A European FB friend of mine asked what I thought about the current war between Hamas and Israel. I asked my husband to reply. Hes a scholar in this area and a professional writer. Heres his reply: Naturally because many more people, including young people, are dying on the Palestinian side this generates hostility to Israel. The issues underlying the war are complex and go back many decades. A position widely held in the Arab world, not only by Palestinian Arabs, is that Israel is some kind of European colony that should be eliminated. In fact the Jews are a native Middle Eastern people and have comprised a significant minority of the population of what is now Israel since biblical times. Their numbers were augmented by European refugees from Tsarist pogroms in the 1890s, and refugees from the German Holocaust during and after World War II. The UN in 1948 adopted a resolution to partition Palestine between Arabs and Jews. The Jews approved, the Arabs rejected, and the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria invaded the Jewish area. The Jews won, Israel was founded, including granting citizenship to what are now 2 million Arab citizens of Israel, while 700,000 Arabs fled the war or were expelled, constituting todays Palestinians. So the Jews have always been able to live with Arabs, but we soon saw that the Arabs are unwilling to live with Jews even where the Arabs are the overwhelming majority. The Arab League ordered all of its states to expel all Jews from all the Middle Eastern and North African countries. So did Iran and Turkey. This created one million Jewish refugees, all native Middle Easterners, none of them Europeans. They became the majority of Israels population. They have nowhere else in the world to go. The Arab states tried twice more to invade and destroy Israel, in 1967 and 1973. They were defeated both times. Until 1967 the West Bank belonged to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt. They came under Israeli occupation after the 1967 war. There has never been a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians themselves into the 1950s wanted to become part of Syria. Only after the death of Arafat in 2004 did the PLO and Fatah, now headed by Abbas, accept the existence of Israel and call for a separate Palestinian state. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in hopes that this would be the first step toward ending the occupation in the West Bank also and see a Palestinian state created. In 2006 Hamas overwhelmingly won the only elections the Palestinians ever held and in 2007 seized power in Gaza. Its first act was to fire thousands of rockets into Israel. It was only then that Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza, which obviously has not stopped Hamas from importing tens of thousands of rockets and using tens of millions of dollars to build tunnels under Israels borders stocked with bombs and guns. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite the perception in the West that its dispute with Israel is over land, Hamas is very clear that this is a religious war. The Brotherhood, and Hamas with it, have as their most basic aim the reconquest of all land once ruled by Islam, including not only Israel but also Spain, and that is to be the first step toward conquering the world for Islam, including Europe and America. They say this repeatedly on their Al Aqsa television station. This is the same Islamic ideology as the Islamic State that now controls large parts of Syria and Iraq, and many other Islamic movements, including Boko Haram in Nigeria. Hamas also calls for the murder of all the worlds Jews as a religious duty. Until recently the Arab states were fairly united in the aim of destroying Israel (Jews were a historically oppressed people in Muslim states and are looked on as inferior to Muslims, so it is an outrage for them to have a state in once-Muslim land and have Arab Muslim citizens as a minority in the Jewish-majority country). That has changed with the rise of the IS in Syria and Iraq, and the battle in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood. So Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, fearing the religious fanatics of the IS and HAMAS, have been quietly on Israels side in the latest war. Hamas for its side, became desperate when Egypt closed its border with Gaza, cutting off the main avenue for imports. Hamas fighters have been killing Egyptian soldiers in Sinai, which has made the current Egyptian government want to see them destroyed. So Hamas started the current war by barrages of rockets into Israel (they could not start a war with Egypt), hoping to win international sympathy and support, in part by having large numbers of their people killed. Israel has tried, more than any other government in any war, to limit Gazan civilian casualties, but many have died anyway. There are also the tunnels under Israels borders for armed assault teams to pop up and kill people. No government could live with having its people hiding in bomb shelters a large part of every day or be exposed to the tunnel threat. I do think that Israels government is too far to the right and that they should have tried harder to come to an agreement with Abbas and the PLO to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and withdraw most of the Jewish settlements. But the war with Hamas, whose constantly repeated aim to kill all the worlds Jews leaves no room for negotiation. Half measures in the past have just led to the same rocket attacks a few years after the last small war. Israel has said it will end the Gaza blockade if Gaza can be demilitarized, perhaps by a UN peacekeeping force as in southern Lebanon and in Bosnia. But HAMAS is just one example of the extremely widespread movement of Islamic radicalism, a movement that sees itself as fighting on an international scale in which any particular piece of land is only a way station on the road to a world Islamic state. Christianity felt that way at the time of the crusades, but got over it. Islam is still deep in that utopian and destructive delusion. Not all of Islam, of course, but a ruthless and bloodthirsty minority of believers is causing a vast amount of carnage in many many countries. This is exacerbated by the deepening regional and world ecological threat: rising oil and food prices, overpopulation, inadequate water and arable land, all making people, particularly in the Middle East, more and more desparate and prone to magical thinking that leads many to follow the Islamic militants.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 23:34:09 +0000
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