A nation must think before it acts.
Time marches on, and events that were defining moments for my generation are, at best, familiar to today’s students only through school text books or grainy YouTube footage. Fifty-one years have now passed since Israel conquered the remaining areas of former British Mandated Palestine in a defensive war, sparking in return, the rise of a fighting Palestinian national movement and eventually returning the Arab-Israeli conflict to its core issue. This September 13th marks the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo agreement on the White House lawn, an agreement designed to lead to a two-state solution and thus resolve the century-old conflict. Of course, that outcome was not achieved, and a one-state reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea seems ever more irreversible. This reality in the West Bank territory occupied by Israel in 1967 is one of hierarchy and domination in all spheres of life – legally, militarily, economically, and regarding land and natural resources, with Israeli Jewish settlers (c. 400,00, plus c. 200,000 within eastern Jerusalem) possessing full citizenship and protection, while the lives of 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs (including c. 400,000 within eastern Jerusalem), remain severely circumscribed and precarious.