“An’ live off the fatta the lan’,” Lennie shouted. “An’ have rabbits. Go on George! Tell about what we’re gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is, and the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that. George.”
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, 1937
George and Lennie are migrant workers moving from ranch to ranch with no place to call their own. George tells Lennie repeatedly, almost prayer like, “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world… They don't belong no place.” They work on a ranch but can’t call it their own and soon they’re back on the road looking for another, temporary place to work and live.
But Lennie and George have a dream, the American Dream, the opportunity to own a piece of land that is their very own: a small plot of land to farm, to grow vegetables, raise rabbits, hunker down in the winter by a fire and know they are safe and have each other to care for.
It’s a small enough, unpretentious wish, surely, to be granted by some universal or local agency can bring it to fruition. George even knows a place with a farmhouse that they can buy with the money that they are saving from each job. As George relates this to Lenny while they camp in the open air next to a small pond, their dream almost shimmers into being. But Steinbeck somehow manages to signal to the reader that this humble enough wish is not to be. And it isn’t.
What does Steinbeck’s novel have to do with Israel and the Jews? As anyone vaguely familiar with biblical history knows, the ancient Hebrews lived in the land that is now Israel and its general surrounding area, beginning from approximately 1,000 B.C. until the Romans finally destroyed their second temple, levelled their capital city of Jerusalem, and drove most of them from the land and into slavery. Many were carried off to Rome, where Hebrew slave labour helped build the Colosseum. Rome was following the playbook for empires: defeat its rival or a small outpost, utterly destroy and ransack the other civilization, raping, killing, pillaging and taking slaves.
To exact further revenge for the Jewish uprising against them, the Romans changed the name of this land from Israel to Palestina, thereby breaking the association of the Hebrews with Israel. From that time forward, the land was referred to as Palestine. Prior to 1948, for example, when Jews had returned to the land in sufficient numbers to grow a culture, their newspaper of record was The Palestine Times, and the orchestra they founded in 1936 was known as the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.
For almost 2,000 years, the descendants of those Hebrews lived in countries and civilizations world-wide. And though they became part of the citizenry to the extent permitted them, over those two millennia their souls, in true Lennie and George spirit, yearned for their little plot of land. While George knew of a place for sale, the Jews also knew of a place, one where they had actually lived and thrived and created The Old Testament. Never forgotten, each Passover their prayers ended, hope against hope, with, “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
And then came the twentieth century and World War I. The Allied forces defeated the Axis powers and gained control of the entire middle east and more. The Ottoman Empire, which had ruled those lands for over 600 years after defeating the Byzantine (Greek Orthodox Christianity) Empire was in turn defeated, losing the war to the Allies.
History accuses the Allies, mainly France and Britain for their self-interested policies, but it’s also fair to say that they didn’t establish yet another empire as all conquerors before them. Instead they carved up the immense property, resulting in the modern boundaries of countries including Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. At the same time, The English Balfour Declaration allowed for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in the land known as Palestine. It seemed reasonable enough, given that whole countries, Arab and Muslim, were being restored or created in this new world order, to offer a sliver of an island in the vast ocean of the former Ottoman Empire, to one of the original peoples who had lived there and therefore were indigenous to the land.
The earlier founding of Zionism was essentially the spiritual and political movement galvanizing and organizing Jewry, helping them to return to their ancient lands once it was made possible.
But the Arab Muslim leadership was not in a similarly generous spirit. They hated the British for the Balfour Declaration. As one Gazan man recently said, “This is our land.” It doesn’t get any plainer than that. And, given the battle cry, “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” he is referring not to a two state solution but to all of Israel. What would happens to the Jews? Various remarks made in the recent weeks and in the past suggest that they go back to Europe, or go to hell. The more generous responses to that question said that some can remain but they can’t have power. And the final answer came on October 7th: a genocidal slaughter of innocents. But of course, they are not innocent to Hamas and much of the Middle Eastern Muslim world, because they are Jews and they are living on what they insist is their land.
Why should they not be willing to share even this small plot of land? There is in Islam the concept of Dar al-Harb which means that once a land falls under Muslim control, it is so forever. Even should Muslims lose control of it, they must persevere to get it back. Any political contract between Muslims and a current - what they would call “occupier” of their land, is only for expediency, until such time as they can reconquer it. Now apply this to the land of Israel, which they regard as their lands because the Arabs conquered it in the 6th century, and because the Ottoman Empire, even though not the Muslim Arab dynasty, were Muslims.
Muslims refer to 1948 as the Nakba, the catastrophe. Although about 800,000 Arabs were apparently displaced, so were the same number of Jewish people displaced from the Arab lands like Syria, where they had lived for hundreds of years. Wars, unfortunately, usually mean mass migration and settlement. So, the Nakba is really about what the Muslims insist are their lands, now and in perpetuity, being lost to the Jews. Worse, the Jews were once second class citizens in Muslim countries with no rights other than what the rulers decided to allow them, forced to pay the Jizya – a head tax – in order to live.
With the Jews now reestablishing their own country on land the Muslims had recently owned, and being free and equal masters in their own home, it must have galled Muslim leadership terribly. Five Arab countries invaded Israel immediately after it declared independence in 1948, promising to destroy the Jews and drive them into the sea. But it didn’t happen and the Jews survived. This also was unforgivable. They were supposed to die, certainly not to embarrass the Arab armies. In reality, the war never stopped: what is happening in Gaza today is an extension of that war, along with the wars of 1956, 67 and 73. When people look for original causes, asking what Israel did to anger the Gazans, this is the answer. They were supposed to die. Instead, they exist in land that Muslim Arabs have unilaterally appropriated to themselves forever. That’s a key concept that bears repeating: Israel’s historic land is land that Muslim Arabs have unilaterally appropriated to themselves and their future generations until the end of time.
The fact that Israel existed for fourteen hundred years before the beginning of the Muslim era is irrelevant in this argument. When Jews argue their history and roots to the land, creative Muslim scholars deny their claim and now say that they are descendants of the Canaanites, and so they are the real indigenous people. This is said without a shred of proof, without a biblical history, without archeology, without genetic testing, all of which argue in favour of the Jewish claim.
After the war of 1967, when Israel recaptured east Jerusalem and what is the west bank from Jordan, the Arab league Conference in Khartoum, declared the three Nos:
No Peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel; No negotiations with Israel.
How can anyone, in light of all this, continue to argue for a two state solution? Nevertheless, for four times, Israel leaders made the offer and each time the proposal was rejected. It is once again being promoted as the solution, even after the massacre on October 7 and even after a Hamas leader said on television that they will commit such activities again and again.
In its Covenant, its founding charter, Hamas states:
*Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.
*The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.
*Palestine is an Islamic land. Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be.
This is a genocidal statement, yet Arab countries and western society insist that Israel is to blame and should share the land. They have no answer to the simple truth: when one side wants all the land and for the Jews to leave it, what options are left for negotiating? It is as if George and Lennie finally bought that farm and settled in, living their dream, when along comes a group of, let’s say ranchers, who say, “We used to graze our cattle on these lands. It wasn’t anyone else’s to sell. We want the farm back. Every square inch. Either you leave, or…” and as in the old western movie cliché, they unsheathe their six gun shooters and aim them at poor George and Lennie. “We’ll be back and you’d better be gone.”
For almost seven million Israeli Jews, who only 75 years ago barely managed to survive one Holocaust, the reality of a second Holocaust is terrifying. Whereas George and Lennie might try contacting the cavalry, given the state of world politics and the corrupted rot of an antisemitic, anti-Israel U.N., no cavalry will arrive anytime soon to save Israel and its Jewish citizens. And so it wages war desperately, fighting not just people, but an ideology forged in religious fundamentalism and an unadulterated hatred of anyone, especially the Jews, who wish only to live in peace on the land that they once inhabited.