The reason they’re called the Abrahamic religions is that Jews, Christians and Moslems share a common core conception of god. But let’s not be too quick about what follows from this. You and I might share a common conception of what it is to have a wife, but it doesn’t follow – or at least let’s hope it doesn’t – that we have the same wife.

So are these three gods, the one the Jews call Yahweh, the one Jesus called Abba, and the one Moslems call Allah, the same god? Not if they have different biographies. I say He gave Palestine to Isaac. You say He gave it to Ishmail. If they’re different gods then there’s no problem. But if they’re the same god then He gave the same toy to two of His children and stupidly expected them not to squabble over it. So citing our respective Scriptures is probably not the way to resolve the current conflict. So what is?

The Blackfoot are no more the indigenous people of southern Alberta than are the Normans the indigenous people of England. So appeals to indigeneity aren’t going to cut it either. In fact according to the Hebrew Scriptures, Abram came to Palestine from Ur, which is in present-day Iraq. In 1755 the British expelled the Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia, but no ethnic cleansing is ever complete. So likewise – and notwithstanding the fall of Masada and Jerusalem in 70 AD and the subsequent forced diaspora of the Judeans – there’ve always been some Jews in Palestine. But that hardly makes it uniquely their homeland, any more than southern Alberta is uniquely the homeland of the Blackfoot.

Human beings are animals. Animals compete for territory. In the process they often kill each other, but as often as not they find each others’ women fetching, and so what were once two peoples, for example at the Battle of Hastings, within a few centuries become one. Or, as often as not, not unlike the Dutch Reform Christian settlers of southern Alberta, one congregation schisms into two, two into four, and so on without end.

When Allah lead Hagar to the well, He promised He would make her son Ishmail the father of a nation no less great than the nation He promised would be fathered by Ishmail’s younger brother Isaac. And so two thousand years later He remembered His promise to Hagar, and sent that nation out from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including, of course, Palestine. Is Palestinian blood therefore Arab blood? Sure. But, as mutatis mutandis with the people of England, or of the Blackfoot of southern Alberta, no more so than Israelite blood and Norman blood and Turkish blood and Armenian blood and English blood … So who are the Palestinians? They’re the sons and daughters of men and women who found each other fetching and, at one time or another, ‘settled’ in Palestine.

Did the Palestinians ever have their own nation? Not if by a nation is meant a sovereign political entity. The Normans – and then eventually the Turks – took it over from the Arabs. The English took it over from the Turks. And in 1948 the Israelis took it over from the British. So to talk about Palestine being occupied or colonised by the Israelis is to suppose that Palestine – or, Antarctica aside, any other square inch on this planet – was ever not occupied or colonised. So if neither occupation nor colonisation is the issue, what is?

Apartheid! Palestine – what the Jews call Israel – is an apartheid state. From 1945 to 1989, in order to maintain a particular way of life for themselves – and the ‘Blecks’ be damned! – the Afrikaners imposed a system of Apartheid. And the Jews have done the same in Palestine, and for the same reason. Israel touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, just as South Africa touted itself as the only democracy in Africa, and just as America touted itself as the first democracy in the New World. And all three are right, if by democracy is meant the rights enjoyed by Jews and Afrikaners and whites respectively. But not if it means the same rights for all the people.

But – and this is the operative ‘but’ – how else could it have been for white Americans, or for the Afrikaners, or for the post-1948 Jews? If – and I emphasise the ‘if’ here – white Americans can’t live harmoniously with people who were recently slaves, or Afrikaners with ‘those damn blecks’, or Jews with those stiff-necked Palestinians, the only options are apartheid or genocide. Are these two options or really just one? Let’s find out.

The Zionist movement took root in central Europe in the 1880’s and then spread eastward into the Pale. So Jews began ‘returning’ to Palestine before the end of the 19th Century. And because some of them brought their European money with them, they were able to purchase land from Palestinians, many of whom were considerably less well off. In 1917 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration acknowledging the need for a Jewish state, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. The English needed their Arab allies to help expel the Ottoman Turks. So a Jewish homeland would have to wait. Until …

After the liberation of the camps in 1945, most Jews, understandably enough, thought the next pogrom was only a matter of time, and so they fled Europe, a sizeable number to the Americas, but some also to Palestine. Israel declared itself a sovereign nation in 1948. Its Arab neighbours invaded. What Moslems around the world call the naqba included a goodly share of what we’d now call ethnic cleaning. And after a short war the original British-drawn partition was replaced with a much expanded Zionist reality on the ground.

The Palestinians caught behind the cease-fire line became Israeli citizens, albeit very much second-class citizens, not unlike the Jim Crow-era blacks in the U.S. Of the millions of Palestinians ‘displaced’ by the war, some went abroad, some fled north into Lebanon, some east into Jordan, and the rest ended up across the Egyptian border into what is now called the Gaza Strip. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, not quite. Gaza had been inhabited for millennia. But refugee camps are anything but quaint. Israel’s Arab neighbours tried to liberate their brothers and sisters in the Suez War of October 29, 1956, then again in the Six Day War of June 5, 1967, and a third time in the Yom Kippur War on October 7, 1973. In each case the Israelis prevailed, gaining rather than losing territory, and then giving some of it back in what both sides mindlessly hoped might be “land for peace.”

All of these wars – ’48, ’56, ’67, ’73, the raid on Entebbe in ’76, the invasion of Lebanon in ’82, the occupation of south Lebanon from ’82 until 2000 – had profound consequences for the millions involved, but equally for the billions not involved. But the most significant, for our purposes, was the Six Day War of June 5, 1967. How so? Because it was in the wake of that war that the Israelis became occupiers, in the more widely understood sense of the term. In addition to the Golan Heights taken from Syria and all of the then-Egyptian Sinai, the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank that had been under the sovereignty of Egypt and Jordan respectively – with a combined population of over four million souls – was now the burden of the Israeli occupation forces.

Occupation brutalises the occupied, to be sure. But as if not more significantly, it brutalises the occupier. Such is the nature of occupation. It can’t sustain itself any other way. The moral high ground of “Never again!” morphed into the less laudatory “Never again us!” And since October 7 that moral decay has increased with every passing day.

Here are some subtleties to keep in mind. Palestinians are not all Moslems. Prior to what proved to be the highly destabilising influx of Palestinian refugees and the subsequent civil war in 1982, Lebanon was 40% Christian. And there are sizeable Christian Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Israelis regard Christians very differently than they do Moslems. Note that they entered the civil war in Lebanon on the side of the Christian Falange. And it was the IDF who invited the Falange into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and told them to “Do your worst!”

The schism between Sunni and Shi-ite has taken its toll on Palestinian solidarity, just as it did in the decade-long war between Iraq and Iran. The West Bank is largely Sunni, as is Gaza and south Lebanon. But Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are supported by Shi-ite Iran, whereas the West Bank is not.

And for good reason. The West Bank is sufficiently close to the industrial and population heartland of Israel that it can, and does, provide the Israelis with cheap unskilled and domestic labour. By contrast, the commute from Gaza is too far. As a result citizens of the quizling government of the West Bank – be it Fatah, the PLO, or now the Palestinian Authority - enjoy incomes four times of those confined to Gaza. And so there’s a palpable asymmetry of discontent between the two, which has become reflected in their religious loyalties. Why? Because Islam is and always was as much a political movement as a religious one. That is, from its very outset, in Islam – for that matter in early Judaism as well – there never was the kind of separation of religion and politics that marks our more secular political sensibilities.

It may also be useful to note that the Zionists who founded the State of Israel were secular Jews, secular because for the lion’s share of Jews God had broken covenant at Auschwitz. They were raised on European socialism, and the kibbutz system they developed reflected that aspiration. But all that changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later. Until ’91, Jews behind the Iron Curtain were not allowed to emigrate. But almost immediately more than 700,000 east European Jews descended on Israel, demanding jobs that now no longer had to be supplied by Palestinians from the West Bank, demanding land, which could only be had by expropriating Palestinian orchards, demanding water, that could only be taken from what was nurturing those orchards …

Well, as any marxist will tell you, it’s the material that wags the ideological tail. And religious Zionism was custom-made for the demands at hand. So, who are the settlers killing Palestinians in the West Bank and taking their land? Those who have now conveniently convinced themselves that God really did give Palestine to the Jews.

But to be fair, something similar has taken place among some Palestinians. The Lebanese under the French, and the Palestinians under the British, had become among the most educated people in the Islamic world. But people under occupation need to get their blood boiling, and keep it there. And nothing does that better than the Moslem notion of jihad. So both religious revivals are now at their most fervent and fevered pitch. It’s hard enough to share land and water. Hard but doable. But we all draw the line at the other blaspheming our God.

Fast forward. On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Hamas broke out of the 365 square kilometre open air prison it had governed since shortly after the IDF withdrew in 2005, though the IDF remained in control of the perimeter of that prison. If you make people’s lives intolerable – and remember: it’s not for us to decide what’s tolerable or not for someone else – they’re going to do what they can to make yours as intolerable as they can.

Well then, comes the counter – by parity of reasoning it’s not for us to tell Israelis how many of their deaths arising from this resistance are tolerable. So putting both propaganda and partisan special pleading aside, the IDF and Hamas stand on pretty much level moral ground.

But not necessarily on level strategic ground. The Hamas leaders had planned October 7 for months. And they’re not idiots. They knew the Israelis would have little choice but to engage in the kind of collective reprisal we’re now witnessing. But Hamas isn’t a thing. It’s an idea. It’s the idea of resistance to occupation. Kill one leader and another will step up to take his place. Burn one letterhead and another will rise from the ashes. The Palestinian Authority cannot replace Hamas because it’s not a resistance organisation, it’s a quizling one. And it’s losing support even in the West Bank because it’s proven itself powerless to defend its people from the IDF-backed settler militias that are with impunity taking their land.

There are 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza. So in addition to the fathers and brothers intent on revenge for the 10,000 children that have already been mere ‘collateral damage, twenty years hence there’ll be another 25,000 angry young Palestinian men the Israelis will have to try to kill. This is a daunting task. It’s little wonder then that the Israelis are now trying to find a way to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza. Followed, no doubt, by the expulsion of the 3 million from the West Bank.

So yes, there is a difference between apartheid and genocide. If they’re within your territory it’s called apartheid. The moving of them out of it is now included in what international law calls genocide. Of course faced with another 75 years of apartheid, or the more permanent solution of ethnic removal, not unlike what happened with Moslems and Hindus during the partition of the sub-continent in 1947, some Palestinians would accept their fate, and others would rather fight. But however the next few months unfold, the absorption of five and half million people will affect billions, because it will alter the very nature of Islam worldwide. Why? Because Islam always was and remains as much a political program as a religious one.

In February of 1968 a pimply-faced kid was sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Callao, the port city of Lima, Peru, reading an English language Time magazine report on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. And I remember thinking to myself, this is an important moment in history. Watching CNN and aljazeera on what’s been happening for the past three months is giving me the same feeling.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: Apartheid, Arab, Balfour Declaration, Blackfoot, British, colonisation, Gaza, genocide, Hamas, Hastings, IDF, Ishmail and Isaac, Israel, Jews, Moslems, Naqba, Normans, occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Six Day War, Turks, West Bank, Zionism