Halewistan is an intriguing new blog by a “perennial student, Canadian national and global citizen.”
/ ha / le / wi /
from the semitic root of the author’s name, meaning join, connect for mutual benefit; alternatively, a wanderer, a consecrated person, ”˜adherent, client, devotee (of god)’
/ stan /
from Persian -stan “country,” from Indo-Iranian stanam “place,” lit. “where one stands,” from Proto-Indo European sta-no-, from base sta- “to stand”
hence,
halewistan | Ù‡ÙŽÙ„Ùويستان | הלויסטן:
A recent post details his vision for the Israel/Palestine conflict:
…The two-state solution no longer seems particularly adaptive for our current day and age. Not on the issue of the region’s shifting demographics, nor on its resource scarcity (namely, water, so often overlooked), nor with regard to ”˜imagining’ an identity politics fitted to the 21st, as opposed to 19th, century.
Israel-Palestine, despite the endlessly ironic tragedy of the current situation, holds promise–perhaps the world’s best promise–for demonstrating how a new sociopolitical system can be consciously imagined, cultivated and employed.
The region must become a permanent international protectorate.
Absurd–i know. But no more absurd than a flourishing nuclear ”˜ethno-Jewish democracy’ living ’side by side in peace’ with a demilitarized Palestinian Bantustan. Please.… No more absurd than perhaps the holiest place in the world devolving into a wasps’ nest of low-grade ethnoreligious civil-war, which is precisely what a Middle Eastern South Africa would look like.
The UN gave birth to this mess (not least out of western guilt for the Holocaust); now it’s a global tinderbox. Time has come to take collective responsibility–to take the potential, nay the necessity, for a powerful set of global institutions seriously, and turn Israel-Palestine into an internationally-administered, shining beacon of hope for the world. No, really. Call me crazy, but i mean it.