HOPE & DESPAIR in Palestine... A clash of aspirations

* “The tensions ripping us apart
Have their origin
In psyches of feuding yin and yang…
Unresolved quarrels in our souls
Now accepted as states of being
In our fragile existentialism…”

Neocons in the West love to talk about the "clash of civilizations”. This is how they visualize the outcome of the eventual irresolution of the portending confluence of opposing forces in a world in which the hopes of some breed despair among those who find themselves disadvantaged by the economic and cultural behavior of those who perceive themselves as “masters”. They may not now call themselves masters, but everything about their actions dictate that they be treated as such.

From the stake-holders in a once apartheid South Africa to the Zionists in Palestine, we have witnessed...and continue to witness the evolution of circumstances in which the power dynamics are undergirded by a volatility that threatens the peace and security of the neighborhood of nations. South Africa had Nelson Mandela and the ANC who for decades articulated in words and necessary action, the perils of a society in which the just demands of an oppressed people are ignored.

Instead of reasonably addressing the righteous demands of black South Africans, the Apartheid regime used every means available to them to demand compliance to the gross injustices of an unsustainable ideology. Mandela and the ANC were branded “terrorists” at home and by Western governments acting as pimps for the whore of oppression. These included the government of the USA.  History absolved Mandela and the justness of the struggle against Apartheid.

Today in Palestine the Hope of a Zionist regime  spurns a persistent Despair among a people constantly calling out to us from a desperate existential prison. In a part of the world whose civility Gandhi would seriously question, 1.8 million Gazans are denied the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No people can claim exclusive access to these rights. The clash between Israelis and Palestinians is not a clash of civilizations. It is more correctly a clash of aspirations. More specifically, it is what happens when the existential needs of one people are allowed to ruthlessly abrogate the human rights of  another. The hopelessness that generates violence deepens when the rest of the world is numbed into accepting the suffering of a displaced people as status quo.

The explosions over Israel and in Gaza will end when there is a fundamental reset of appropriate physical boundaries giving each a right to statehood. As in the case of the decline of Apartheid in South Africa the United Nations has a moral duty to insist through enforceable means, that this become reality. A just definition of such boundaries though, will be a function of something deeper than a right to a homeland. The resolution of the existential dilemma called the “Middle East Conflict” will necessarily demand a moral reset in the psyches of all involved in this unfortunate historical drama. It is time for the pool of hatred to give way to the fountain of mutuality. Without doubt, the tensions ripping apart these two peoples have their origins deep within the historical psyches of each. The dilemma they must deal with is the fragile existentialism that has come to be a state of being over the last sixty plus years. For the sake of their children and the world, this must end sooner than later. How about now?

*Excerpt from the poem “Self-Destructing”. From my book “In My Element”.

SELF-DESTRUCTING

Bouquets from an enemy…
Someone once loved
Now sending messages featuring crossbones
And words prophesying doom…

Frightening…the spiritual variety of our existence…
Love flipped like a coin…revealing an ugly underside…
A spirit buoyant with the sparkling vibrancy of life
Now drifting above the weight of an anchor of malice
Threatening death…

The tensions ripping us apart
Have their origin in psyches of feuding yin and yang…
Unresolved quarrels in our souls
Now accepted as states of being
In our fragile existentialism…

The battle threatening between us is redundant…
Because the smoke proceeding from our feuding breaths
Is a signal of the destruction within…
And in our bowels…Bouquets
Of ashes