Alone Atop The Mountain
What happens when your national identity has no Other to push against?
Mind experiment:
Take all the Jews from all over the world, and move them to an unpopulated island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. What might give shape to their days, their weeks, their years, their lives?
Now, imagine the same scenario but with the Palestinians. What might give shape to their days, their weeks, their years, their lives?
Compare and contrast.
We Jews would build a functioning state with all that implies, just like we did last time we got the chance.
Palestinians would bitch and moan that the Jews are on a stolen, colonized Palestinian Island and committing genocide against the Palestinians, even tho the Palestinian population is growing uncontrollably.
It seems both parties would face the same challenge, each in their own way.
What would the Palestinians be without Israel, and what would Jews be without the Holocaust and centuries of European oppression etc? Who are they, if they are no longer victims?
Wait, I figured it out. For some long period of time, both would continue to cling to a victim identity, but the battlefield would move from the real world to the digital world. The war would become purely rhetorical.
So, to fix that, no Internet for either island! :-)