Or a small country steeped in history. Let us call it “X”. Over three millennia this country has seen all kinds of invaders, all kinds of occupants, all possible liberators. Almost all invoked an imaginary entity with various names, what is known as a god. The empire of which this country has been a part of, for the longest time in its history - let's call it Y - has controlled it for four centuries and one year. Another Empire -Z- succeeded it for 30 years. Y had not asked anyone's permission to occupy X, and above all not that of its inhabitants. Z had not done this either, but it had the support of its fellows.

 Then an extraordinary event took place. An assembly of representatives of 53 countries, all foreigners to X and which had no legitimacy to decide its fate, voted a text deciding that X was going to be sliced ​​into 3 parts: one part for the people of X, one part for a group of settlers who came from elsewhere and qualified as a "people" -which they were not and whom we will call J-, and a third part, considered as a holy city, under international tutelage.

70 years later, X is and remains the strangest country on planet Earth. It is divided into three pieces, a large, a medium and a small one. The first piece is totally and exclusively controlled by State J, the second one almost totally and indirectly by the same State J, the third piece is the largest open-air concentration camp in the world, painfully administered by a fake State of natives of X.

As you will have understood, this country X is Philistine, this land of the Philistines that became Palestine through the language of the Roman occupants, Latin. Y, is the late Ottoman Empire, and Z, the British Empire, that monster on which the sun never set. And J is what is known as Israel, the so-called "Jewish" state. On 29 November, 1947, 33 of the 53 countries then represented at the UN voted in favour of Resolution no. 181, which decided outright to partition Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a quasi-capital, Jerusalem, under international tutelage. 70 years and a dozen wars later, only one point of this resolution came into force: the creation of a Jewish state.

During these 70 years, as during the thirty preceding years, the Philistines experienced all the forms of oppression that a minority human group can exert on a majority human group. They have therefore experienced all the forms of resistance and struggle that humans can invent and attempt, from the most harmless peaceful protest to the most desperate form of violence through to underground armed struggle and semi-armed mass uprisings, not to mention the use of words, artistic expression, diplomacy, strikes and boycotts. All these forms have failed to this day.

And yet, the people of X still exist, they live, they think, they love, they die, they live again.

Philistine, mirror of the world, you belong to the heritage of humanity. Continue to amaze us. Continue to teach us to survive, against all odds, whoever we are, wherever we are, in this ever-shrinking world.