In the fall of 2023, the conflict in Palestine re-emerges where the secular trend can be perceived beyond the facts and comments. The concern raised by the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7 and the response of the State of Israel is therefore a concern of a historical nature, since the past navigates the waters of the present with the intention of clouding the future. Here again are those in favor of living in tension, dressed in combat uniform, on both sides of the thin line that separates two countries and two value systems. Are they aware of the duration of the conflict? To see it, I propose a tour in ten moments, from today to its beginnings.
Seventy-five years in which Israel has sought to restore its historical identity and at the same time found a modern State, and in which Gaza, as part of Palestine, has witnessed the consolidation of a political ideology that advocates the creation of an Arab State own. The border between the two, with a concrete wall, illustrates the attitude of the world today towards territorial conflicts that are difficult to resolve while evoking the image of a humanitarian crisis that generates disenchantment. Sometimes, on a holiday, the idea of ??being a different cosmos with respect to lifestyle, religious beliefs, sacred places or language is reborn on one of the two sides. It is then discovered that the two homes are perfect strangers despite being close and sharing the same geography. The farms of some are strangely oppressive in the agricultural collectives of others; and thus tolerance in diversity is not possible. The weight of the world economy is too noticeable and that is why today the distance in per capita income between Israelis and Gazans has increased regardless of creeds. This makes it easier for the State of Israel to maintain the initial plan devised by the Haganah between 1920-1948 based on population growth and internal migratory movements, on the use of military skill and on the lack of willingness to adopt customs foreign to Israel. the image of courage, resistance and Jewish pride; while the leaders of Hamas, who have ruled Gaza with an iron fist since 1987, see what is happening on the other side of the border as the creation of agro-military colonies with a view to turning the strip into vassal territory and insist on affirming that they live immersed in a global political plot that has taken away the land that belongs to them by inheritance from their ancestors.
Edmund Allenby’s campaign with the support on the eastern flank of the Arab light cavalry under Colonel Lawrence in 1917 drove the Ottomans out of Palestine and favored a colonial era that, however, brought cosmopolitanism in cities like Haifa for the Palestinians. or in the Grunewald neighborhood in Jerusalem for German-Jews where it was easy to find Martin Buber or Gershom Scholem. There were no internal borders; There was only one Palestine and diverse groups coexisted there under the gaze of Arab countries created in the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire: Syria, Iraq and Jordan. Palestine was then considered for the establishment of a Jewish home as stated in the statement of Minister Arthur Balfour to Baron de Rothschild, without taking into account that it was not the best time to propose courteous and ironic measures regarding the rights granted by history. Ultimately, the sour and controversial tone with which the idea was received shows that it was only going to produce permanent conflict, as it has.
The Ottoman Empire’s policy on Palestine constitutes one of the most decisive moments, not only because of its duration, four centuries, but also because of the way it approached the ethnic kaleidoscope of the territory. The Sultan of Istanbul attended to public works, including the water supply system for the city of Jerusalem, with the restoration of the outer wall of the Rock Mosque with the marble covering on the upper part that gave it an Islamic image. the city; but at the same time he protected the rest of the religious communities, especially the Jewish one, with schools dedicated to the reading of the Zohar that gave a new meaning to the diaspora. It was at the end of Ottoman rule, around 1850, when an archaeological brigade arrived to take a closer look at the holy places. And then an interest in Palestine began, first cultural, which came to add archeology and reading of the Bible with figures such as General Charles Gordon, one of the first to affirm the need to restore Palestine to the Jews; and second, strategic, since Palestine was the necessary step to end the Ottoman Empire.
The Arabs arrived in Palestine driven by jihad, taking advantage of the cracks opened by the Great War between the Byzantines and Persians. The Rock Mosque in Jerusalem provides the best example of the religious conflict created from that moment on, as the building and the territory it occupies are claimed as a holy place by the three religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Arabs built a market and a grid of streets around the temple that make up the Old City. The pilgrims filled the impression of the place with coded messages, the Christians when they went to the Holy Sepulcher, whose destruction by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim in 1009 motivated the crusade of the Franks that conquered the city ninety years later, giving way to the creation of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as the political framework of a restitution of a Christian Palestine where Muslim and Jewish communities lived. The destruction of the Crusader kingdom by the Ayyubid dynasty, with Saladin as a hero, gave rise to a succession of rulers, among them, the Mamluks who knew how to distinguish Christians who went on pilgrimage from those who went as crusaders.
After the edict of Milan issued by Constantine the Great ending the persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire, his mother Elena went to Jerusalem with the intention of finding vestiges of Jesus’ death on Golgotha. A Christian Palestine was opening up on the horizon, thus becoming a pilgrimage goal. Egeria, a nun from Bierzo, a relative of Emperor Theodosius, established the nature of the trip by verifying the real existence of the Holy Sepulcher and with it the rest of the places that were once trodden by the feet of the Savior. The conflict over this land increased as the power of the Holy Land cult and the importance of its relics grew.
Rome became interested in Palestine to bring order to a region dominated by religious effervescence inspired by the resistance of the Maccabees to the spread of Hellenism. Thus Pompey made a pact with the local dynasties to create a political space for the region that he placed in the hands of Herod the Great, who restored the Temple of Solomon, of which the wailing wall still remains. But it was not possible and after some events, such as the crucifixion of Christ, the emperors Titus and Vespasian demolished the Temple of Jerusalem, took the most sacred relics such as the menorah to Rome and caused the diaspora of the Jewish people throughout the Mediterranean. To complete the task, Emperor Hadrian, at the beginning of the second century, rebuilt Jerusalem as a Roman city, called it Aelia Capitolina, and made Palestine a province of the empire with its capital in Caesarea, the former prefecture of Pontius Pilate.
Hellenism, promoted by the heirs of Alexander the Great, was based on the idea that Greek civilization could be adopted by peoples who were not ethnically Greek, the barbarians of whom Herodotus spoke in his stories. The Palestinians adopted it with resistance from a part of them that gave rise to the movement of the Maccabees, a family of rigid orthodoxy based on the Bible that saw the cosmos promoted by Hellenism as a danger to the faith of their elders. Thus began a conflict filled with religious effervescence and political tensions.
After defeating the Assyrians, the Persian king Cyrus the Great freed the people of Israel from their captivity in Babylon in the year 538, at least that is what Flavius ??Josephus said. Centuries had passed since they were moved there as effects of the conquests of the Assyrian empire, their most conspicuous enemy. During that diaspora seen as a captivity, writers, prophets and legislators meditated on the meaning of their history and the reasons for the collapse of the Jewish kingdoms that extended from the lower Galilee in the north to Beersheba in the south, reaching the conclusion of that they were a people different from the others, a chosen people, perhaps because they were not Canaanites by origin, or because they enjoyed a unique relationship with their god, or because they had forged their national identity in the midst of a conflict with the military powers that they surrounded. In any case, during that captivity, during the 7th to 6th centuries BC. They wrote with ancient materials a text that gave meaning to the life of a people who needed to return to their home to build a cosmos: the Bible.
The biblical account of Joshua’s conquest became very popular in the wake of the Haganah victory in 1948. Archaeologists sent a simple message to the world: the archaeological sites of ancient Palestine referred to the story of ancient Israel as told by the Bible to the point of indicating that modern Israel created after 1948 rested on ancient biblical Israel. What the United Nations had certified was simply a restitution of the Jewish home that now became a social and political cosmos under the Star of David. In their excavations they looked for the remains of any Tel (archaeological site on a hill) in the region as an indication of the presence of the ancient Jews in the land of Canaan, marking a line of work that adjusted to some plans of the so-called Biblical archeology of the most conservative sectors of American Christianity that claimed to have found Noah’s Ark on the top of Mount Ararat, the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, the bed of the Red Sea where Moses passed, the exact place where Jesus was crucified and, lo and behold! !, the Ark of the Covenant in a quarry near the Damascus Gate. And they took it with a seriousness worthy of praise, despite the mocking tone with which these arguments were presented in one of the most famous Indiana Jones films. And all this in the midst of a gigantic controversy where archaeologists like Albert Glock, murdered while working in the West Bank (what the Israelites call Samaria and Judea) began to doubt archaeologist Adam Zertal’s statement that “an archeology without the Bible is an archeology without a soul.” You can follow the steps of some excavations, such as that of Kathleen Kenyon in Jericho, who said she discovered that the place was uninhabited when the Bible says that Joshua arrived to destroy the walls to the sound of the trumpets of his army. Apparently it is a matter of chronology since between Jericho and the arrival of the Israelites there was a jump of centuries and a half. This led to raising the tone of the debate as people began to doubt whether the figures of Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Saul, David or Solomon had ever existed and were nothing more than a literary product, along the lines of the heroes of Troy. in Homer’s Iliad.
An agnostic creed has taken hold among Syrian-Palestinian archaeologists who doubt the results of their Israeli colleagues who maintain the thesis that the excavations prove that ancient Israel existed and that the New Israel is a restitution. Complex controversy that is entangled in the conflict to know who owns the land of Palestine, since there is news that a confederation of peoples called Israel appeared around 1200 BC. in the mountains of Canaan with the intention of controlling the water supply of the Gihon spring located at the gates of what would be the future Jerusalem. In this universe of beliefs and readings of the Bible, three key but highly controversial moments stand out: first, Abraham’s decision to leave Ur, in Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC. with the promise of his God that he would give them the land of Canaan as their own to found Israel; second, the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt led by Moses around 1250, in the time of Ramses II, with the proof that the people of Israel are mentioned in the stele of the victory of Pharaoh Mernepteh around 1210 BC, thus confirming the forty years of wandering in the desert before entering Palestine with Joshua at the head of a powerful army; and, third, the tendency to consider any site between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age to be Israelite, basically between 1200 and 900 BC. based on a distinction between Jews and Canaanites, Hurrians and Bedouins of the region. Which leads us to focus on the Philistines located in what is now the Gaza Strip, their leader Goliath and his adversary David with his sling. And so archeology enters fully into the conflict over the present to the point of becoming – stated Amos Elon – a key argument in the culture of current Israel.
The beginning of history leads to the present and marks the path of the future. Palestine increasingly needs an intellectual strategy that allows it to consolidate the sense of identity of each of its parts, leaving aside the ideas of superiority that have constituted, and constitute, the reason for the conflict between those who claim the right to this land as heirs of a confederation of peoples called Israel from the late Bronze Age and among those who feel they are heirs of the ancient Canaanites. A good story will be a key piece to a good peace.
