Crisis in the Levant
Franck Salameh, of Lebanese Jewish persuasion, made an argument from phonetics that Palestine does not exist, because its main advocates pronounce the P with either a B or a F. This is plainly just ridicule propaganda rather than substantive engagement with the main issue at hand. High schoolers, maybe a score or more, at one school in San Francisco went viral filming themselves chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” My friends Isayas and Loza recently covered the age-old debate of lyrics vs. vibes in songs on their podcast Light and Love. I chose up immediately. I told them, “Lyrics over everything, otherwise you find yourself bobbing ya head to lines like Empire State of Mind (Alicia Keys ft. Jay-Z) that say, Jesus can’t save you, life starts when the church ends.” Now, putting Jigga’s Jesus lyric aside for a moment, what could these SF students mean? The plain meaning is by hook or by crook remove the Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The esoteric meaning is the one-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians live under one roof singing kum ba ya, so to speak.
The problem is obvious. Kinda. Once you put 10,000 hours into studying the historical context. It doesn’t make sense to say either the Jews or Arabs were always there, but they have both been there continually enough that both deserve to be there, and neither side should be ethnically cleansed out of there, like our 200,0000 Armenian brothers and sisters of Nagorno-Karabakh who Curtis Yarvin mentioned in his recent post on the subject. The Zionist project, the idea of having a nation-state for Jews, started getting the ball rolling when the Ottoman Empire ruled the Levant. All kingdoms eventually fall, except for He whom we proclaim every liturgy, “your kingdom will have no end.” The British took the Levant from the Turks. They either did not know how to manage their new subjects, or did not have the will to do so. They left.
There have been legion negotiations from 80/20 splits to 50/50 splits. All negotiations have failed, and when they do war ensues. There have been several wars, including multiple nations of the region, and Israel has won them all swiftly and decisively. Israel had left Gaza mostly alone for years now, and allowed many denizens of Gaza to even work in Israel, but has been increasing settlements in the West Bank.
What are the solutions? There seem to be none, but let’s explore some. And if I miss any good ones, please let me know in the comments, or by replying to this email. The most charitable reading of the SF students’ chant would propose a one-state solution where Jews and Palestinians live together. The problem with that is Israel is an ethno-state that believes demography is destiny. Dan Carlin recently got in trouble for saying this out loud on X, in a vague enough way where you could apply that logic to the Anglos of Australia against their Aborigines, or the Anglos of America against the migrant crisis. But let’s keep our eyes on Israel. If there is any possible world in which a one-state solution works, it would be if Israel abandoned calling themselves the only Democracy in the Middle East, and became an absolute monarchy, like that of Saul and David and Solomon. Or more close to home, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and that desert that prize-fighter Johnny Walker failed to acknowledge when asked by a doctor in the octagon in his second language after a knee-strike to the face. I have been to Dubai before. The natives are a minority. And good luck getting citizenship there if you are not one of them. But somehow, it works. And there is no income tax, and relative peace and freedom. If freedom means feeling safe as a woman walking the streets at night, and not meaningful participation in selecting the executive of the emirate.
What about a two-state solution? One problem is that Israel would not trust the Palestinians to be armed. Another problem is that nothing currently connects Gaza and the West Bank. So, are we talking about a three-state solution? Israeli settlements should stop in the West Bank, and the West Bank should become its own micro-nation, or join with their not so distant cousins the Jordanians into a larger kingdom. Gaza I have no clue what should happen, because it is so small and isolated, and home to an elected Hamas, responsible for the wonton killing of Israeli citizens that has reached numbers (>1000) that are the highest since WWII, in terms of Jewish lives lost in one place. I won’t call them terrorists, because whether I hate it or love it, my international ethics professor taught me that word is reserved for non-state actors. They have a de facto small state. They are convention-breaking killers.
The head of my Washington DC program, in which I spent four months living and working there in Congress, was a Palestinian Christian. My Hebrew Bible and New Testament teachers Fr. Paul Nadim Tarazi and Fr. Marc Boulos are Palestinian Christians. One of my favorite congressmen, who I met in DC when I worked there in 2011, the Hon. Justin Amash is a Palestinian Christian who lost family during the Israeli bombing of Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City.
I went to some school with and have had Muslim neighbors (Palestinian and otherwise) who have shared stories with me as well. I used to be in a San Fernando Valley basketball group almost exclusively filled with Israelis and their American Jewish friends. The Israelis had served their mandatory term in the IDF, and some had even picked up some Amharic phrases (i.e. እስከ መቼ iske meché, until when? used to mock their drill sergeants as they drill them) from the Ethiopian Jews they served with. If your TikTok algorithm is anything like mine, you’ll see these Ethiopian Jews in uniform teaching their countrymen and countrywomen Amhara culture through song-and-dance.
I don’t want to pick a side. And I don’t have to. I have a natural inclination to neutrality, but it was also developed in studying dispute resolution at the graduate school level, and working as a mediator in courts and an organizational ombudsman in universities. My geopolitical solution, as an American, is that not $1 of American taxpayer money (whether in cash or kalashnikov) should go to either side. My geopolitical solution, as an Ethiopian, is the same thing. We just want access to Jerusalem, but if not, that’s okay, it’s why we made Lalibela in the first place.
Putting geopolitcs aside, my Palestinian professor of Hebrew, Fr. Paul, has an incomparable book on this subject from a biblical perspective. It is called Land and Covenant, and if this subject moves you at all, and you are a student of Scripture, I highly implore you to purchase a digital or print copy and read it. In it, though a Palestinian, he is not one-sided, unless by one-side you mean God’s side. It is imperative we understand that the Semitic king (mlk) is owner of a given territory. And God, as Semitic king, has a given territory called the universe or the heavens and the earth and the fullness thereof. That means we here on the earth are stewards and caretakers and guardians. We are guests. And thus, as every kindergartner is taught, we must obey the diktat of kindness, “sharing is caring.” We must share the land. And give thanks to He who owns it, for lending it to us. I don’t use kum ba ya pejoratively.
ጸልዩ። Pray.