Hebrew and Palestinian history, in reverse

[grassfed]

Hebrew and Palestinian history, in reverse

It was not exactly the Red Sea parting to allow a persecuted, enslaved people to flee to safety, but it was pretty close as far as political symbolism goes. Palestinians this week blew holes through the wall on the Egyptian-Palestinian border that Israel built to pen in the Palestinians in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians poured over the border into Egypt. They went mainly to purchase the simple everyday needs that had been denied them recently due to Israel's policy of total isolation and strangulation of Gaza and its people.

The scale and symbolism of events in Gaza clarify some simple truths about the Palestinian issue in its wider historical, political, and geographic context - and perhaps also its moral context, thanks to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's insensitive and obtuse call to "think creatively" about how to deal with the Gaza situation.

It is ironic but not unexpected that 3,500 years after the Hebrews fled their dismal life in Egypt and escaped eastward to freedom across the miraculously stilled Red Sea, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians should be fleeing from the modern-day descendants of the Hebrews, who now play the role of oppressive Pharaoh to the subjugated and dehumanized Palestinians in Gaza. The reversed political geography is politically stunning, and tragic for both sides. The double irony, however, is that the indigenous Palestinians in both cases pay the heaviest price. In antiquity, the Hebrews who fled Egypt conquered and settled in Palestine, driving out the native Canaanites and others who can be seen as the ancestors of the Palestinians; just as the Hebrews can be seen as the ancestors of Israelis and Jews today.

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Israel and the US refuse to do the hard work of making reasonable compromises that all the Arabs, including Hamas, have already suggested: to engage with all the Palestinians and negotiate, first, a long-term truce and, subsequently, a permanent peace that is fair to all, that gives Israelis and Palestinians alike a chance to live in peace and dignity. The quest for "creativity" is a desperate bid to evade law, morality, human decency and constructive political compromise. It is a moral abomination that demeans all Americans in whose name it is spoken. It is also one reason why the flow of thousands of desperate, dehumanized people across the Sinai - fleeing subjugation and brutality, and in search for their own humanity - has gone the other way this week, 3,500 years after today's Israeli jailers were history's jailed Hebrews. No surprises, here; just politics and humanity, or absence thereof, taking their normal course. The answer is not "creativity." It is mutual respect, abiding by the law, and, above all, human decency

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=88412