Oren Cousins, Contributor
This concludes the four-part series titled "The Irony of Holiness" .
MORE recent developments report that while the United States of America is trying to establish peace in the Holy Land between the Palestinians and the Israelis, attacks and retaliation continue. Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, called his security cabinet to discuss strategies of retaliation. The Arab militant group Hamas claims responsibility for the attacks on Jewish settlements. The Palestinian authorities denounced the attacks, but at the same time, Sharon accuses Arafat of doing nothing to stop the militants from attacking Israel, despite the truce declared September 26, 2001. New violence erupted after President Bush declared that he would play an active role in the establishment of peace and that an independent Palestinian state would be set up.
A few thousand Arabs living among a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are demanding that the Jewish settlements there be dismantled. The Jewish settlements are frequently attacked with mortar bombs, gunfire and suicide bombers. Arafat promised to punish the infiltrators, but Sharon, in a speech at Jerusalem, blamed Arafat, charging that he had "established a coalition of terror". Sharon complained that he was under pressure to allow his Foreign Affairs Minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Arafat on September 26, 2001, to declare a truce, but he received "terror and more terror instead".
The Palestinian Arabs have charged that Israel has violated the terms of the truce by not lifting the road-blocks, the travel restrictions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, thus crippling the Palestinian economy and which was causing widespread hardships and anger. There seems no solution in the near future to the irony of holiness in Palestine. President Bush's efforts to cement a lasting peace between the Palestinian Islamists and the Zionists is being thwarted while there is talk of rather than peace. It is ironical that many wars were waged because of trivialities such as whether or not to build on a site threatening a few buried 'holy' artifacts.
A perspective of the irony of holiness is the steady decline of Christianity in Palestine, The Holy Land where Christianity was born. Christ condensed the problem some 2,000 years ago in his famous words that no prophet is accepted in his own country. Christianity seems to be healthy elsewhere, numbering over a billion and a half souls. Today, Christians make up the largest religious group in the world, totalling roughly a quarter of the world's population. Christians once comprised about 10 per cent of the population of Palestine before 1948. They now make up about 2 per cent of more than nine million people altogether in the Gaza Strip, Israel and the West Bank.
Christianity coming after Judaism and before Islam, if it had not become so increasingly insignificant where 'Israel's overwhelming majority' is Jewish and Islam is the dominant religion among Palestinians, because of its modern ecumenical nature and yearnings for the brotherhood of man, could have acted as a buffer and cohesive force towards establishing peaceful co-existence of all parties in Palestine.
The irony is there will be no resolution of the 'holy debacle' in Palestine unless a great wave of love and tolerance - true holiness - contagiously infects the land, Arab and Jew alike. There are not many options towards peace. One option is forceful occupation of their 'not so holy' land until peace is assured. But this could be painful and costly, and a delicate situation that could involve the entire Middle East.
Another option is non-intervention by the U.S., thus allowing the opposing parties to continue to suffer and, in time, to negotiate towards their mutual salvation. There shall be no peace unless Palestinians and Israelis realise a common moment of truth in the issues that separate them. Inability or reluctance to recognise what such a common denominator ought to be is the irony of it all.
Oren Cousins, a retired principal is an author.
