Does it matter who started all this? Twitter screams yes, yes, yes.

It’s maybe time to say how I make money. State profession, job, source of income. Routinely confused with one’s entire identity.

I teach languages. I have a therapy client here and there and a neglible amount of money comes in via ads on my website or interpreting jobs, but most days I teach. For the past seven years I haven’t gone without teaching for longer than four days or three days even. Usually I teach one on one, but I teach groups as well.

Some of my students wish to discuss current affairs. In English, in German, in Dutch or in French or in Slovak (I don’t teach Slovak, but some of my students switch to Slovak during our lessons when they want to express themselves as precisely as can be).

A few of them wish to devote sometimes an entire hour to understanding the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Even the students who I know make a big effort to follow the news surprise me with their comments.

One of my most hard-working and most proficient students:

‘Hezbollah is a terrorist group in the West Bank, right?’

A common hiatus in the knowledge of my students is that they assume all muslims are the same. Many have never heard of sunnites or shiites or other muslim ‘denominations’. They also assume that all countries with a muslim majority are somehow the best of friends.

I know I know only a little bit more than the students who are the most avid consumers of news articles.

For example in the ever raging Twitter battle over who started this whole mess I often get completely lost.

Before I started talking to Moshe I would most likely have said that the Jews started murdering Arabs in the area now known as Israel and as a result lots of neighbouring countries ganged up on it to stop this and grab the land for themselves. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly I thought about the events leading up to 1948. Perhaps most accurate is to say that my focus was on the Naqba. There was a ‘regular’ war between what’s now Israel and its neighbouring Arab countries and the war went badly for all those Arab allies and the Israelis saw their chance and started ethnically cleansing large areas. Perhaps on a particularly balance seeking day I would have said something like: ‘And the Arabs probably massacred some Jewish civilians here and there as well.’

Today I am prone to believe Moshe when he tells me that those fledgling Arab nations turned on the Jews in Palestine with the explicit motivation of ridding the area of all of them. My pro-Palestinian reflexes automatically go for ‘ridding’ and not for ‘exterminating’. I am the same person who will accuse CNN of sanitizing its language to faciliate Israel committing a genocide. Moshe often calls me ‘intellectually honest’. I tried to be, but most of all I feel extremely confused, if not bewildered.

I am not 100 percent sure who started ‘the whole mess.’

What am sure of is that there was an area of land previously an integral part of the Ottoman empire and when this Ottoman empire crumbled in the wake of its siding with the losers during World War I and this land got to be controlled by the British who at some point promised the same area of land to local and incoming Jews and local and incoming Arabs.

Two groups wanting to have exclusive ownership of the whole thing. The thing being an area of land that was not organized as an independent state at that point.

One of my students made me realize that we are so used to the whole world being divided in nations that we find it hard to envision a situation where there is land that is not part of any established nation. Some land floating in the air.

Where things get blurry for me is how Jews and Arabs in that area treated each other in the years between the end of the Second World War and 1948.

I think that prior to 1948 Jews arriving in the area didn’t systematically evict Palestinians and steal their land. I do think that this is happening in the West Bank right now. I think this is what angers so many people all over the world today.

Moshe says that what is going on in the West Bank is more nuanced than that. The surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank is there to prevent terrorist attacks in Israel. He doubts that the Israeli army systematically helps Jewish settlers to set up camp in the west bank and enroach upon Palestinian land. Amnesty International tends to see things my way on this issue, but I think Moshe and I need to look into the matter more. His comments on the situation in the West Bank have so far not convinced me that Israelis are not aiming to control as much as the land as possible. Us disagreeing on some key aspects of this situation is what makes our talks so valuable in my opinion. I felt woefully underinformed during our conversations, especially during the third talk where I didn’t find the words to describe what I think is going on in the West Bank anno 2023. It’s humbling to discover that and encourages me to study more. By study I don’t mean only reading things that please me.

But back to the search for ‘the original sin’ in the framework of this conflict.

Yesterday I bumped into yet another video of grieveously injured Palestinian kids.

I couldn’t sleep and it was about 1.30 am when perhaps because of fatigue a different idea popped into my head than is usually triggered by brutal footage like that.

I wrote:

A four year old crying because her runny nose hurts already makes me completely tense and cramped because I don’t want a child to be in any kind of pain and then this pops up on my time line and I do wonder why I let this be inflicted upon me. I think I feel complicit if I don’t at least watch the thing when it appears in front of my eyes (I never seek this stuff out). So… have seen yet more gashes, more bones protruding through skin, kids strangely numb and quiet although bleeding all over, almost always on cold looking floors. Whoever reads this can play the usual blame game, but I suppose the first question on these kids minds right now is not who technically speaking slashed them up, amputated their limbs and reduced other body parts to mush. Am not an expert on child psychology but I would bet these injured kids, while bathing in their own blood, are asking if their parents are still alive, if their brothers and sisters are still alive, when their pain will end, if they will ever go back home, if they were bad and caused this to happen to them? Anyway, everyone back to debating who rejected which peace plan some decades ago. We’ll send the results to the surviving kids as soon as Twitter comes with the final verdict on who started all this. The kids are really dying to know

This is lenghty for Twitter attention spans, so the next day I shortened it. While shortening it I had to think of that quote, not sure who said it, ‘I didn’t have time to write you a long letter, so I wrote you a short one’. Yes, writing the short version took me more effort than writing the long version:

The kids in Gaza are dying to find out in which month of which year which big wig rejected whose peace deal. As soon as X has a verdict on who started the whole bloody mess they’ll be informed. For now they can clench their teeth on a stick as a bewildered doc saws off their leg.