King Solomon’s Sword and the Partition of Palestine

Originally published on Substack

Two women came to King Solomon holding a single child.

Both said the child was theirs.

King Solomon called for a sword: “Cut the child in two. Give half to each.”

The first woman cried, “Don’t split him — keep the child whole!”

The second said, “Split him — cut the child in two!”

King Solomon gave the child to the first woman.

“She is his mother,” he said. “The one who wouldn’t see the living child divided.”

I grew up in a West Bank settlement, deep inside a divided land. What follows is how I came to see that division not as natural or justified, but as an inherited framework that shaped how I understood truth, morality, and the land.

For years, I lived inside one framework of truth. It defined what was moral, logical, and just. Inside it, nothing outside made sense. I perceived only through what I’d been taught. And when reality contradicted it, I did not question what I’d inherited, I forced the world to match what I already believed. So I projected, defended, and justified.

Anything that challenged what I believed became proof of the other’s wrongness, extremism, or violence. The system protects itself by making alternatives feel unthinkable.

I once understood partition through the lens of who was willing to compromise. We said yes to dividing the land. Palestinians said no. And the displacement, exile, death, and occupation that followed was, I believed, “their” fault.

Real change began only when I could hold truths that didn’t fit inside what I’d been taught. Once I developed the capacity to hold another perspective, I began to see the same world differently.

The facts didn’t change — my perception did.

If you read and argue about whose facts are true, you’ve missed the point entirely.

This is about developing the capacity to hold multiple truths. Not to declare one true and the other false, but to see through different eyes without losing your own. To understand how the same event carries completely different meanings depending on the lens you’re looking through.

When I could do that, something opened that had never been accessible before. New ways of relating, loving, and being that were impossible from inside a rigid ideological frame.

King Solomon showed me how.

Two peoples claimed the land of Palestine was theirs.

The world called for a sword — the 1947 Partition Plan: “Divide the land in two. Give half to each.”

The Palestinians cried, “Don’t divide it — keep the land whole!”

The Zionists said, “Divide it — cut the land in two!”

Solomon’s sword doesn’t decide, it reveals. The test wasn’t about fairness or compromise, but about who still saw the wholeness of life. When you understand that cutting the baby kills it, fighting to keep it whole isn’t rejectionism — it’s refusing to participate in destroying what is alive.

I used to think I understood the Palestinian perspective. I didn’t.

I understood the Zionist reductionist explanation of Palestinian behavior — violence, hate, extremism — but that wasn’t their perspective. It was my framework interpreting their actions through its own conditioning.

Learning to hold another perspective meant noticing when I was seeing through conditioning rather than reality. I learned to watch for the moment I wanted to shut down or defend — that edge where the framework resists being questioned. I learned to sit at that edge instead of retreating. To stay with the discomfort long enough to see what the reaction was protecting me from.

Slowly, I developed the capacity to shift lenses — to see 1947 not through “who was willing to compromise,” but through “who was willing to divide.” And the entire story inverted.

A land that once had free movement, families connected beyond what became borders, Jews, Muslims, and Christians living in shared towns with shared culture, language, and land. It became divided, riddled with checkpoints, families separated by walls, and life reduced to permissions: to move, to work, to exist. The Nakba wasn’t an isolated moment in time, it is the continued division of what was once whole.

Dividing what is whole never brings peace, it produces fragments that can’t survive on their own.

Solomon’s test reveals the nature of sacred connection itself.

The metaphorical sword doesn’t ask which mother has a better claim. It reveals who already sees the land as a whole and sacred entity. The response to division is the revelation.

Something that the Zionist lens cannot see is that other lenses exist at all — it can only see itself. This is where the shift in perspective begins, recognizing that there were always two ways to come home after exile.

One way was as a colonizer, arriving with ancient claims and modern certainty, building systems to exclude and control rather than integrate, where division feels acceptable because you’re here to secure your piece.

Or as a brother, like Ishmael and Isaac, separated for a time but united in Abraham — arriving home with humility to learn what had evolved while you were gone, honoring the language, culture, and customs of those who remained, where division is unbearable because brothers don’t divide the home — they share it.

The 1947 partition was Solomon’s sword raised again.

The Palestinians’ refusal to divide the land reflected a deeper truth — they saw the land as whole. Their belonging came not from ideology or conquest but from origin. To divide the land would have been to sever something sacred. There is wisdom to that, a deeper knowing. Their response to the sword showed they could not bear to see the land cut apart, a sentiment that endures today in their longing for freedom inside an inclusive, shared land rather than segregation within borders carved by colonialism, occupation, and dispossession.

Zionist acceptance of division — the willingness to “split the baby” — revealed a framework of possession: the land not as a whole, diverse, sacred place, but as an object to be seized, even if in incremental fragments. Fragmentation as a path to ownership, not belonging.

The framework of Zionism I inherited suggested our two positions were morally equivalent — a conflict between two equally valid claims, competing for an outcome. But if the framework itself is not morally valid — an imperial project to colonize a land and its people — then the claims are not equal, nor is the disadvantaged side equally responsible for the cost of that compromise.

One people had already lived on and inhabited the land for generations and were asked to give up what had been generally shared among all. The other arrived with ideology, a claim of superiority, and geopolitical leverage to seize a portion of a land they had not lived in — personally or ancestrally — for millennia. The fragmented system that followed produced generations of Palestinian families that were oppressed, divided, occupied, and controlled, while newcomers with no lived connection step into privileged lives built entirely on the back of that oppression.

When I could hold that truth, I saw what I’d been doing my entire life — not just to Palestinians, but everywhere.

I know what it looks like to stay trapped for too long because I lived there. The other person becomes a means to an end. Their pain becomes proof they’re overreacting. Their attempts to be heard become evidence they’re attacking. Their resistance simply confirms their hostility. And the fight deepens because I believed I was defending truth when I was defending myself — splitting the baby to be right.

When I could hold hard truths without defending, without making someone else wrong to stay right, I stopped seeing the other person as attacking me. I could finally hear what they were saying about what happened. I could see their actual reality instead of my justification.

That is how the Palestinian perspective became visible. Not because I abandoned the Jewish story, but because I learned to own what was wrong first.

When I found peace within myself, I could see the possibility of peace around me. I could finally meet people without needing them to validate myself. I could hear their story without defending mine. Real connection became possible — not conditional love based on agreement and control, but love rooted in recognition.

Peace became possible not because they changed, but because I did.

Solomon’s sword is raised again now. At every checkpoint, in every wall, in every system that divides what was once whole, and it is revealing who the rightful mother is.

קדוש

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