A 17 Year Old Speaks

  Israeli forces storm Al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian families evicted from their homes. Rockets fired by Hamas. Gaza bombed. Hundreds of casualties and thousands displaced. An international appeal for peace. How did we get here? Well, to comprehend the current escalation that has the world on its edge, you need to understand the creation of Israel. At the time of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was 617 years old and on the brink of collapse. Still, they ruled large swathes of geostrategically important territory including controlling access to the crucial Mediterranean and the Black Sea. When the First World War erupted, Ottomans were desperately looking for foreign allies to hold onto their survival. They chose to ally with Germany. And as they say, the rest is history.  The European powers offered Arabs complete sovereignty of the Arabian Peninsula if they helped them defeat the Ottoman Empire. However, the Arabs were in for a surprise. The British and French held a top-secret

  The bell rung. Time for the highlight of my day. A smile crept across my face as the instructor wrote ‘Interquartile Range’ on the board; I was mesmerized by the elegant techniques that extracted meaningful conclusions from raw statistics that looked like gibberish to the eye. Barely able to control my excitement, I sharpened my pencil just as the lecture began. “The interquartile range for a given set of data shows…” He never got the chance to finish. An explosion jolted the room, throwing him off his feet. Gunfire. As I scrambled to my feet to barricade the door and kill the lights, my classmates rushed to the teacher who was sprawled motionless on the ground. More shots. Sirens wailed in the distance. Some of the girls started crying. My parents’ faces came before my eyes. Is this how I die?    After what seemed like an eternity, a megaphone announced that the premises were ‘all-clear’ and special forces had surrounded our school to deter any subsequent strike. Later, we