The Insubstantiality of Time

How about that old chestnut: "Time heals all wounds". It should, but it doesn't, necessarily. In some instances, memory becomes faint, diluted, the pain recedes.

But in many other instances of, for example, humiliation due to some kind of collective defeat, the memory is kept alive and bitterly nourished generation after generation. The fact is some types of collective assaults on human dignity can be diminished with time, while other types of assaults, vicious and destructive, claiming lives through a political or human violations process on an immense scale will forever rankle.

Armenia's insistence on the memory of the genocide of her people by Turkish forces, an example in point. With Armenia declaring the need for recognition and apology, and Turkey declaring itself innocent of intent. England and Northern Ireland still coming to terms with decades of violence, bombing, terror and slaughter. Asian and African conflicts victimizing ethnic adversaries.

World Jewry's solemn remembrance of the Holocaust, for example, resulting in the collective declaration that the dread assault against a defenceless civilian population that utterly devastated the belief in the commonality and compassion of humankind, would never be forgotten, never forgiven. That the Jewish experience would never be repeated. The Holocaust as code for the deepest recesses of inhumanity.

And then there are so many instances throughout history from the ancient past to the recently past century to the present, of political, ethnic, geographic struggles seeing invasion, conquest, occupation and migration. Borders and boundaries where none had existed. Excluding or including tribal and ethnic, traditional or religious groups, and whose result has been generations of protest, aspirations, conflict and devastation.

Take India, for example, and the convulsive social dislocation that occurred with partition, when Pakistan was born of what was once a part of India. When mass atrocities seemed unavoidable in the passions unleashed between the majority Hindu population and the Muslim population determined to have a country of their own. The two live now, uneasily, side by side, still bitterly arguing over Kashmir, each in possession of nuclear armaments.

There are places in the world where dissolution of a long-standing and ostensibly workable aggregation of peoples occurred, such as with Czechoslovakia. A civil and gentle separation, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia finally deciding to go their own way. Much different from what occurred with the former Yugoslavia. When the iron grip of Marshal Tito saw the federation fall into disarray resulting in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia (Kosovo) and Slovenia going their own way.

Worldwide awakenings of nationalistic yearnings has awakened traditional ethnic populations to the possibilities of independence, of claiming their own autonomous states. Which has resulted in the rise of armed militias representing the aspirations of those ethnic groups, desperately attacking the governments and the politics of those whom they consider to be occupiers of lands denied them as their birthrights.

And then there is Israel and the Palestinians, for whom 60 years has proven no panacea to the struggle of each to maintain their existence. Israel, despite its legality of a nation established to regain its original position within the ancient Middle East, remains an island of refuge for Jews surrounded by a sea of hostile tribes refusing to recognize her legality, intent on keeping the bitter grievance of displaced Palestinians at the fore of their collective rejection of the Jewish state.

The bitter enmity of a people displaced and clamouring for restitution of what they feel is rightfully theirs hasn't been even remotely placated over the space of six decades. That they have secured, through the partition decision issued by the United Nations, two tracts of land alongside that allocated to Israel has never ceased to infuriate the Palestinians. They continue to nurse their festering wound, adamantly refusing reality.

Instead of busying themselves building a nation of their own, they have exercised their plaintive right to complain unceasingly, to foment rebellion and violence against their neighbour. They have been satisfied to sacrifice their advancement as a nation to their denial of reality. They have wallowed in self pity, held their victimization close to their passionate hearts.

Indulged in the passions of rhetorical bombast, while being utterly impervious to reason. A reasonable assent to the status quo, the existence of a neighbouring state, which is ready to accept their partnership in the geography as a nascent and independent state. Which requires the laying down of arms, and a final agreement for peace.

What exists today between the two does not remotely resemble the potential for peace. Numerous truces have been agreed upon, but the many Arab terror militias have seen no reason to respect a complete and permanent truce. Rather they adhere to the long-range plan of biding time until the moment may arrive when they feel they will see success in eradicating the presence of the State that so enrages them in its indomitable presence.

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel." Clearly the former must precede the latter. Time flies, the urgency of a peace settlement has never been more imperative. But how to reach beyond a mass psychosis that greeted the initiation of Israeli independence with "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre".

And sixty years on remains wedded to that pledge.