The old man turned 65 recently. As expected of him, he intended to implement an orderly change to his lifestyle in his little world from that day, but instead of an orderly world, he woke up to a rather disorderly one.

In Australia, 65 was the official pension age for a very long time. But of course, they added two more years seeing the old man was about to get his hands on the promised pension. Like the promised land for the Jews, what’s promised does not always eventuate. It would not surprise him that in two years’ time, the promised entitlements would be either diluted further or markedly revised from the original promises or worse, further delayed. The more the government promised, the less he trusted them.

“Democracy is a farce,” he said, in a poor attempt to excuse himself for voting for the wrong guy.

We get to vote for the local member of parliament but we have no say in who our Prime Minister should be. It’s the ruling party that picks their leader, as does the much maligned Chinese system. The American way is just as awful. They were given two choices, Trump or Biden. One was impeached and the other impeachable. Neither was a good choice. No matter who wins, the budget deficits will grow larger and the same warmongers will cajole the army generals to prepare for war against China.

At least Abraham had a good excuse. The promise made by God to him was not in writing, so Abraham could not be accused of failing to read the fine print. The God of unconditional love had imposed a condition for the promised land. There were some covenants that had to be fulfilled, such as circumcision and animal sacrifice. The Talmud teaches us that those who fail to cut off their foreskin are cut off from sharing the rewards promised by God. To this day, the Zionist movement cling to this promise of a promised land called Canaan, later changed to Israel, apparently because God had changed the name of a grandson of Abraham to Israel. Jacob became Israel, meaning let God prevail. Canaan became Israel, perhaps to exclude the other Canaanite tribes and gentiles or non-Jews from claiming they too had rights to the land. The promise was not in writing, so we cannot blame Abraham for failing to recognise that the promise was conditional and that exclusivity was not stipulated. To assume is always a dangerous folly – why Abraham assumed that only his descendants were entitled to the land is unfortunate for his future generations. It is true that Talmudic law defined “neighbour” to exclude gentiles, and so a Jew’s ox had every right to gore a gentile without punishment but a gentile’s ox that gored a Jew would mean a severe punishment for both ox and owner. We can understand why in Israel today, many Jews still find it difficult to live with Palestinians and why some still deem gentiles to be ‘human animals’. Abraham also failed to understand that God’s promise did not mention that the promised land would be theirs forever. Sure, if you left, you could return, as we can with a visa today but it did not mean it was in perpetuity. Such intricate details were not left to a property settlement expert to determine, unfortunately. No one should blame Abraham or for that matter, blame God, of course, for both were not property brokers.

The old man had made grand plans for his 65th birthday celebrations. A slow handover of duties to fellow colleagues at work and an orderly process of passing the reins to his successor. Initially, he would work just in the mornings. Rain or shine, busy or quiet, he planned to clock in before nine and clock out by lunch, and after a month, he would take some paid long service leave and visit Egypt and Italy for a month. He had great plans indeed, to visit the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza. Every detail of their holiday had been scrutinised with a magnifying glass. There would be no hiccups and no unexpected detours – his Mrs would be impressed, he said. He assured her there would be no repeats of his silly oversights such as checking in online for their flight to Kuala Lumpur but then forgetting to obtain their boarding passes at the counter just because they had no check in luggage. That was a debacle his Mrs would not allow him to forget and no, he would never again walk to the opposite direction at immigration to check on why the faraway queue was so short whereas where they were supposed to line up was like a frantic gate to a Taylor Swift concert. No, that was another debacle his Mrs would not allow him to forget also.

“You don’t just wander off as if you’re still a young man,” she said.

They were to be at Cairo before catching a flight to Aswan, in a fortnight’s time.

“We will visit the High Dam and also the Temple of Philae, which was devoted to the two goddesses, Isis and Hathor, after which we will visit the Unfinished Obelisk,” he informed his Mrs.

When his Mrs grizzled about why they would want to look at something that’s unfinished, he smugly suggested that they listened to unfinished symphonies too. An unfinished work would allow us a glimpse of how the pharaohs constructed the magnificent Obelisks, she knew that, of course.

The highlight of the tour in Egypt for him would be the cruise on the Nile. He had imagined himself to be the new Hercule Poirot. With an immaculate moustache and a lousy French accent, he had planned to do a role play with his Mrs aboard a glamorous river steamer.

“A steamy scene in a river steamer?” I asked, without expecting a reply and none was given.

At the Temple of Abu Simbel, he intended to ask the gods why the King’s wife Nefertari was given only a small temple. Just as in any Asian country, a holiday would not be complete with just a visit to one temple. There would be others to visit and a chance to ask the gods questions or favours. At Kom Ombo Temple, they would get to worship the gods Sobek and Haeroris and then onward to Edfu to visit the Edfu Temple which was dedicated to Horus, a most important Egyptian deity. Taking 180 years to build, it was completed 50 years before Jesus Christ was born. In time, Christians would rise up and dominate Egypt. Many of the temple’s carved reliefs, considered pagan by followers of Jesus Christ, were burned a few centuries later. For weeks, the old man fretted about getting on board a hot air balloon at Luxor. Already paid for, he secretly knew he would forfeit the ticket to fly with the gods. More temple visits would follow, Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, Karnak Temple, and Luxor Temple. Other planned highlights were a camel ride and an evening on a felucca on the Nile. Giza sounded like a dream start of a nice, happy retirement for the old man.

But, instead of Giza, it was all about Gaza. The massacre of Jews by Hamas. The massacre of Palestinians by the Jews. Ashkenazi Jews used to live peacefully there in the promised land, with fellow Christians and Muslims, for hundreds of years during the Ottoman Empire. It was only following the Balfour Declaration paid for by Walter Rothschild that conflicts arose. There is the idea that it was the Khazarian Jews from Europe that did not “fit in”. Faisal actually welcomed the Jews to share the land, even though the Arab himself was promised the land by the British for helping them oust the Turks in WW1. They were not all hostile neighbours in the beginning. They all lived peacefully together for hundreds of years during the Ottoman Empire. The conflicts and wars inflicted on both sides had a lot to do with how Israel, as a sovereign state, treated their neighbours as ‘human animals’. They were the ‘pests’ that Hitler needed to exterminate from Nazi Germany and now they dish out the same abuse to their neighbours, whose land and homes they were evicted from. When one believes gentiles should not be neighbours, it is easy to convince oneself that they ought to leave by whatever means necessary, by bus, train, plane or bombs. The abused become the abusers, weird but sadly again and again, we see this ‘phenomenon’.

It is understandable for most people to rise up against tyranny after decades of abuse, killings, torture and imprisonment. It is what all of us would do, if we saw our homes bulldozed, our crops destroyed, our families tortured or murdered and our land seized as we are threatened with genocide. Even the Jews rebelled against tyranny, opposing the planned Roman colony of Hadrian. 500,000 killed in those days is a very large number of civilians killed. We wept for the Jews in the Holocaust but why can’t we weep for the Palestinians today is beyond me. We would be accused of anti-semitism if we spoke of Jewish wrong-doings. Everyone suffered the same miserable fate of losing loved ones. It is only right to call out what’s wrong in this world right now.

It is the poor wretched people the world should focus on. They were forced out of their lands and homes and then treated like animals and pests. To rise up after decades of subjugation and brutality is what you and I would do too. But, would that make us terrorists or the terrorised?

“Both, unfortunately,” Mr Laurs replied.

The land may be promised but no promises were made about peace and security. Abraham should have been more discerning to ask God for some clarification on this very important matter. We are all a speck of dirt in the universe. Why must there be a need to dominate others and cause misery? Isn’t life short enough?

John Lennon taught us nothing. Imagine….

As missiles were flying in the skies above occupied Gaza and dropping on innocent civilians, the old man was occupying his mind with the question of whether to still visit Giza’s pyramids and temples. As the bombs continued to pile on the Gazans, with thousands dead and many more wounded and missing, the plight of the people in the world’s biggest concentration camp today dominated the news media and was the reason for many street protests around the world. Recognising the obscenity of his ‘clinical’ detachment from the suffering in Gaza, the old man quickly stopped his pondering about Giza. He asked his travelling companions to give him another day to agree to the cancellation of their holiday but by the time morning came, they had already cancelled and forfeited a big chunk of the deposits paid.

Imagine…

“How many lobster meals did we forfeit?” the old man asked.

Pausing to think of or pray for the wretched people of Palestine feels fake when one can think of lobsters lost at the same time.