Israel, of course, prefers to obscure that history, because it leads to an obvious conclusion: the region needs less, not more, tribalism and dogma of the sort Israel favors.
The Jewish majority in Israel lives almost entirely apart from the Palestinians who stayed on their land and are today nominally citizens. Meanwhile, in the West Bank -- known to Israelis as the Biblical kingdoms of "Judea and Samaria" -- Jewish settlers lord it over a ghettoized Palestinian population subject to military rule.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been drafting a basic law defining Israel as belonging to a globalized "Jewish nation," not the country's citizens. And he insists that peace talks take place only once the Palestinians under occupation recognize Israel as such a Jewish state -- a condition that, once viewed as risible, has now been adopted by Washington.
In a sign of the prevailing mood, Israel's education ministry has recently banned from the curriculum two novels featuring romantic attachments between Jews and Palestinians. At the same time, the "green line" that once demarcated the occupied Palestinian territories has been erased from Israeli classroom maps, implying instead that it is all Greater Israel.
Faced with Israel's zero-sum policies and diplomacy, Palestinians have grown increasingly anxious about the future.
Last week a resolution from UNESCO, the UN's scientific and cultural body, gave voice to their concerns. It highlighted Israeli threats to the most important Muslim and Christian heritage sites under occupation.
Recognizing the importance of Jerusalem "for the three monotheistic religions", the resolution nonetheless warned that Israel was exploiting its illegal control to erase the Palestinians' connection to such sites, especially Al Aqsa mosque.
Hoping to deflect attention away from these criticisms, Israel railed against the UN for denying primacy to its narrative. Al Aqsa must be billed equally as Temple Mount, Mr Netanyahu insisted, referring to a long-lost Jewish temple believed to be buried under the Jerusalem mosque.
But the ruined temple's likely location leads to the opposite conclusion Mr Netanyahu has reached: not that the Jews have a stronger claim to sovereignty, but that the region's peoples and religions are impossibly intertwined.
That should be a chief lesson for the current Jacobs and Rachels, many of them living in armed and relentlessly expanding colonies on stolen Palestinian territory.
This land was always shared, and there will be no peace until it is again.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
