There will always be terrorists…

…our job is to give them what they don’t want!

The year is 2030. After the war ended, the international community put great pressure on the State of Israel to agree to creating a Palestinian State. Palestine has now been established for five years. The land ranges from just south of Beit She’an to just north of Arad and the country’s capital is East Jerusalem. The Arab communities have been flourishing, receiving huge financial support from all around the world. The Israeli State continues to flourish.

In the North of Israel, Jews and Arabs live peacefully together. In the South, the kibbutzim have been rebuilt and relations between the Gazans and the Jews on the Gaza strip are strained, but generally peaceful.

However, in the hills around Jerusalem, there is growing unrest in the younger generation of Orthodox Jews. They continue to be taught by their Rabbis about the utopian days when the Jewish state was the stronger power, where there was a real possibility of the Jewish people owning all the land God had promised. Once again, just like in the time of the Torah, they have been forced to leave some of their beloved land.

The youth form an underground freedom fighting group.

On the morning of the 7^th October, 2030, the freedom fighters take large amounts of amphetamines and MDMA, leave their homes, enter nearby Arab villages under cover of darkness, and systematically burn everything to the ground. Those who get in their way are shot or bludgeoned to death.

By the time the army arrives, over one thousand Palestinians have been murdered, and six thousand have been forced to flee their homes. It takes some time to stabilise the situation. Most of the freedom fighting group flee and go into hiding. Those who are captured share the same narrative: the land belongs to us; we will strike again; we will not stop until every last Arab is dead and our rightful land belongs to us.

I wonder how many of you are thinking: this could never happen. And if you are thinking that, exactly which part do you mean?

That the international community would not get fed up with the apartheid in areas of this country (please note, I do NOT call Israel an apartheid state, but yes, there are places where apartheid exists in the occupied territories) and puts an end to it once and for all? I think the cases in the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice show this as entirely possible.

That the two countries could not live and work side by side, peacefully? The existence of the following mixed cities: Haifa, Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Acre, Nof HaGalil, Ma’alot Tarshiha, and Jerusalem, and peace organisations with Arabs and Jews working together such as Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun, Standing together, Hand in Hand, The Parents Circle Families Forum, the umbrella organisations ALLMEP and The Forum of Israeli Peace NGOs, as well as many other Palestinian or Jewish peace organisations, show this vision of peace as entirely possible.

That Jews would never do this? That Jews could never be terrorists?

Look carefully at the first photo. A building destroyed, demolished, burned. No, it’s not a kibbutz in the south, but it’s reminiscent of it, isn’t it? The building is a primary school, or what is left of it. We find a little boy’s scorched lunchbox. Exercise books lie in ashes on the ground of the classrooms. Children’s drawings of tiny houses are still on the whiteboard. The doors of the classrooms are hanging off their hinges, or lying among the smashed pieces of wall on the ground. How can I express the horror of being witness to such a place?

Now look carefully at the second photo. Look at the guard, his hand guiding the young boy, protecting him as he walks up the street. If you could see the look on the boy’s face, the oppressed, one of the victims, afraid in their own home. There must be terrible violence afflicted on them, terrible injustices for this to even exist, right?

This boy is a settler, and he has a guard protecting him because his family have decided to settle in the village of Silwan, an Arab village opposite the three-thousand-year-old ruins of what are argued to be King David’s city. Hence why the settlers believe the city belongs to the Jews. They force the Arabs out of their homes so they can live there. This is why they need protection. And our country, despite its Declaration that “it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”, sends the army into these Arab villages to protect the Jews who are forcefully removing the Arabs. And we, the upright and moral citizens, even provide the funds to enable this to happen.

Look again at the primary school, burned to the ground by settlers, after they had forced all the inhabitants of the village to flee. It’s Khirbet Zanuta, an abandoned village in South Hebron, where the settlers told the inhabitants they had twenty-four hours to pack up and get out, or they would come back and kill them all.

But of course, it’s the settlers who need protecting.

I witnessed all this on a heart-breaking tour of South Hebron, as part of a three-day peace seminar in Jerusalem. This evidence, these pictures, speak more than a thousand words, more than any demonstration, any delegation, any court of justice could summarise in their speeches and their judgements and their sanctions.

The year is NOT 2030. The year is 2024, and we are still at war. We are in a war that has lasted, people say, for almost ten months now. But they are wrong. This war has been going on for decades. This war has been going on because there are terrorists on both sides. There are Arabs who wish all the Jews dead, so they can own all of the land. And there are Jews who wish all the Arabs dead, so they can own all of the land. And it is now under Hamas, one extremist terrorist organisation, that the Arabs suffer, and it is under Netanyahu, a weak, right-wing leader who allows the extremists in the coalition to make decisions, that the Israelis suffer.

One of my friends, born and raised in Israel, could not believe it when I told her the Hilltop Youth are forcing Palestinians from their homes by using harassment and violence. That they have been doing this for years before October 7^th. She could not believe that these Palestinians are peaceful farmers living on their land. “But that means these Jews are terrorists.” She said.

Yes. There are terrorists on both sides. There are good and bad people on both sides. There are victimisers and victims on both sides.

But thank God, there are also peace activists on both sides whose numbers are growing all the time. What does it take for peace activism to truly come into its own? A war. A terrible, horrendous, brutal and ongoing war.

It’s time for us peace activists to step up.

Unspoken terror: photo by Shoshana Lavan

Why do I need protection? Photo by Shoshana Lavan