God promised Abraham to make him a nation and bless him. They disregard the fact that orthodox teachings of all Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are in agreement on that, and they omit that God granted Abraham such privilege because of his faithful devotion to the will of God.
‘God’s foreign policy’ is pretty clear, they argue. ‘If you bless Israel, you will be blessed. If you curse Israel, you will be cursed’. Therefore, calling Israel an Apartheid state or Zionism an oppressive racist system is simply blasphemous. To these evangelicals, the number 70 is the prophecy of Prophet Daniel in the Bible, therefore, declaring Jerusalem the capital city of Israel is not mere symbolism but a necessary action “To bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy….” That, according to Pastor Jeffries, Jews will finally come back to their senses and embrace Jesus as their messiah.
Zionism Hara-kiri
This is a ‘let’s not talk falsely’ moment in history, for the hour is getting late. Zionism is a genocidal enterprise conceived to rid the indigenous Palestinian people out of their homeland to establish an exclusively Jewish state. And neither its leadership nor its supporters attempt to hide that objective.
Regardless of the prevailing narrative in the U.S that Israel is the only secular democracy that upholds Western values in the Middle East, in actuality, Israel is neither secularist nor democratic.
Western secularism as expressed in the American and the French revolutions was intended to separate powers of the church and the state. They wanted to prevent the church from extending its authority to undermine the state power and to prevent the clergy from imposing their doctrines on others.
Today, politics in Israel is overwhelmingly dominated by religious zealots with an apocalyptic worldview. The two faces of that body politic are expressed in the land piggishness of the settlers that systematically uproots the indigenous Palestinian population with mob violence, targeted destruction of their agricultural livelihoods and their homes, and also by the political hubris of the state that has a surrogate veto power at the UN Security Council which allows her to break more international laws and commit more human rights violations than all the countries of the world combined. Its 70-year record that created human catastrophe known as Nakba speaks for itself.
Carrying state condoned war crimes, Israeli snipers have been executing what is according to Amnesty International a shoot-to-kill-or-maim policy. There are a number of videos showing these snipers celebrating their assassinations that are circulating on social media. More than 100 Palestinian civilians, including journalists and babies, have been killed since March 30 and more than 10,000 injured, many by live ammunition.
Behind the jubilant façade, some of the Zionist intelligentsia strategists are nervous about the global consequence of the current brutality and how it may be perceived in the court of social media.
Israeli Knesset and the Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, are pushing a repressive undemocratic bill that criminalizes the documentation of human rights violations against Palestinian citizens by Israeli soldiers. Shooting a video or taking a picture of a soldier committing war crimes could get a journalist a minimum of a 5-year prison term. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate and other civil society organizations have issued a statement of condemnation.
The Millennial Might
Today, the most serious ‘existential threat’ facing Israel is not some Arab coalition armies that might invade it and ‘throw the Jews into the sea’; it is not Iran or Turkey; it is the unarmed Palestinian men, women, and children of all ages who put their lives on the line protesting against the ruthless oppression of Zionism in a broad daylight. Their resilient spirit is more of a threat than any missile.
Now that the boycott of Israel campaign spearheaded by conscientious millennials has found traction, the endgame for the last Apartheid system in the world may be near. How long before these socially conscious and politically enlightened students become America’s policy-makers and opinion-shapers? Ask the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley, about her excruciating embarrassment on stage at the University of Houston.
“Nikki Haley! The blood is on your hands! You continue to sign off on the genocide of a native people!” roared the auditorium as she started her talk. Ambassador Haley was the person who made the case for the US to block the independent UN human rights commission to investigate whether or not Israel committed war crimes at Gaza buffer zone. Since then, on the very day Israeli snipers cold-bloodedly shot dead a 21-year-old Palestinian nurse in uniform, the US has vetoed a resolution calling for the “protection of Palestinian civilians”, making it the only UN Security Council member state to vote ‘No’.
Imagine when these millennials who transcend faith, ethnicities, and nationalities organize a persistent campaign of civil disobedience or sit-ins at Israeli embassies around the world that trigger mass arrests.
Diminishing Support
Israel is not sustainable mainly because it is a case founded on a moral argument emanating from Biblical history and Nazi victimhood that is protected by repressive realism and an Apartheid model.
A growing number of the American political elite are coming to terms with the fact that U.S. geopolitical interest and that of Israel are not one of the same. And with one of the highest GDP per capita in the world and the largest, most equipped and most technologically advanced armies in the world, Israel neither needs overprotection nor financial welfare from the U.S.
Likewise, a growing number of celebrities—including Jewish ones—are protesting Israel’s genocidal policy toward Palestinians with boycotts or conscientious disinvites.
The last Apartheid regime in the world must either accept one-state-solution with equal citizenship rights or succumb to a looming endgame.
The most widely used counterargument against the one-state-solution is one of sociopolitical eugenics that goes like this: ‘considering the birthrate of the Palestinians, it is a sure way to wipe out our Jewish identity.’ In order to maintain the superior race, the reproduction of the undesired or the inferior race must be controlled.
It is time to break the ethnocentric and faith-based shackles. The holy land cannot be a sacred space exclusive to a single faith. It belongs to all Abrahamic faiths — Jews, Christians, and Muslims. And nowhere is that fact more established than in the Qur’an where the connection of David, Jesus, and Muhammad to the holy land is prominently enshrined.
