I still remember riding out of Jerusalem one day about thirty years ago. In those days you were surrounded by desert almost as soon as you left the city. But in the distance there was a speck of green. It grew larger and larger as we drove towards it. It was a farm. People - Israelis - had made the desert bloom. I was always a hard worker, but I knew then that the people who made the desert bloom had to have worked a lot harder than I and most people would or could.
Even in those days there was talk about Israel stealing the Palestinians' land and I suppose that is true in some (many? all?) cases. But it was obvious that the land was fallow for centuries and with superhuman effort the land was made to bear harvests. Why now should those who let the land sit there get the benefit of the work done by people who literally made the desert bloom?
So, today's news story that almost 40% of the land on which Israeli settlements sit is land owned by Palestinians brought back that day in Jerusalem.
1 comment:
Sadly, the Israeli/Palestinian issue is another case of the ordinary people (or many of them) just wanting peace and a chance to live their lives without conflict. As always, it is the politicians on both sides who inevitably manage to cock it all up, usually for their own self-centred, greedy ends. The Israelis did transform the desert and could have lived in harmony with the Arabs, had they been left to do so. Ben Gurion and his minions, coupled with political troublemakers on the Palestinian side, made sure they weren't.
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