Many of us, simply because we have read a few accounts of history, believe we have absolute and incontrovertible knowledge of everything. Lies! We all know in tiny little bits.
What I have come to understand, particularly with my quest to understand more about the Israeli-Arab conflict over the occupation of the disputed space is that land occupation is in a constant state of evolution in time. Nothing is cast in stone forever.
America, as we know it today, was not always owned by those who run it today. History tells us (at least from where the authors chose to pick their narratives from) that the New World (later renamed America after a certain Italian slave merchant, Amerigo Vespucci) was occupied by the red Indians being the aboriginal owners of the place until the slavers came along from all other parts of the world and subjugated the lands and converted it to theirs.
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For the purpose of this article, here is a brief excerpt from Wikipedia to butress my narrative on the evolution of America.
‘Native Americans lived in the Americas for thousands of years. English people in 1607 went to the place now called Jamestown, Virginia. Other European settlers went to the colonies, mostly from England and later Great Britain. France, Spain, and the Netherlands also colonized North America. In 1775, a war between the thirteen colonies and Britain began when the colonists were upset over paying taxation to their government in the UK, but were not being given any chance to vote in the UK/British elections, to contribute to how that money was spent.’
Just after dawn on April 19, 1775, the British attempted to disarm the Massachusetts militia at Concord, Massachusetts. This began the war with the ‘Shot Heard Round the World.’ On July 4, 1776, Founding Fathers wrote the United States Declaration of Independence. They won the Revolutionary War and started a new country. They signed the constitution in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1791. General George Washington, who had led the war, became its first president. During the 19th century, the United States gained much more land in the West and began to become industrialized. In 1861, several states in the South attempted to leave the United States to start a new country called the Confederate States of America. This caused the American Civil War. After the war, Immigration resumed. Some Americans became very rich in this Gilded Age, and the country developed one of the largest economies in the world’
Having recalled the US evolution history, it should become clear to us that history is in a constant state of flux. A lot could change within a thousand years and more. Nothing stays the same forever, particularly with regards to land ownership. We can never rule out the place of conquest and occupation through the use of force per time. Humans are not so different from the beasts in the jungle in this regards.
A day would come when both the United Nations and the current International Laws would no longer be in existence and there would be no trace of it at all. Everything that holds the world together today would have been replaced by completely different phenomena!
New nations would emerge and those who are the high and mighty ones today would be read only in history books because they would have become extinct, while many others would be lost completely like they never existed. Ask Babylon if it ever imagined it would be no where on the world map in the 21st Century!
Those who argue that either Israel or Palestine are the original owners of the disputed areas today are being driven by emotions. Whoever occupies the land per time owns it! Rome, England, Syria, Egypt, Babylon, etc once laid claims to the land when they had what it took to do so and the world moved on. Palestine and Israel have also had cause to appropriate the lands at different times in history and heaven did not fall. Your rush of emotions about collateral damage wouldn’t change anything. It was always so before your great grandfather was conceived and it would not change even after your demise.
Just the same way the Fulanis from Futa Jalon have used their might and ruthless guts to take over everything that was once Nigerian and are enjoying it today with the rest of us looking on as second class citizens without daring to raise an eyelid because we don’t want war, so also should we look away as Israel, through their superior military prowess annexe as much lands as they can within the precincts of the disputed territory.
Life is not fair!
By
Comrade Duke Aigboje
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK