Israel & Palestine

How can we define who is indigenous and who is the colonizer? Indigenous peoples of the Americas were there before European colonizers. However, Europeans have now lived there for 500 years — their "grandparents are buried there". If the indigenous peoples were forced to take the land back, would they be the new colonizers? Human history is not mathematics. There is no perfect equation for universal fairness. The keys to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are compassion, compromise and concessions.

I sympathize and have an understanding for Jews & Israel — they are a sliver of land in a sea of hostile Arab countries and in the not-too-distant past Christian Europeans slaughtered them to near extinction. They feel they are in a constant fight for survival and must be one step ahead of any potential existential threats. However, their foreign policy is dirty and Machiavellian. They invoke shared 'Judeo-Christian values' when they need American and European support but they had no problem helping Muslim Azerbaijan ethnically cleanse 100,000 Christian Armenians a few weeks ago. They compare Hamas to ISIS but they did nothing at all to stop ISIS, if anything, they directly and indirectly helped ISIS wreak havoc in Syria.

I sympathize with and my heart breaks for Palestinians. They live in an ever-shrinking, open air prison and have been victims of circumstances they mostly did not bring on themselves. However, their non-negotiable insistence on Jerusalem as the capital of their future state is not the stance of a defenseless minority at the mercy of Israel. It shows they are backed, to differing degrees, by the entire Muslim Middle East in which Israel, is in fact the minority, and in which Israel would find itself defenseless if it was not so militarized. Israel makes up under 1% of the area of the Middle East, Jews make up under 1% of its total population. To not allow them to exist on their ancestral homeland, even in this minuscule amount, is absurd.

On the macro-level, few can argue the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland in Israel. On the micro-level, a Palestinian child growing up in Gaza will not find much solace in the fact other Arabs and Muslims control 99% of the Middle East, they have more pressing concerns — such as life under occupation. This is why Israelis must show the utmost compassion and compromise to Palestinian aspirations. On the other hand, Palestinians must show sensitivity to the well-documented and lengthy Jewish history in the region. The al-Aqsa Mosque was built over the ruins of the Jewish Holy Temple, Jerusalem is the Holiest place in both Judaism and Christianity and the third Holiest in Islam, Judaism predates Islam by thousands of years.

Lastly, armed revolution and terrorism are not the same. Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Ferdinand as he paraded around occupied Bosnia. He did not indiscriminately shoot up the Vienna Opera Ball. Sometimes terrorism is the only outlet for the desperate but copying your enemy takes away any moral superiority. That said, airstrikes do not soften killing — the victim is indifferent to being killed by the hand of a 'terrorist' or a 'soldier'. To end this cycle of death both sides must make uncomfortable concessions.