"Look at the moon in the sky," says Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, or simply Rumi, a 13th-century poet, Hanafi jurist, Maturidi theologian, Sufi mystic born in the Khwarazmian Empire and the beloved Mawlana of Tajiks, Afghans, Persians, Seljuks, Ottomans and us, the people of Türkiye; and continues: “not the one in the lake.”
“Only from the heart can you touch the sky,” he once said, teaching how to cultivate an open heart which would set you truly free.
Only reality sets us free from innuendoes, hearsays, rumors (and disinformation, in a modern parlance). Go all the way to Washington, D.C., and talk to the man, directly; tell what you have to tell to his face: Israel is not the country you think it is, anymore. Whether you let him annex the Western Sharia or you don’t, he’ll do it. If he doesn’t, he cannot continue to enjoy parliamentary immunity as the prime minister of Israel, and consequently, he will go to jail for embezzlement. He doesn’t care if the hostages Hamas holds come home safely; all he needs is the endless war his Zionist coalition partners want to have against Palestinians. The Zionist narrative that his partners keep boasting is not even firmly in place when he perfunctorily repeats.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pointed at the moon where it should be looked at when he was welcomed at the White House. Sometimes it is strenuous (to say the least) to tell your host that this man indicted in the International Criminal Court never honors your wishes, as in the case when you told him in no uncertain terms not to attack Iran. Quite contrary, pulling the strings he has in your country’s deep state (those neocons and interventionists who are big on remapping the Middle East), they even make you join him in attacking Iran. Especially when its representatives are sitting in the room like a string of beads.
They are the people whom the U.S. deep state controls, keep pointing at the lakes that the deep state created and produce images of the moon, even more authentic than the moon itself! Meanwhile, some people in Türkiye keep playing word games with the statements of President Donald Trump: Did he mean this or that with the term “rigged elections”? Did he make you buy things in exchange for heaping praises on you?
Well, whatever you do is not good enough for some people. They are not looking in the sky to see the real moon. So one should not bother with those people who fool themselves. And we cannot correct everybody’s error; however, we can try correcting some of them before they become major earth-shaking mistakes. John F. Kennedy once said, “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
For instance, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Portugal recognized Palestine as a state ahead of a conference designed to revive prospects for a two-state solution as a basis for peace between Palestinians and Israelis last week at the United Nations. With other countries announcing their recognition, now 157 of the United Nations' 193 members consider Palestine a country. Palestine is recognized by four out of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, leaving the U.S. as the only permanent member not to recognize Palestine.
It is good news, right? Recognition of Palestinian statehood is very much appreciated in the face of Israel’s decades-long denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination. Zionism, not Judaism, with its settlement expansion plan, buried the idea of a Palestinian state. It definitely is a good thing, but not the whole thing that Palestine needs. A country needs not only international recognition, but a land on which its people can settle so that they can build homes, schools, hospitals, etc., and develop farms, factories, stores, dams and roads to make life possible in that country for its people.
The millions of Palestinians expelled from their villages and towns could exercise their God-given right to return to their state when it has land. If they have a state with land, then they’ll have a chance to build not only a home but a peace in that home. Either their neighbors in a different partition in the new state or in their own state neighboring Palestine, Jewish people will help Muslims and Christians to build that peace that has been reigning over those lands for millennia.
Right now, the gesture of recognition by Britain, Canada, Australia and Portugal is only helping the Zionist expansion policy of Netanyahu and his accomplices in that occupy-expel-and-settle colonialism that has prevailed in Palestine since the creation of Israel. For decades, Israeli politicians have been implementing that colonialist policy for one and one reason: to block Palestinian statehood. House by house, street by street, town by town, they expelled Palestinians from where it was supposed to be the Palestinian State. The Zionists implemented the colonialist policy so that now their own land is a lawless apartheid state.
The original lands of Palestine, as designed by the U.N. Resolution 181 in 1947, had three large parts marked as “Palestine.” The total of those adjoining areas was 43% of the Palestine Province of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish territory would be 56%. But even before the plan was accepted in the U.N. General Assembly, the armed Zionist militia began its occupy-expel-settle policy so that all three “Palestinian” territories had lost almost one million Palestinians.
Simply recognizing a Palestinian state and reenacting a document that recommends “a two-state solution” will not help to make it a reality. If Trump looks at the moon in the sky and can make his own country’s deep state forget the images they created on many lakes all over the world, that sovereign Palestinian state with territorial integrity on the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital can be a reality.
But no Palestine can be created if Trump goes on being Trump, appointing the crafty puppeteer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boss, making her ruin the Department of Justice, and keeping his topkick secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, sparking military anxiety. Not only will Palestine not be created, but the deep state of his will make Trump create a not-so-funny paper moon.
