Two seemingly unrelated articles in the Guardian caught my attention this morning. One described the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict; the other was news about Australia rejecting a proposal to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution, and I thought about them as I passed the pro-Palestine demonstration in the city centre this afternoon.

First of all, what Hamas is doing is pure evil, another example of a weaponized religion in action, just like in the case of ISIS. But saying that, based on what I read in the first of the aforementioned articles, it seems like Israel, out of its own political calculations, contributed to the growth of Hamas as a way of undermining support for the Palestine Liberation Organisation under the leadership of Yasser Arafat. It’s obviously not the same as what Americans did for the Afghan mujahidin, but it’s hard not to notice some parallels. But what is more important is the way Israel handles the situation in the region and how it treats Palestinians. If Israeli and foreign human rights groups started using the word apartheid, that says a lot. One could imagine that a nation that survived the Holocaust would know better.

And here comes the news about the referendum in Australia. Of course, the situation is different because, even though it has a practical dimension—to improve the living situation of Aboriginal people—the fight is more in the symbolic realm; it’s about Aussies’ honour and acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians in the country’s constitution. There are no border disputes, no living memory of a country that existed prior to the current state of affairs, and no religious fanaticism used as a weapon. And still, the referendum ended in failure, just like the previous one in 1999.

There is a saying that history is written by victors, but the problem with it is that it implies history as a zero-sum game. And even if this is the reality, I would like to think that we are still able to shift that paradigm and finally move to a non-zero-sum game that allows everyone to win.