03/01/2026
I've been a bit thinky for a while now
https://tooraktimes.com.au/a-field-report-from-the-edge-of-the-idea/
Notes from a Place That Refused to End
The problem with imagining a Jewish–Palestinian future is that everyone keeps starting from the wrong end. They start with borders, flags, sovereignty, or ancient promises — the sort of things that look solid on paper and behave like hallucinations on the ground. Maps have been redrawn so many times here they’ve started to resemble palimpsests: scrape off one certainty and another bleeds through.
A post-national, post-trauma future wouldn’t arrive with a signing ceremony. It wouldn’t look like victory. It wouldn’t even look like justice in the way people like justice to look — neat, proportional, morally symmetrical. It would look like fatigue made functional.
Like two 'peoples finally too tired to keep auditioning for history.
The first thing to go would be the idea that anyone gets to “win” the land. That concept has been strip-mined. Every attempt to secure it permanently has produced the opposite: more fear, more walls, more dead children whose names get folded into speeches. Empire tried. Theology tried. Nationalism tried. None of them delivered safety — just better justifications.
A post-national future wouldn’t erase identity. That’s the fantasy that always kills the conversation. Jews wouldn’t stop being Jews. Palestinians wouldn’t dissolve into some generic civic category. Language, memory, religion, food, grief — all of it stays. What changes is what those things are allowed to do politically. Identity stops being a weaponised credential and becomes what it should have been all along: a personal inheritance, not a governing principle.
The state — whatever shape it takes — would have to be aggressively boring. Equal citizenship, enforceable rights, courts that don’t care which ancestor arrived first or which book you quote. No ethnic master key. No demographic panic buttons. No laws that quietly assume one people is permanent and the other provisional. Trauma hates boredom, which is exactly why boredom is the point.
Movement would matter more than borders. People don’t want flags; they want to get to work without being humiliated. They want water that works, electricity that stays on, and schools that don’t double as memorials. A confederated reality — two political homes sharing a physical one — starts to make sense when you stop pretending separation has ever actually separated anything. The land is already shared. The air never asked permission.
Jerusalem would stop being treated like a trophy and start being treated like a commons, which would feel sacrilegious to everyone and therefore might actually work. Shared municipal governance, protected holy sites, international guarantees where necessary, and local administration where possible. Less destiny, more plumbing. The city doesn’t need another prophecy; it needs reliable rubbish collection and fewer funerals.
Refugees are where the trauma shows its teeth. Everyone wants a single, pure answer — full return, no return, symbolic return, demographic maths disguised as law. A post-trauma future would refuse the purity test. Return for some. Residency for many. Compensation that actually pays. Acknowledgement that doesn’t hedge. Options instead of ultimatums. Dignity without insisting on one ending. Trauma doesn’t heal by being cornered.
Security would have to be demystified. No holy armies. No eternal vigilance mythologies. Just policing that answers to law, not identity. Disarmament that’s phased, verifiable, boring. External guarantees that know when to leave. The goal wouldn’t be perfect safety — that’s another fantasy — but predictability. People can live with fear; they cannot live with arbitrariness.
And then there’s the part nobody likes: memory. You don’t get a post-trauma future by asking people to forget. You get it by making denial socially unacceptable. Truth commissions, open archives, testimony that isn’t immediately litigated or weaponised. Not “everyone was equally wrong,” but “everyone’s losses count, and no one gets to erase the other’s dead.” Memorials that don’t read like threats. Days of remembrance that don’t double as rehearsals for the next war.
Economically, the future would arrive quietly or not at all. Shared infrastructure. Regional trade. Water agreements that assume climate reality instead of divine exemption. Anti-corruption enforcement that understands trauma produces black markets as reliably as it produces martyrs. Nothing heals ideology faster than a job that works and a permit that doesn’t feel like a leash.
What would it feel like, day to day? Less dramatic than anyone hopes. Hebrew and Arabic everywhere, normalised. Mixed neighbourhoods because people chose them, not because someone drew a line. Border crossings that feel like commuting, not confession. Politics that argue about housing density and sewage instead of annihilation. Children who grow up knowing the other side not as an abstraction but as classmates who are annoying for ordinary reasons.
The price of entry is brutal and unavoidable. Palestinians would have to let go of the fantasy that justice looks like reversal — that history can be rewound until Jews vanish back into someone else’s catastrophe. Israelis would have to let go of the fantasy that safety comes from permanent dominance, permanent control, permanent exception. Both fantasies are trauma talking. Neither survives contact with reality.
This kind of future wouldn’t be pure. It wouldn’t be redemptive. It wouldn’t satisfy the metaphysical accountants. It would offend theologians, nationalists, and empire managers equally, which is usually a good sign. It would be held together not by shared belief, but by shared exhaustion and mutual interest in not destroying the place they both refuse to leave.
If Jesus were sitting in the shade of a church watching this unfold — hands in his face, shoulders slumped — he wouldn’t be weeping because people failed to believe the right things. He’d be weeping because they kept insisting on being right instead of being done.
A post-national, post-trauma future wouldn’t mean history finally made sense. It would mean people stopped demanding that it justify itself with blood.
That might be the only miracle left on the table.Like
