The photos in this essay are of Palestinians and Jews from various sources.
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This is part one of a series. Part two can be read here.
This story is not 75 years old.
It does not surprise me that many present-day activists skip over millennia worth of information to start the story within a more graspable timeline, especially when the very mechanisms for digesting complexity and engaging in critical thinking have been compromised by the mind-numbing reductivism of social media.
Further, we have a liberal/left that insists upon hierarchies of oppression to justify ideological righteousness, that has abdicated actual responsibility to The People to perch upon platforms of moral lecturing without any real integrity, that is a captive audience to influencer culture thirsting to be seen as the “wokest” in the room and the quickest to pin every crisis down to a two minute TikTok video. We have a liberal/left seduced into regurgitating slogans and phrases like “free _______” and “defend _______” and “_______ lives matter” – not that those ideas aren’t valid but that they are fraught with easy manipulation, unintentionally yet consequentially creating a rotating roster of oppression olympics to determine who is worthy of filling in those blanks while we fighti to defend our worthiness to one another.
Fascism festers when both the left and the right demand we rank and file ourselves into hierarchies of who is the more righteous one. Humanity is erased to fit into neat categories.
Diversity only becomes more rich as you get more intimate and allow it to be expansive, to take up space.
Diversity is interesting and generative when you have Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisting, but diversity is fascinating when you learn the personal stories of each Muslim, Jew, and Christian in those shared lands - what languages do they speak? What were their ancestral migratory patterns (forced or chosen)? What do they do with their time? What does their food taste like? What was their mother like? Their grandfather? Who do they turn to in times of despair? How do they process grief? This is the world I want to live in. A world where there is space enough for all of us to be heard, seen, and held without anyone having to fight for it.
This substack is a fierce commitment to complexity and nuance, and I will do my best to meet you there. I promise to stay open to any places you see me closing (please don’t hesitate to share your feedback).
To that end, we cannot understand the present-day situation if we only view it through modern concepts and ideas that didn’t even exist at the time when all of this began. The fact that we have to transport ourselves so far back in history to understand the immensity of this moment is not a “barrier to entry” for being a compassionate person who rejects violence, but it is an essential buffer against misinformation that waters the roots of violence. Violence is facilitated through ignorance. History and context matter.
So let’s do just that
This story is not 75 years old.
It stretches back to the beginning of the beginning, when the very nascent ideas of ‘civilization’ were forming. Back to one of the oldest known populations in human history.
The earliest-known and documented population in the region and one of the oldest populations in the world were the "Canaanites" - an ethnic catch-all term that includes settled and nomadic-pastoral indigenous populations throughout the regions of the southern Levant or Canaan, beginning around 4500 BCE during the Stone Age. Sub-groups included the Ammonites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Israelites. Only one sub-group remains today – Israelites who were the earliest ancestors of the ethnopopulation of Jewish peoples – and one language – Hebrew.
Civilizations are a product of social organizing around values, ideas, relationships, common bonds. Canaanites practiced Earth-based wisdom traditions out of necessity – what was poisonous? What healed wounds? What numbed pain? What ensured a robust harvest? How is ______ best stored to last? What rules govern us, what principles guide us?
Numerous empires and kingdoms rose and fell, but Canaanites as a people persisted until the Assyrians conquered the entire region. By that time, various Jewish Kingdoms had emerged - Saul > David > Israel > Judah. Under Assyrian rule the Kingdom of Judah flourished with Jerusalem at its cultural and religious center. But when the Neo-Assyrian empire fell and Egypt and the Neo-Babylonian Empire fought for control over the region in the vacuum, Judaism was nearly decimated.
In 587 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem, bringing an end to the Judean kingdom, and exiled most of the surviving Jews to Babylon. Jews were later allowed to return under Persian governance, but it took 400 more years for Jews to fully regain independence from them in the Maccabean War. Then the Romans swept in and took over for a VERY LONG TIME. It was during Roman rule that the first recorded use of the word “Palaistinê” was documented by Herodotus, the Greek historian, in 480 BCE. Palestine was used to denote a geography under Roman rule within which Jews lived in a province called Judea, which still included Jerusalem despite all the atrocities that city faced over millennia at this point. Jews lived under Roman rule as second-class citizens, and this is something worth noting. From this point forward, Jews lived as second-class citizens EVERYWHERE until the late 1940’s.
Ok, back to the 1st and 2nd centuries. A series of unsuccessful large-scale Jewish rebellions erupted against Rome, known as the Jewish-Roman Wars. The First Jewish-Roman War (66-73) resulted in the destruction of Jerusalem again and the fall of the Second Temple. Judea's countryside was devastated, and Jews were either killed, displaced or sold into slavery. Following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman colony under the name of Aelia Capitolina, and the province of Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina to erase the Jewish-ethnic connection of that region. This is after thousands and thousands of years of Israelite/Hebrew/Judean life.
In the 4th century, the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the associated upswing in Christian pilgrimage to the "Holy Land" further persecuted Jews. In the course of late antiquity, with imperial support, Christianity succeeded in asserting itself against Judaism in almost the entire region. By the fifth century, Christianity had gained further ground among the population and Christians formed a majority in Palestine and Jerusalem.
Then the next massive transformation occurred in the region. The Muslim Empire began to move up through then “Arabia” and conquered the Levant in the 7th Century. It was then that the region was Arabized and Islamized through conversions of and growing Muslim settlements. Beginning in the Middle Ages, Islam became the region’s main religious group through conversion and conquest.
Jews were Romanized into Palestinians, then both Jews and Palestinians were Christianized (not always successfully), then Arabized. Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted. Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic coexisted. And all of this is a product of waves of colonization.
Here we have this tangle of ethnicity and religion. Palestinians were now a mix of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. Jews were now Arabs (Mizrahim). Jews under Islamic rule were given the status of dhimmi – rights and protections as "people of the book" – but this still required Jews to exist in Muslim nation-states at the mercy of those governments. Fortunately, Jews predominantly found refuge in this reality throughout the Middle East. Christianity has been far more dangerous for Jews than Islam ever has.
The throughline is that Jews and Palestinians both have rightful, ancestral claims to this land. We can witness this history beautifully summarized here:
“Throughout history a great diversity of peoples has moved into the region and made Palestine their homeland: Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines from Crete, Anatolian and Lydian Greeks, Hebrews, Amorites, Edomites, Nabataeans, Arameans, Romans, Arabs, and Western European Crusaders, to name a few. Each of them appropriated different regions that overlapped in time and competed for sovereignty and land. Others, such as Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Babylonians, and the Mongol raids of the late 1200s, were historical 'events' whose successive occupations were as ravaging as the effects of major earthquakes ... Like shooting stars, the various cultures shine for a brief moment before they fade out of official historical and cultural records of Palestine. The people, however, survive. In their customs and manners, fossils of these ancient civilizations survived until modernity—albeit modernity camouflaged under the veneer of Islam and Arabic culture.”
Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist
What has happened in modernity in this region is worthy of a lifetime of singular devotion. I don’t feel qualified nor energized to unpack it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring our humanity to it ~as~ we grow our understanding of it. Indeed, it is essential that we do.
What I can say is that Palestinians and Jews have both faced the immense pressures of nationalism within the grand unfolding of the human story, as a form of protecting their peoples within the overwhelming, culture-annihilating contexts of “colonialism”. Neither Jews nor Palestinians are settler-colonialists technically. One can only think this if they apply a modern framework onto an ancient history. Yet both have engaged in that behavior against one another at various times. Like Indigenous populations world-over, the concept of “nation-states” was imprinted, was imported, was implanted, largely by European ideologies. Both Jews and Palestinians in their own ways have been ‘colonized’ by these ideologies, internalizing them and enacting violence through them. Zionism is not simply an expression of nationalism. Many pre-Mandatory Palestine Zionists organized to assert the fact that Palestininans and Jews are brothers, and that Arabs and Jews could unite in class struggle.
Both Palestinians and Jews are suffering under localized and globalized forms of colonialism. Netanyahu and the Likud party are engaging in one of the most devastating, disgusting forms of hypocritically Jewish-suicidal endeavors - not only with the torturous decimation of Gaza but through the expanding settlements in the West Bank and the neglect of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of an egomaniacal nightmare. Palestinian nationalism under Hamas, Fatah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have forced Palestinians into tremendous precarity, with skyrocketing rates of depression, untenable rates of unemployment, and horrifying degrees of food insecurity while their leaders live in mansions in Qatar and pocket aid into personal bank accounts at the expense of their people.
“I cannot come to Jewish Israelis and tell them to liberate me as a Palestinian. I’m a partner. I’m a part of their society. And I also understand and acknowledge that the vast majority of us in Israel have a shared interest in advancing many of our issues of social and economic injustices within Israeli society against our government. October 7th has highlighted that need. Many of the Palestinian liberation movements have failed to acknowledge the humanity of Jewish Israelis. That is not only morally lacking but it’s also strategically catastrophic for the Palestinian cause. If you are unable to hold the humanity of people, regardless of how just your cause is, then you are compromising your cause.”
Sally Abed, a Palestinian-Israeli who is an activist with the group Standing Together
There are countless compounding realities. Just one on my mind right now is the sinister proliferation of Christian Zionism that seeks to gather the world’s Jews in Israel to trigger the Rapture and finish the project of Judaism once and for all. Once all Jews are murdered, Christ can come again.
Palestinians and Jews each represent 0.2% of the global population.
I grieve for us from a place of such pain there are no words to describe it. Thousands upon thousands of years of terror have reduced us both to such a miniscule fraction of humanity. I feel it in my cells.
In surveys and interviews conducted in Gaza between September 28 and October 8, 2023, on the eve of and just after Hamas’s October 7th attack, 73% of Gazans supported a peaceful resolution between Israel/Palestine1. 73% of Jewish Israelis also favored a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict2.
73% and 73%.
In March 2013, ten years prior, surveys found support for peace processes at 70% among Jewish Israelis and 62% among Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.3 Both populations have only grown in their commitment to peaceful coexistence. This sentiment is swelling amidst the rise of authoritarianism under Netanyahu’s far-right extremist regimes and as the Hamas-led government is increasingly untrusted, unsupported, and recognized as the source of dysfunction and suffering in Gaza. (For example, as evidenced by the survey cited above, Gazans were far more likely to blame Hamas’s leadership than Israel’s blockade for exacerbating their suffering and failing to address their vital concerns, including attributing the lack of food in Gaza to internal problems like corruption, government mismanagement, and inflation rather than to external sanctions from Israel and Egypt.
This kind of peace does not mean complicity with the status quo by normalizing the current dynamic nor conceding to a life of constant distress as war-mongering ego-maniacal, terrorist/fascist machines drone on. This kind of peace is the most challenging work there is. This kind of peace makes empire shudder with the recognition that consciousness is shifting and more people than ever are demanding a reality free from endless, excruciating, exhausting indoctrinated hatred.
More people than ever are recognizing that holding hatred overtly or by refusing to recognize internalized bias dehumanizes all of us by forcing us to desecrate ourselves to pick sides, fragment, fracture, split, instead of keeping our gaze on dismantling the forces that demand this and relentlessly rehumanizing one another, simultaneously toward the promise of peaceful coexistence on shared ancestral lands. I truly believe we have reached a level of consciousness on this planet that enough of us are *done* with this level of violence, now we need our praxis and our action to back it up and weneed to leave ideological righteousness, identity politics, and hierarchies of oppression on this threshold crossing into a new paradigm.
When we say #LandBack, may we mean for both Jews and Palestinians. When we say #FreePalestine may we also say #FreeIsrael as fascist regimes rage and forces of greed exploit the people like pawns for their biddings, both Hamas and Netanyahu/Likud authoritarianism. When we say PEACE, may we mean for both Palestinians and Jews and all beings everywhere.
May we end the occupations, may we dismantle fascism and all forms of terrorism, may we the people have the right to self-determination, sovereignty, and safety bound together in unshakeable solidarity, until war becomes the memory.
This is part one of a series. Part two can be read here.
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This substack will always remain free, but your subscriptions and financial support make that even more possible to pour into this devotion. You can pay what you can to honor any benefit you gain from this place through venmo.
www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/what-palestinians-really-think-hamas
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/26/israelis-have-grown-more-skeptical-of-a-two-state-solution/
news.gallup.com/poll/161456/israelis-palestinians-pro-peace-process-not-hopeful.aspx
Rachel...once again so grateful for you sharing your perspectives, getting to the heart of a matter...this post provides such valuable historical/current contexts which allow us to understand complexity in the fog of war and grievance...
May all, who believe that fundamental transformation of the present world order is necessary, embrace your call to break out of our fallback positions and listen to those voices which are drowned out by forces in power...
in Peace and with Love!
Farm dad
Thank you. Very clear and your passion is palpable. You do not mention the British with the Balfour “Agreement”. Peace now is the message.