Looking at the above map and reading its caption, anyone who is not so well acquainted with the history of the Arab peoples and of the Muslim-Jew conflict in the MENA region, might wonder why the vast majority of Arabs who indeed have so much vast swathes of geography and country at their collective disposal cannot get together and give away a tiny slice or sliver of land carved out of it from somewhere within and gift it away to the Palestinians so they can call it their own country . … and make lasting peace finally with the Israelites and the rest of the world ?!
Wouldn’t such a humanitarian gesture solve the Palestinian problem for good? It’s a nice thought, yes, but then it’s so very wishful too …
The sad but ineluctable fact of the matter is that it’s very difficult for the great majority of a region’s peoples to be accommodative and voluntarily give up even a piece of the real-estate they have come to hold as sacred in favour of a minority competing for the same property. Giving up even “an inch of land” under the circumstances for both sides then becomes inconceivable. It amounts to no less than heinous treason, to treachery and betrayal of the interests and honour of the majority population…. And all of that high fervent feeling then somehow gets inevitably whipped up and whipped into a heady but deadly cocktail of fermented religious passion too.
It is really not so much Hate but some atavistic notion of collective Pride of the people that makes both sides remain antagonistic to each other for centuries if not millennia..
The pathological attachment to holy real-estate that people suffer from gets conveniently labelled as “religious sentiment” by every one when, in fact, the religions per se have nothing to do with it.
Throughout the history of mankind we have seen this so-called “religious sentiment” infect people like some unseen deadly virus — unseen, pandemic and uneradicable… so much like Covid today … one might say! … and, yes of course, mankind is yet to discover a vaccine for it!
In the great Hindu epics, the theme of bitter and bloody battling for real-estate is always the constant leitmotif.
In the Ramayana, the story is about how 2 half-brothers in a great dynasty got dragged into a battle for claim of real-estate heirloom … the throne of Ayodhya .
In the Mahabharata, brothers went to war since one of them would never concede even 5 small villages to the other to own and enjoy.
In the Ayodhya of today, we saw too how India’s majority Hindus, owning and holding almost 85% of country’s total real-estate of 812.3 million acres, fought tooth-and-nail for well over 150 years against an equally adamant and litigious minority Muslim-brethren … and for what, do you think?!
They fought bitterly and bloodily for a patch of land … for c. 2.2 acres of land in Ayodhya where both a temple and mosque, once upon a long time ago, seemed to have stood!
It’s pretty much the same sorry story of real-estate litigation too that we see with Arabs, Israelites and Christians fighting amongst themselves for centuries now in Jerusalem: over a small patch of land on a hill where the Dome of the Al Aqsa mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Wailing Wall all crowd together to share a tiny speck of geographical space on planet earth. There’s just doesn’t seem to be enough room for all the three gods of humanity on that blessed little hill…
This, it is not all really about Hate in the first place coming to think of it and coming to reflect upon human nature in general… The canker of Hate really starts spreading only much longer after Pride first starts spreading its poison.
Yes, I for one am fully convinced that it’s really some unknown perverse sense of Pride (which in their ancient philosophy of Vedanta, the Hindus called it “ahamkaara/mamakaara”); it seizes hold of the hearts of men and then it spreads like a virus and causes pandemic wave after wave of Hate, for generation after generations… Believe me, it is Pride indeed that causes Hate … it’s really not the other way round .
Sudarshan Madabushi