If you are interested to know what will happen in the matter of the Palestinian struggle to gain independence from a regime that makes Nazi Germany look like a troop of boy scouts and calls itself Zionist Israel, you may board the ship of time-travel in your imagination and go on a trip to the future. When ready, you get into the ship, power it and hear the computer ask you: Where to, my valuable traveler? You say Palestine, and the computer says there is an infinite number of alternative universes from which to choose but a few are classified as classical alternatives and recommended for beginners of which you are one, I can tell. These are alternatives whose probability of happening to you range in importance from A to Z and where each probability unfolds a different scenario of the Palestinian story. So tell me, dear time traveler, which universe do you want to visit? After a moment of reflection you pick a letter at random and tell the computer you choose alternative M.
Rather than move through the chronology of a time-line that is straight and that goes forward from the present to the future, the ship takes the U-shaped route of a worm whole which is a shortcut offered to travelers in a hurry. And so you go to a period that is relatively far into the future where the Palestinian scenario is unfolding its last act near the end of the story. The computer tells you it is 15 years into the future and allows you to disembark. Without delay you begin to investigate the contemporary situation and record the information that you gather. To do this, you move around with the help of a teletransporter that can take you from place to place at the speed of thought which is instantaneous no matter how far apart the places may be from each other. Working diligently, you discover in little time that the United Nation has been replaced by a new international body made of many councils and agencies each of which makes its headquarter in a different city around the globe. The body of nations also has an equivalent to the old Security Council but is made of 25 members, all of which rotate and none of which is considered a permanent member or has the right of veto. Some types of resolution need 13 votes to pass and some need 17 votes. The venue where the council convenes also rotates among the cities of the globe, and Moscow is where it is convening at this time. This tells you that America has lost its luster which means that Israel is standing practically alone in the world like the pariah that it is.
The current delegates are meeting to discuss the plight of 12 million people inhabiting the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. A third of these people say they are Jews and the rest are Christians and Muslims calling themselves Palestinians. Studying the political landscape, you find that the 4 million Jews have split into several factions all armed to the teeth and fighting each other in a kind of low key civil war. They are also raiding the Palestinians and fighting them at a level of savagery that would have shocked even the most bloodthirsty of the Nazis. There is a Jewish central government but it is unable to restore order because the civil war is raging between units of what used to be the Israeli army, an army that has divided into several factions calling themselves names like the Russian faction, the Yiddish faction, the Talmudic, the Black-Jewish, the Arab-Jewish, the fundamentalist religious faction and a few less relevant ones.
You want to know how this situation came to be so you return to the ship and tell the computer to take you back toward the direction from which you came. You go back 5 of the 15 years you had advanced where you find that Israel has elected as Prime Minister Gideon Topazberg, the notorious right wing religious fanatic who is known to most people as Topaz the acid tongue. But shortly after the transfer of power to him, the man ordered the dismantling of a number of Jewish settlements, a move that did not sit well with the settlers or their backers in the rest of the country. Some of the settlers refused to move and Topaz ordered the army to remove them by force. Some units of the army obeyed the order but others rejected it. Some of the latter even joined the settlers and moved into position to protect them from the attacking units. This is how the civil war started and this is when the movement that disintegrated the army began to gather momentum. The end result has been that several army factions were formed, each coalescing around a separate cause, a unique gripe and an ax to grind. And each faction was pitted against all the others by ideology, methods of operation and the goals they aim for.
You tell the computer of the ship to take you back another 5 years where you witness a scene of carnage that is beyond description. It is nighttime and a band of settlers led by a younger Topaz is chasing Palestinians out of their homes. There is hand to hand combat where the Palestinians fight with bare hands against settlers who carry weapons of all sorts including firearms which they use as if on a hunting trip. Scores of Palestinians are killed and those who survive abandon their homes and flee the village to a place where they can feel safer. Having accomplished what they came to do, the settlers leave the scene except for Topaz who goes into the homes of Palestinians looking for valuables to steal. He discovers in one of the homes an exceptionally pretty young woman who is in a state of shock. She is sitting on the floor of her bedroom scantily dressed in a fetal position. Hugging her knees and looking straight ahead without blinking, she does not respond to his entering the room or to the bellicose orders that he barks telling her to leave the house. He angrily walks to her, pulls her up to her feet but she collapses in his arms. He drops her on the bed where she passes out and closes her eyes. Lying on her back with legs bent at the knees and dangling to the floor, she looks feminine, attractive, helpless and vulnerable but he is too wrapped in his aggressive mood to notice any of that.
He leaves her there and walks around the house to see what he can find. Pictures that indicate she was married not long ago in a church that is not far from the house catch his attention. He looks at them intently and only now realizes that these people are human beings too having the same interests as everyone else. He calms down a little and returns to the side of the bed. He sits beside her and shakes her to wake her up but she does not respond. As he calms down even more, he notices how pretty she is yet how helpless she remains. He gently caresses her face as if overtaken by remorse for what he has been doing. He places his finger near her nose to see if she is breathing but fails to detect a thing. He tries to take her pulse but not knowing how to do this, he feels no heartbeat. He places his ear on her chest to hear the heart but hears nothing. Finally, he sees a sheet of facial tissue on a night-table nearby so he brings it to her nose trying again to determine if she is breathing. But what happens this time is that a corner of the paper gets inside her nostril. This causes her motor reflex mechanism to make a facial grimace which tells him she is alive. He is relieved.
He gently taps her on the cheek to wake her up but she does not respond. Frustrated to some degree but hating to leave her alone where she may die without help, he tenderly caresses her face when an urge he cannot control suddenly grips him. Responding to the urge, he lets his hand go down her neck and beyond it to her breasts where he dwells for a while as he fondles one breast and then the other. This causes his libido to surge to a level high enough that he reaches out to the bottom of her nightgown and pulls it up. What he sees and what he does not but can imagine push his libido to a level he cannot control. Fighting back against the urgings of his hormones, he hesitates for a moment to make the next move but looses the fight and succumbs to the temptation. He stands up, pulls down his pants and gets ready to rape her. And so he does while she remains unconscious.
Stunned by what you see, you get back to the ship determined to find out what will happen in the months ahead. The way you do it is to check on the girl and on Topaz at intervals a few weeks apart. To your surprise you discover that he too is checking on her from a distance. After a while you begin to see that the girl is pregnant and you learn that she believes the child belongs to her husband who was killed during the night of the settlers' raid. All the while, suspecting that he may be the father of the baby, Topaz discretely follows her comings and goings until she delivers a baby boy at a clinic where Topaz has connections. She names the boy Jesus after his presumed father who was called Jesus Josephus. Topaz manages to get a sample of blood from baby Jesus and takes it to a DNA lab along with a sample of his own blood. The lab compares the two samples not knowing what the story is and confirms that there is a father and son relationship between the two samples.
You deduce from all this that Topaz has gone through an epiphany since the night of the settlers' raid. But he continued to pretend he was the religious fanatic that his friends and supporters expected of him. In fact, he played the role of Jewish fanatic so well that he has managed to get himself elected Prime Minster of Israel after which he abruptly did a one eighty turn and began the process of dismantling the settlements. But the move triggered a civil war among the Israeli Jews and caused the calamity that has befallen the inhabitants of the whole place, Jews and non-Jews alike. He now feels he is caught in a quandary and spends all his time searching for a way out.
You are back again at the 15 year point into the future. The boy Jesus is 10 years old and doing as well in school as any lad his age. He is also learning from his mother and the other elders about the history of the village where the man he never saw but thinks was his father was killed the night that the Jewish settlers raided the village, killed many Palestinians and robbed their homes. Young Jesus was so moved that he wrote to Prime Minister Topaz telling him about the village of his parents and the story of its destruction. He ended the letter by asking the Prime Minister to look into the incident so as to identify the culprits and punish them because the older he gets, the more he is consumed by the thought that justice was not done in his case. He wants closure because he feels odd and different from the other kids. And what he wants most of all is to grow up normally and lead a normal life like everyone else.
In response to the letter, Topaz invites Jesus and his mother to his house for dinner one evening, something he had planned to do for some time anyway but was waiting for the right moment. When they get there, he greets them warmly and treats the boy with unusual affection. The mother is touched and quips: “You know, Prime Minister, he looks so much like you, he could have been your son,” and the man responds: “I know, I know.” They get into the dining room and have supper then go to the living room where they sit and relax. After a while, Topaz points to a door and tells the boy that he prepared a room for when he gets married and have children. He says there is everything in that room to entertain a boy his age and tells him to go see for himself and play all he wants.
Jesus goes into the room and closes the door. Topaz asks the mother to tell him what happened the night that the settlers raided the village. She tells him she remembers that they burst into the house while she and her husband were asleep in bed. They beat him up savagely and dragged him out of the house. She tried to help her husband but they knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she found herself sitting in a little bit of water in the bathtub dressed in a nightgown. A few things were missing from the house and when she got out she saw the dead body of her husband right by the door. She ran to the next village where a number of other people had also fled.
By now tears are coming down his cheeks. He gets up, walks to her, drops to his knees and sobs: “I am sorry, I am so sorry.” She brings her hands on either side of his neck to console him and ease his pain but he breaks down and cries uncontrollably. His head drops down to her lap as he continues to cry. After a minute or so he pulls himself together and sits facing her a few feet away. “I have a confession to make,” he says. She stays mum. He goes on: “I was there that night.” She remains mum. “I participated in the attack on your people...” he goes on to explain “...and I did something horrible, something awful, something unforgivable.”
In a faint voice she asks: “Did you kill someone?” He answers: “No, I never killed someone in my life and did not hurt a single Palestinian man that night.” And so she responds: “Well, maybe you can be forgiven because you killed no one, you feel all this remorse and you are expressing it.” He takes a deep breath and adopts a serious tone of voice. “Listen Mrs. Josephus...” he begins but she interrupts: “Call me Mary”. He resumes: “Listen to me, Mary. For the first time a unit of the air force has mutinied. I received intelligence to the effect that their first act will be to bomb this house which is something they plan to do within the hour. I am not getting out of here because my death will be the way to end the civil war. There is a car at the back of the house. Take Jesus and go to your village as fast as you can.”
“Come with us. You speak Arabic well, my people like you because of what you have done for them, and they will protect you. Your enemies will think you died here during the attack and will not look for you,” she tells him. “No,” he says “I must die because I did something the night of the raid that is as bad as kill someone.” They begin to hear the jet planes fly over them and he continues: “We crucified your Jesus two millennia ago, we savaged your beloved Palestine nearly a century ago and I so cowardly raped you a decade ago when you were unconscious and helpless.” He stops talking, begins to cry again then resumes the talk with a voice that is chocking: “Yes, I did that. I raped you and I sat you in the bathtub with a little bit of water to confuse you and hide my crime … The Jesus that was born to you is not the son of Josephus; he is my son and I have the DNA papers that say so. They are in that box over there along with a few other documents that can be valuable to you and to your people. Take the box and decide for yourself what you will do with it ... There is also money and checks in it. I hope you will accept them and use them to take care of our Jesus; your Jesus and mine. You decide whether or not to tell him our sad story ... Hurry up, the planes are getting in position to fire their smart bombs and they don't miss ... take the boy and get out of here quick.”
Loaded with conflicting emotions, you get back to the ship and return to your time amazed at what the future holds for that part of the world.