*EDWINA CHARLES, BA, BSc (Hons)*
Peace on Earth? An impossible dream, many would argue. Jesus Christ desired it passionately, and evil-doers made him pay for it by his Passion… for two thousand five hundred years of recorded history (adding the Christians onto the classical Greeks) mankind is still deprived of global peace. Worse, post-modern politicians preach it but warmonger continuously in the corridors of power like primitive barbarians. The lies and hypocrisies touted about in international forums (United Nations, European Union, and NATO etc.) are comical, were they not intensely dangerously bellicose – those who love playing with fire on the brink, may unwittingly suddenly fall into the abyss, and plunge the world with them, as it happened in the First World War!
Assuming that the Israeli-Arab conflict is one of the worst of casus belli in the history of mankind, and reason for many seemingly unrelated wars in our own times, a successful peaceful resolution of it may serve as a paradigm shift for achieving the same in other national conflicts.
At least that seems to me to be the logic of Mr. Richard Skellington, poet, and the very distinguished Editor-in-chief of the Open University website Forum. A Sociologist, course-book writer, and a founding father of Britain’s largest University with over 260,000 students nowadays, Mr. Skellington has done great honours to Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian by picking on his PPPP – Professor Pilikian’s Peace Plan – as the most practical and doable action to achieve a just peace – an agreeable peace with acceptable Justice – in the Middle East. There simply is not another one comparable on the international table; https://www.open.edu/openlearn/people-politics-law/politics-policy-people/society-matters/thinking-outside-the-box-resolving-the-palestinian-problem
“One wonders what the war-crimes perpetrator, ex British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been paid for (they say) a million English pounds per annum, for a decade now loitering and soliciting in the oil-rich Middle Eastern Sultanates, and Emirates, and pseudo-Kingdoms … invented by the British imperialists”, wonders Professor Pilikian (personal communication). At least the Professor had offered his plan on a Google-Blog for nothing, back in … 2007 https://israel-arab-conflict-solved.blogspot.co.uk/
And if adopted then, many thousands of lives would have been saved, let alone the latest war-crimes in Gaza.
An intellectual opponent of Professor Pilikian is his dear friend Maestro Alberto Portugheis, a renowned Concert-Pianist, Musicologist, author, and nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago. Maestro Portugheis has his own maverick passion, battling for the elimination of the Arms-industry, and he won’t accept that the Professor is totally on his side… The Maestro thinks they disagree, as he considers all efforts for peace completely wasted as long as the Arms-industry flourishes globally and subverts every attempt for peace, considering everybody to be naive who thinks otherwise.
Professor Pilikian agrees that he may be a tad naive, but he points out that without it producing some Hope and “naive optimism”, Life has been made unbearable by ultra-capitalist inhumanity, skinning people alive daily everywhere in the world. The increase in global poverty on an industrial scale (people living off garbage dumps in India, Africa, and Brazil, Junk-Food-banks in Britain) is horrendous and pure satanic evil, while the few of the bank-robbers live in heavenly splendour, deluded that they have escaped god’s justice.
“About 2,500 years ago (and half a millennium before Jesus Christ), history’s first great Greek Tragedian Aeschylus wrote a Trilogy (Oresteia), to work out the Democratic principle for conflict resolution. He could have been as naive, by defining it as the abrupt break in the reciprocity of Revenge-acts. Not his words, but I adopt proudly his unambiguous implication expressed through his plotline – the great war-monger and destroyer of Troy, Agamemnon is killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is then killed by their son Orestes… by the ancient primitive barbaric laws and rituals of Revenge, they were all doing their “moral” duties by acting on the principle of an-eye-for-an eye, and a tooth-for- a-tooth Revenge cycle ad infinitum et absurdum. One man, Aeschylus, a great poet could see that the murderous revenge reciprocity MUST stop, before mankind itself ends! The Furies, a gaggle of female spirit-monsters with frightening looks, had the duty to harass and persecute mother-killers to their own death. Aeschylus invites them to the Pnyx, a promontory in Athens near the Parthenon, where the world’s first democratic parliament was constituted. The god Apollo with his ‘lawyers’ also gets there, and in a gloriously logical argument succeeds through give-and-take (the principle of democratic Negotiation) persuading the Furies to give up their Revenge obligations, transformthemselves into good-spirits with beautiful looks, become the guardians of the democratic city-state of Athens, which begins to flourish economically in peace-time, and as a direct result of it! I cannot say who is more naive, Aeschylus, me or my friend Maestro Portugheis – but one thing is certain; the democratic principle of breaking down the vicious Reciprocal Revenge-cycle via negotiations (defined as give-and-take) CAN bring about a just peace. Revenge, unfortunately, is a most despicable Semitic feature, prominent in the Old Testament, where even God is infected by it… thank god comes the New Testament Jesus Christ preaching unconditional total Love even of mortal enemies, but alas, only to be ignored and unjustly murdered. Semites (Jews and Arabs alike, step children of Abraham), still behave by the dictates of Reciprocal Revenge endlessly ridiculously murdering each other, and OBSCENELY ALL IN THE NAME OF God!! You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Jacob (named “Israel” by God himself) could not prevent his obnoxious children selling their sweetest youngest brother Joseph into … Slavery. Two thousand years later, the Israelis (= all … Jacob-s) treat their brethren Palestinian Arabs as their slaves”, concludes Professor Pilikian.
Two points of the PPPP render it totally practical; The Professor’s Aeschylean definition of the breaking down of the vicious Reciprocal Revenge Cycle (worthy of an acronym – RRC) through give-and-take negotiations. It is incredibly foolish of Israeli negotiators wanting to take-take-take, and all, giving nothing or little in return, which has been the feature of Middle Eastern pseudo-negotiations without exception hitherto.
All charges of naivety suddenly fly out of the window altogether with the Professor’s simple, scholarly, factual, straightforward, and extraordinary discovery of the possible elimination of the name Israel as a political entity. No need for Hamas rockets and mad underground tunnels, hate-filled suicide bomber jackets murdering thousands. One can do it with the flick of a ball-point pen – and here is where Professor Pilikian’s genius lies. At a time (in the Seventies) when no one in Britain was called a genius (except Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci), Professor Pilikian as a legendary young theatre-director was so baptized by Hugh Cruttwell, no less than the Principal of the world-famous RADA – Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts ;
Pilikian’s scholarly factual observation is impeccable;
(1)The founder of Zionism and the first dreamer of a country for the Jews called it The Jewish State (the original in German; Der Judenstaat) not Israel.
(2)The Balfour Declaration which turned Herzl’s dream into reality displays no awareness at all of any “Israel”, just a Jewish “homeland” – “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people» – See more at: https://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/E210CA73E38D9E1D052565FA00705C61#sthash.Cu5ooYRr.dpuf.
(3)When the British transferred their protective mandate of the country, named Palestine, to the United Nations,
(4)It was legitimized in UN records made historical, as the Palestine Mandate.
“My father’s name was Israel, and is my proud second name; strangely very rare among the Jews of Israel proper”, confirms Professor Pilikian, “I never met anyone in Israel, named Israel like myself! Let everyone in Israel name themselves “Israel” if they wish, like my father, but why abuse it as the name of a country or people, when historically it was no more than the alternative name of a father (Jacob) backstabbed by his own children!”
Professor Pilikian’s “discovery” of this uncontroversial historical fact is comparable to the discovery of the atom in the 20th c. The “atom” has existed since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, but it was only at the beginning of the 20th c. that Rutherford and Bohr “discovered” the Atom. The fact that the name of Israel was a person’s name (the Patriarch Jacob’s) was known for two thousand years, but as a name not-used in international law can serve as a momentous basis for a bout of practical, democratic, civilized negotiations by breaking down the despicable RRC (Reciprocal Revenge vicious-Circle), to finally achieve a just peace, that can serve as a model for achieving peace all around the globe. And that would be truly the greatest achievement of mankind – heavenly peace – after two thousand years of hell on earth.
Another first is that it will be a peace constructed by … creative artists – poets, musicians, theatre directors … not the inhuman politicians and military straw men. A simple summary of Professor Pilikian’s Peace Plan possesses the beauty of a perfect mathematical formula much strived after in pure Mathematics.
And it is impossible not to join with yet another poet, Mrs. Phaedra Behrent’s most beautiful statement expressed most beautifully, and published as a Comment on the OU website, wishing the PPPP a Nobel Peace prize status and legitimacy.
Here is the simple summary of the PPPP from the 2007 website;
https://israel-arab-conflict-solved.blogspot.co.uk/
* Rename [and declare] present-day Israel as New Palestine
* Rename [and declare] The State of Israel as The Hebrew State
* Rename [and declare] the West Bank as The Arab State
* Declare New Palestine to be a Federative Union Between The Hebrew State and The Arab State
* With Jerusalem as the universal Capital city
* With Tel-Aviv as the Capital City of the Hebrew State
* Ramallah as the Capital City of the Arab State
