a bonobo humanity?

There was no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state?

 Golda Meir, President of Israel, 1969

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

Anne Frank, 1944

As I’ve pointed out a few times before on this blog, nations are a human invention, and quite a recent one. Here in Australia, we became a ‘state’ in 1901, when the British government decided they’d had enough of governing our land by proxy from the other side of the world. France and Germany’s borders were obviously still under question during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1, and Germany was two nations from 1949 to 1990. Italy became a nation-state in 1861, Switzerland in 1848, Austria in 1804 (as a central part of the Austrian Empire – it didn’t become a sovereign state in its current form until 1955). The borders of the Chinese and Russian ‘states’ have changed regularly over the centuries, more or less entirely due to warfare and pillage. 

I should also point out that humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for some 99.9% of that time – or is it more? – have done quite well without the need for nations. And the land has existed for some 4 billion years, in different shapes and sizes, without being ‘owned’ by anything resembling a human. 

The remarks by Golda Meir quoted above (and often repeated by her) were obviously made without a trace of irony, considering that there had never been an Israeli or Jewish state before it was imposed on the people of the region after massive dispossession and bloodshed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. In any case there is no doubt that Palestine is a place. As such, it is mentioned by Herodotus in his 5th century BCE histories. Before that, the region was called Philistia, the land of the Philistines, dating back another 7 centuries, and even before that, the land of Canaan. People lived there, as they did in Australia some 40 to 50 thousand years ago, and made it their own. Of course, they didn’t have a state. Such a concept didn’t exist before the modern era. 

Years ago, I had a friend who wrote about and essentially complained about what he called ‘heavy culture’. I was inclined to agree, and that was some years before I joined a humanist organisation, as a kind of statement to myself that I considered common humanity to be more important, far more important, than nation or ethnicity.

Of course, that kind of thinking raises the question – what do we do with culture? What is culture, exactly? Think of unique cultural products, like kimonos or didgeridoos, which, over time, and sometimes grudgingly, get to be shared with cultural ‘outsiders’. And think of language, perhaps the most central cultural product. Nobody really knows how many there have been, but it’s in the tens of thousands, at least. Is it a tragedy that most of them are no longer spoken? Is it a tragedy that most of the gods we’ve invented are no longer worshipped? Is the movement away from religion, particularly in the WEIRD world, a form of evolution?

But I digress. The Palestinian people have suffered death, destruction and humiliation through the latest settler colonialist venture, just when we thought we were done with all that shite. And to be honest I’m not quite sure that when people talk of the state of Israel they’re not talking about the 51st state of the USA. That country has poured billions of dollars into Israel’s settler movement, especially its military, and has long been a profoundly biased negotiator in Palestinian-Israeli disputes. 

Palestinians have had their villages erased, their leaders murdered – along with quite a few Israeli leaders, it must be said – and their lives continually threatened, for a long time now. They fight back against enormous odds, they reach out desperately for allies in the region, some have even become suicide bombers. Being mostly Moslem, like all their Arabic neighbours, they get little in the way of help, or even sympathy, from the WEIRD world. That world, where it exists in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Africa, had a more or less ‘successful’ settler-colonial history, which it now tries to come to terms with, more or less successfully. Of course we know that recent Jewish history has been traumatic to say the least. I’ve read books and watched TV programs on the Holocaust. The diary of Ann Frank was a set text at school when I was only twelve or thirteen, and I still get emotional just hearing her name. But there have been other examples of mass-murder, far less publicised, because those slaughtered belonged to cultures and ethnicities that have never gained prominence in the West. This is the case with the Palestinians, whose voices have gone largely unheard, first by the British, then by United Staters (I rather enjoy calling them that).

So, who are the Palestinians? They are the long-term residents of the region, who can trace their ancestry there for generations. They’re also people who have left the region for a better life or at least some kind of life after their homes have been destroyed, family members killed, their lives threatened and so forth.  They’re a hurt and angry people, but many are stubborn and resolute about their homeland and their need to protect and preserve it. Of course many first people everywhere – here in Australia, in New Zealand, in all the Americas and much of Asia – have had what they thought were their lands taken away from them by more powerful new arrivals, but now we know – history tells us – that much of what those new arrivals did to the established populations was cruel and inhumane. The Palestinian people, like all those other first populations, deserve better.

References

Olfat Mahmoud,  Tears for Tarshiha: A Palestinian refugee’s inspiring tale of her lifelong fight to return home, 2018

Ramzy Baroud, The Last Earth: A Palestinian story, 2018

Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and loathing in Greater Israel, 2014

Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine, a history of settler colonial conquest and resistance, 2024