Think First

 As I’ve said many times before, if liberals remain confused about Islamic extremism, the appetite for right wing authoritarianism is going to continue to grow throughout the West. We need to do everything we can to avoid this.

Hold on to that thought.

That is how Sam Harris wrapped up a recent podcast the transcript of which you can find here in which he castigates in no uncertain terms the lack of thought (my term, Harris is more direct by using terms like sheer ignorance and outright stupidity) that pervades the current movement at college campuses, protesting the ongoing war in Gaza.

I have a few gripes with Harris's piece, namely that, as in previous podcasts, he does little more than pay lip service to the unspeakable humanitarian crisis that has befallen the people of Gaza. No matter which side you are on in this debate, or like me you take no sides between the Israeli and Palestinian people (if not their respective governments), it is impossible to ignore the pain and suffering of the millions of Gazans who want nothing more than to simply live their lives.  

As I've stated in earlier posts, the argument of who has the moral high ground is meaningless when it comes to tens of thousands of innocent people killed, and many, many more injured, displaced, their lives forever altered and their future seriously in doubt. The fact that probably half of these innocent people are children compounds the tragedy logarithmically,

Every decent human being should mourn their loss and grieve over the bloodshed that goes on to this day.

Nonetheless, I have to say I agree with more of what Sam Harris has to say than disagree.

To put it simply, as brought up by a friend, "Why is no one protesting against Hamas?"

On October 7th of last year, Hamas was, and continues to be, the de facto government of Gaza. Therefore, the unprovoked and unspeakable attack they carried out that day against the people of Israel, besides being vile and reprehensible in every sense of the words, was an act of war, no different than Germany's unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, no different than Japan's unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As such, Israel had every right to declare war against Hamas.

Today, people of good will all over the world are calling for a cease fire, for an end to the killing, for the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas, alive or dead, to be released and for both sides to come together and negotiate peace. 

That's all well and good, but there's a big problem.

The stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel, it always has been, and continues to this day.

We could argue all day and all night for the rest of our lives about the merits of the creation of the State of Israel three generations ago, after the Holocaust, but the fact of the matter as I've also repeated over and over again since last October is that Israel, a sovereign state since 1948, is not going away. 

Neither are the Palestinians.

Therefore, some reasonable compromise must be negotiated in order for there to be any semblance of peace in the region, a long shot at best but what other choice do we have?

It is impossible to negotiate when one side in a war is unabashedly devoted to the complete destruction of the other side. Hamas is not interested in making peace with Israel in the slightest.  As long as Hamas continues to have any teeth left, we can expect acts like what took place on October 7, Israel's equivalent of 9/11, to be commonplace, obviously, unacceptable for the Israelis.

Therefore, from the Israeli point of view, which is not unreasonable in the slightest, Hamas must be destroyed or at the very least, its ability to wage war, eliminated.

Make no mistake, Hamas knew exactly what they were doing in the planning and carrying out of the October 7th attacks. They understood full well that Israel would respond with deadly and overwhelming force and that the vast majority of its victims, fellow Palestinians, would be innocent civilians, including children. They knew that because Hamas routinely uses its own people as human shields, intentionally placing them in harm's way between their fighters and the Israeli military. Any chance of taking out Hamas fighters in battle inevitably leads to civilian casualties. And Hamas understood all too well that the outrage over the carnage would cause support for themselves around the world among otherwise well-intentioned people who refuse to look beyond their own biases, or simply won't bother to dig any deeper than the proverbial ten second soundbite.

It was all by design, the blueprint for the slaughter of 30,000 and counting Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023 was brought to the world courtesy of Hamas, pure and simple.

For their part, Israel is continuously lambasted for not having responded "proportionately" to the Hamas attacks, as the current toll of Gazans killed is well over 30,000, while around 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7.

But what does a proportionate response even mean? Should Israel's response have been tit for tat, in other words, would the war have been OK if they had stopped at 1,200 dead Gazans?

To put it into perspective, 2,403 U.S. military service members died as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the event which resulted in the U.S. declaring war on Japan, thereby entering World War II.

By that war's end nearly four years later, in the words of retired U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley:

…we (the United States) destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered people in massive numbers – innocent people who had nothing to do with their government – men, women, and children.

I would add that during World War II we also fire-bombed German cities, causing the pain and suffering of innocent civilians some would argue, far more agonizing even than that caused by the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This in no means is to minimize or trivialize the suffering and death of innocent civilians in fact, quite the opposite.

During a recent conference at the Carter Center in Washington, General Milley, who brought up other examples of civilian casualties caused by the actions of the U.S. military, including those in which he participated said: 

War is a terrible thing, but if it’s going to have meaning, if it’s going to have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose, and it must be achieved rapidly with the least cost, and that you do by speed.

Here I would question as in the case of Sam Harris, Milley's use of the term "morality", as that term when applied to war is fraught with much difficulty. A war can be just, it can be a fight for survival, but can there ever be a moral war? The answer to that question is way out of my pay grade. 

But Milley got to the crux of the matter when he commented on the overt support for Hamas on American college campuses:

They’re out there supporting a terrorist organization, whose very written charter calls for the death of all Jews – not just in Israel, worldwide. I mean, come on now. If you’re going to support that, you’re on the wrong side.

If you have doubts about Milley's remark about the "death of all Jews" as I did, please refer to the last sentence in Article Seven in The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas's 1988 manifesto) which you can find here.

Article Six of that document gets to the real motivation of the group, which can be heard in the popular chant heard on university campuses throughout the U.S.: 

Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.

In other words, the entire land that is now occupied by Israel. But not to fear says the text:  

(Hamas) strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the one wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned.

That last part sounds all well and good until you talk to residents of other utopian Islamic theocracies such as the biggest supporter of Hamas, Iran. 

Truth be told, many of the Jews who represent about one hundredth of one percent of the population of Iran, (that number was a lot higher before the Islamic Revolution of the 1970s), claim to be free to practice their religion in Iran without much governmental interference. 

The same cannot be said of members of non-Abrahamic faiths such as the largest religious minority in Iran, the Baha'i, whose members have been routinely persecuted ever since the Ayatollahs took over. 

The same certainly cannot be said for members of the LGTBQ community.

Nor for women who choose not to conform to the dress code of Iran's morality police. Just ask Mahsa Amini when you meet her in heaven, or the nearly 500 people killed there while protesting her death.

The saddest part is that Iran is a paradise for those groups and others who don't toe the hard line of the religious zealots, compared to places like Afghanistan under the Taliban, and portions of Syria and Iraq under the control of the Islamic State.

Now you might say I'm just cherry-picking extreme examples of radical Islam that have little relevance to the political group that is currently in control of Gaza who are merely "fighting to bring justice to the Palestinians". 

Well, the following is Article Eight of the Hamas Covenant in its entirety:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

If that doesn't send shivers up your spine, I guess nothing will.

Quite difficult it is to negotiate with people who are not only willing and eager to kill you and annihilate your people, but are also willing and eager to die themselves, or at least send their underlings who are more than willing to die for them.

Yet here we are.

I disagree with Sam Harris when he intimates that what we've been seeing on college campuses since October 7 is driven primarily by antisemitism, equating it say with the tiki torch carrying, swastika wearing mob in Charlottesville, VA chanting "we shall not be replaced." 

Rather in my opinion anyway, what's driving these protests beyond a genuine concern for the people of Gaza, is the myopic point of view held by many in contemporary academia and in the Left of hostility towards and rejection of the dominance of western culture, manifestly expressed through colonialism. 

That said, the widely reported harassment and assaults of Jewish students by protestors and the faculty members who support them is, if not outright antisemitism, then a good impersonation of it. So is openly calling for intifada. And so is calling for an end to the State of Israel. 

Beyond the lack of thought, (I'll be generous and leave it at that), beyond the catchy radical chic chants and slogans, beyond the misguided efforts of many Americans to address the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with a one-size-fits-all solution, is a profound failure to look at the big picture. 

As I wrote above, the war in Gaza is an unspeakable human tragedy. But innocent lives will not be spared by the efforts of protestors however well-intentioned, who haven't thought the whole thing through.

As Sam Harris suggests capping off his podcast, the movement on U.S. college campuses to condemn Israel and only Israel in the war in Gaza, is a godsend to right wing political extremists who exploit the chaos and lawlessness of the demonstrations, which they greatly exaggerate of course, the tacit support for an extremist, terrorist organization which cannot be denied, and most of all the antisemitism, both real and perceived, to gain a foothold among American voters who are not on the margins of the political spectrum, by claiming the moral high ground on this issue.

Far more serious is the perilous division it is causing among Americans who honestly value the rule of law as proscribed by our Constitution, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, the separation of church and state, the promoting and nurturing of ethnic and racial diversity, reproductive rights, the freedom to marry whomever you wish and to live your life however you see fit, and all the other rights made possible by a liberal democracy, which is currently under threat by extremists, both at home and abroad, with a much different agenda.

We've come too far as a nation to let that happen. From time immemorial the modus operandi of totalitarianism is divide and conquer. To those of us who cherish living in a democratic republic and the values that have held this nation together, flawed as it may have been for nearly 250 years, we can disagree on any number of issues but in the end, we can't let ourselves become divided over the big picture. 

If we do, we'll only have ourselves to blame when it all comes to a screeching end. 

Think about it.

Talking Point Number Two: Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism

This is a subject wrought with pain and strife, one that not being not Jewish, I probably have no business talking about. But that doesn't stop anybody else so why should I be different?

Like all forms of bigotry, intolerance and racism, antisemitism is a blight on humanity, even without considering one of the darkest moments of history, the Holocaust. I think blight is a good metaphor because the primary use of the word is to describe a disease. This is definition number one of blight from Merriam Webster:

a disease or injury of plants marked by the formation of lesions, withering, and death of parts (such as leaves and tubers)

First and foremost, racism of any kind is a disease of the human condition, but not an anomaly. We are a social animal, but also a tribal one. By nature, we are distrustful of members of other tribes, one of the survival mechanisms our early ancestors picked up along the way. However, humans not only survived but thrived primarily by our ability to learn. One thing the species Homo sapiens has learned over nearly ten thousand generations of our existence is that we can accomplish much more and suffer much less by cooperating with members of other tribes, rather than fighting them. Yet we haven't quite learned how to get over our primordial instincts to distrust and hate one other. Consequently, our inability to see each other as fellow human beings, rather than as members of different tribes, whether they are defined by race, ethnicity, faith, ideology or whatever, has resulted in countless lesions, withering and death, caused by fear and ignorance fueled by our primitive instincts. As we now have the technological ability to wipe out our entire species along with all the others on the planet, with the possible exception of those belonging to the order Blattodia, the blight of racism may prove fatal to us all.

Antisemitism, the distrust and hatred of the Jewish people, has been a blight on humanity for thousands of years. It is particularly raw today because the effects of it including discrimination, oppression, segregation, ethnic cleansing, violence and genocide are still fresh in the memory of people still with us who lived through it not very long ago.

And it has not subsided.

It's been two months since the depravity of the Hamas attack on kibbutzim and a music festival in Israel just beyond the border with Gaza. 10/7 was the most devastating attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It came as a surprise to exactly no one that the Israeli government responded swiftly, resolutely, and brutally, leaving a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in its wake.

 

In the two months of war following the atrocity, the same talking points come up again and again from supporters of both sides of Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One of these is the conflation or conversely the differentiation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Yesterday the U.S. Congress passed a resolution equating the two. The inspiration behind the resolution were the hundreds of rallies in the United States, several of them on college campuses in support of the Palestinian cause. Many of these demonstrations took place immediately after the 10/7 attacks with the protestors openly expressing their support for Hamas and for their actions on that dreadful day.

Let me say unequivocally that I was as appalled as anyone by people who should have known better, celebrating the torture, rape, kidnapping and butchering of innocent people, many of whom were on the same ideological side in regard to the Palestinian cause as the protestors. As guaranteed by the First Amendment, the protestors were within their rights. But their rights do not extend to immunity from being called out for their heartlessness, ignorance, stupidity and yes, antisemitism. In a televised presidential debate the other night, candidate Nikki Haley indirectly compared the demonstrators to the Ku Klux Klan. She is not off the mark. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Let me also say unequivocally that supporting the Palestinian cause in itself should not be equated with antisemitism.  

Neither should criticism of Israel. 

Most supporters of Israel are quick to point that out by the way, but I'm not 100 percent convinced they all believe it.

So what's the deal with Zionism and what does it all mean today? Frankly I'm a bit confused. As I wrote in an earlier post, Zionism was the aspiration of a homeland for an oppressed and dispersed people, the Jews. It was a movement that had existed in different forms for several hundred years at least. 

Zionism became more than an aspiration when Great Britain during their mandate over Palestine between the two World Wars, declared its support of a homeland for the Jewish people in that land. And it became reality 75 years ago with the establishment of the State of Israel.

With the aspiration becoming a reality, where does that leave Zionism and anti-Zionism today?

Here's a statement I've heard practically my whole life, the entire time of which I've never known there to be no Israel: "I'm not against the Jewish people, I'm against Zionism."

It is said that today, anti-Zionism is the denial of Israel's right to exist, an idea which plenty of groups advocate, and many more like Hamas are trying make a reality. That is precisely the implication of the catch phrase "from the river to the sea" which U.S. Congresswoman Rashida Talib was rightfully excoriated for using recently. But beyond the obvious antisemitic tone of that sentiment, when you think of it, isn't denying Israel like denying the United States' right to exist, or for that matter all the nations in the Americas, and many scattered throughout the world, whose "founders" conquered the land causing displacement, great suffering, and even death to the indigenous people of those places, much like the founding of Israel?

If there ever was a quixotic enterprise, denying an established, sovereign nation it's right to exist is surely high on the list. Israel is here to stay, like it or not.

The first person I heard make the comment above about Zionism was my father. I'm not sure he even knew what Zionism actually was, as I never heard him mention his opposition to the state of Israel. To my old man, Zionism was a nefarious movement that involved a conspiracy at the hands of the Jewish elite who had control of the world's banks, the press, popular culture and many other institutions that had a great influence on people's lives. The end goal of course was world domination. 

Politically as a child I was much more under the influence of my mother, so I always thought my dad's ideas were unique to him or at best, shared only by a few other kookie folks, until I learned they are commonly held, especially among my father's fellow Europeans. Not even the horrors of World War II could diminish them. Sure, others may not have been as blatant in public as my father was at home with his family, but there were always the telltale signs bringing up a certain group of people not mentioned by name, (but "you know who they are"), and conspiracies. Silly me but I didn't realize until fairly recently how prevalent those ideas were stateside until all the fuss about George Soros and his supposed Zionist plot to disrupt the American political system by changing its demographics, otherwise known as the great replacement conspiracy.

This shit never grows old apparently.

Let's face it, making the point of saying you're anti-Zionist but not antisemitic, is really just putting lipstick on a pig. If you feel the need to point out that you're not antisemitic, or any other kind of racist for that matter, you probably are. And you're in good company because none of us are truly immune from the blight of racism.

So yes, in that sense, anti-Zionism and antisemitism go hand-in-hand. 

What about pro-Zionism today? To many, with the stated goals of Zionism already accomplished, the term refers not simply to the preservation and security of the State of Israel, but to the expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territory, the continuation of Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the treatment of the Palestinian people in Israel as second-class citizens, all of which has been condemned by much of the world as well as the United Nations.

Is this condemnation antisemitic? 

What if a person thinks as I do that the ideal, perfect world solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a one state solution, where Jews and Palestinians would live together in a State of Israel, all with the same rights and opportunities, as a true democratic republic? This would mean technically the end of Israel as an exclusively Jewish State, but not the end of it as a Jewish homeland. It would instead be a shared homeland. Does that make me an antisemite?

Admittedly this one state solution is little more than a pipedream, one that has about as much chance of happening as pigs flying on the twelfth day of never.  It would require a constitution (which Israel currently lacks), which while maintaining majority rule, unequivocally guarantees minority rights, in other words something like what we have in the United States. Even more important, it would require a population that's all on board with it.

 

Aye, there's the rub.

As we've seen lately in the United States, our democratic republic and Constitution, two of our most cherished institutions, are under attack in a country whose divisions are a mere speck compared to what they are in the Middle East. If democracy has a chance of collapsing here, think of its chances over there.

I stated in an earlier post that I am neither on the side of the Israelis nor the Palestinians in this conflict but rather on the side of peace. Does that make me Islamophobic (an essential but misleading word as I'll point out in a subsequent post) as well as antisemitic?

If it is, so be it.

As we've seen, both Zionism and its antithesis anti-Zionism are highly charged and ambiguous terms, speaking to the past but having little practical relevance today. Just as the State of Israel is no longer an aspiration and is here to stay, so too are the Palestinian people. Maybe it's time to retire those terms and at the very least, keep our accusations of racism on both sides to a minimum. 

They are not helpful.

While my father shared his European culture's prejudices as we saw above, he was fond of saying something that was a truism yet deeply profound, something in my heart of hearts I think he truly believed. I've mentioned these words time and again in this space, but they too never grow old:

People are people. 

Despite my own prejudices, and there are more than I'd like to admit, I've tried my hardest to live by those words which I'll take to my grave. 

They should serve to guide us all in this difficult, complicated world.

Talking Point Number One: It's All About Colonialism

This is part one of a series of posts I hope to create that deals with the current talking points concerning the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. 

There are simple problems in this world with complex solutions, and there are complex problems with relatively simple solutions. I can't think of any real-life examples of the latter at the moment but I know they exist. But the most heart-wrenching soul searching, tragic issue dominating the news at this writing, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a sterling example of the former.

In a nutshell, simplified only to a small degree, here is the problem:

A nation, the Jewish people, had lived in exile from their ancestral homeland for nearly two millennia. Keeping their way of life, their traditions and for the most part their religion intact, the Jewish diaspora lived as outsiders wherever they found themselves, and were often treated as such. Despised, denigrated, segregated, deprived of the rights of citizenship, and often basic human rights, antisemitism has been a given in the Jewish experience since their time in exile. 

Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish state and homeland, has existed for centuries. It wasn't exclusively a Jewish movement as Christian groups hoping to fulfill scripture, found inspiration in returning Jews to the Holy Land in order to achieve that end.

It was in fact American Christian Zionists who coined the contentious term: "A land without a people for a people without a land."

That land of course was Palestine and suffice it to say, the first part of that aphorism was dead wrong. For centuries, Arab Muslims formed the majority of the population of Palestine, the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For the most part, they lived there in peace with Christian and Jewish minorities, all the while under the sphere of the influence of foreign colonial rule.

Meanwhile the nineteenth century saw a marked increase in antisemitism in Europe which inspired the modern Zionist movement. In the late 1800s, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish lawyer and journalist born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is today the city of Budapest, would become the founder and driving force of the movement that would ultimately result in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. As a young man Herzl realized that assimilation of the Jews into European society was impossible. He believed there was no solution to antisemitism and that the only way for the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom was the establishment of a state of their own.

Herzl's ideas were brought to the public in his book Der Judenstaat, (The Jewish State), published in 1896. The following is the conclusion of Herzl's work:

...I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence... Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes. The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.

Palestine was not the only location considered for the new Jewish State. Historically, places as far afield as sites in the United States, far eastern Russia and even Japan were brought up as possibilities. In 1903, the British suggested a territory of Eastern Africa which was under their control, in present day Kenya as a possibility. Herzl took that idea under consideration. 

One of the reasons for the rejection of the idea was that the people already there would object.

Imagine that.

Some say that colonialism is responsible for the current crisis in the Middle East and that idea is not entirely without merit. As has been pointed out ad nauseam by fervent supporters of Israel, there has never been an independent Palestinian state with Palestinian Arabs in control of their own destiny. Rather, Palestine and its people have been pawns on a chessboard representing whatever foreign power controlled them. Some would say they continue to be.

As for the Jews, if the 19th Century was disastrous for them in Europe, the 20th Century was catastrophic. 

During World War I, in exchange for their support in the effort against the Ottoman Turks, the British and the French made contradictory deals, promising self-determination to the Arabs of the Middle East, and a homeland to the Jewish people in Palestine. After the war, the two victorious European powers had a change of heart, dividing the spoils of their victory among themselves and in the process created the nations of Iraq and Jordan as token rewards to the Arabs. However due to their strategic importance, Syria and Palestine, also considered by the Arabs to be part of the deal, would remain under European power. The Europeans did keep their promise to support a Jewish homeland in Palestine however, with little regard to the people who already lived there.

The following is the complete text of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a public pledge written by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and sent to a prominent British Zionist, Lord Walter Rothchild:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. 

(emphasis mine)

Some staunch defenders of Israel use the highlighted portion of the text to point out that the rights of the indigenous Palestinian population were indeed an integral part of the Zionism project. 

What they fail to mention was that Britain had no intention of involving the current residents of their plan to create a homeland for another group. In a private memorandum, Arthur Balfour said this:

In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants.

He would later add that the cause of a Jewish homeland was...

Of far profounder import than the desires of the Arab inhabitants.

Colonialism certainly created the framework that set in motion the conflict we have today where in the words of the prominent Israeli intellectual Arthur Koestler: “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third.” 

Yet in the wake of the decline of colonialism in the 20th century, another "ism" had taken its place, nationalism. The right to self-determination is a noble concept that looks great on paper. But the real world is not so tidy and compartmentalized.  There are always groups of people who are left behind when one group is granted self-determination over their region after years of colonial rule. We have seen this happen time and again in Africa, India, the Balkans and of course Israel, to name just a few. 

The British were in control of Palestine from the capture of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917, until 1948 when they decided to cut their losses and go home. This period is referred to as the British mandate of Palestine. While upholding the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which declared British support for a Jewish state in Palestine, the British controlled the number of Jews who could enter Israel, even during the height of the reign of terror of the Nazis that resulted in the Holocaust. It is said this was done in order to prevent the Arab countries from siding with the Axis powers. Nevertheless, between the end of the First and the end of the Second World Wars, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from around 90,000 to 630,000, while during that time, the Arab population remained fairly stable at around one million people.

It should come as no surprise that there would be consequences to such a dramatic demographic shift over such a short period of time. The consequense was violence committed by both the Arabs and the Jews. 

In 1948 the Arab population of Palestine was still in the majority. When the British left, control of the region was given over to the newly formed United Nations. The U.N. determined that the solution to the Arab/Jewish conflict was to partition the region in two areas with each group given hegemony over their own area. The map they drew up looked very similar to the Israel of today with the West Bank and Gaza as well as the Golan Heights given over to the Arabs, while the rest of the territory, some 60 percent of the land, was to be handed over to the Jews. Given the very simple fact that the minority of the land was offered to Arab Palestinians, the indigenous people of the region who still constituted a majority of the population, they rejected the offer.  

Can anyone blame them?

Or for that matter, can anyone blame the Jews for looking to find a homeland, especially after the horrors of the Holocaust?

As I said at the top, at its heart it's a simple problem, namely two groups of people in conflict over the control of a small piece of land.

The solution to the problem on the other hand, is painfully difficult.

Sure, colonialism played its part. But blaming colonialism or any other "ism" I'm afraid, isn't in the cards as part of the solution for the here and now.

We're stuck with what we have, Israeli and Palestinian people, many with quite different agendas, some 15 million people trying, and some not, to live together in a piece of land that is just slightly bigger than the state of New Jersey.

It's a simple fact of nature that we cannot turn back the hands of time to change the past, we can only move forward.

The next talking point when I get around to it is this: anti-Zionism = antisemitism.

Stay tuned.

Running Out of Other Hands

There's lots of blame to go around, that much is certain. What is also certain is there is not a single justification for what took place in Israel, across the border from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

None whatsoever. 

They call it Israel's 9/11 which is really saying something about a country whose entire existence has been defined by war and terror. In my opinion, in the scope of sheer depravity if not body count, 10/7 was worse. 

On that dreadful day, at this writing, three weeks ago, members of the terrorist organization Hamas, standing eye-to-eye with their victims, mostly ordinary Israeli citizens, tortured, raped, and butchered close to 1,500 people. Some were intentionally burned alive while hiding in their homes. Others were beheaded. Bodies of victims were desecrated. Many who were not killed were taken hostage. No one was spared, not the elderly, not the infirm, not children.

I'm not going to go into all the horrific details because information on that is everywhere. 

All I will say is that it takes a special kind of monster to kill parents in front of their children, not to mention all the other atrocities that took place that day.

Almost as disturbing were the scores of public acts around the world including the U.S., where people who support the Palestinian cause (a just cause in my opinion), openly celebrated the 10/7 attacks, claiming they were a legitimate response to Israeli policies.

If torture, rape and slaughter of innocent people, and cheering it all on aren't bad enough, for author/neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris, there is another atrocity that trumps them all, the use of human shields. In his words:

I’m talking about people who will strategically put their own noncombatants, their own women and children, into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies, knowing that their enemies have a more civilized moral code that will render them reluctant to shoot back, for fear of killing or maiming innocent noncombatants.

This is taken from a transcript of Harris's recent podcast on the 10/7 attacks titled: The Sin of Moral Equivalence.  In the podcast, he notes that while ethics and morality take on different forms depending upon one's culture and religion, human civilization has advanced to the point where there are certain fundamental moral laws in our day an age, that nearly everyone accepts. It is generally agreed for example that it is wrong to kill (unless absolutely unavoidable), or to rape (in any circumstance), or to torture, or to take hostages, or to revel in such acts. And it is beyond wrong to use innocent people as shields to protect oneself from committing these crimes.

Therefore according to Harris, there is not any moral equivalence between the violent acts of Hamas, and the violent acts of Israel, who is merely attempting to defend itself. In his words: "Intentions count." 

I agree.

But he raises a few eyebrows with the following:

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.

To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible.

The problem is we could argue all day about whose culture is the morally superior, but in the end, we're still left with the question of what to do about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 

I'm sure it makes little difference to the victims of the 10/7 attack, or the Israeli response to it, (over 5,000 people killed in Gaza at this writing), whether their or their loved one's killer was morally superior or inferior to the killers on the other side.

We can pick sides and argue until we're blue in the face as to who's cause is more valid, which side is responsible for more atrocities, and what group is more entitled to call the small patch of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, home.

Or we can go back and forth justifying the actions of both sides until we run out of other hands, as I certainly have after the 10/7 attack.

But in the end, there are only two realities that matter: 

Israel is here to stay and so are the Palestinians. We can either go on as we have for 75 years living with an unending cycle of violence and death, or somehow, someway come up with a solution for the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to live together in relative peace.

Yes I know, that sounds very kumbaya of me but in all honesty, short of the mass eviction or genocide of one or both of the groups that call that land (whatever you want to call it) home, can you think of any other scenario?

No, I'm not presumptuous enough to claim to have an answer to this conflict. All I know is that it is not as some suggest a struggle between right and wrong, between good and evil. If it were, it would be an easy choice for those of us who haven't a personal stake in the issue to pick sides, like the other war we're dealing with in Ukraine. Nevertheless, many do pick sides without giving the other side the benefit of at least trying to walk in their shoes, even for a brief moment. 

To be sure there are very bad, perhaps evil actors involved in the current struggle in the Middle East, but the truth is that both sides have legitimate arguments that need to be listened to and respected, especially by each other.

In all his wisdom, Sam Harris makes no bones about which side he's on, which is certainly his prerogative. But in doing so, he illustrates much of the disconnect we have going on right now on both sides regarding this issue. 

While denying moral equivalence between the 10/7 attacks and Israel's response, Harris pays lip service to some of the issues Palestinians have, mentioning the:

the growth of (Israeli) settlements, (and) the daily humiliation of living under occupation.

 But then he adds:

Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.

This is a half-truth. While it's true that previous to the 10/7 attacks, Israeli forces were not occupying Gaza from the inside, Israel has blockaded the region, walled it off, controlling its air and maritime space, six of seven of its land borders, and as we've seen during this conflict, complete control of Gaza's utilities including water, electricity and telecommunications.

Harris's comments dismiss the dreadful conditions people have lived through in Gaza leading some to declare it, an "open air prison." And that was before Israel's current air bombardment and impending ground invasion, which have made it a living hell on earth. 

In all fairness it must be stated that a great deal of the suffering of the people of Gaza has been exacerbated by Hamas who has been the governing body there since 2007, and has been using the territory to launch missile strikes against Israel.

Sam Harris is not alone in his selective reading of history, In virtually all the assessments of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I've read on both sides of the issue, the authors use charged language consisting of half-truths, false equivalences, conflation and other rhetorical devices crafted for the purpose of minimizing the suffering of and dehumanizing the other side.  

Folks taking the Palestinian side for example like to use provocative terms charging Israel with "imperialism" "settler colonialism", "racism", "occupation", "ethnic cleansing", "apartheid" and even "fascism". These are fighting words, terms designed to ring a bell by conflating Israel's treatment of the Palestinians with familiar grievous atrocities that have taken place throughout history such as the European conquest of the Americas, Apartheid South Africa, the brutal war in the Balkans in the nineties, and the quintessential symbol of evil, Nazi Germany.

Like Sam Hariis's occupation remark, while not entirely off the mark, these are half-truths that tell only part of the story. Israel is indeed guilty of committing grievous atrocities against the Palestinian people. What the folks who use these terms conveniently leave out, are the grievous atrocities carried out against Israelis by terrorist organizations acting, or so they claim, in the name of the Palestinian people.

Also conveniently not mentioned is the terrible history of racism and oppression against the Jewish people, culminating in the Holocaust which was the final straw that made the establishment of the State of Israel, a fait accompli.

On the other side, in a 1969 interview, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said this: "There was no such thing as Palestinians."  She went on:

When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist. (Emphasis mine)

What she says here with the exception of the last sentence, is not entirely without merit. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the territory of Palestine had been under the control of the colonial powers of Great Britain, the Ottoman Turks, several other Muslim groups broken up for a brief period by European Crusaders, the Byzantine Empire, the Romans, (with brief interludes of Jewish rule), the Greeks, the Babylonians and the Persians. That takes us back to about 600 B.C.E. when the Hebrews still ruled over much of the area when the Egyptians weren't calling the shots. In none of that time was there a Palestinian state governed by a people called the Palestinians.   

According to Meir's framework, the people who came to be known as Palestinians, were simply Arabs who happened to live in Palestine. As such they were subjects of the imperial powers mentioned above and were referred to as Palestinian Arabs. Golda Meir compares these people to the Jews like her, who lived in Palestine before 1948, and were referred to as Palestinian Jews. 

So she's right in that there was never a Palestinian state. Other commentators point out that even the word Palestine is a Greek, not an Arab word. 

Golda Meir spent years backpedaling her remark but the idea of a lack of a true Palestinian identity has been picked up by many hardline defenders of Israel and has been the foundation of their argument that the people who identify themselves as Palestinians have no legitimate case. In their view, they are simply Arabs who should live with other Arabs in places like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. 

The germ of that argument may be factually true, but in its entirety the argument can be refuted in two words: so what? 

Before World War I, about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in the region as had their ancestors before them for millennia. There was no mass migration of Arab people into Palestine, no one date when we can say the Arabs arrived in Palestine. Modern day Palestinians can legitimately trace at least part of their ancestry to the region back to the time of Abraham and before.

As can the Jews.

The Arabs of Palestine had their own towns, farms and way of life. They bonded as a community. They had developed their own culture and language, one of the many dialects of Arabic. And they lived in peace with members of the Jewish minority who had remained after the mass exodus during the first century C.E. after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. 

That all changed after World War I as the massive immigration of Jewish people into Palestine, made possible by Great Britain with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which declared British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the region, which completely changed the demographics of Palestine. 

Tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians were evicted from their homes and forced into exile, communities were destroyed, olive trees that provided Palestinian families their sustenance for centuries were uprooted, and entire towns were leveled. One incident was so horrific, The Deir Yessin Massacre, the obliteration of an Arab town near Jerusalem by radical Israeli terrorists, that it bears resemblance to what happened three weeks ago outside of Gaza, again if not in body count, in terms of sheer depravity. Remember as Sam Harris pointed out, intentions count. 

Today, Jewish people from every corner of the planet who have never set foot in the place are welcome to move to Israel upon which they automatically become citizens, yet Arab people who were born there and have since left for whatever reason, are denied that right.

I could go on forever describing sins of the past and present but what's the point?

The question of the day is where do we go from here?

Among the people making the rounds on the interview circuit in the past month is the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harrari, who has friends and family members in Kibbutz Be-eri who were victims of the 10/7 massacre.

Harrari has been a strong critic of the current government in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Harrari is a populist, conspiracy theory driven strongman with aims to divide Israelis in order to shore up his own power. (sound familiar?). Harrari directly attributes the "success" of the Hamas 10/7 assault to the distraction caused by Israeli political infighting which led to a breakdown of security forces and Israeli intelligence resulting in letting their guard down, enabling the Hamas terrorists to cross the heavily defended border virtually unencumbered. 

 

Harrari also finds Israel's response to the attack unacceptable. While he agrees that Hamas must be dealt with severely, he doesn't agree with the hard liners' stance that the terrorist group must be annihilated. 

Beyond the obvious moral ramifications of killing thousands of innocent Palestinians in order to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, there are strong tactical points that should be considered using Harrari's logic. 

Hamas knew exactly what Israel's response would be to their 10/7 attack, and Israel is playing right into their hands. Hamas on its own has no chance to stand up militarily to the mighty Israeli armed forces. But they know that thousands of dead Palestinians at the hands of Israel will further harden the hearts of the remaining Palestinians to the thought of a negotiated peace, and turn much of the world against Israel. In this sense, every dead Palestinian at the hands of Israel is a victory for Hamas, whose stated goal is the replacement of Israel by an Islamic state. 

Annihilating Hamas, if that is even remotely possible, would inevitably result in the deaths of several more tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and the displacement of millions. With Hamas gone at the cost of all those lives, something will inevitably arise to take its place. Something that is, that will probably be much worse. 

Demanding justice is a normal, fundamental human desire. But Yuval Harrari poses this question: what is more important, justice or peace? There will never be traditional eye-for-eye justice for the 10/7 attack, just as there will never be justice for 9/11, Deir Yessin, or the Holocaust. 

The only real justice for the victims of these atrocities is to do everything in our power to ensure they never happen again. 

Justice in the form of retribution only leads to more retribution, an unending cycle, just as we've had in the past 75 years. 

Harrari proposes a rekindling of the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia that were looking very promising up until 10/7, in fact he speculates their very existence was one of the prime motivations for the attacks. The last thing Hamas, a jihadist organization wants is peace with Israel.

Then in Harrari's words, with a 

coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.

With a rebuilt Gaza, and assurances from Israel to keep their hands off, maybe, just maybe there will be some hope for the future among Palestinians and the possibility that one day they will be able to live with dignity. And if that happens, maybe just maybe, Hamas and other similar groups will be seen for the truly needless destruction they cause and will be rendered irrelevant.

Yes it's farfetched but it's an infinitely better scenario then simply blasting Gaza to kingdom come, which is what we are experiencing now. 

But peace won't come unless attitudes on both sides change. 

Moshe Dayan was a formidable Israeli military leader and politician from the state's founding until his death in 1981. In 1956, he delivered the eulogy of a fallen comrade killed outside his kibbutz near Gaza by Palestinian fedayeen. Defining the reality and the terrible moral compromise forged with the establishment of the State of Israel, Dayan's words are resolute, yet filled with self-reflection and anguish:

Let us not condemn the murderers. What do we know of their fierce hatred for us? For eight years they have been living in the refugee camps of Gaza, while right before their eyes we have been turning the land and the villages, in which they and their forefathers lived, into our land.

Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that this small band of youths, settled in Nahal Oz, carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces — has this been forgotten? For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

Imagine that kind of honesty coming out of the mouth of ANY politician today, let alone one involved in the Israel/Palestine crisis.

Compare Dayan's words to these words addressed to the Palestinians, of Israel's current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich:

you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out.

Clearly we not only need to disarm organizations like Hamas, but we also need to encourage the Israeli and the Palestinian people to stop choosing religious-zealot-extremists to lead them, as leadership on both sides has tragically failed its people.

As I said above, Israel and the Palestinian people are here to stay, despite the rantings of sociopathic lunatics.

We need to tone down the rhetoric and be willing to listen to different voices to try to understand our adversaries, instead of demonizing or dehumanizing them. 

Most of all, rather than declaring ourselves on the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis, all people of good will should declare ourselves to be on the side of peace.

I'm not at all optimistic peace will come, but what other choice do we have?