Israel: “A Land without Borders for a People without

Boundaries”
By:
Stan Moody, Ph.D.

July 15, 2008

From: Ramallah, Palestine Occupational Territory

Complicating efforts toward resolution is the Christian Right in

America, a powerful evangelical political lobby for right-wing agendas
and for whom physical Israel is the locus for an imminent Second
Coming of Messiah and thus at all costs must be prepared for the final
Battle of Armageddon. With typical western Manifest Destiny zeal,
these Christian Zionists join forces with radical Israeli Zionists to
equate land with divine promise and the Jewish race with divine favor.
All who stand in the way of divine promise and favor are expendable,
a more than curious rejection of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

“Let us never forget,” says Shawan Jabarin, General Director of Al-Haq, “that
Palestine is an occupied territory suffering under a façade of democracy and law.”
Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, stands
apart as a defender of human rights in Palestine Occupational Territory – a
watchdog agency employing a myriad of means to alert a sleeping world to
violations on both sides of the Wall of Occupation.

“Let us never forget” seems to be a metaphor for our time when the half-life of a
lesson learned is about a generation long. It is the central theme of every
Holocaust museum and memorial. Yet, it is as well the central theme of
Palestinians who have suffered ethnic cleansing at the hand of their oppressor,
the nation-state of Israel, under the complicit approval of its American godfather.

On one side of the Wall of Occupation, a 27ft. high, 500 mile-long concrete curtain
erected by race, religion and US foreign aid, stands the nation-state of Israel,
largely an amalgam of North American and European Jewish descendency.
Enjoying the uncritical support of an America suffering yet from residual guilt over
that black chapter of human history – the Holocaust, Israel today is the
unrestrained bully of the Middle East. All who dare demand of it civilized
standards of international protocol and behavior, risk being branded in the
Western press as anti-Semitic.

On the other side of the Wall of Occupation stands a severely crippled Eastern
culture for which borders, property deeds and rights are only a recent
phenomenon. Municipal governance there is less than 200 years old. Over the
past 40 years, Palestinians have seen their farmlands taken, their homes
destroyed with empty promises of the “right of return,” their people crammed into
refugee camps, their water supply and electrical power plants seized or destroyed
and their dignity ridiculed – all in the name of that subjective and illusive thing
called “security.” Acts of terrorism, instead of achieving international recognition
of and sensitivity to their plight, have further hardened a western world whose
past has been carved out of the forceful acquisition of land from tribal peoples.

One has only to examine modern history of the Native American culture to
understand the disastrous short-term effects of equating power with land. The
western mindset finds order in the rule of law protecting rights of property
ownership; the eastern mindset finds order in community and family, a poor
defense against implements of mass destruction.

To resist the acquisitive war machine is to be dismissed as a “savage” or a

“terrorist.”

Complicating efforts toward resolution is the Christian Right in America, a

powerful evangelical political lobby for right-wing agendas and for whom physical
Israel is the locus for an imminent Second Coming of Messiah and thus at all costs
must be prepared for the final Battle of Armageddon. With typical western
Manifest Destiny zeal, these Christian Zionists join forces with radical Israeli
Zionists to equate land with divine promise and the Jewish race with divine favor.
All who stand in the way of divine promise and favor are expendable, a more than
curious rejection of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

It is a clash of one culture seeking security in firm and wider borders while the
other culture seeks peace through human justice, unable to draw the attention of
a biased and pre-occupied world to its imprisonment. The tragedy is that neither
of these brothers by blood – Jew and Palestinian – can achieve their objectives
without a legitimate regard for each other and a bedrock conviction that the
welfare of its neighbor ultimately dictates its own destiny.

Only in their common heritage and interests can there be strength.

Code words of western culture include “to the victor belongs the spoils; might
makes right; the best defense is a good offense.” Intellectual integrity has no
place in a world in which those who claim rights to land on the grounds of race
also view land unrecorded in a registry of deeds as up-for-grabs. The law of the
jungle prevails over such conflicting principles.

It all began with a slogan – “A land without people for a people without land.” No
matter how many people occupy and farm a certain land for no matter how many
centuries, failure to record its boundaries or legally establish itself among the
community of nations makes that land vulnerable to seizure. Lack of respect for
physical boundaries is, to the western mind, the way of ignorance and savagery
that must be moved aside in the interest of “civilization.” In a suburban sense,
the house lot trumps community. We know, in fact, that the suburban house lot in
America has become the private defense against community.

The Wall of Occupation, meandering selectively through hundreds of miles of the

West Bank, is the staking of borders by Israel in defiance of international law and
with the full complicity of the all-powerful US. The diplomatic peace process that
raises its ugly head from time to time serves as a clever means of ensuring that
those new boundaries become permanent and codified. While the world focuses
on the ethereal attractions of peace, Israel, favored son of the West, sets its sights
on erecting Jewish settlements by the thousands. Scores of settlers dependant on
Israeli protection from a disenfranchised and newly-created “people without land”
render the Wall of Occupation permanent.

I am reminded of an expression attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu: “When the

missionaries first came to Africa, they had the Bible, and we had the gold. ‘Let us
pray,’ they said. So we bowed our heads and prayed. When we opened our eyes,
we had the Bible, and they had the gold.”

And so it is that a legitimate concern for human rights and human dignity for the
Jewish people has degenerated into a grab for land. The former “people without
land” are now in possession of some 75% of the “land without people.” Those
people so lightly dismissed because they knew nothing of meets and bounds have
become the new “people without land.” Refusal to visually connect with a people
legally unattached to land, however, does not mean that they are not physically
present.

Israel as a nation cannot long exist without first recognizing the right of
Palestinians to their own borders and to freedom of movement within those
borders. While Lawrence of Arabia evokes a romantic time of sand and camels,
the civilization that the West has brought to the region through oil exploration, its
accompanying wealth and international world order ought to demand from Israel
a higher standard than the law of the jungle.

The United States, as well, will not long exist without a resolution of the conflict
between Israeli hegemony and Palestinian tribalism. It will crash under the weight
of its own hypocrisy. Fear and greed breed further fear and greed, mortal
enemies of justice within and without.

The problem for western democracy is this: Western colonialism derives from fear
of suffering, while Palestinian resistance was born in suffering. Fear builds walls,
while hope scales fear’s walls. Just as those oppressed peoples south of the US
border will sacrifice everything for opportunity, so the Palestinian people can go
on for centuries more, surviving loss of dignity and suffering at the hands of its
occupiers. They will survive, however, long after the exploiters of their land run
out of room and resources.

I returned to this article after a visit to the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem.
The Holocaust was Europe’s answer to a failure of community, enterprise and
human decency. It began slowly and experimentally, gradually gaining
momentum until it slaked the thirst not only of the oppressor but of the oppressed
nations that fell to the Third Reich. The Jews of Europe should like us never to
forget their occupation, the confiscation of their land and the callous disregard for
their dignity. Yet, these are terms that adequately describe the plight of the
Palestinian people.

The oppressed has indeed become the oppressor and sadly within my own
lifetime, giving credence to the notion that we always forget, and soon. The
Western nations respond exactly the same as they did in 1938 and beyond – non-
binding condemnation but insistence that such matters are issues best left to the
region to resolve. And yet their money and their industrial collusion become
familiar landmarks of progress to those affected.

“Land without people for a people without land!” That is a slogan that indeed
exalts denial to an art form. The people we refuse to see simply are not there. Let
us, then, take the land!

In the interest of slogans, perhaps it might better be said that the modern nation-
state of Israel has been carved out of a “land without borders for a people without
boundaries.”