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BY IAN AUSTIN

When considering the “Palestinian Question,” it helps to identify all true, core issues. I believe most rational, literate people would agree that it is inherently wrong for a powerful foreign military to forcibly eject a people from their ancestral homeland and bequeath land to someone else entirely. 

But I am not talking about the victorious WW2 Allied forces and the cumulative actions up to May 14, 1948 that resulted in the forcible re-establishment of the state of Israel; I speak now of the Romans, in the year 135 CE, when they evicted the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland of Judea and bequeathed the newly designated land of Palestine Syria to the Jew’s even-then-arch enemy, a people known as the Philistines.

Land theft in the Middle East has a long tradition with no angelic people who deserve it all and no evil people who should be banished. Origin stories matter, but so does the passage of time.

Measuring from the time of Abraham, the Jews predate Arabs and Muslims both in the Middle East by approximately 2,600 years. It is common knowledge that the mosque in Jerusalem is viewed by the Islamic faithful as their “3rd Most Holy” religious site, and certainly one of the primary reasons they “cannot” surrender the city to the Jews. What also needs to be mentioned is how the mosque’s foundation is built, literally, on top of the First Jewish Temple.

Palestinians base their claim on more than 1,900 years of history, but if historical context is our designated measure, the sad, inarguable fact is that the Palestinian’s claim is predated by Jewish occupancy. 

Despite the near-collective efforts of humanity at large, the Jewish people are alive and well today!

Indeed, as we approach the Jewish year of 5784, in this, the year 2024 CE, a simple head-count of the Jewish people has finally rebounded, in full, from the decimation of WW2’s Holocaust that claimed more than six million Jewish lives, or approximately 40 percent of their total. However, this represents an overly simplified view… in 1933, 15.3 million Jews represented roughly .5 percent of the human population. Today’s 15.8 million Jews, by contrast, account for only .2 percent of today’s total humanity, showing that the impact of the Holocaust continues to be felt, to this very day, with a 60 percent reduction of the Jewish presence in humanity as a whole.

This tiny .2 percent subset of the human family, 15.8 million out of more than 8 billion, has somehow managed to take home 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes awarded since their founding in 1901. 

Are Palestinians traumatized, in pain, and feeling unjustly treated? Of course. If ever the saying “Hurt people hurt people” were appropriate, it would be in the Middle East, right now, across the board.

When people who wish to be free and sovereign can have a nation-state of their own, free from threats, they can slowly manage to heal. Jews – remnants from Europe’s Holocaust in particular – have never had that chance. They were instantly attacked in 1948. They have never been safe and when one party is unsafe, all parties are unsafe. 

At the very least, the rest of the world should stop pumping gasoline on that fire – stop sending arms that are doing the worst work imaginable. Perhaps if America and Iran were held to account for the harm caused by the bullets they send, they would both stop sending the damn bullets.

(Ian Austin is studying to be a Conflict Resolution specialist.)