Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution…

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1 https://t.co/1YLgIO4kWC

The idea of drawing a line around a piece of land on a map, and saying ‘this is mine’. Partitioning just adds more lines, and hopes that settles people down. We won’t confront the deeper connection to land. We don’t understand that. /2

This was a shock to European Australians, when Uluṟu was closed as a tourist rock-climbing playground. The idea of being denied access entirely still doesn’t compute with many. We’re a travel/tourism culture. /3 https://t.co/3Mx7KflVop

The world is our playground. We believe we should have the right to travel and ‘experience’ anywhere. At home our land is framed as real estate. Property. A saleable address. Location, location. /4

Property that we now exclude many of your young from ever owning. Every home to them is now Uluṟu. They’re forbidden access. By the rest of us, the travel junkies. Happy to consume others’ homes for recreation. /5

‘Seeing the world’. (‘The world’ is other peoples’ homes.) The world is now increasingly sick of being this theme park, for our enjoyment. /6 https://t.co/nxDnEgCWCK

Art speaks truths. One of our most beloved movies shows a man apparently unhinged. Because he loves his connection to place. Even though in real estate terms, it’s a stinker. /7 https://t.co/JgyksvaD2O

Good history sees it too. One of the most powerful analyses in Gammage’s book is about ‘farming without fences’. Indigenous Australians don’t fence land. Fences are how we enforce our ‘sovereign territories’, on maps. /8 https://t.co/jKM6RNG9Wr

Instead they enrich the land for both themselves and the species they want to farm or hunt, attracting prey while enriching the landscape, for all. Everybody wins. The landscape becomes the existential focus. /9

It’s not conceptually difficult to understand that land is fundamental to all living things. Their piece of the Earth. Lovingly crafted, and from which all emerges and returns, as religions say. /10

But we’re still infected with our imperial conquering past. We want to accumulate sovereign parcels of land at home, while trampling all over everybody else’s OS. We won’t settle. We won’t allow ourselves to be grounded again. /11

Whether a long weekend or annual holiday, we’ll pack the car and van, or jump onto planes. We can’t stay home. We have no real home, just addresses. Nobody travels to see our suburbs. /12

They’re car parks for commuters. We don’t feel the bond with that land that Indigenous Australians feel for Uluṟu. Our quarter-acre (if we’re that lucky) is a ‘step on the property ladder’. /13

The late architect Christopher Alexander called the English countryside humankind’s greatest ever creation. Read Gammage and you’ll know Australia is actually that. But for the same reason. /14 https://t.co/02Km2l95M6

Because the landscape was lived in, for generations, worked and tended and loved, and enriched. It sustained us, and we sustained it. A mutual relationship. /15

We have no conception of that now. It’s all just real estate. And we travel to find the beauty we’ve forgotten how to make at home. We don’t understand ‘home’. That sacred relationship to place. /16

We know it’s missing, various reactionary ‘sovereign’ movements are trying to grasp it. But that’s just more sovereign ownership rubbish. Not a mutual relationship with landscape. /17

The Earth beneath is all that ends war and violence. Being in relationship with landscape. While we choose to live inside maps, we won’t understand this. /end