I’m not an expert on the history of the Jewish relationship to the land now known as the state of Israel, as well as with the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank; but that ethnically Jewish people have had millennia long interests in this highly contested part of the world is not in doubt.
Religion is one cause of the turmoil affecting the region, but there are wider historical, geo-political and ethnic causes too which make the situation quite complex.
I think it can be understood in terms of population pressure and limited resources. If the Big Guns US would stand down, the 1948 UN blunder could self-correct through natural and logical consequences and eventually assimilation. If the US wants an Israel, move it to the Bible Belt.
Perhaps something like this may have been worth considering back in 1948 (or even before that in 1917), but now that Israel exists it’s unrealistic to think of the population moving en masse to Texas or Canada.
The fact is that Jewish (and Arab) Israelis, and Palestinians, have to find some way of coexisting in a small part of the middle-east without killing each other. Some form of two-state solution - though impossible to conceive of right now - is the only semi-peaceful political future for Israelis and Palestinians.
The conversation now turned to ongoing conflicts in the world: Iran and Iraq, Northern Ireland, the Lebanon. Someone criticized the Israeli government for excessively suppressing the Palestinian population. But Krishnamurti, as he usually did, staunchly defended Israel, “No, sir. What can Israel do? She’s pushed against the wall. She’s surrounded by wolves, with her back to the sea. Where is she to go? She has no choice but to defend herself. No, please, see the whole situation.”
The kitchen chronicles : 1001 lunches with J. Krishnamurti
I think the nation of Israel came about because of the holocaust. The Nazis’s attempt to systematically extinguish the Jews was so atrocious that the allies (who defeated the Nazis) felt obliged to make some kind of gesture, and Britain was so accustomed to carving up the middle east, it was just one more boundary to establish.
Hello, Inquiry!
You must know that group activity is very powerful and potentially very dangerous. What we see is that after a while all religions get subdivided into sects or autonomous groups and have their own dynamics even forgetting the principles of their mother religion. In this particular case, we have the case of Hamas which uses some aspects of islamism in order to exert terrorism. Israel is a nation these days which is not based on the Jewish religion, there is no point in referring to it today as ‘the promised land’, it simply was a political somehow peaceful way of solving the problem of their existence. Now, Krishnamurti was once asked what would happen to the teachings when he had gone. He answered it would be what people would make of them. It’s what happens with religions!!
