Appealing to historical circumstance is interesting. While I support a Palestinian state, I do so only under the secular vision of someone like George Habash (whose Marxism, before anyone goes there, I thoroughly disagree with). You cannot create a “free Palestine” and then immediately use your new sovereign power to crush the Palestinian Christians even moreso than is already done now whenever the Islamic forces in society feel a need to reassert themselves. Palestine is the home to holy sites in all three major religions, and any recognition of Palestine must be within the context of respecting the religious practice of ALL the people who are native to the area, and guess what, this means that Palestinian rights ARE Christian rights (and Muslim rights), and to the extent that one group is much older than the other, if anyone has the right to appeal to history in making their case for freedom, it’s the Palestinian Christians who just want to be left alone by the Israeli military, not the Palestinian Muslims who want to have Palestine be another Islamic state. Which do you think keep the Israelis more on edge? It’s probably not the Palestinian Christians, since they’re not ones blowing themselves up on buses full of Israelis or outside of Israeli-frequented cafes.
Muslim claims to any piece of land in the Middle East outside of the Arabian peninsula are suspect anyway. The non-Arabized Assyrian Muslims of Ma’loula, Syria are more than enough evidence that the “Arab” identity of most of these countries is the result of oppression and attempted extermination every bit as bad as what is thrown at the Israelis on a daily basis. I say both groups deserve it: The Israelis for the hypocrisy of their “democracy” which doesn’t even guarantee equal water rationing in the freaking desert (but nevermind, those going without are Palestinians, so they deserve it! Sorry, kids!), and Muslims for their constant complaining and anger over their colonization at the hands of the Western powers when they themselves did the same thing to the Assyrians, Berbers, Copts, and others who are TRULY native to the Middle East, but they are in complete denial of this fact. Why is there no “free Assyria”? Because some jerks who call themselves Kurds allied with their Muslim brothers in Turkey and again in Iraq to massacre the NATIVE INHABITANTS of the Middle East, because they were Christian and because they wanted their rights to live without being oppressed!
And they still do, but they still live under this fake “Kurdistan” or fake “Turkey”, or fake “Iran”. What do all of these places have in common? Corrupt Muslim hegemony. An idea that the Muslim narrative of the Middle East that places every other people in second place no matter HOW long they’ve been there is the only way that anyone should consider events in that area of the world. That the Palestinians are the only victims, and the Israelis the only oppressors.
Let’s not add Palestine to the list of such places. The people deserve more than to exchange one oppressor for another, and by “the people” I mean both Christians and Muslims.
FREE PALESTINE, FREE ASSYRIA, FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF FOR EVERYONE. Anything less is not acceptable.
