As I See It By HJS

About Palestine? Well, the story usually gets long and with a lot of different characters, but in a nutshell, this is about it.

Let us say that you have been promised a whole pie and are looking forward to it. You have been a long time without pie. Let us say that your neighbor heard about the promise and complained that nobody ever promised them a pie.

Oh, they have always had a slice of pie any time they wanted one, but they had never done anything to earn a whole pie and had never asked for one. The neighbors maintained a steady cacophony of loud and ill-mannered complaints and law suits, trying to stop the fulfillment of the pie promise and harassed anyone that showed disagreement with their cause. Finally, to avoid more bad feeling, it was decided to share the pie, half for you and half for the neighbors.

Now let us say that on the day that the promise was scheduled to be fulfilled, the pie was put out to cool and
one of the neighbors cut out about ¾ of the pie and ran off with it. No one did anything about the pie-grab, but only a quarter of the pie was left. The other neighbor said that the remainder still had to be split 50-50, even though “the neighbors” already grabbed off 75 per cent of the original pie.

You could have complained that “the neighbors” who were supposed to get 50 percent already took it upon themselves to take 75 percent; however, you know that nobody ever takes your side, so you simply go along with the new split, which incidentally is now 12.5 percent of the pie; a very thin sliver, the other 12.5 percent going to the neighbor who did not get any pie yet (even though he should have shared the 75 percent his relative took).

After the official split, all the neighbors assaulted you to get your thin sliver and you had to fight on and off for years to keep it. To make matters worse, the neighbor who received the other sliver is asking for half of your sliver and everyone in the area, even your dumb friends, thinks that is fair.

Now you are being assaulted all over again to surrender 50 percent of the 12.5 percent you realized from the original promise, which would leave you with only 6.25 percent of the original pie, or half of almost nothing. If you are ever stupid enough to give up 50 percent of what little you have now, you know that directly afterwards, your neighbors will be demanding 50 percent more. And after that...

There are many other parts to the story, none of them fair to Israel. As far as the land part of the Palestinian picture is concerned, that is how I see it.

HJS