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What does peace and goodwill towards Palestine and Israel mean? Each year, at Christmas, the world takes a moment to focus its attention on Palestine, where the birth of Jesus took place, and how the story of Christianity first began. But there exists yet another side to the origin story of hostilities througout the Middle East that began in Palestine with the invasion, in 1948, by Israeli commando ‘terrorist’ groups who set into motion the total takeover of Palestine and wholesale displacement of Palestinian peoples which continues to this day.

What follows could be called an Amicus Curiae brief, presented to the court of world opinion, on behalf of all the human beings of present-day Israel, Palestine and especially the dispossessed Palestinians now to be found scattered in places throughout the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Gaza Strip. Their questionable status speaks to the broader implications of not only their survival but the survival of the rest of the world’s indigenous people and that of the Earth herself.

The ultimate verdict and outcome of this court of world opinion rests upon those who will read this brief who and then serve as the world’s ad hoc presiding judges, jurists and friends-of-the-court who will be prepared to advance similar arguments and take whatever necessary actions on behalf of all those others who cannot.

The seemingly endless crisis that began in 1948 between Israel & Palestine is one of those black holes in life that seems to swallow up everything around it wisdom, truth, ideas, ideals, beliefs, rationality, honourable intentions with no hope of escape; where far better minds than this observer have passionately and forcefully weighed into the fray at great length, and railed with as much brilliant insight, sound logic, deduction and judgment as could be mustered, but, in the end, with seemingly little more impact and effect than any other brave soul who has sought to penetrate the strange mystique of Israeli racism and apartheid.

Like every other hotly-contested black hole debate in the world, waged against the forces of whatever ‘ism’ – Nazism, Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Islamism, Terrorism, Neo-liberalism, Fascism before any positive change can ever occur, they all must invariably run their due course, like a thundering avalanche hurtling out-of-control down the mountainside, until, finally, whatever irrational, enigmatic, chaotic, destructive energies that originally set them off are finally dissipated.

ISRAEL: AN IRRATIONAL ENIGMA OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE

After however much palaver can be made about Israel’s repeated violations of Palestinian human and international rights, and its committal of numerous acts of criminality against them, a single-most burning unanswered question of all still remains. Why, for nearly 70 years, has the world allowed Israel to commit the very worst of atrocities against the Palestinian people, and yet is allowed to get away with it, totally scot-free, when the same atrocities eventually brought to heel other racist, apartheid states like South Africa?

An irrational human enigma surrounds the mystique that is Israel. This mystique one that exists at the core of many biblical prophecies, that encompasses everything, from: the Christian concept of “The Anti-Christ”; Islam’s concept of Masih ad-Dajjal, and its “False Messiah– ISA”; the Jewish theological concept of Armilus, the anti-Messiah, its “Gathering of the Exiled Diaspora’ and ‘Revival of the dead Tsadikim’. To some biblical scholars, the creation of the modern Zionist Jewish state in 1948, and the Six-Day Arab-Israel War in 1967, represents the “Beginning of the End” as prophesized in Matthew (24:4-6).

Ever since the execution of Jesus on the Cross by the Jews of the Old World, Humanity’s deepest, darkest fears and anxieties of death, oblivion and redemption remain at the core of the ancient mythology that surrounds Israel’s earliest beginnings and continued survival. If these fears and anxieties of the human psyche hadn’t ever manifested around the entity known as”Israel”, they no doubt would have had to manifest around some other comparable ‘touchstone entity’ within the human story.

A PARADOX OF HUMAN EXISTENCE

For many, the basis of this human paradox is too powerful to ever challenge or call into question. Israel a paradoxical tale of: goodness and evil; love and hate; beauty and cruelty; life and death; where human existence, even when joyful, is marred by vulnerability, tragedy and sadness. Its mythology lies at the heart of certain fundamental existential human questions that ask: “Where did this story first begin?”, “Where is it going?’, “How will it end?”

World conflict around Israel and the Jews goes all the way back in time to their hostilities with the: Egyptians, Amalekites, Midianites, Moabites, Ammonites, Amorites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans; and all those they ever warred with, from: Sennacherib, King of Assyria; the villainous Haman of Persia, to Hitler of Nazi Germany and Khomeini of Iran.

Both Christian & Jewish prophecies contend that God has a special plan for the nation of Israel and that Satan wants to defeat that plan; and so, as the prophecies go, it is this satanically-influenced hatred of Israel, its ancient Yahweh God, and the God EL of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon before it, that forever fuels this epic struggle. This enigma manifest in biblical prophecies of everything from: ‘The Second Coming of Christ’, in Matthew (26:64) & John (14:1-3); ‘The Covenant With the Anti-Christ’, in Daniel (9:27) & Isaiah (28:15); ‘The Great Tribulation’ in Revelations (Chapter 9); the ‘Time of Jacob’s Troubles’, in (Jeremiah 30:7) & Deuteronomy (30:3); the ‘Rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem’, in Daniel (9:27) & Matthew (24:15,21), or ‘Israel’s ‘Recognition of Jesus as their Messiah’, in Romans (11:26) & Ezekiel (11:17). To all true believers of the Rapture Prophecy in 2 Timothy (4:8) & Revelations (4:1), or those who await the coming of the prophesized New Jerusalem, in Revelations (21:10-12),whatever horrors already have, or will be perpetrated against the Palestinians or whomever is a small price to pay that is of little real consequence or concern.

Israel, in short, is the world’s Tar-Baby. The more the world struggles to untangle itself from the Tar-Baby’s madness in the Middle East, the more entangled it becomes in the Tar-Baby’s every insane political affair.

MORAL OF THE BIBLICAL PARABLES

The lyrics in the song “Days End” by the Christian rock group IVORYLINE cajoles its listeners, “To scream ‘Thank You’ with every waking breath. And cry ‘Mercy, Mercy’ at every day’s end. Yet we remain quiet and comfortable in our A to B lives. Our complacency won’t last much longer, an urgency will sweep, sweep, sweep our sleep, sleep, sleeping hearts.”

Whether one ponders long into the darkest hours of the night: the Torah’s mystery parable of The Fish & The Fox; the Qur’an’s hidden meanings within the Spider Story & Ant Story; or the Bible’s secret teachings of the Three Camels; their revelatory gist is one in the same. The endless squabbling between the world’s religions over questions of ultimate truth is the bane – the curse of the human condition. The longer that the ‘European-Jewish-Arab-World Problem’ remains unresolved, all the more probable will Palestine one day become destined to become one of the seminal holocaustic killing fields between the world’s religions.

In cosmic terms, by day’s end, we humans, as individuals and as nations of people, will either be called upon to rise up, on the strength of our native wisdoms and traditions – and draw upon our many eternal, transcendent parables of life – or ultimately fall upon our own swords and succumb to all the ignorance that will swallow us up.

But what it ultimately will take to ward off all the hate-war-fear mongers, political ideologues, propagandists and their crony “powers that be”, who would have us believe in the inevitability of “the end of days” prophecy to be centered in Palestine is a consummate mystery.

The challenge every individual must answer for him or her self in the days and years ahead is how to simultaneously heal and evolve one’s self and humankind’s shadow from the outside, while knowing that any real healing and evolution can only ever come slowly from the inside; the crisis always more one of spiritual transformation rather than some expedient political resolution.

Another utter mystery within this resolution process is how to convince those who forever live within this shadow’s pale, that an all-important first step that must be achieved to heal the kind of rifts that exist between Israel and Palestine would be to lift all the existing sieges and blockades not only in Gaza but in the rest of Palestine; while simultaneously allowing Palestinians the Right To Return and begin to establish the political reality of One Nation Two Peoples.The United States, Canada and other mixed settler-immigrant-indigenous nations in the New and Old Worlds all have had to grapple with this same reality; the success of which is of the utmost critical importance to the entire world’s future well-being that, in the long run, is actually in every Jew and Palestinian’s own best interests, as well.

Which brings this down to what steps must now be taken to move the human race forward on a higher plane of existence, towards a world that one day will be able to live in peace and harmony. Were the U.N. General Assembly to adhere to the Book of Isaiah (2:3-4), it could, if it so desired, to declare tomorrow, before all its members, “Friends, allies and enemies, mankind has been savaging one another since the beginning of time, and it won’t ever stop until we here finally put a stop to it. The mayhem must end! So, if not now, when; and if not us, then who? It’s time to beat our swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, and no longer sell to any other country, dispicable, murderous WMD’s, like: Hellfire missiles, White Phosphorus bombs, fin-guided bombs, Cube Shrapnel or Flechette DARTS & DIME munitions. No longer will we sell F-16 combat aircraft, gunships, Apache & Black Hawk attack helicopters, drones, tanks or missile systems to be used against the Palestinians, or anyone else in the Middle East or the world, for that matter.

Is this sheer fantasy thinking or a potential reality some day?

VISION OF A U.N. COUNCIL OF PEACE

The Peoples of the Earth and especially those in the Middle East – have a sacred right to peace. It’s shamefully backward that every country hasn’t yet created within its government a Department of Peace, or that the U.N doesn’t already have established, as a corollary to its Security Council, a Council of Peace. Canada, as a first step towards this end, could become one of the luminary nations in this righteous cause were they to advocate that the first action of such a U.N. Council of Peace would be to impose an immediate arms embargo upon Israel, Hamas and all other Palestinian armed groups. The world’s corporations, universities and religious institutions could follow suit with an array of boycotts, divestments and sanctions against any commercial, military, governmental enterprise that violates this U.N. Council of Peace embargo, designed to place limits and controls on “all the bullies-on-the-block!”

This could become the world’s new cause celebre – its new Dues ex machina plot device whereby the seemingly unsolvable universal madness of mankind’s penchant for non-stop terror and warfare suddenly and abruptly is resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of this new Peace Embargo concept within the United Nations. Thus, the whole human story of evolutionary progress could be dramatically fast-forwarded; its new way of looking at humankind’s purpose on Planet Earth, going from contagious to viral in a heartbeat!

POTENTIAL U.S.-CANADA-ISRAEL-U.N. SOLUTIONS TO CONFLICT

Another immediate action Canada and other like-minded countries could take would be to reverse their dreadfully divisive long-standing stance towards Palestine and world peace by following the sterling lead of those like Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, and the some 135 and counting other countries who already offer ad hoc recognition to the State of Palestine, and cajole the rest of the EU’s leaders to follow suit. Canada could be one of the leader nations to encourage the implementation of some semblance of the original U.N. Plan of Partition & Economic Union of Palestine & Israel, as well as encourage ways to tear down Israel’s Apartheid Wall in the same way that the Berlin Wall was torn down years ago as one of the first steps to begin to tear down the artificial, unnatural separations and divisions this wall and others like it have, for too long, created between Palestinians, Israelis and the rest of the world.

Israel could also offer inspiration to the world were it to commit to no longer violate but instead honour, on behalf of the Palestinian people, every Article of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as every Article within the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. Such actions would launch Israel’s footsteps onto the same long and arduous road along which so many other countries have had to grope, as they struggled, however fitfully, to become truly-integrated, mature, human societies.

The United Nations could come up with its own contrived ‘Deus ex machina’ plot device and creative solution to this much too long clash of political wills and cultures were it to consider various visionary, thinking-outside-of-the-box, concepts of conflict resolution; such as outlined in the book One Land, Two States: Israel & Palestine as Parallel States, that proposes a Mandatory Palestine & Eretz Yisrael to become overlapping, parallel states that cover the entirety of what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. If successful, this single ‘silver bullet’, to try to solve the unsolvable, could even become a worldwide model for other contested regions to try, such as in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Cyprus, Kashmir, Tibet and Western Sahara, to name but a few.

Some political pundits, however, will always scoff at any such new bold concept. One can almost already hear them chide, “You’re dreaming!”….. “It’s too premature!”…. “It doesn’t fit into Israel’s peace process plan!”….. “Might be possible some day, maybe, but not at this point”….” “Such enlightened thinking won’t ever happen because too many humans still think and act like monkeys and apes!”

Would these be the voices of wisdom and foresight or ignorance and hindsight? Are the proponent’s of One Land: Two States, dreamer-visionaries of how life conceivably could be for humankind, or but the latest in a long line of polyanna purveyors of world peace? Who is right!

PALESTINE: AN ALLEGORY FOR HUMAN EVOLUTION

The ancient biblical lands of Palestine are dry, barren places without a great wealth of natural resources to attract the greedy. Its indigenous peoples, considered by some to be too primitive and undeveloped to ever worry about, have now become the sacrificial lambs on the altar of a long-standing unsolvable historic ‘European-Jewish-Christian-Muslim-World Problem’ of human co-existence.

Yet, ironically, Palestine now has perhaps taken on the greatest allegorical meaning of all of human existence. For the dilemma of the Human Race is that it will not and cannot ever move on to the next, higher stage of its development until it completes its current stage; a stage that now demands that, through the conflict between Israel and Palestine, it is being forced to find, as it were, a solution to the metaphorical: algorithm of ‘The Rubic Cube’; King Solomon’s ‘Splitting of The Baby’; the riddle of Christopher Columbus’ ‘Breaking of the Egg’; the ‘Archimedean Point’ of Archimedes, or; ‘Alexandrian Solution to the Gordian Knot’.

Thus, the challenge to transcend this evolutionary impasse offers a clear choice between two opposite directions. One direction leads towards the devolution of humankind’s civilization, and an ever-deeper plunge into the Black Hole of the Collective Soul and cancerous malignancy of the human heart.

Such a metastasizing condition, if simply left unchecked to run its course whether it be in a human body or that of the Earth’s the results can only but end one way: the ultimate death of the organism. The opposite direction will lead humanity towards a more glorious destiny, far beyond the void of the abyss into which the world now gauntly stares.

What that direction will be is anyone’s guess. At present, the tinder – economically, politically, militarily, environmentally is at flashpoint; the ignored feminine wisdoms & mysteries of the Earth and humankind remain as stark mirrored-images of one another’s deafening psychic screams for all in the world to see and hear!

A TIMELESS PARABLE SPEAKS TO THE ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN IMPASSE

This leaves but one last eerie timeless parallel to draw between this widespread pathology that exists within the world and a final biblical parable (Exodus 1:8-11), that speaks of the same impasse that once occurred between Pharoah Ramesses & Moses. Israel’s modern Apartheid Wall not unlike the parable’s ‘pretend wall’, that was meant to keep the ancient Israelites safe from their hated Egyptian enemies; today’s continuing plagues of death and destruction in Israel and Gaza not unlike the ten biblical plagues of gnats, flies, frogs, locusts and ruination of old; the modern-day high-tech rocket and missile attacks between them not unlike the magicians of Pharoah & Moses who once threw staffs at one another’s feet that turned into snakes that sought to consume the other; the ghoulish spectre’s of each side’s God, Passing Over their hated enemies towns and villages, hoping to kill not just the first-born sons but as many sons and daughters of either side that they can; the heart of Israel’s new ‘Pharoah’ as hard, cold and unrelenting as Egypt’s Pharoah of antiquity.

Such parallels beg to know: What last horrific plague will finally cause the new pharaoh to try to put life back to normal once again in Israel & Palestine? Where does there exist, for them both, that mythical land of milk & honey?

Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American activist-writer who, for decades, has sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by excessive mega-development and the host of related environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey”, a spiritual sojurn among the native peoples of North America, and has produced numereous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; innumerable accounts of the violations constantly waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul

1398 Hope Road, North Vancouver, B.C. Canada, V7P1W7 jerome_irwin@yahoo.com

Tag Line:Israel-Palestine conflict, Israeli-Gaza Conflict, Armistice Day, Rememrance Day, Veterans Day, Genocide, Apartheid, Peacekeepers, U.N. Resolution against Israeli violation of International Law, State Terrorism, Mass Murders, Massacres

(Photo credit: The Washington Institute).