A Night in the Zurich Youth Hostel, 1973
A Glimpse of Gaza, 2023
Fifty years ago, I was a student living and studying in Munich. I owned a third-hand rear engine air-cooled Volkswagen Variant held together with paint and chewing gum - a "Squareback" in the US auto market. A friend and I decided to spend spring break caravaning through Spain.
I am not sure what route we took to get from Munich to Spain, from the Isar River in Bavaria to the Mediterranean (or, "From the River to the Sea" in today's lexicon of blacklisted & forbidden speech).
I know there were no tunnels through the Alps at that time. I think we zigzagged south-west, more or less, into Switzerland, heading for the South of France and thence into Catalonia. Those were carefree days of long hair, beads and John Lennon wire frame glasses. The plan was no plan. This was a Jack Kerouac-ian kind of road trip. We lived on French baguettes, cheese and salami, stopped when tired, "camped" in Jacques Borel motorway restaurant1 parking lots, and stayed in pensions or cheap hotels in the bigger towns and cities.
En route to Spain, we spent one night in the Zurich Youth Hostel - a Jugendherberge.
I recently visited the website for that same hostel. There are pictures of the place that, apparently, has been remodeled since I was there. Still, the exterior looks exactly as I remember it, even if it wasn't exactly as I remember it. It was fortress-like, blocky, solid. It looked a little like a prison.
Today, according to the website, the largest rooms hold six bunks. In 1973, I remember spending the night in a 12 person dormitory with double stacked bunks. Maybe I am wrong, but that is what I recall. At that time, guests were segregated by gender (there were just two in those days). I was assigned to my "barrack" - somewhere above street level facing the back or side of the building. My travel partner was lodged in a women's dormitory elsewhere in the building.
All the beds were full. I remember that all of the other men in the room were in their late teens or early twenties and that they seemed to know one another. I spoke and understood English and German, passable French and rudimentary Italian, but these young men conversed, animatedly, in a language that I did not know.
I remember one peculiarity of this particular youth hostel that, I am sure, must have changed. Or, perhaps, it never happened except in my memory: the management declared a nighttime curfew at a certain hour. Then it locked the bedroom doors from the outside. Like a prison.
The overhead lights went out at curfew leaving only small reading lamps for illumination. I lay in my bunk tucked inside the one piece multi-function bedsheet/pillow case that European youth hostels use. I prepared to sleep.
I didn't sleep, though.
They were talking to me. That is, all twenty (or more) young men who occupied the dormitory with me were talking to me. There were twenty or more in the twelve-bunk room because, after the door was locked from the outside, many more had clambered in through an open window, using ropes or bed sheets tied to together, like a reverse jail break. This is probably why the management locked the youth hostel dormitory doors at night - both as an internal security measure and to try to prevent non-paying guests from sneaking in. Even at youth hostel prices, money was dear for those who were day laborers, and if several could split the cost with those already there, then doubling up was still better than sleeping au naturel in a park or under a bridge like a clochard.
For they were, indeed, day laborers - Gastarbeiters. Non-Swiss who had, legally or illegally, come to Europe to do scut work to earn some money for themselves to survive or to send home to family.
They were from Palestine. These twenty (or more) young Palestinian men clustered around my bunk, above, across and beside me. They were the displaced refugees born of a series of misbegotten events that long predated their births and mine. They were the grandchildren of the Nakba, the "catastrophe," the violent removal and dispossession of the native peoples in 1948 from the land that is now Israel. I distinctly recall that one man sitting on the bunk across from mine had a rather large knife. You do not forget that kind of detail even decades later. He might have been paring an orange although, at the time, I wasn't sure whether he was preparing to pare me. The prior summer - the summer of 1972 - was the year of the Munich Olympics. The Yom Kippur War broke out about a year later. These were stressed and turbulent times. Like now.
I had been living and studying in Munich at the time of the Olympics. The Black September sub-group of the PLO had infiltrated the Olympic Village, killing two Israeli team members and taking nine hostages. The subsequent attempted rescue by the German authorities was botched: all of the hostages died, as did five members of the Black September group and a police officer. The three hostage-takers who were captured alive were themselves later released in yet another hostage exchange involving hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615.2
I rapidly considered my situation that night in the Zurich youth hostel. I was locked inside the room. The Munich Olympic massacre had occurred less than a year earlier. Twenty (or more) young Palestinian men - one of them handling a large knife - were clearly very excited and wanted to talk to me. Right there. Right then. In light of the options (of which there were none), I agreed to talk with them.
One of the gentlemen seated on a bed mattress directly across from me was clearly their designated "spokesman." He spoke a little broken English, slowly and haltingly. He also spoke fragments of German and French. As he struggled to interview (or interrogate) me, the spokesman's compatriots all excitedly pressed around him simultaneously shouting what they thought (apparently) were the most important issues to "discuss."
Although I do not remember any names today, decades later, I do remember first introducing myself by my name and asking theirs, too. Knowing someone's name immediately makes someone a "person" and not just a stereotype. I offered and shook hands with the spokesman. I "saluted" the others with a tip of the fingers to my forehead, a "hello" in English and a colloquial "servus" in German. They saluted back, more or less, with various Arabic phrases that probably meant the same. Probably.
The ice had been broken.
I do not remember exactly how long the "interview" lasted. Time seemed at once to freeze and accelerate. I remember that I helpfully offered to "assist" the spokesman for the group to phrase his questions as he struggled to put them into an intelligible form of English. He then struggled to re-translate my (intentionally) convoluted answers from English into (presumably) their own Arabic dialect so they could understand what I had said. They (apparently) thought the spokesman's translations incomprehensible and started shouting at him and poking him to try harder. A few of them shouted their own questions to me in a mishmash of words and languages that made even less sense. The more they struggled, the more verbose "help" I offered, with a smile and an amiable laugh, including my increasingly frequent assistance in pronunciation and grammar. As I spoke longer and more contrived sentences, it tended to slow and complicate the conversation. We got bogged down deeper in semantics and the peculiarities of the American dialect of English. My roomies became first restless, and then increasingly less interested in the conversation.
That night, I think, the thought came to me that I would become a lawyer. If I made it through the night.
I remember only a few bits of the actual dialog, but the gestalt of this night in the Zurich Youth Hostel I remember like yesterday.
I recall, first of all, that my interlocutors wanted to know who I was, where I came from and what I was doing there. I showed them my International Student ID card - I was an American studying at the German university in Munich. I was traveling during term break en route to Spain. All of this was true. I asked the same questions of them and they told me.
Where in America did I live? they urgently wanted to know. I think they only knew about a couple of US cities - probably New York and Washington D.C. or Chicago - and they were very confused when I said, truthfully, that the last time I had lived in the U.S., I had, years ago, lived in... Pittsburgh. I remember how that bit of news, in turn, launched a lengthy (and totally confusing) discussion about where "Pittsburgh" was and what it was then known for (steel mills, coal mines, Iron City Beer, the Pittsburgh Pirates and kielbasi!). I remember that wasn't the answer they wanted or expected thinking, perhaps, that I was a Jew from New York City. But they never asked that question, and I wasn't from New York; so I didn't volunteer what I thought they might have been thinking.
They wanted to know why America supported Israel all the time.
I told them the truth - then as now - that I have no clear idea why the United States government does what it does, but that not all Americans agree (then or now). I did tell them, truthfully, what I thought then, and what I think now: that nobody in the American Capitol ever asks me for, or seemed to want to hear, my opinions; and that, generally, U.S. policies, at home and abroad, were often duplicitous, deceptive, inconsistent, dishonest and/or biased. I explained, for example, that the Vietnam War (which was then still an ongoing "hot" war) was one of the reasons why I was then studying in Germany and not in the United States. All of this was true.
They wanted to know what I thought about the Black September attack on the Israeli sports team only a few months earlier. I was living in Munich at the time. What did I think about that, they urgently wanted to know. So I told them the truth: violence begets violence. I told them what I thought then and what I think now: Arabs and Jews are closely related historically, ethnically, religiously. It makes no sense for them to fight one another. They should be allies, not adversaries. Family and good neighbors, not enemies. I told them what I thought then and what I think now: I completely understood the reason for the attack on the Israeli Olympics team and the desperation that motivated it. But I also told them that I disapproved it.
The "struggle session" - for that's what it was - lasted for hours. It was well past midnight before we all tired. One by one, my "roomies" lay back in their bunks and fell asleep (many two to a mattress). Soon, their spokesman, too, quit trying to quiz me. I think we exchanged something, maybe a piece of chocolate from my backpack. Then we slept.
Or, at least, I think I slept because I distinctly remember - somewhat to my surprise - waking up the next morning!
The youth hostel, reversing what it had done the night before, unlocked the doors at daybreak, turned on all the overhead lights and piped in loud, thumping music through the public address system - a medley of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple and Heino (you had to have lived in Germany to appreciate the grating incongruity of this soundtrack mix!). I think this is what reveille at Army Boot Camp must be like for new recruits at Fort Benning, Georgia.
We all tumbled out of our bunks and headed for the large and noisy common lavatory to wash, shower and hit the head. We greeted one another like we had been acquaintances forever. Maybe, in another universe, we had been. I am not sure, but we may have exchanged names and addresses on scraps of paper (there was no email or text-messaging in the 1970s). We shook hands. I bought some brioches and Danish pastry at the cafeteria and gave some to them. They gave me some oranges and lemons. I rejoined my travel partner and we prepared to drive on toward Spain. The Palestinians and I parted friends.
This story is true.
The names have not been changed because I do not remember any of them. I long ago lost the little scraps of paper with their names and addresses. If they are alive, they will be my age, more or less. Perhaps one of them will read this story. Perhaps one of them will remember the story a little differently. Some of them have undoubtedly gone back to Palestine, some will have emigrated somewhere. Some are parents and grandparents. Some probably became doctors or lawyers. Some, probably, joined Hamas or Hezbollah or some other militant group. Those that live are still displaced refugees born of a series of misbegotten events that long predated their births and mine.
Perhaps they still live in Switzerland. Perhaps they now live in Gaza. Perhaps they are dead.
* * * * *
How did we get from the Zurich Youth Hostel 1973 to Gaza 2023?
History is not just one damned thing after another. History is what happens to each of us. It's the water we live in even if, like fish, we aren't aware of it. What occurred fifty years ago, a hundred, and a thousand years ago, here and over there, affects us today and will affect everyone else in the future (should humankind have a future).
Everywhere there's a road map. Knowing what actually happened and what paths you traveled helps you to know where you are, how you got here and where you are heading. Knowing all of that can help you change direction, if you want to. Thus, knowing "all that history stuff" is an exercise in free will, self-awareness, autonomy and independence. That is precisely why so much energy is invested in misstating facts, fictionalizing, bowdlerizing and revising history; so that you will find it hard to change direction, so you won't know where you are or understand how you got here.
To twist the old proverb, What you don't know won't hurt Them; but what you do know might.
In November 1917, the British Empire declared, as vaguely nuanced aspirations, that after the Great War (World War I was called the Great War although there was nothing "great" about it), the Jews who resided in Palestine could have home rule, more or less, kind of, sort of. Simultaneously, the British Empire declared "that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Now how on earth was this supposed to happen? Nobody knew. Nobody explained. Nobody cared.
This was the infamously ambiguous Balfour Declaration. Of course, the British Empire had no authority (although it had the de facto power) to declare who would live where in the Middle East. The Empire's imperial rights were illegitimate and its unexpressed objectives were equally so. The Balfour Declaration was a classic play from the imperial Roman handbook, divide et impera. It is easier for the foreign occupier to rule, if the locals can be induced to hate and fight among themselves. You see countless examples of that principle today domestically and all around the globe.
The Balfour Declaration, as vague as it was, contradicted another compact, a secret one signed by the French and the British Empires: the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. This secret treaty provided that, after the Great War, the majority of Palestine would be under "international" administration (by "international" they surely meant European nations like France or Great Britain). France and England further agreed that at the conclusion of the "Great War," the rest of the Middle East (including the resource rich and strategically important regions now known as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates), would be apportioned between them. None of this (ahem) self-rule nonsense when it came to the victorious colonialists!
None other than Vladimir Lenin discovered a copy of the Sykes-Picot agreement among the Tsar's secret papers soon after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. War is a racket, wrote the double Medal of Honor recipient Marine Major General Smedley Butler. The secret Sykes-Picot agreement proved General Butler's point.
To the immense embarrassment of the French and British governments, Lenin sought to end World War I by disclosing to everyone the Great Powers' true and deceptive intentions. Lenin published the secret Sykes-Picot document. He described it as "the agreement of colonial thieves." It was a WikiLeaks kind of moment. Little wonder, therefore, that "the West" continues to anathematize the Bolshevik Revolution, just like it anathematizes Julian Assange.
Why did the British Empire issue the Balfour Declaration when it did? By late 1917, the trench warfare of World War I had ground to a bloody stalemate. Support for the Great War was flagging despite the unrelenting pro-war propaganda. The United States had earlier joined the fray as a direct belligerent, but its impact was not yet decisive. A month before the Balfour Declaration, in October 1917, the Bolsheviks had overthrown Tsarist Russia and declared the new socialist state's intention to make peace and quit fighting. Lenin, by disclosing the secret deal of Sykes-Picot, had ripped the veil from the Great War and revealed it to be not so great after all. It was no more than just another capitalist gambit to colonize, exploit and expropriate. The soldiers on all fronts were exhausted. They were metabolizing through brutal and direct experience the purgative of revolution. The home front was worn out, impoverished and cynical. The Russian Empire had been overthrown. The German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs were teetering. Troops on all sides were beginning to refuse orders, to desert, to mutiny. The soldiers everywhere just wanted to stop fighting. They wanted to go home... preferably alive, whole and intact.
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had told the U.S. Congress that America needed to enter the war "to make the world safe for democracy." This sounds rather like the American/NATO/EU bromide about their current war against Russia in the Ukraine. The veneer of Wilson's war to "make the world safe for democracy" was stripped off by Lenin's disclosure months later of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement to recolonize the Middle East.
As though in response to the bombshell of the Sykes-Picot bombshell, Wilson, in early 1918, then proclaimed his famous Fourteen Points as the basis for a just and lasting peace. These were two of the key provisions of Wilson's blueprint for a post-war world:
Point 1: Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view; and
Point 5: A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable government whose title is to be determined.
It is obvious that Point 1 meant that secret colonial agreements like Sykes-Picot would be verboten after the war (we all know how that worked out, don't we!). Equally obvious was Point 5 which, in an echo of the Balfour Declaration, kind of, sort of, implied self-rule, more or less, for colonized peoples everywhere. Or, at least, the hope of decolonization... which, of course, contradicted what the victorious combatants actually intended by secret agreement.
The Balfour Declaration's vague promises served to shore up support for the War at home and build local opposition to the German-allied Ottoman Empire. The doddering Ottoman Empire, of course, was the colonizer du jour in the Middle East. If France and Great Britain proposed to oust the Ottomans, it was merely to substitute themselves as colonial overlords. They had no genuine intention of allowing "self-rule" for anyone in Palestine - neither for Jews nor Palestinians - any more than they intended to decolonize anywhere else in their empires. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
World War I also was surreally described in its propagandist heyday as the "War to End All Wars." Of course, it did no such thing. In fact, World War I did not end, but simply paused to catch its breath. Thus was the stage set 30 years later for what we know as World War II, but which was really just a continuation of the first one. World War II, in turn, also never ended but flowed seamlessly into the so-called "Cold War" (which was very "hot" indeed, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War and a mind-boggling abundance of bloody coups and insurgencies throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, South and Central America). The very hot "Cold War" flowed directly into our current state of world-wide belligerence which is not World War III, but the natural, direct and uninterrupted continuation of the as yet unresolved Second Hundred Years War that began in 1914.3
And that's why Gaza.
The contradictory winds of World War I fanned the nationalist aspirations that were lit centuries ago. Wilson, in 1918, seemed to promise the emancipation of the world's colonized peoples. A fusty and bigoted pedant, Woodrow Wilson, might have meant something, kind of, sort of, like his Fourteen Points... but only for 'civilized' Europeans and Americans. Wilson lacked both the political will and the moral fiber to actually follow through with his Fourteen Points for anyone else. He basically abandoned his Fourteen Points in the face of continental European and U.S. congressional opposition. In other words, it was Sykes-Picot time again, and the colonial victors in the war "to make the world safe for democracy" had no intention whatever of implementing "democracy" or emancipating anyone if they could help it.
The "nations" that the victors did "emancipate" after World War I were primarily those possessed by the losers - the German Reich, Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Thus, out of the ashes of World War I were born so many of the Central and Eastern European state-lets that, in various stages of political evolution, have merged, dissolved, united, fought, transmogrified, Balkanized and sometimes outright disintegrated such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia,Yugoslavia, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, etc. After the war, Africa continued to be partitioned among European colonizers. India and nearby lands remained British and European colonies. So did Southeast Asia and China, with the exception that an increasingly militaristic Japan (as a colonial wannabe) was "permitted" to carve out for itself, like the Europeans had already done, a large piece of the senescent Qing Dynasty's Chinese lands.
Immediately on the heels of the Armistice, the western powers of the United States, Britain and France (plus Japan), along with allies from Finland and the Baltic states, actually invaded the Soviet Union from the north and the east. The 1918 U.S. invasion of the Soviet Union has been swept under the carpet of American history. It is simply more proof that World War I did not "end" - it simply moved east. The U.S., France, Great Britain, Japan and their allies (including many demobilized German soldiers and Freikorps officers from the defeated Reich4) fought in support of the counter-revolutionary "white" forces opposing the Bolsheviks. They tried to "liberate" and reinstate the Romanov family to the tsarist throne. And, of course, they tried to bite off and "administer" big pieces of valuable Russian territory. The British, French and American occupying forces directly participated in and prolonged the Civil War in the Soviet Union for nearly two years remaining right through 1919. Japan, in the East, continued to occupy Soviet territory even longer. Japan eventually withdrew its occupation of Soviet land and then immediately occupied more of China.
Thus was the groundwork laid for the the next stage of the Second Hundred Years War, aka World War II, that, in turn, morphed into the Cold War as well as the world war we currently experience. It's an unbroken chain of causal events. It's not a pretty or heroically patriotic picture notwithstanding what we learned in high school and college.
But what about Palestine? you ask. How do you get from the Zurich Youth Hostel in 1973 to Gaza in 2023?
Within the shifting boundaries of the states created and dissolved in the aftermath of world war, there were also state-less minorities who either did not identify with the newly described political entities, or political entities that wanted to expel those same minorities to some other political entity. Among these state-less minorities were the Jews, primarily of Central and of Eastern Europe, who variously wished to integrate as full-fledged citizens of the countries where they resided; or to create a state of their own like every other peoples' state; or just to be left alone. The Jews of Europe did not hold monolithic opinions. Some, were Zionists. Some emigrated elsewhere. Some were integrationists. Some, like my maternal grandfather, were members of the Bund, an organization that shared some of the ideology and methods of the Bolsheviks.
The Zionist inclination toward a distinct nation - let alone a nation situated on the lands of Palestine - was just one of many sober or harebrained ideas under discussion. The idea of actually forming a Jewish state in Palestine, although previously considered, did not crystallize until baited by Wilson's Fourteen Points and the Balfour Declaration. It did not become reality until Nazi Germany and the extermination camps of World War II gave the nationalist impulse an existential urgency. The Jewish remnants of Europe grasped for a nationalist straw of salvation. With a kick and a shove from the "winning" states (that did not want to absorb any such numbers of Jewish "displaced persons"), the Zionist impulse prevailed and Israel was created in 1948.
So was the Palestinian Nakba, "the catastrophe" of their forced displacement by an influx of Jewish refugees created by a European civilization and culture that had proved itself neither civilized nor cultured. Catastrophe piled on catastrophe piled on catastrophe. At the bottom of the heap were the Palestinians.
This is not just the history of Palestine, for, truth be told, it was no different in North America. The European colonists gobbled up native lands, corralled the American peoples on reservations (more or less similar to Gaza), crushed their culture, constrained them, starved them, vilified them, treated them as savages and earnestly tried to wipe them out. Just as modern Israel has done to the Palestinians.
1973 was an eventful year for me. Several months after my night in the Zurich Youth Hostel, I spent six weeks in Jerusalem as part of a travel-study program sponsored by ZIS, the German affiliate of the French Zellidja association. It was my first and only visit to Israel.
Israel impressed me. But it was a land of contradictions and mirages. It was a thin layer of modern techno-crazy Euro-American society floating like an oil sheen on five thousand years of antiquity. There were ghosts everywhere. In Israel, I ran across older men who bore blue ID numbers that had been branded onto their arms in the concentration camps. I encountered young, self-assured and flirtatious uniformed women just my age who didn't fear to make eye contact because they slung loaded Uzi sub-machine guns across their chests. I met - and lived with - devoutly religious yeshiva students who neither recognized, nor approved, nor participated in, nor interacted with the state or its army. I saw priests and rabbis and imams, pilgrims, modern day Crusaders, hallucinating fanatics, cultists, self-proclaimed prophets, seers, ascetics, charlatans, monks, nuns, mystics, penitents, zealots, scholars and raving lunatics from every known religion and sect, all crossing each others' paths, but not interacting. And I saw the local, mostly sullen Palestinian populations who, it seemed to me, were treated like second-class Gastarbeiters such as I had met in the Zurich Youth Hostel.
Shortly after I returned from Israel to Munich, the Yom Kippur War broke out. I wasn't surprised.
When the latest war involving Hamas broke out in 2023, I was surprised; but only because something like it had not happened sooner.
Hamas, itself, if not created by Israel, has been supported by it for many years to counter Hezbollah and the PLO. In an analogous way, the U.S. originally supported Osama bin Laden and his religious fundamentalists as a counter-force to the Soviet supported socialist regime in Afghanistan. The idea was, again, divide et impera. By splintering Palestinians among rival factions, at least some factions in Israel - for "Israel" is no more monolithic than the Jewish Weltanschauung is or ever has been - intended to prevent the creation of any independent Palestinian state. Israel certainly knew in advance that Hamas would attack, though possibly not as aggressively as it did. Did Israel deliberately allow the attack to occur as a pretext for yet another Nakba, another expulsion of Palestinians from land that Israel coveted? Was there an elaborate sub-plot to induce Iran to directly attack Israel in support of Hamas, thus ensnaring the United States to attack and destroy Iran, consistent with the ravings of Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley and their neocon war party?
Who knows? Someone does, but they will never tell the likes of you or me. This much I do know:
War is, indeed, a racket, and a lot of people here and abroad make oodles of money selling the weapons to kill people and destroy property. War is big business. War generates jobs, preserves political power and keeps the economies of many countries afloat, including the U.S. economy.
Regardless whether Israel orchestrated or merely "permitted" the 2023 attack to occur, it had the look of a violent slave-uprising: the Spartacus led revolt against Rome in 71 B.C.; Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831. In pacifying the violent Spartacus revolt, the Roman military commander Marcus Licinius Crassus crucified 6,000 prisoners of war along the Appian Way. In suppressing the violence of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, Virginia hanged people en masse and imposed still harsher slave laws. Was Benjamin Netanyahu's wrathful reaction to Hamas in 2023 terribly different from Rome's vengeance against Spartacus, or Virginia's against Nat Turner and America's slaves?
Or was what happened in 2023 more like the Great Sioux War of 1875-76 when decimated remnants of America's Indian tribes fought a ferocious, but losing war rather than obey the mandate of President Ulysses S. Grant to relocate them yet again to a small patchwork of barren reservations?
Or did Hamas's gambit resemble the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 when Jews, walled up inside their urban prison, refused Nazi orders to entrain for the concentration camps, preferring, instead, to die fighting?
The situation in the Middle East is difficult, but not impossible. All who live there are the makers, and victims, of history born of a series of misbegotten events that predate their births and ours.
The policy wonks talk in terms of a two state solution. But this will never work if one of the "states" - presumably Palestine - resembles a patchwork of disconnected Indian reservations. The policy wonks sometimes talk about a "one state" solution. But they dismiss this because that will undermine the concept of the "Jewish State" (a concept that, in my opinion, is illogical, delusional and antediluvian). Perhaps the "no state" solution will work best. But "no state' isn't possible these days when everyone, so it seems, must be contained within borders.
There are many who shed crocodile tears about Gaza, but who do not really want peace in the Middle East - not there any more than anywhere else. Geo-politically, the Islamic World's ruling class has been emasculated and many of its "leaders" are satraps propped up by the West (including the generally useless and superannuated Mahmoud Abbas, the nominal president of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank). The West bullies and demonizes those few states, like Syria and Iran, that resist its will. It has outright destroyed others like Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq.
I honestly have no answers.
I did, however, have an insight once: a night in the Zurich Youth Hostel fifty years ago.
We learned to talk that night. Certainly, we didn't persuade one another of anything. But we really didn't try and persuasion really wasn't the point.
The point was that we made it through the night. By morning, we had come to know each other just a little. There was a glimpse of Menschlichkeit.
I wonder - whatever happened with the people who were at that Zurich Youth Hostel fifty years ago?
Jacques Borel was a French chain of highway restaurants similar to the Howard Johnson rest stop restaurants in the United States circa 1950-70.
The hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 615 is itself surrounded by theories and counter-theories about whether it truly was a hostile act or one coordinated with West Germany to help it off-load the three surviving Black September militants it had captured after the attack on the Israeli Olympics team.
Indeed, we can trace this uninterrupted stream of class and economic warfare back to Joan of Arc. In the latter stages of the "first" Hundred Years War, the peasant girl Joan of Arc tapped the nascent sentiment of national identity. In so doing, Joan's army of Frankish plebes helped to oust the English occupiers from lands we now know as France. Unfortunately for Joan, by infusing nationalist and populist sentiment into her military campaigns, she was deemed a threat to both the French and English ruling class. They did not believe that they owed allegiance to any other than their own class, let alone a motley crowd of armed commoners and nationalists (Ms. Hillary Clinton's so-called "Basket of Deplorables" at that time). Worse still, Joan claimed that God spoke directly to her - no priestly intermediaries necessary! You see echoes of this in Napoleon a few centuries later. Napoleon, at the head of huge volunteer armies of "Citizens" singing the Marseilles and proclaiming The Rights of Man, routed Europe's dynastic forces. Similar to Joan who spoke directly with God, Napoleon crowned himself emperor without any Pope having to enthrone him. Heresy! Egads! shrieked the defenders of the classist status quo in Napoleon's and Jean of Arc's times. Eventually, they captured and banished and (probably) poisoned Napoleon. As for Joan, with the complicity of French and English inquisitors, she was promptly tried and French-fried at the stake. Both the French and English "noblemen" perceived Joan and what she represented as a far greater threat to them than either the French or English "noblemen" presented to each other. It's been naked, uninterrupted class warfare ever since Joan's auto-da-fé and heretics continue to be burned.
You might be struck by the similarity between the coalition that invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 and the US, EU, NATO coalition that is fighting Russia in Ukraine. It is not a coincidence. But that is a story for another day.