The Borders We Share: A New Way to Fix a Broken World
Section 6: Cities and Rocks (Posts 31–36)
Post 35: Utopia’s Gates, Hebron’s Split: Ideal Cities Clash
Enigma of the Perfectly Divided Dream
Two cities that were born to heal the world now bleed from the same wound.
One is the crystalline crescent of Thomas More’s Utopia, rising from a calm harbour in 1516 like a moon carved from marble and reason. Fifty-four identical towns, each laid out in perfect quadrants, streets wide enough for two wagons to pass without touching, houses exchanged by lot every ten years so no one grows attached to brick or beam, no locks on doors, no private kitchens, no gold worn as ornament—only as chamber pots to cure the sin of pride. Every citizen wakes at dawn to farm, returns at noon to read Plato, sleeps under the same roof as yesterday but knows tomorrow it may belong to another. Perfection, absolute and serene.
The other is Hebron, older than scripture, older than the word “city” itself. Here Abraham bought a cave for four hundred shekels of silver, here David reigned seven years before Jerusalem, here the bones of patriarchs and matriarchs lie beneath layers of Herodian stone, Byzantine mosaic, Crusader iron, Ottoman cedar, and now bullet-proof glass. Today 220,000 Palestinians and 850 Israeli settlers share the same narrow valleys and terraced hills, yet live under two legal skies: H1 governed by the Palestinian Authority yet encircled by Israeli military oversight, H2 governed entirely by Israel, where Shuhada Street—the artery that once carried figs, gold, and wedding processions—lies welded shut, its Palestinian shops painted over with Stars of David, while above it a settlers-only road floats on concrete stilts so Jewish feet never touch Palestinian earth. The Cave of the Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque itself is bisected by a wall of glass and hatred erected after Baruch Goldstein emptied four magazines into praying worshippers on a February morning in 1994.Both cities were conceived as answers.
Both became cages.
I arrive with the companions who have walked every fractured stone of this series: Sherlock Holmes, coat now carrying the chalk dust of Utopian marble and the tear-gas residue of Hebron’s Casbah; Dr. Watson, whose notebook has grown heavy with the weight of identical injustices written in different centuries; King Arthur, whose eyes darken every time a round table is promised and a sword is drawn instead.
With us walk the living and the remembered.
From Utopia come Governor Ademus, elected for wisdom yet terrified of any idea that has not been voted on twice; Raphael Hythloday, the traveller-philosopher who brought the island’s tale to a startled Europe; a young Utopian mother clutching the lottery tile that will force her family to abandon the only garden her children have ever known; and a bondman—face branded with the letter “B”—who has cleaned the golden chamber pots of senators since childhood.
From Hebron come Khaled Osaily, mayor of the Palestinian side, whose office window looks onto a checkpoint; David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, who quotes Psalms when asked about welded doors; Um Mohammed, mother of seven, who has not walked Shuhada Street since her eldest son was born; Eliyahu Cohen, a settler teenager raised to believe the city’s very stones cry out for Jewish return; and a Palestinian shopkeeper whose store on Shuhada has been closed for thirty-one years, the key still warm in his pocket like a coal that will never cool.
This is Post 35, the fifth stride in Section 6: Cities and Rocks. We have climbed Laputa’s arrogant skies and Dubai’s vertical deserts. Now the series descends into the most intimate fracture of all: two cities that promised paradise and delivered partition.
The Parallel Architectures of Exclusion
Utopia’s beauty is mathematical. Every street is twenty households wide, every household sends one phylarch to council, every ten phylarchs send one representative to the Senate in Amaurot. No one owns land, no one owns a house longer than a decade, no one owns another human—except the bondmen, of course: war captives, criminals, or Utopians who dared to campaign for office outside the Senate. They wear iron chains painted gold so the sight will disgust free citizens into virtue. Religious tolerance is offered generously—provided you believe in the immortality of the soul and divine reward; atheists are tolerated but never trusted with public office. Travel requires a passport issued by the prince; to leave your district without it is death. The gates stand open, yet the soul is policed.
Hebron’s fracture is older than any protocol. The 1997 Hebron Agreement, signed after the Goldstein massacre, divided the city into H1 (80 % Palestinian civil control, Israeli security oversight) and H2 (20 % full Israeli civil and military control). Within H2, 850 settlers and 40,000 Palestinians live under different laws on the same streets. Shuhada Street, once the beating heart of commerce, is a museum of absence: 1,800 Palestinian shops forcibly closed, their metal shutters welded from the outside, graffiti in Hebrew proclaiming “Death to Arabs” fading under new layers of spray-paint. Above the ghost street, a settlers-only road floats on concrete stilts. The Ibrahimi Mosque / Tomb of the Patriarchs is itself split: Muslims pray on one side of bullet-proof glass, Jews on the other, the same ancestors listening to prayers in two different languages separated by a wall erected in blood.
My Sovereignty Conflicts (2017) diagnoses both as inward-turned triadic conflicts: two ideological claimants (Utopian Senate vs. individual freedom; Israeli settler ideology vs. Palestinian majority) fighting for exclusive dominion over a single, densely populated urban body whose constitutive population is treated as an obstacle to the dream.
Territorial Disputes (2020) adds the sociological fracture: in Utopia the bondmen and the secretly dissatisfied; in Hebron the Palestinian residents of H2 who are simultaneously protected and punished by the army that protects the settlers.
Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023) reminds us that any polity that denies moral equality to part of its resident population ceases to be cosmopolitan and becomes merely territorial ideology wearing the mask of law.
Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025) analyses the guarantor mechanisms that achieved 92% durability in Latin American shared-sovereignty arrangements—mechanisms that both Utopia and Hebron have stubbornly refused.
The Evidence Gathered in Marble Dust and Tear-Gas Residue
Holmes walks Utopia’s identical streets with a measuring tape in one hand and a copy of More’s book in the other, timing how long it takes a citizen to realise he is being followed. In Hebron he walks the same route every day for a week, timing how long it takes a Palestinian to pass through Checkpoint 56. The numbers he returns with are merciless.
In Utopia: zero private houses, zero locks, zero reported crime—yet 11 % of the population are bondmen in perpetual servitude, and the Senate records show 43 citizens executed in the last decade for “private political conversation.”
In Hebron H2: 850 settlers, 40,000 Palestinians, 120 physical barriers, 1,014 violent incidents recorded by OCHA in 2025 alone, 1,800 shops closed since 1994, 0 Palestinian vehicles permitted on Shuhada Street since 2000.In Utopia, citizens must obtain a passport to travel between towns; refusal is punished by enslavement.
In Hebron H2, Palestinians must obtain permits to walk on their own rooftops; refusal is punished by detention.
Watson’s notebook, page 127: “Both cities have achieved perfect order by perfect exclusion. The difference is only in the material of the cage—marble in one, concrete and steel in the other.”
Arthur stands first before the flawless façade of an Amaurot house whose family has just been relocated by lot, then before the welded door of a Palestinian shop on Shuhada Street whose family key still fits a lock that no longer exists. He speaks only once: “A gate that opens for some and closes for others is no gate at all. It is a wound.”
Two Conclaves, One Covenant
We hold the gatherings separately, because some wounds cannot yet share the same air, but the covenant that emerges is the same.
In the marble Senate of Amaurot, beneath a dome painted with the constellations of reason, Governor Ademus meets Hythloday, the young mother clutching her lottery tile, and the bondman who has never been allowed to speak in public. Arthur lays Excalibur flat on the polished floor. I read aloud from Sovereignty Conflicts (2017) the four principles—egalitarian consensus, efficiency, fair input-to-output ratio, equilibrium proviso—then from Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023) the non-domination requirement that no resident may be treated as a means only.
The young mother speaks first: “If perfection requires me to lose my home every ten years, it is not perfection—it is exile dressed as virtue.”
The bondman, voice cracking from disuse, adds: “If perfection requires some of us to clean the golden chamber pots of others, it is not perfection—it is slavery wearing philosophy’s robe.”
They sign the Amaurot Renewal: citizens may now keep their houses for life if they choose; bondmen are offered gradual, compensated manumission; a Citizens’ Assembly elected by lot from all residents, including former bondmen, gains veto power over any law that restricts movement, speech, or dignity; the death penalty for political conversation is abolished.
The next morning, in a bullet-scarred community centre in H1 Hebron, beneath a ceiling stained by tear-gas canisters fired through the windows, Khaled Osaily meets David Wilder, Um Mohammed, and Eliyahu Cohen. Arthur lays Excalibur flat a second time. I read the same passages. Um Mohammed speaks first: “I just want to walk to the market without a soldier counting my children.” Eliyahu answers, voice trembling: “I just want to walk to synagogue without stones thrown at my children.” Both are telling the truth, and for the first time they hear it in the same room.
They sign the Hebron Covenant on a table made from an old shutter pried from Shuhada Street: phased reopening of Shuhada under joint Palestinian–Israeli municipal patrols; closed shops may reopen with shared commercial courts; the Cave of the Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque placed under a joint religious council with equal representation and mutual veto; a Higher Court seated alternately in H1 and H2 with judges from both communities and international guarantors drawn from the Latin American models analysed in Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025); settler security addressed through technology, training, and accountability rather than collective punishment of the Palestinian population.
Two documents, five centuries and nine thousand kilometres apart, yet written in the same trembling hand.
Murmurs of the Divided Wind
The wind still carries warnings. In Amaurot, old senators whisper that freedom will bring greed. In Hebron, extremists on both sides promise blood if a single shutter rises. Yet beneath the warnings, new sounds have begun to travel.
In Amaurot, the first family chooses to keep their house for twenty years instead of ten; a former bondman is elected to the Senate; a child plants a lemon tree knowing it will still be there when she is grown. In Hebron, the first Palestinian shop on Shuhada Street raises its shutter in thirty-one years; the metallic screech echoes like a birth cry; a settler teenager and a Palestinian teenager share a cigarette on the reopened corner, arguing about Messi and Ronaldo instead of messiahs and martyrs.
Peace in cities that were born to be perfect is never the absence of tension. It is the presence of doors that open both ways, streets that remember every footstep, and a table round enough that no one—bondman or settler, mother or teenager—has to stand outside it.
Why This Resonates in You
You have dreamed of a city where no one is poor, no one is afraid, no one is greedy.
You have also walked a street where one side is alive with light and laughter and the other side is a corridor of welded doors and silence.
You have believed, at different moments of your life, both that humanity can be engineered into harmony and that some divisions are eternal because they are written in scripture or stone.
The Borders We Share does not ask you to choose between Utopia and Hebron. It asks you to notice that both became dystopias the moment they decided some human beings were less human than others—and that both began to heal the moment they admitted the opposite.
Next Tuesday we leave the ideal cities behind—new stones, new skies.
I remain, as always, Dr. Jorge (X: @DrJorge_World), https://drjorge.world
Trails to Wander:
• Sovereignty Conflicts (2017).
• Territorial Disputes (2020).
• Cosmopolitanism and State Sovereignty (2023).
• Territorial Disputes in the Americas (2025).
NOTE:
New posts every Tuesday.
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Post 34: Laputa’s Towers, Dubai’s Fringe: Sandstone Stakes
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Section 6: Cities and Rocks (Posts 31–36)
36, Holmes’ London, Belfast’s Line: Fog of Peace
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Tuesday 2nd December 2025
Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez
X (formerly, Twitter): https://x.com/DrJorge_World
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