05/06/2024
Mideast Issues - an historical perspective
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 ancestors of 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 missiles
or Semtex laden vests. Of course, most
of these simplistic naifs don't recognize that Abraham's deal, including the
ritual male fleshy genital 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 (read as “imply) 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
alleged chat with the sky spirit, but that's just an inconvenient truth. The
folks killed in Jericho were Semites as were the Hebrews and almost every other
group in the region.
The term “Semite”
means: (Encylopedia Britannica def):
“Semite: name given in the 19th century to a member of any people who
speak one of the Semitic languages, a family of languages spoken primarily in
parts of western Asia and Africa.”
On the other hand, the same volume defines “Arab” thus:
“Arab, one whose native language is Arabic. Before the spread of Islam and,
with it, the Arabic language, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic
Semitic inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula.”
Why the definition? To educate those who fail to see that the
terms: “Hebrew” and “Arab” are essentially linguistic differences originating
from common racial stock. The term
“Jewish race”, which I recently heard a member of the clergy use, is not truly a
biological racial designation, but rather a linguistic and cultural one. It
ain’t a race, it’s a religion. At the time of the Old Testament, the difference
between Hebrews and other tribes was philosophical, not physical. (you know,
like the Welsh, Irish and Western English, whose Celtic derived languages have
diverged). In modern usage, “anti-Semitic” has been hijacked to mean “anti-Jewish.”
To complicate
matters even more, the Diaspora (a term which actually applies to any ethnic
group which spreads from their original homeland) has meant for most Hebrews that
their physical ethnicity has changed, even if their cultural one hasn’t.
By contrast,
there has been far less widespread Arab diaspora from the region of the current
conflict, further complicated by the overwhelming presence of Islam as State
religions, especially in nations such as Iran, which is definitely non-Arab,
but as co-religionists are supportive of Palestinian issues.
While we’re at it, Are Hebrews and Jews the same thing?
Yeah, sort of. “Hebrew” really referred to as the Semitic language and
Abraham’s descendants who spoke it. They were also called “Israel” [Genesis
32:28])—from that period until their conquest of Canaan (Palestine) in the late
2nd millennium BCE. From that time on these people were referred to as
Israelites until their return from the Babylonian Exile in the late 6th century
BCE, from which time on they became known as Jews. (Think changing a group name
from “Dubliners” to “Catholics”
-
best analogy I could come up with).
Hebrews were not the politically 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 70 AD. 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." Get that: Palestine was Palestine and definitely not
Israel or Jewish controlled for over 1800 years.
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 (longer than Hebrews ever had) 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 religion
induced 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
(Modern Istanbul), 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. Islam had no hands in these pogroms.
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 ensure
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 very
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 called Zionism 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 also 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 Muslim farmers
already there! This immigration
increased the Jewish communities in Palestine, then part of the (non-Arab,
Turkish) Ottoman Empire, by the acquisition of land from Ottoman and individual
Arab landholders, known as effendis, and the ensuing establishment of Jewish
agricultural settlements. At the time, Arabs had 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 European 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
(86% Arab). 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, (Can you say “oil?”) facilitated by a conveniently 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, post-war, later 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. 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 had 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 his 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 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 future Israeli Prime Minister 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. 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 had also 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 (yet). Adjoining nations, following Israel's
declaration of statehood and Britain's 1948 withdrawal and 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 return to 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 primary
conflict of previous wars had been by uniformed services one against the other,
the Intifada was far more of a terrorist action in 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 still
inexplicable 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 called 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 led 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 and lingering tribalism, 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. One fact remains certain: Benjamin Netanyahu’s current methods and Hamas’
intransigence will only serve to
exacerbate an already inflamed situation.
