What’s in a word…
Just 200 years of history and 30 million hopes and lives…
The recent ‘normalization’ of ties between certain Arab countries and Israel has come through as a little sudden though not as surprising. In the ever-evolving world of economic, military and nationalist priorities, things become complicated and once strong threads become frayed.
As in most instances, it can be easy to be swayed to either side of the conversation…there is so much history that one could conveniently and selectively pick and choose instances that serve one side of the argument over another.
Neither the history books I studied in class nor what I learnt through Schindler’s List, nor the fact that around 100,000 Palestinians died in conflict just in the 20th century alone inform me adequately about who or what is right. In most instances, is anyone really, truly, absolutely wrong? And after so much pain…was it really worth it?
Here’s a radical thought…maybe both sides were correct; the villain being the League of Nations, the colonial powers of the time and the lack of adequate consideration for all opinions. Like Picasso went through several colored phases, maybe the colonial powers went through a partition-crazy ‘40s, practicing their protractor and compass based geometry lessons across all their colonies, agnostic of the lives and deaths entangled between those sheets of paper.
Yes…it would be premature of me to form an opinion on the topic just yet.
I stumbled upon a site (https://www.cjpme.org/mapss) which seeks to present a cartographic representation of the history of Israel’s territorial evolution.
To validate, I also located the originally planned map of partition from 1947, as envisioned by the colonial powers of the time. In fact, the United Nations has several hundred digitized versions of documents from the time: https://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/vMaps?OpenView
The Map 2 version from both CJPME and the United Nations sync up,so it can be confirmed at least what the originally planned territorial lines were supposed to be. The rest remains to evaluated more thoroughly.
A very complicated history condensed into a few lines…
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/PalremixBeta147/timeline_main.html
