Did you know that east of the
Mediterranean Sea there’s only a narrow strip of fertile land before the
mountains rise up? No?
Well, quite likely you have
heard a lot about this area in the media, without realizing it is just a narrow
strip of land with lots of people living there.
Here are the present-day
names: Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. And you may say: ‘Hey, it’s that
area where rage and suffering never ends. The people have fought one another
since biblical times and it still goes on.’
That's right. The violence is structural and age-old.
See, the fertile strip of land
was part of the Fertile Crescent, where humans took to the cultivation of food
grains 12,000 years ago and populations grew rapidly.
But in the narrow corridor
they had much less space for expansion than in other parts of the Crescent,
such as in Egypt or Iraq. So, in the Corridor the population grew beyond what
the fertile land could provide for. People resorted to life in the mountains
which brings small communities existing fairly isolated from each other or
fighting each other.
Second, while communities in
and near the Corridor remained weak by their small size and mutual fights,
other societies in the Crescent expanded and built large armies. They moved
over long distances and often came through the Corridor.
Next to scarcity and mutual
fighting, the Corridor communities faced a long series of terrorizing
occupations, oppressions, exploitations and deportations by the empires of
Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and, in
the end, also West Europeans.
So it came that the formation
of stable political structures in and around the Corridor remained disrupted.
Fragmentation reigned and mutual fighting between small communities went on.
This became so deeply ingrained in the unconscious of people that we still see the pattern continued.
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