A recent Facebook
post spoke (well, I thought) to the increasing number of persons whose
principal news source(s) are apparently social media. The discussion was prompted by the vast range
of opinions expressed regarding the current lamentable state of affairs in
Israel/Gaza. I believe that a significant
complicating factor in creating the current murky, and to a large degree
morally ambiguous, nature of such posts is a lack of historical perspective by
many regarding the region.
A second complicating
factor is the belief of many that somehow the region was divinely appropriated
to the current Israelis in a deal brokered somewhere around 4000 years ago
between a desert nomad and a supernatural sky being. Seldom have so many died
from such an obscure germ of an idea.
For American Christians of a fundamentalist bent, this has
come to mean that it is our national duty as a "Christian Nation" to
facilitate the solidity of the state of Israel so the sky spirit can swoop down
and escort all the true believers to some paradise. Oddly enough, this is the
same end that is supposed to be accomplished by all those extremist Muslims who
sacrifice their corporeal selves in the process of killing any and all Jews
within range of their Semtex laden vests.
Of course most of these simplistic naifs
don't recognize that Abraham's deal, including the ritual fleshy
sacrifice, is as sacred to Muslims as it is to Jews.
With all that in mind, and stipulating that numerous
scholarly works by real authors precede this poor effort, I shall try to
provide a simplified chronology of the problems and actions of others in laying
the groundwork for the current crisis.
Current Israeli claims to ownership of this relatively small
area on the Mediterranean are baseless
from the standpoint of "who was here first?" The region is a cradle
of civilization and one of the places which first experienced the Neolithic
Revolution, sometimes referred to much more descriptively as the Agricultural
Revolution. As such, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a
crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics.
Palestine has been controlled by numerous
different peoples, including the Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, ,
Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans,
Byzantines, early Muslims caliphates (dynasties) such as the Umayads, Abbasids, Seljuqs,
Fatimids), European Crusaders, later
Muslims (Ayyubids, Mameluks, Ottomans), the British, the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan (1948–1967, on the "West Bank") and Egyptian Republic (in
Gaza), and modern Israelis and Palestinians. Other terms for the same area
include Canaan, Zion, the Land of Israel, Southern Syria, Jund Filastin,
Outremer, the Holy Land and the Southern Levant. The name "Israel" is
recent and and obviously chosen to affirm to the world that this is, indeed the
"promised land" referred to in Genesis in the Hebrew Torah and
Christian Bibles.
In the past this
"promise' has been invoked by the ancient Hebrews to justify brutal acts
against peoples such as the residents of
Jericho and Ai whose offence, apparently was being there when the Hebrews
wandered out of the desert and claimed ownership. Of course the Jericho site
has ruins going back as far as 6000 years before Abraham's chat with the sky spirit, but that's just an
inconvenient truth.
Hebrews were
not the political dominant force in
modern Israel for well over 1900
years. The Diaspora (cultural /political/religious dispersion)
began with the 6th century B.C. conquest of the ancient Kingdom of Judah by
Babylon, the destruction of the First Temple (c. 586 B.C.), and the expulsion
of the population, as stated in the Bible. The Babylonian ruler,
Nebuchadnezzar, allowed the Jews to remain in a unified community in Babylon.
Another group of Jews fled to Egypt, where they settled in the Nile delta. From
597 B.C. onwards, there were three distinct groups of Hebrews: a group in
Babylon and other parts of the Middle East, a group in Judaea, and another
group in Egypt.
Although Cyrus, the
Persian king, allowed the Jews to return to their homeland in 538 B.C.,
most chose to remain in Babylon. A large number of Jews in Egypt became
mercenaries in Upper Egypt on an island called the Elephantine. Most of these
Jews retained their religion, identity, and social customs; both under the
Persians and the Greeks, they were allowed to conduct their lives according to
their own laws.
In 63 B.C.,
Judah/Judaea became a 'protectorate' of Rome, and in 6 B.C. was organized as a
Roman province. The Hebrews, now generally referring to themselves by the
religious and culturally inclusive name "Jews" began to revolt against the Roman Empire in
66 AD during the period known as the First Jewish–Roman War which culminated in
the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. During the siege, the Romans destroyed
the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem.
In 132 A.D., the Jews rebelled against Hadrian. In 135 A.D., Hadrian's
army defeated the Jewish armies and Jewish independence was lost. Jerusalem was
turned into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to
live there, and Hadrian changed the country's name from Judea to Syria
Palaestina, which presages the name "Palestine."
Muhammad (c. 570
CE – c. 8 June 632 CE), considered by Muslims as the last Prophet of God, based
on his alleged conversations with the same sky spirit as Abraham 2600 years
earlier, originated a new strenuous and
proselytic monotheism, which he called ""Islam," meaning
"submission," and, oddly enough included some of the same concessions to the spirit in
the sky as Abraham's - dietary restrictions, ritual killing of animals,
circumcision, and ritual prayer.
Muslims (Semites
just as the Hebrews had been) gained political control of the region in question
and ruled it as part of one caliphate or another for somewhere around 450 years, at which time, in 1096 in response
to Papal propaganda and political
concerns of the Byzantine Emperor, the Crusades were initiated. Ostensibly to
redeem the "Holy Land" (holy to many, but holy with a capitol
"H" to European Christians,
most Crusaders were driven by purely
human motivators, including freedom from serfdom, a chance to grab an empire,
and the commands of their monarchs, who were motivated by greed and the urge to
make a religiously significant name for
themselves. The crusades influenced the
attitude of the western Church and people towards warfare. The frequent calling
of crusades habituated the clergy and monarchies to the use of violence. The crusades
also sparked debate about the legitimacy of taking lands and possessions from
pagans on purely religious grounds that would arise again in the 15th and 16th
centuries with the Age of Discovery.
With its power
and prestige raised by the crusades, the papal curia had greater control over
the entire western Church. One glaring
facet of the Crusades in general, is that , although, ostensibly aimed at
"reclaiming" the "Holy Land', technically, no European since pagan Rome had
ever "claimed" the region in any case.
Another spinoff was that
although the Saracens (Turks/Muslims) were the targets, European and Levantine
Jews suffered horribly as a sort of
zealous collateral damage. Jews living peacefully in Jerusalem were slaughtered in the thousands not by
Muslims, in whose caliphate they resided peacefully, but by Crusader Knights,
all in the name of God. In Germany, synagogues were burned, sometimes with the
congregation huddled inside. The Fourth Crusade, as an example of the depravity
of the entire concept, actually attacked Byzantine Christian Constantinople,
and sacked the city, taking many of its
priceless and art and artifacts to
Germany, Italy and throughout Europe.
Persecution of Jews in the First Crusade began a thousand year tradition
of organized attacks on the Jews of Europe.
From about 1300 CE
through the 18th century, control of the
region remained under the auspices of
various governments with little in common except Islam, which was
enough, to insure that Christians and Jews remaining in the area, referred to
as "people of the Book," were significantly less persecuted than in
Europe where Jews remained objects of hostility and persecution and Christian
dissenters fared little better.
The current Arab–Israeli
conflict is a relatively modern phenomenon, which has its roots in the end of
the 19th century. After almost two millennia of existence of the Jewish Diaspora
without a national state, the Zionist movement was founded in the late 19th
century by secular Jews, largely as a response by Ashkenazi Jews to rising
anti-Semitism in Europe, exemplified by the Dreyfus affair in France and the
anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (see "Fiddler on the
Roof"). There was institutionalized social anti-Semitism in most European
nations throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
The political movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian
journalist Theodor Herzl in 1897 following the publication of his book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). At that time, the movement sought to
encourage Jewish migration to Ottoman (Turkish) Palestine. Zionism grew rapidly and became the dominant
force in Jewish politics with the World War II era destruction of Jewish life
in Central and Eastern Europe. The conflict became a major international issue
with the birth of Israel in 1948. Prior to the petroleum age, much of the
Levant was more curiosity than concern for most European governments. The Arab–Israeli conflict has resulted in at
least five major wars and a number of minor conflicts. It has also been the
source of two major Palestinian intifadas (uprisings).
Tensions between the Zionist movements and the
Arab residents of Palestine started to emerge after the 1880s, when immigration
of European Jews to Palestine increased. Herzl, a strong advocate for the cause of
Zionism, encouraged contributions from a broad spectrum of Europeans, Jewish
and gentile, said monies to be used to sponsor European Jews
as settlers in Palestine. In a sense, this is analogous to Europeans
encouraging settlement in the New World, in that the land wasn't empty in the
first place. As an alternative to stealing the land and evicting residents as
Europeans did with American Indians, Zionists purchased land, albeit, land with
poor farmers already there! This
immigration increased the Jewish communities in Palestine, then part of the
Ottoman Empire by the acquisition of land from Ottoman and individual Arab
landholders, known as effendis, and establishment of Jewish agricultural
settlements. At the time, Arabs lived in an almost feudal existence on the
effendis' land.
It is important
to understand that the same rich Arabs who decry
Israel's existence today were the very social group who sold their tenants'
land out from under them. Additionally, in as much as Zionist settlers
tended to be literate and better educated, they had political skills and clout
disproportionate to their numbers. Demographers have "guesstimated" from Ottoman Turkish census data that the
population of Palestine in 1882–3 was about 468,000, consisting of 408,000
Muslims, 44,000 Christians and 15,000 Jews. By the outbreak of World War I, these numbers
had increased to 602,000 Muslims, 81,000 Christians and 39,000 Jews, plus a
similar but uncertain number of Jews who were not Ottoman citizens. As of 1920,
the ratio of Arabs to Jews was 15:1 with
a Christian population greater than the Jewish count.
Following WWI, Europeans set about deciding the political
fate of the Middle east, with an eye towards control of lands and resources,
facilitated by a fabricated "mandate" concept established by the
League of nations. The process of
establishing the mandates consisted of two phases: The formal removal of
sovereignty of the state (Ottoman Turk or Austro-Hungarian) previously
controlling the territory and the transfer of mandatory powers to individual
states among the Allied Powers (France or Great Britain). Palestine, Jordan and
Iraq (their modern names) fell under British mandate, while Syria and Lebanon
were French.
This now transferred
responsibility and control of these largely Islamic regions to Christian,
European control, with Palestine, while majority Muslim, containing a growing
portion of educated European and Levantine Jews, and under nominal control of
Christian Britain. What could possibly go wrong?
While the British had made
promises to give both Arabs and Jews land, (the Balfour declaration) the
British claimed they had never promised to give either side all of the land.
Rising tensions had given way to violence, including the Nebi Musa and Jaffa
riots in 1920 and 21. riots, and Jaffa riots of 1921. In an attempt to
placate the Arabs, and due to Britain's
demonstrated inability to control Arab
violence in the Mandatory Palestine any other way, the semi-autonomous Arab
Emirate of Transjordan was created in all Palestinian territory east of the
Jordan river (roughly 77% of the Palestine mandate). In 1922, the League of Nations formally
established the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan, assigning all of the land east of the Jordan
River to the Emirate of Jordan, ruled by Hashemite king Abdullah but closely
dependent on Britain, leaving the remainder west of the Jordan as the League of
Nations Mandatory Palestine.
The British now found themselves in a politically charged
situation at home and abroad. The loss of much
of a generation of young men left Britain shorthanded and sickened
by matters military, while thousands of
miles away in a part of the world most Britons couldn't even locate on a map, the
conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and the Zionist movement created a
situation from which the British could neither resolve nor extricate
themselves.
Continuing pogroms
in Russia and the Ukraine as well as the first hints of Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany
created a new urgency in the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state, and the
evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance
and attacks against the Jewish population most notably in the preceding 1929
Hebron massacre, the activities of the Black Hand (perhaps the first modern
Islamic terrorist group), and during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine). The
British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led Arab opposition
to the idea of turning part of Palestine into a Jewish state.
In search for
help in expelling British forces from Palestine, (thus removing the enforcer of
the Zionist enterprise), the Grand Mufti sought alliance with the Axis Powers.
The response of the British government was to banish the Mufti from
Palestine (He spent much of World War II
in Germany and helped form a Muslim SS division in the Balkans, perhaps sowing
the seeds of the 1990's "ethnic
cleansing" in reverse?) , curb Jewish immigration, and reinforce
its police force. The Jewish leadership adopted a policy of
"restraint and static defense"
in response to Arab attacks and
criticized the British for what they
considered to be a British retreat from
the conditions promised by the Balfour
Declaration and its (Britain's) less than enthusiastic response to Arab
violence. This sense of "we're on our own" led to was a break
away from the more pacifistic Hagana
(the self-defense organization of the Yishuv) and created the more right-wing
militant Irgun, which would later be led by Menachem Begin in 1943. Irgun led
attacks against Arab policemen and civilians in the 1930s .
In 1936, A British
Royal Commission of Inquiry that came to be known as the Peel Commission was
established to attempt resolution to the
continuing and widening split in its mandate.
The commission proposed a
two-state solution that gave the Arabs control over all of the Negev, much of
the present-day West Bank, and Gaza and gave the Jews control over Tel Aviv,
Haifa, present-day northern Israel, and surrounding areas. The British were to
maintain control over Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding areas. The
two main Jewish leaders, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion had convinced the
Zionist Congress to approve the Peel
recommendations as a basis for more negotiation. The Arabs, however,
emphatically rejected it while demanding "an end to Jewish immigration"
and land sales to Jews, calling for independence of Palestine as an independent
Arab state.
Recall, the Arabs held a
large numerical advantage, but the Zionists had far more resources,
organization and political skill, not to mention a steady infusion of funds
from wealthy Jews in Europe and America.
Jewish violence against the Mandatory Palestine continued to mount
throughout the latter half of the 1940s, with attacks by the Irgun, assassination
of British authorities officials by the Lehi, and the 1946 King David
Hotel bombing. In 1947, the population was reported as 1,845,000, consisting of
608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs and others, making the region still 2:1 Arab
to Jewish population, even with the new flood of European refugees and
holocaust survivors, for whom the West (the former Allied Powers) had
significant and appropriate sympathy and concern.
The 1948
Arab–Israeli War (1948–49), known as the "War of Independence" by
Israelis and al-Nakba ("the Catastrophe") by Palestinians, began
after the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory
Palestine in November 1947. The plan proposed the establishment of both independent Arab and Jewish states in
Palestine (see figure, above). The Arabs had rejected the plan while the Jews had accepted it. As a
point of interest, a modern day point of
Palestinian discontent seems to be lack of independent territory, which
they rejected almost 60 years ago! For four months, under continuous Arab
provocation and attack, the (we'll say "Israelis" from here on) were
usually on the defensive while occasionally retaliating. By March 1948 however,
the United States was actively seeking a temporary UN approved trusteeship
rather than immediate partition, known as the Truman trusteeship proposal, a
proposal rejected by Israeli
leadership. By now, both Israeli and Arab militias had begun campaigns to
control territory inside and outside the designated borders, and an open war
between the two populations emerged.
At this point the
stage was set for all the violence and hatred of the following 60 years. Palestinian Arabs felt they had lost their
land even if it had been sold out from under them by other absentee rich Arab
landlords. Having no recourse, they were primed to turn their disaffection on
the Israeli settlers who had bought it.
It must be noted that regardless
of how one views land ownership, Israelis didn't steal Arab land. Adjoining nations, following Israel's
declaration of statehood and Britain's 1948 withdrawal, admitting they were
powerless to stop the flood of Jewish immigration, declared the mantra which
survives today - "Israel has no right to statehood." Further in an
act of hubris and epic underestimation, Israel's neighbors assured the
Palestinian Arabs that their troubles would be short lived as they (Syria,
Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon , fueled with Saudi money) were about to
annihilate the Israelis. They were encouraged to leave until hostilities were
over and they could reclaim "their" lands and independence.
Jordanian,
Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Saudi troops invaded Palestine subsequent
to the British withdrawal and the declaration of the State of Israel on May 14,
1948. Israel, the US, the Soviet Union and UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie
called this "illegal aggression", while China broadly backed the Arab
claims. The Arab states proclaimed their aim of a "United State of
Palestine" in place of Israel and
an Arab state. The Arab Higher Committee said, that in the future Palestine,
the Jews would be no more than 1/7 of
the population. i.e. only Jews that lived in Palestine before the British
mandate, not specifying what would
happen to the other Jews. They considered the UN Plan to be invalid
because it was opposed by Palestine's Arab majority, and claimed that the
British withdrawal led to an absence of legal authority, making it necessary
for them to protect Arab lives and property. About two thirds of Palestinian
Arabs fled or were expelled from the territories which came under Jewish
control; the rest became Arab citizens of Israel. As a further cultural
nightmare for the Arab neighboring states, Israel humiliated them militarily. All
of the much smaller number of Jews in the territories captured by the Arabs,
for example the Old City of Jerusalem, also fled or were expelled. The official
United Nations estimate was that 711,000 Arabs became refugees during the
fighting. These, then, are the
progenitors, several generations removed, of today's current crop of violently
anti- Israeli terrorists, encouraged into exile by their fellow religionists
and left to ferment in refugee camps.
The fighting ended with signing of Armistice Agreements in 1949 between Israel
and its warring neighbors
formalizing Israeli control of the
area allotted to the Jewish state (per the original UN partition plan, rejected
by Palestinian Arabs) plus just over half of the area allotted to the Arab
state. The Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan until
June 1967 when they were seized by Israel during the Six-Day War. The 711,000, or so, Palestinians who fled or were expelled from
the areas that became Israel were not allowed to return to their homes, and
took up residence in refugee camps in surrounding countries, including Lebanon,
Jordan, Syria, and the area that was later to be known as the Gaza Strip; they
were usually not allowed to leave refugee camps and mix with the local Arab society
either, leaving the Palestinian refugee problem unsolved. Around 400 Arab towns and villages were
depopulated during the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Post war, the surrounding Arab states created
a group of their own whom they neither recognized or significantly assisted
financially.
After the
1948 war, the (defeated) Arab states insisted on two
main demands, neither of which were accepted by Israel: 1. Israel should
withdraw to the borders of the UN Partition Plan — Israel argued "that the
new borders—which could be changed, under consent only—had been established as
a result of war, and because the UN blueprint took no account of defense needs
and was militarily untenable, there was no going back to that blueprint." 2. The Palestinian refugees deserved a full
right of return back into Israel — Israel argued that this was "out of the
question, not only because they were hostile to the Jewish state, but they
would also fundamentally alter the Jewish character of the state." It is
worthy of note that Arabs who had not left were integrated into Israeli society
to a large extent unless demonstrably hostile to the established order.
Over the next two
decades after the 1948 war ended, between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews fled or were
expelled from the Arab countries they were living in, in many cases owing to
anti-Jewish sentiment, expulsion (in the case of Egypt), or, as in Iraq, legal oppression but also quite often to
promises of a better life from Israel; of this number, two-thirds ended up in
refugee camps in Israel, while the remainder migrated to France, the United
States and other Western or Latin American countries. The Jewish refugee camps
in Israel were evacuated with time and the refugees were eventually integrated
in the Jewish Israeli society (which in fact consisted almost entirely of
refugees from Arab and European states). Over the ensuing 60 years there have
been numerous hostilities, overt and terrorist, between Israel and her
neighbors. They include armed conflicts in 1950, 1956, 1964 (the Six Day War),
1973 (the Yom Kippur War), anti-terrorist incursions into Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, and in 1987-1993 the first Intifada.
While the
principle conflict of previous wars had been by uniformed services one against
the other, the Intifada was far more of a
terrorist nature. It began as an
uprising of Palestinians, particularly the young, against the Israeli military
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the failure of the nationalist
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve any kind of meaningful diplomatic
solution to the Palestinian issue. The exiled PLO leadership in Tunisia quickly
assumed a role in the intifada, but the uprising also brought a rise in the
importance of Palestinian national and Islamic movements, and helped lead to
the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988. The intifada was started
by a group of young Palestinians who began throwing rocks at the Israeli
occupying forces in the Gaza Strip in
December 1987. In May 1989, the government of Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir, suggested
that violence cease, and that elections should be held in the West Bank and
Gaza for "a political delegation with whom Israel would come to terms
regarding the implementation of Palestinian interim self-governing authority in
these areas." These elections however never materialized as Israel had and
continues to have internal divisions over ways and means of dealing with
"The Palestinian Problem."
Backing the wrong
horse has become a way of life for Palestinian separatists in more recent years.
The First Gulf War was a political disaster for the PLO due to their support of
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Following Iraq's crushing defeat by coalition
forces, Kuwaiti authorities forcibly pressured nearly 200,000 Palestinians to
leave Kuwait. This forced expulsion was a
response to the alignment of PLO leader Yasser Arafat with Saddam Hussein. They
(oil rich Kuwait) also withdrew their financial support from the Palestinian
cause due to PLO support of Saddam Hussein. This large political setback created
the conditions that allowed for the PLO
to begin talks with the United States and Israel. The First Palestinian
Intifada ended with the Madrid Conference of 1991 and the signing of the Oslo
Accords by Israel and the PLO in 1993.
A second Intifada
of 2000, triggered by Israeli PM Sharon
declaring the temple Mount in Jerusalem to be "an eternal Israeli territory" lasted another several years and was
characterized by suicide bombings and large numbers of civilian casualties, in
a sort of prequel to current events. In
2002, as the second Intifada raged on, Saudi Arabia offered a peace plan in The
New York Times and at a summit meeting of the Arab League in Beirut. The plan essentially
calls for full withdrawal, solution of the refugee problem through the
Palestinian "right of return" (to ?), a Palestinian state with its
capital in East Jerusalem in return for fully normalized relations by Israel with
the whole Arab world. This proposal was the first to receive the unanimous
backing of the Arab League. In response, Israeli Foreign Minister Peres said: "... the details of every
peace plan must be discussed directly between Israel and the Palestinians, and
to make this possible, the Palestinian Authority must put an end to terror."
(still waiting for that to happen!) Curiously, following the Saudi plan, In 2005,
the United States Congress acknowledged that our regional ally, Saudi Arabia, had been funding Hamas and other Palestinian insurgency terrorist
groups.
In an effort of
its own in 2005 Israel unilaterally evacuated settlements, and military
outposts from the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank. The Disengagement Plan
was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the
government and enacted in August 2005, to remove a permanent Israeli presence
from the Gaza Strip and from four Israeli settlements in the northern West
Bank. The civilians were evacuated (many forcibly) and the residential
buildings demolished after August 15, and the disengagement from the Gaza Strip
was completed on 12 September 2005, when the last Israeli soldier left. The
military disengagement from the northern West Bank was completed ten days
later.
In January 2006, elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas won these elections, and thus secured a majority of seats. Due to the nature of their Parliamentary system, this meant they also controlled the executive posts of the Palestinian Authority, including the Prime Minister's post, and the cabinet. Hamas gained popular support because it appeared much more efficient and much less corrupt than Fatah (political, relatively non-violent). Unfortunately, it was also far more willing to resort to violence to achieve its aims. While it built various institutions and social services. Hamas also openly declared that it did not intend to accept any recognition of Israel. It stated it would not accept the Oslo Accords, and would not accept or recognize any negotiations with Israel. Throughout previous years, it had openly stated that it encouraged and organized attacks against Israel. This created a major change in previous Israeli-Palestinian interactions, which had previously been going through various periods of negotiations. This also signaled a huge step back from resolution, triggered by the Saudi plan and the Israeli unilateral withdrawal of 2005.
Most Western nations and international organizations did not give the Hamas lead government official recognition and responded by cutting off funds and imposing other sanctions. In June 2007, Hamas took control of Gaza, violently routing the forces of Fatah. This effectively severed control of the Palestinian territories. Those in the West Bank were under Fatah's control, with those in Gaza under the control of Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, dissolved the government. The fighting had numerous casualties, and gave rise to even more refugees, who fled to Egypt and other countries
And so we come to the present. With or without their Palestinian serfs' approval, more than 100 years ago wealthy Arabs freely sold Jewish immigrants land on which their Arab tenants lived. Powerless against their former landlords, Palestinian Arabs turned their hatred upon the Jews. The holocaust left numerous European Jews stateless, so they fled to Palestine. European nations, having made promises and pseudo political divisions they had no ability to enforce or maintain, simply left. Fueled by cultural and religious hatred, Arab neighbors turned military force upon the new state of Israel after it took unilateral steps to create a nation. While Israel may have acted alone, they did not create an exclusionary policy until they were attacked on all sides. Meanwhile Arab states, having created a huge number of Palestinian refugees, did little to deal with them or incorporate them into their own Arab societies. In fact, due to Islamic sectarianism , some were regarded as poorly by others as if they were Israelis, not fellow Arabs.
Several wars and
six decades later, even though Israel had
withdrawn from Gaza, Hamas forces seized
control in Gaza, ousted the Palestinian authority and destabilized the region.
Hamas terrorists in Gaza built tunnels used for terrorist raids
inside Israel, By its nature, terrorism endangers those who sponsor it, in this
case Hamas and, unfortunately those innocent civilians in whose presence
terrorists hide. In the face of Hamas' intransigence and continued terrorist
actions, Israel was (is) faced with really only two choices: sit in Israel and
allow continued tunnel incursions and rocket bombardments from and by Hamas, or
defend its own civilians. What Israel is doing has had horrific effects on
civilians, yet what is the option? If
they do nothing, they will be continually assaulted. What did Britain do when
the Germans lobbed v-1s and v-2s into London? They bombed Berlin, hardly a
military or industrial target, and civilians died, same in Dresden, same in
Frankfurt. There is a choice in Gaza as
there was in Germany - stop projecting deadly force at your neighbors. Hamas isn't the moral standard setter for anyone. It is a rogue terrorist
organization which has hijacked Gaza and endangered all its occupants. Where
should world anger focus in the current situation? Stopping Hamas' use of
deadly force? This may be hard since they have broken three cease fires since
their action triggered the current horror.
No one should condone this terrorist violence but, considering the way Things got to this point, One can (or should) understand it. Remember, Arabs didn't evict Jews and deprive them of their civil rights.
