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By Honey Sharma. Dated: 10/25/2023 5:40:00 AM

Without bloodshed, can Israel and Palestine coexist?

The Israel and Palestine conflict pivots to the question ‘who owns the land?’ It is a time-tested principle that the land to its inhabitants. But who are those inhabitants? And what stay time limit can define them to be so?
According to me, natives of any area are the people who respect and share motherly love with that land. They are the ones who care for its welfare and cherish that. So, basically those people are like children of their motherland.

And yet the events unfolding in Israel-Palestine for the last few weeks show us how humans who profess their love for the same land are busy eliminating each other.
In any land, humans can coexist not by hatred but by cohesive force binding their relationship stronger and stronger. So, humans have got the innate ability to exist together. Now the question here again arises: What holds more value to build a nation of humans belonging to the same religion or to live as human beings?
For now, the people of Israel and Palestine need to value each other's life and instead of smothering their sacred land with blood they need to rethink that their disastrous actions can burn them collectively. After all, we cannot qualify to be human without knowing and understanding the language of compassion, consideration and empathy. If one does not possess that then they should question themselves who they actually are? The kind of bombings witnessed in Israel and the much worse scale of violence in Gaza Strip is shocking. Who are the people who engage in such violence or justify it? Why have they turned themselves into living zombies that gulp human blood without any remorse?
With hundreds and thousands of people dying in Gaza Strip every day while rest of the world views in silence, I fear the legacy the present generation of the world will leave behind is of lifelong hatred and never ending vengeance.
The horrifying Israel-Palestine crisis also raises the pertinent question of why most conflicts, civil wars, proxy wars and tons of violence happens in the global south, while the more modernized and powerful West takes sides, supplies them with weapons and encourages them to remain at war? The western imperialism that existed a century ago in the form of colonization of countries now colonizes human minds, holding humans in the captivity of hatred and gloom.
It is sheer hypocrisy that while the democratic powers of the developed world encourage wars and then preach democracy to rest of the world. The world looks up to democratic West for inspiration. The West should live up to those expectations by inspiring democratic values and peace, not by promoting wars for petty economic and strategic motives. In the Israel-Palestine crisis, instead of siding with Israel and egging it to unleash more violence, a superpower like United States could have played the role of a peace negotiator.

While the West can play a great role in steering the world towards meaningful democracy, there is also need for bringing honest and earnest debates in pursuit of cutting down weapon production and sales world-wide. Weapons were created for defence not for fulfilling greed and dehumanizing the world. Most countries in the world spend heavily on the defence sector in the name of maintaining peace. Instead, this has only served the interests of arms lobbies, promoted competitive stockpiling of weapons and encouraged violent conflicts and wars in which all humanity is trampled. An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.
(The author is a student of M.A Mass Communication and New Media, Central University Of Jammu)