When I read Akhila’s e-mail about the possible opportunity to do a guest post about Being the Change, the first thing that came to mind was Palestine. I am a political blogger and a political individual, I will spare you all a fiery one-sided rant about who should be in the dock at The Hague and instead focus on why I think people need to wake up to this conflict.
I am constantly surprised when people are confronted with the question of Israel and Palestine, their responses to it and the utter changes that come across people’s faces when the conflict is given mention. People that are normally well-educated, socially and politically motivated and not in the least bit apathetic suddenly descend into a blathering mess of umms, errs and ‘why can’t they all just get along’-type cliches. The misconceptions about this conflict are staggering. People somehow imagine something like the flawed cartoon above, two crazed peoples butting heads until oblivion. The idea that this conflict exists because Jews and Muslims have always hated each other, or because the land has been hotly contested for thousands of years or because there must be something in the water make about as much sense as ‘they hate our freedom’ being touted as the reason for 9/11. Ie. not much at all.
In reality, the conflict’s roots can be traced to no earlier than the late 19th century, when the Zionist movement began and immigration of European Jews to what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine gathered pace, and the modern phase began when the State of Israel was declared in 1948. The conflict has always been one over land, over national self-determination and over political power. The religious element was only injected later to whip up support on both sides. Whatever Qur’anic verses you may have heard lambasting Jews specifically, for example, are shady at best, and have only been seriously invoked recently. And while anti-semitism has long been a scourge globally, specifically anti-semitic political movements, such as al-Qaeda, and political figures, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are recent additions that have come about in reaction to the political situation.
The “Palestinians” and their supposed Arab friends, as far as the conflict goes, are far from a monolithic entity. Within Palestine itself, there are two widely divergent and conflicting dominant political movements, of the Western/Israeli-supported Fatah (currently rather unpopular locally) that rules the West Bank and represents the Palestinian Authority, and the Western/Israeli-shunned Hamas that governs Gaza.
If I was to try to even barely sum up in dot points the main events of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the wider Arab-Israeli conflict which is inextricably linked, I would fill up pages and pages of Akhila’s precious web real estate and possibly bore many of you (it’s not something you could ever hope to understand in one sitting). We’re talking about a conflict that is roughly 150 years old, and yet entire university subjects are devoted to it as part of undergraduate degrees.
I am unashamedly pro-Palestinian in my personal stance. I do not see this is a two-sided issue. I see that there is a dominant military power and a group of state-less people with no nation and no clear avenue to self-determination. Israel keeps the West Bank under occupation, bisecting its land with checkpoints and ever-growing settlements, and making daily life and economy very difficult for the locals indeed. And while Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 (a unilateral decision made for political considerations, not out of the goodness of their hearts, I assure you), it has turned the strip into an open-air prison, imposing a crippling land & sea blockade that keeps Gazans in abject poverty, lacking stable power, food and medication. I condemn Hamas’ constant rocket fire into Israel as deplorable, targeting civilians always is, but the population of Gaza did not deserve to lose 1400 of its number (mostly civilian) to a 3 week blitz known as Operation Cast Lead either. My opinion happens to be shared by several more prominent intellectuals than myself, and on Gaza specifically, has been confirmed by a recent UN fact-finding commission into the Gaza offensive which uncovered war crimes committed by both sides. Our hope is that one day the international community will see this for what it is: an apartheid comparable in scope to that of South Africa, not a namby-pamby two-sided game of ‘oh why don’t they just get along’
Well I had to rant a little… but what I truly encourage you to do is to educate yourselves on this conflict, starting form wikipedia, media, bloggers, intellectuals, wherever you’re comfy, and encompassing as many varied opinions as possible. If you need suggestions, feel free to hit me up via the avenues listed below in my bio.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the world has plenty of other problems. There’s Darfur, there’s Myanmar, there’s North Korea, there’s the Congo, there’s a whole lot of other places and people with issues incredibly deep and suffering that cannot be quantified or truly compared. But if you want to understand the widely disparate geographical area roughly termed the Middle East (the borders of which have never been agreed upon), from Morocco to Pakistan and further, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict holds the key.
Not only is this conflict one of the great moral questions of our time but without understanding this conflict, you will never understand the region, or its politics. And thus fail to understand a region that, apart from being an emerging market economically, polarises politicans, foreign policy wonks, pundits and intellectuals the world over. We saw the importance of the Middle East on 9/11 as we were glued in horror to our television screens, we saw it during the oil shocks and in global trade patterns, costly wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, and that’s just the last 20 years. The importance of this region in global politics today cannot be denied, and neither can the issue at its core: that of Israel and Palestine.
The Changemaker
Alex Lobov is a final year undergraduate student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, majoring in Spanish, Japanese and Accounting. Interested in literature, coffee, fashion, good food and beautiful things. Bored of the politics of his native Australia, he enjoys the never-a-dull-moment nature of Middle Eastern politics. After travelling throughout the region he still harks back to the cliched-but-fantastic shawarma & shisha of the Persian Gulf and beyond. Connect with him over at his blog dedicated to Middle Eastern Politics, The Zeitgeist Politics, his personal blog or his twitter @alexlobov.
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