OPINION
Ken M
Israel/Palestine…over the last 20 years or so I have been reading extensively the history behind this whole question. To qualify my answer would take a number of hours, but, in short, my sympathies lie with Israel. I’m sure I can defend my sympathies on either ethical, moral or legal grounds; however, that would take much more than a brief email exchange.
So consider this question: You run a country in which you alone amongst your neighbours give every single person, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political affiliation, exactly the same political DEMOCRATIC rights – the same opportunities – yet you are hated with passion by most of those neighbours for doing nothing wrong apart from fostering the humanities and defending yourself and all of your differing ethnic groups (20 per cent of Israel’s population is Arab) and political persuasions.
Why?
Let’s also put aside the previous 5000 years, in which the Jewish people staked their claim upon a desert wilderness and subsequently had to put up with invasion and subjugation by a number of different so-called civilisations and invaders keen to steal what the Jewish people had created, and advance to last century.
In short, after the first world war, when the Turkish Ottoman empire had been eliminated (actually slightly prior when their defeat was recognised), the British, in concert with the League of Nations, tried their best to carve up the Middle East into its own home-ruled factions based on tribe, geography, political factions and religion. Obviously when you look at the ongoing unrest they didn’t get it perfectly right. They also set aside Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people but for political reasons never allowed that mandate (The Balfour Declaration) to see the light of day.
By the end of the second world war six million-plus Jewish people had been murdered for nothing else apart from being Jewish. In 1948, determined to not allow this to happen again to your people, you demand your homeland be released by the reluctant British, who were worried about oil and offending the Muslim locals (who hate Jews even more than they hate Christians). After a considerable amount of argy-bargy, you force and embarrass the Poms into pulling out. By this stage you own a goodly part of the land: some already owned and much purchased from the previous Arab owners (originally taken from your forebears), so you declare a new state and are promptly attacked by the local Arabs (who incidentally had been mounting pogroms and indiscriminately killing Jews for generations) with the assistance of all of the neighboring Arab countries.
Against all odds you cobble together a defence and you beat these hate-filled religious fanatics off and in doing so occupy a comparatively small amount of land they had vacated in order to allow their mates in to annihilate you. This land you rightfully occupy, the first of comparatively small amounts of land you realise you need to buffer yourself from attack.
Remember also those Arabs who didn’t make war and go out of their way to foster your killing are still there today as Israeli citizens with the same rights as Jewish Israelis. Subsequently you have had to beat off numerous attacks by combined Muslim/Arab forces who have one stated aim, which is to wipe you off the face of the earth. Kill every single Jew!
Unbelievably, despite all of this, you are a cultured, peace-loving people and you recognise the anger of the dispossessed people (the Palestinian Arabs), so on numerous occasions you attempt to negotiate a settlement where you compromise considerably to accommodate the very people who would seek your annihilation. Every time you think things are sorted, at the 11th hour the Palestinians throw it back in your face, unable to get past their contempt and hatred for the Jews, and they will not compromise: either all Jews dead or enslaved by the adherents of Islam.
For the sake of being a good world citizen over the next few decades you put up with sporadic attacks and wars, only defending yourself. You allow Palestinians to come in, gain work, health treatment and various other benefits from your civilised society despite them sporadically murdering and attacking your people. You can never let your guard down, as to do so means death.
Then a month ago the Palestinians (Hamas) cross a line: 5000 rockets/mortars fired into your towns and cities and an invasion where 1400 hundred men, women and babies are brutally raped, murdered and debased by these hate-filled psychopaths who glory in their savagery and cruelty and boast online about their disgusting exploits. On top of that, they take hostage over 200 of your people – your wives, sisters, mothers, children, brothers, etc…God alone knows how they are being treated!
No, the Israeli people no longer have any choice. They must now draw this poison from their sides; they have no choice but to eradicate Hamas and those who support it, as whilst they will never eradicate Palestinian hate of the Jewish, they can at least buy themselves a decade or two of comparative freedom from attack. Judaism can live alongside Islam. You only need look at the recent progress in relations between Israel, Egypt, Saudi and the UAE.
I personally can’t understand the antisemitism so prevalent amongst our academia, our left-leaning political factions and of course the mohawk-skinhead, nut bar, so-called alt-right (basically idiots who have no idea what they stand for). This is a culture which is the basis of our whole moral/legal code, which gave civilisation the mandate for learning and recording; the culture which has massively disproportionately produced far more Nobel Prize winners than any other culture and has done more for mankind than any other. Why do people hate them so?
In short: Israel must win, humanity depends on it.