ISRAEL AND PALESTINA FOREVER
Leopoldo de Quevedo y Monroy
From Colombia
Traducción al inglés de Anabel Torres
Ever since my dad José Leopoldo, a schoolteacher in the town of Choachí used to teach me the scriptures in 1949, using the textbook written by Bruño, I have been hearing about the clashes between Israelis and Philistines. Every story coming out of my father´s mouth was lifted with a flourish of details from that schoolbook.
The whole region stuck in my mind ever since. It stuck in my memory like a mental landscape gradually become sharper with photos, Internet images and the news pouring out of Jerusalem, Haifa, Hebron, Gaza or Beirut. The book of Genesis is chockfull of beautiful and exemplary passages, and we have also been crammed full with the stubborn data voicing the virtues of family life, the ugliness of hate or the disgust of deceit.
Just where is Paradise on earth located? Is it in Haifa, perhaps, facing the Mediterranean, and was it in Matam Park that Eve and Adam met? Where did Abel use to put his sheep out to pasture, Abel the dreamer, brother of Cain? Where did Absalom’s long hair get tangled while riding a reinless stallion? Where did that scene take place in which David the young Israeli cast a stone with his sling at Goliath, the muscular Philistine soldier? In what valley did the battle take place in which Joshua, as day came to a close, ordered the sun to stop in its tracks in order to be able to capture the Philistines fleeing into the shadows of night? And on what spot did the arc that a giddy Noah built come to a halt after the deluge?
It is already more than three thousand years ago that a struggle takes place to have a State, to have peace and a safe homeland to be in, a homeland two peoples can claim to be ´the land of their fathers”. Israelis and Palestines have lived next to each other, back against back, but they have not been able to live peacefully side by side, even though they listen to the same kinds of music, share the fruits of a common land and both cry over their dead during endless war. Like the gazelles and goats roam the desert, the kibbutzim have roamed over sand and dunes while both peoples have had to come up against the hardened stares of their neighbors.
How much longer will religion continue to be an instrument of domination and a whip and not a link in the chain of peace and forgiveness? Why can´t Jehovah be friends with Ala and the descendants of David Ben Gurion be friends with Mahmud Abbas? In 1948 Ben Gurion led the UN´s recognition of the present State of Israel. Today, Mahmud Abbas leads the petition asking UN Member States to sign, also recognizing Palestine as an independent State.
Territorial reasons, the fact that they share such a common history, a common land and similar ways of life; the fact that they share the same landscape and the same need for stability for their heritage, make negotiation necessary. Humanitarian reasons, forgiveness for all the time lost, must eventually lay the sables to rest and stop the roar of fighter planes overhead.
After what its people had suffered Israel should follow the example the UN set out over half a century ago, and the U.S. should remember that it agreed to the UN proposal along with the concert of nations. The UN does not make alliances to separate peoples but to join them. And Colombia has a good chance right now to make its presence felt in favor of historical causes and the unity of nations, alongside the rest of the countries in South America.
Note: This column was written before Colombia took the poor decision to align itself with its powerful Northern neighbor and not with its neighbors in the South.
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