ifda dossier 74 - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

arrio alto of Providencia no longer have much use for those in the
poblaciones. The minority in India who live in the cities, find jobs in the
'modern' sectors and speak English no longer require masses of
peasants, tribals or outcasts. One in four young Dutch people below
30 never had, and never will have a job. In France, 'incompressible'
unemployment excludes two to three million men and women from the
mainstream of life.
Palestine is on our minds, both as a paradigmatic metaphor and as a
reality.
The ultimate in dispossession, whatever the other motives, which are
real but secondary, was the Zionist settlement in Palestine. A premonitory
sign, perhaps, of the exhaustion of the Judeo-Christian model,
those living on a land, for the first time in colonial history, were seen
as superfluous. Their very existence had to be negated. Golda Meir said
it all: "There are no Palestinians". This is a warning to all those human
beings who are no longer necessary, because they no longer need to be
exploited.
The only possible 'civilized' response to this, for those like us who can
still be heard, is our identification with those who are excluded, with the
victims of history: We are all Palestinians.
Paths towards a more humane world
Throughout the three securities runs, one way or the other, a rainbow
thread, that of a coming global civilization. Five centuries of dominant
capitalism and technical progress, including the information explosion,
have made the world one. No problem is any longer amenable to
piecemeal solutions. A new thinking is emerging, or, rather, a very old
thinking is re-discovered: the whole has precedence over the parts,
global security over individual country security, global environment over
specific environments, universal values over parochial ideologies, society
over classes, the human species over nations, states and countries.
Limited means explained the division of the species between the in and
the out. The wealth of means now available make possible the recon-