I haven’t posted for a while here. My mental health has not. been great. Some personal issues but also the state of the world, especially with two big wars happening now between Russia and Ukraine and also Israel and Palestine. I am not totally anti-war, as my grandfather was a soldier in WW2, but I can’t see either of these wars as having a just reason. They are both about territory essentially, and strangely they are both about territory that was formerly in the Ottoman Empire. Crimea was held for a long time by the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire helped other nations fight Russia for in the Crimean War, and Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. It is very depressing that former territory of the Ottoman Empire is again violently contested. In Australia we remember the WW1 Gallipoli Campaign fought in the Ottoman Empire (now modern day Turkey).

I remember at University some of the history subjects I took covered the early stages of the Israel-Palestine conflict, starting with the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after WW1. The Allies wanted to make sure there wasn’t a powerful State in the Middle East so they carved it up, and the boundaries they created often exacerbated ethnic tensions. The rise of Zionism in the late 19th C led to European Jewish people moving to the territory we now call Israel and Palestine. Zionism is an ethnic nationalist ideology where some Jewish people feel connected to Israel as an ancestral homeland and want to start a nation there. Ethnic nationalist beliefs were really popular in the West in the late 19th C and first half of the 20thC.

I am not sure where someone should identify a homeland for the Jewish people, but in Genesis it states that Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees, which is located in modern day Iraq. Perhaps we could talk about multiple homelands for a people on the move.

After WW2 ended and the Holocaust became public knowledge, the Allies decided to support the creation of a Jewish State, Israel, in Palestine. At the time it was thought Jewish people were unsafe in Europe because they didn’t have a homeland and there had been centuries of antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust. However the land was not empty. Palestinian people lived on the land that became the first territory of the new State of Israel. Palestinians call the violent displacement in 1948 the Nakba, which means the catastrophe. Over the next 70 years, the State of Israel expanded its territory by displacing more Palestinians. The land occupied by Palestine now is fragmented and crowded. Palestine is recognised as a State by the United Nations, but many places like the USA and Australia do not recognise Palestine as a State. Many people in Gaza are very poor and unemployed. It is a dangerous place to live.

I don’t really have any great ideas about how these two conflicts should be resolved, but I do hope they are resolved soon, and that the pointless loss of lives stops. It is a difficult situation where conflict and violence has been entrenched for around 70 years and negotiations have proved very hard work. May peace come.

(Revised from a Facebook post)