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Ownership Versus Connection

When it comes to the ‘right’ to land, are all claims equal?

7 min readAug 17, 2026

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The Dome of the Rock centered in the middle of a blue sky.
Photo of the Dome of the Rock by BECCA SIEGEL from Pexels.

** TRIGGER WARNING: reference to SA ***

SOURCES LISTED BELOW

There is a well-known Abrahamic story regarding the Wisdom of King Solomon. Two women are brought forth, both claiming to be the mother of an infant, both insistent the other is lying.

Solomon responds: simply cut the child in two with a sword and divide the two halves between them.

One cries out and quickly insists that he simply give the boy to the other woman, while the other woman agrees with the ‘solution’ Solomon offers. From this, the king is able to deduce who the real mother is.

No matter how badly they suffer, the people of Palestine would rather die poorly in their homeland than leave it. It ‘s like asking them to sever themselves from their heart. They refuse to do it. Meanwhile, many settlers are quick to swarm the airport once missiles start raining on their cities, as many of them are dual citizens. Settlers that are encouraged daily to sever their connection to their heart, because to feel for others is to look honestly at the monstrosity they have not only allowed, but partook in and sometimes even enjoyed.

It is from studying the differences in how these two groups respond to similar enough pressures that we can observe that it is, in fact, different to relate to something you love from a place of ownership rather than a place of genuine connection.

There exists a cognitive dissonance that rests within the proverbial heart of ‘Zionism’ in which believers reason that because they love this land and are meant to be here, they have the right and even the duty to bomb and destroy as much of it as possible. Hail fire and brimstone and kill their way into the loving arms of the Promised Land. As if the land itself is not a deeply sacred living thing in its own right. The state uses the guise of warfare to justify the vicious uprooting of sacred olive trees that have been around hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Trees that were sacred long before Moses arrived with his Torah, or Jesus with his teachings. Back before monotheism was even a concept, as Athena (the goddess of wisdom AND warfare) wins in a competition against the destructive will of Poseidon by blessing the people with the first olive tree that would not only provide food, but also oil to light their candles to drive out the darkness and the cold.

The destruction of the native flora and fauna is not just an unfortunate consequence and inevitability of war, but actively pursued by its main drivers. Not only are they burning olive groves to starve the populace, they also slaughtered over 400 endangered crocodiles for the crime of inhabiting the river that was preventing soldiers from crossing through its waters and into the West Bank (you’d think that the very presence of the reptiles would be a fairly obvious indication that the action itself would be best left un-pursued).

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A group of crocodiles gathered by the water.
Crocodiles gathered by the water. Photo by Haim Charbit from Pexels.

Yet, they are wholly deaf to such spiritual messaging, as they have thrust a knife into their own heart in order to win some game of dominance that should have been left long ago in the caves from which they were born.

They bomb incessantly, poisoning the air, staining the earth with the blood of children, and heavily polluting the waters offshore as they destroy all plumbing infrastructure, forcing their ‘targets’ to foul their own water. They greatly accelerate the warming of the planet by having no restraint on the level of bombings, as buildings with carcinogenic materials pollute the air and soil. They spread illegal phosphorus over Lebanon, and deliberately poison Syria’s farmland with planes spraying ‘God’s miracle’ over their crops, truly believing that this soil will then be able to sustain them once they claim it as theirs.

The swarm of bees descending upon the state of Israel is less a result of biblical wrath and more of a natural consequence of the state having gone out of its way to bomb and destroy one of South Lebanon’s most prominent bee-keepers, Marouf Ramel, on April 5th, 2026. A man who had devoted his life to saving the population of Lebanon's bees. He shaped most of Southern Lebanon's apiary production, with his queen bees having been used by most beekeepers in the region. Being such a key player in Lebanon’s agriculture, it is safe to assume that Israel deliberately targeted him and his apiaries. Their military is quite bad on a tactical level, and overly relies on U.S. weaponry and intelligence to make up for the lack of manpower and actual ineffectiveness of their ground invasions. So they rely on agricultural and ecological terrorism to kill off most of the populace of these places.

Ecological terrorism is a policy decision being made every hour of every day.

The reason the fires had ravaged so much of Palestine/Israel some two years ago was not solely because of extremists trying to hurt native people (as they often do), but due to their choice many decades prior to plant trees that were non-native to the landscape. Trees that were unable to contend with the level of dryness that the Levant experienced all year round. The idea was to make it look more like Europe, while also implementing an actual displacement strategy, which seems bizarre once you realize how many people working in their parliament have changed their names to sound more ‘middle-eastern’ to further divorce them from the actual European ancestry they seem so keen on implementing in a place that was not designed for it.

When it comes right down to it, they are ‘white colonists’ long before they are ‘Jewish.’ One needs only understand that they have created slurs specifically for ‘other kinds of jews’ to know this to be true. After all, the metric of distinction they are using is one that is wholly Eurocentric. In an environment where there is a daily exercise of dehumanizing others, to assume it would stop at ‘Arab’ is foolish. Despite what the marketing has claimed, Israel is not some haven where all Jews are unified and protected (their one and only justification for their occupation). They consider Mizrahi jews as inferior and less civilized, adopting a period of time in which they’d literally turned into the child-abducting boogeymen that Hitler had used to sully their image many years before. They separated babies from their Yemeni Mizrahi mothers, so that they could be raised with ‘civilized Jewish families’ (because nothing cries ‘civilized’ like abducting, trafficking and bombing children.) Ethiopian Jews, despite having established Israeli citizenship, are still treated as second-class citizens to this day, with the government having engaged in a program in 2013 to give them contraceptives without their knowledge or consent by mandating what they claimed were vaccines.

Associate professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, Brian Roby says, “People think about it as, 'Oh, well, it’s Israelis versus Palestinians,’ without recognizing that, within both contexts, there’s something going on between Israelis.”

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So one has to wonder: is this really about honoring Jewish and therefore truly Semitic roots? Or is it about whitewashing Judaism so that it can be a useful tool to advance the interests of the Empire and its vampiric contract class?

At some point, we have to ask, does this group of people truly harbor a connection to the land they claim to be an intrinsic part of? Or do they simply embody a toxic sense of ownership over it?

It’s all the difference between a man cherishing the love of his wife and one who implements a revenge-plot to teach her a lesson for having embarrassed him the other day.

If you truly felt connected to this place or this idea called “the Promised Land,” would it not hurt you and your spirit to violate it so deeply so consistently?

How can you feel nothing as you rape it to death?

That’s not love, loyalty, or devotion. It is a violent ownership over a thing that you have decided defines you as a person. Someone who is enraged by the idea that they are being held back from the cookies in the jar. It’s not about some soulful attachment your ancestors tearfully handed you on a pillow. It’s about the indignance and the principle of being told ‘no’ in the midst of a rape culture.

And you better believe Earth is saying, “no.”

*UPDATE: Turtle Sanctuary, The Khalil Turtle Sanctuary, and Conservationist Founder, Mona Khalil, was also recently murdered and bombed near Tyre in Southern Lebanon.

Youtube Video Embed from The Rational National, Titled: ‘Sign from God’: Israel Swarmed With Bees As Human Rights Violations Continue.

SOURCES:

Al Arabiya English. Israel killed hundreds of crocs over fears they could be used in West Bank terror attack. 18 Jan 2021.

United Nations. UN rights office sounds alarm over ‘skyrocketing’ Israeli settler violence during olive harvest. 21 October 2025.

Human Rights Watch. Lebanon: Israel Unlawfully Using White Phosphorus. 9 March 2026.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Israel’s chemical spraying of farmland in Lebanon and Syria amounts to war crime, targets civilian survival. 04 Feb 2026.

Dhuga, Amelia. Lebanon’s Beekeepers Are at Breaking Point. 23 April 2026.

Jamal, Hannah. Remembering Marouf, the beekeeper. 20 April 2026.

Al-Haq. Jerusalem Wildfires in Summer 2021, When Climate Change-Related Wildfires Expose the JNF’s Colonial Afforestation Project. 06 Nov 2021.

Weiss, Dorit et al. The Yemenite Children Affair. 15 Dec 2024.

The Association for Jewish Studies. Episode 3: The Yemenite Children Affair and the Story of the Mizrahi Jews in the Development of the State of Israel. Unspecified.

Traubmann, Tamara. Ethiopian immigrants in Israel received contraceptive shots without their consent. 11 Mar 2013.

Israel News. A Third of Israeli Female Soldiers Were Sexually Harassed in 2021, Report Says. 28 Nov 2022.

United Nations. “More than a human can bear”: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023. 13 March 2025.

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Sarah Abu-Ali
Sarah Abu-Ali

Written by Sarah Abu-Ali

American-Palestinian Writer & Spiritual Healer in training.