Domination cannot endure without belonging, and belonging cannot exist without justice.
The modern world likes to believe it has left the age of conquest behind. We have drawn borders, signed treaties, and founded institutions meant to protect human dignity from the appetite of empire. Yet, despite the intricate machinery of law and diplomacy, entire peoples still live without protection. The promises of the United Nations, repeated in the language of resolutions and cease-fires, have become a ritual of impotence. Gaza burns; the West looks away. Each time a child’s cry pierces the smoke, a clause in international law dies a little more.
History offers echoes too clear to ignore
The Middle East is called volatile, but perhaps it is not the region itself that breeds turmoil. The instability may be the inevitable consequence of a presence that was never allowed to belong. Israel, founded in 1948 as a refuge for the survivors of Europe’s catastrophe, quickly became a Western fortress in an Eastern land. From the beginning, its identity was shaped not by its surroundings but by its distance from them. It sought protection not among its neighbours but from powers across the sea. Thus, the geography of Asia was made to host the psychology of Europe — an arrangement that could only sustain itself through perpetual defence.
History offers echoes too clear to ignore. Nine centuries ago, the Crusader kingdoms rose from similar designs: European enclaves planted in the Levant, built upon faith and fear, fortified by distant patrons. The Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted almost two hundred years — long enough to believe itself eternal—before Saladin’s armies reclaimed the city and the tide of history receded. Those Latin fortresses fell not merely to the sword, but to the weight of their own estrangement. They had conquered the land, but never truly belonged to it. Their stones, now ruins under the sun, remind us how fragile foreign power becomes when it loses moral legitimacy.
Israel is a nation both of the West and in the East
Israel’s condition mirrors that paradox. Militarily unassailable yet spiritually isolated, it exists as a state that competes in Europe’s tournaments and sings in Europe’s festivals while occupying the soil of the Middle East. It is a nation both of the West and in the East, and that tension defines its tragedy. The West embraces it as a mirror of its own values—democracy, technology, progress—while forgiving what those same values deny: the dispossession of other people. Russia, the self-appointed rival of Western hypocrisy, fares no better; it invokes anti-imperial rhetoric even as it builds its own empire by other means. Between these poles of power, Palestine remains the moral wound of our time—a people surviving in the interstice between words and deeds.
Moral renewal, not conquest, is the only path to peace
International law, designed to protect the weak, becomes a stage for the powerful to perform remorse. Reports are written, condemnations issued, and embargoes postponed. The world’s conscience turns bureaucratic. In this atmosphere, the idea of deliverance returns — not as a political program, but as a moral necessity. When justice is denied by institutions, it reemerges as prophecy. The oppressed, having exhausted the patience of diplomacy, begin to imagine a figure who will speak for them: not a conqueror, but a conscience strong enough to awaken the world.
Every age of humiliation has birthed such figures. Moses faced Pharaoh with nothing but a voice. Gandhi carried no weapon but his refusal to obey. Mandela emerged from prison to forgive rather than to avenge. These leaders were not saints untouched by anger; they were humans who transmuted anger into moral power. They remind us that a messiah is not one who conquers the enemy, but one who restores the meaning of humanity to both oppressor and oppressed.
For the Palestinian people, that hope is not abstract. It is a daily act of survival—of planting olive trees in scorched earth, of writing poetry in the ruins of schools, of refusing to forget the names of villages erased from maps. Their endurance itself becomes a quiet form of messianic faith: the belief that no wall, however high, can contain the dignity of the human spirit. If a new leader arises among them, it will not be to wield a sword, but to reclaim language, to remind the world that justice is not a Western invention but a universal birthright.
The fall of the Crusader kingdoms offers a lesson, but not a blueprint. History does not repeat; it reveals. The lesson is that domination cannot endure without belonging, and belonging cannot exist without justice. When a state’s existence depends on denying another people their freedom, it builds its own walls of isolation. Power may postpone reckoning, but it cannot abolish it. The Messiah of the Oppressed is not a single person—it is the awakening of conscience that renders oppression unsustainable.
No empire has ever survived the truth it refused to face. The stones of Jerusalem, worn by prayers from every faith, have outlasted all who claimed them. One day, perhaps, they will no longer echo with rival anthems, but with a shared silence — the silence that follows when justice finally speaks. Until that day, the hope of the oppressed will continue to rise, not from the palaces of the mighty, but from the tents of those who still believe that moral renewal, not conquest, is the only path to peace.
