Browsing some historical maps, I came across this one. The UN plan for partitioning Palestine.

Even if you’re not a military strategist, or if you are a totally naive pacifist, the borders and the mishmash of different states on that map should give you pause.

I mean. I guess you can pass three people side by side from the southern part of the Jewish state to the part just above Jerusalem. But in the northern part… it’s probably air-ballooning that’s intended.

This map explains a lot to me. I’m not trying to defend Israel’s actions, even though I can understand them to some extent. In comparison, if Hitler had done to my country (Sweden) and its population what he did to the Jews about one in 20 would have survived. Sweden, with a population of 6.3 million in 1939, would have had some 300,000 people left at the end of the war.

But, that’s not exactly the topic of this post.

Looking at that map I can come up with a few reasons for why it was made as it was:

• The mapmakers were blind.
• The mapmakers were totally 100% bat shit crazy.
• A chimpanzee was contracted to make the map. Possibly by throwing darts.
• Or, it’s yet another colonialist divide-and-conquer tactic.

Of course, I suspect the real reason is that this is actually how the ethnicities in Palestine is divided. And sure, trying to mesh everything together in one single country is probably a bad idea, ask the former Yugoslavs.

But this map is like setting up a table in your home with several types of buffet food and then putting out plates and cutlery and become really surprised when your guests arrive, start putting the food on the plates and eat it instead of just enjoying the view and play Chess.

I mean, did they really think Israel would not try to reshape their country into something that was actually possible to not only defend but travel?

Former Yugoslavia is a great example here because the ethnicities are so mixed up that the only way to really put all different cultures into a single country would have been to create city-states, a concept abandoned some two thousand years ago.

Nope, in Yugoslavia Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and all other ethnicities had to accept a certain overlap to get any reasonable countries at all. It seems to have worked there, at least in comparison to the Yugoslav Wars.

It may have been less intrusive in the long run to give the Palestines one half and the Jews the other half, even if that meant some people would have to live in the “wrong part.” It’s not like some people in Palestine don’t feel they’re living in the wrong part as things stand today…

But then again, maybe I’m asking too much. This map was drawn up, pretty much by the same political system that felt A-bombing actual, real people was a great idea. And at that time they were also thinking more about long-term political grandstanding than solving any acute problems, so… why not?