Not Our War
Two groups of people are screaming at each other in Australian streets about a piece of land twelve thousand kilometres away. Nobody is asking who drew the lines in the first place.
Two groups of people are screaming at each other in Australian streets about a piece of land twelve thousand kilometres away. Nobody is asking who drew the lines in the first place.
Two groups of people are screaming at each other in Australian streets about a piece of land twelve thousand kilometres away.
Both are convinced they're on the right side of history.
Neither is asking who drew the lines in the first place.
In 1917 the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter. One page. Seventy-seven words. He promised a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine.
Palestine was already inhabited.
The British knew this. They wrote it into the letter. The establishment of a Jewish homeland should not prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
They made the promise anyway.
At the same time British diplomats were promising Arab leaders independence in exchange for fighting the Ottomans. Lawrence of Arabia wasn't a movie. It was a recruitment operation. Fight with us, they said. You'll have your sovereignty when it's over.
They lied.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement was being drawn up simultaneously. Two men. A map. A pencil. The entire Middle East divided into British and French spheres of influence. Straight lines through cultures and communities and histories that had existed for thousands of years.
Britain promised the same land to multiple people and then administered the resulting chaos for thirty years.
When it became too costly (too complicated, too bloody, too much) they did what the British imperial system always does.
They left.
They handed the problem to the United Nations in 1947 and walked away. No resolution. No framework that could actually hold. Just the departure and the paperwork.
The conflict that followed has never stopped.
Over a million dead. Multiple wars. Generations on both sides who have known nothing but the wound. A humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. A security crisis in Israel. An entire region shaped by lines drawn by men in London who never lived within five thousand kilometres of the consequences.
That's the origin.
And here's what nobody says out loud.
The same institution that created this wound is the one with its fingerprints all over the Western response to it. The same Chatham House that manages the narrative. The same establishment media that frames the debate, sets the terms, decides which suffering is visible and which isn't. The same NGO infrastructure that funds the protest movements. The same university system that loads the cause into young minds and calls it political awakening.
The British imperial system created the conflict. And now it manages the outrage about the conflict. Both sides. Simultaneously.
Pro-Palestinian marches organised by the same institutional machinery that manufactures every approved cause. Pro-Israel lobbying backed by its own network of institutional pressure. Both using Western cities as their theatre. Both demanding that Australians declare allegiance to a war that has nothing to do with Australian sovereignty, Australian land, or Australian lives.
Except it does now.
Because it's here.
In our universities. Our streets. Our workplaces. Our families.
A generation of young Australians handed someone else's wound and told it was their fight. Given the flags, the chants, the moral urgency, and pointed at each other instead of at the system that imported the division and benefits from the noise.
While Australia's actual problems go unnamed.
Housing.
Manufacturing.
Energy.
Sovereignty.
A working class abandoned by both parties.
A country rich in resources that can't afford to house its own people.
Nobody is marching about that.
Because nobody loaded that cause into the curriculum.
The British imperial system created this conflict in 1917. Walked away from it in 1947. And is now watching it play out in cities it no longer has to govern, while collecting the benefit of divided, distracted Western populations who are too busy fighting each other to ask who drew the original lines.
Not our war.
Their mess.
Our streets paying the price.
And the only thing more remarkable than what they did is that nobody's pointing at who did it.
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
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