Israel-Palestine War is just an advanced land wrangle

The genesis of the Israel-Palestine conflict is a little less nuanced than it is made to look. For one to understand and get a layperson’s understanding of this war, one needs not look far beyond their own backyard. 

The  Ugandan primary and secondary school curricula for Social Studies and History respectively,  give detailed accounts of the migrations of different ethnic groups that currently live in and outside Ugandan borders and beyond.

These accounts trace the geographical origin and ancestry of a people, and many of these accounts have been scientifically, geologically, socially, and culturally proven to be true.

It is a proven fact that for tens of reasons, people used to migrate from one place to another, and never look back, as they would eventually find new locations to call home, at the expense of wherever they came from. 

That is the exact script that the story of the Jewish people and their ancient nation of Israel took, in fact, it is well recorded in the Bible. The only twist in the plot for the Jewish people occurred on November 2, 1917 when, the  Jews, who, for decades had been mooting the possibility of returning to the cradle land (from where their ancestors migrated 2,000 years earlier), were handed the Balfour Declaration by Great Britain. This declaration promised full and unequivocal British support for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The support of the Jewish return to Palestine, by a Superpower that had just won World War I, was not just an endorsement of an idea, but a pledge to see the aspirations and wishes of the Jewish people through. 

This laid the table for the longest and most bloody land dispute in history, given that the land to which the Jews were planning to return, was at the time already inhabited by Palestinians, who equally claimed millennia of ownership by their ancestors.

In the years between 1917 and 1948 when the Jewish state of Israel was formally established by the United Nations, Great Britain not only supported the immigration  of several Jews back to Palestine but also mobilised international support for this exodus. 

What we see today as the Israel-Palestine war is, therefore, nothing but a land dispute that started 105 years ago, when the returning small numbers of Jews were allowed to peacefully settle in parts of the then-Palestinian State. 

As the case has been here, with the Balaalo  in central and northern Uganda, or the Bafuruki  in midwestern Uganda, at some point, the host community started developing feelings of discomfort about the presence of a settler.  To make matters worse, the immigrants had the support of the “establishment”; Great Britain in 1917, followed by the League of Nations in 1922, then the United Nations in 1948, and now the United States of America. 

Unlike the land disputes that we experience here in Uganda where the Bakonzo and Basongora youth use stones, pangas and spears, or women of Amuru hold nude protests, the “communities” involved in the Israel-Palestine land dispute are heavily armed.

While one party has powerful “godparents”, the other party has notorious “ghetto youth”, and these parties are fuelling the two communities that are fighting over land ownership and control to fight in defence of their claim.

The million dollar question is whether the parties to the war are still fighting for land, or the dispute eventually transcended the original objective of the parties and is now about the interests of the “godparents” and the “ghetto youths”? And that is what makes this land wrangle advanced.

Mr James Muhindo is a Mukonzo from Rwenzururu Kingdom. 
Email: [email protected]