The amorphous nature of Palestinian statehood allows the world to view atrocious Palestinian violence as not quite real — sort of imaginary, like the state of "Palestine" itself.
Absolutely correct! This also is why they keep calling Israel "The Occupation" as I argued in my substack piece, Deconstructing the Occupation (https://open.substack.com/pub/schecter/p/deconstructing-the-occupation?r=1wpgf7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). And why Daniel Greenfield argues there are no civilians in Gaza, where Hamas is embedded in the clan structure and nearly the whole population is willingly locked into its murderous program. See his piece reproduced in Israel National News: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/391525. The West should keep out of a situation they do not understand and simply back Israel until it demolishes Hamas, conquers Gaza and rules there.
Your last paragraph is spot on. Westerners who support Palestinians/Hamas are denying them agency when they deny the atrocities which Hamas proudly filmed on GoPro cameras. It’s maddening listening to the denials.
Thanks. A good article. It seems that 'oppressed peoples' are allowed, even encouraged, to be as infantile and discriminatory as they like. That is their non-white privilege, you might say. While 'oppressors' must not only suffer all indignities with complete equanimity but perpetually apologise for their relative strength, prosperity and maturity. It's like an extreme version of a campus-wide DEI agenda: never satisfied until the perfect state of (unequal) equity has been achieved.
Such an excellent article, and I love your point-blank style. I wish you would have included that the "oppression" the Pal. Arabs experience that somehow excuses all of their atrocities and warmongering is in fact "oppression" of their own making -- 1) the oppressors of the "Palestinian Arabs" are their own "leaders," but more importantly, and this is key to the whole conflict, they are not responding to "oppression" at all! They are responding to their own Islamist ideology that does not tolerate Jewish (Dhimmi) sovereignty in land conquered by Muslims (1,400 years ago), and especially the very land where Jews originated as a people/nation (the case could be made that Zionism is the most successful de-colonization project in history). It is world sympathy for this fake oppression and fake narrative that justifies in so many people's minds that on some level the Pal. Arabs are entitled to "fight back" and that they are entitled to land that is not theirs in the first place and never has been. The reality is that far from being the victims fighting back, they are the perennial aggressors who cannot/will not give up their ideological charge to defeat, destroy, subjugate the Jews.
And getting back to Golda, her prophetic statement in 1973 defines where we were prior to 1948 and today -- "If the Arabs lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be a massacre." It's not complicated.
I have one problem with this article and that is this sentence: “Palestinians are a real people with real world problems”. Really are they a “real” people. What makes them a “real” nation. Actually they are bunch of tribes and clans who live in this region. They are Arabic. They Muslim. They are Sunni Muslims. But that is where the similarities between them end. They don’t marry between the Tribes or the Clans. There is deep distrust between them. The only thing that unifies them as a political entity is their enmity towards their hated “Zionist entity”. Once they (G-d forbid) meet their goals as a political entity of destroying Israel they will start killing each other. They already do. The ONLY thing that unites them is their hatred of Jews and Zionists and the state of Israel. That it is a 100 year war with the Zionists and will end at some point when they manage to destroy Israel. They are not interested in a peace deal or any agreement at all. Any agreement with them is just a catapult to the next phase of their war. Anyone who thinks otherwise lives in LaLa land and needs to wake up quick.
I guess you could say that all peoples and nations are really just a group of tribes who have decided to call themselves a unit. The point, I guess, is that it is not really for outsiders to determine the legitimacy of a group's identity. Like when people say, "Jews don't deserve a nation because they are a religion, not a nation" ... it is based on both (in this case) ignorance of the complexity of Jewish identity but also the refusal to recognize people if they don't fit into the boxes we like to put people. That's my thought. Anyway, thanks for reading and I appreciate your comment.
Strictly speaking Israel required terror to have existence. Israel is in existence today due to terror. We have history as a record that neither the colonial power nor the Zionist nor the Arabs sought common ground. We are now reaping the benefits of rejecting Torah.
Huh? Do you mean Nazi terror, centuries of European terror, Islamic terror against their Jewish population?
Apparently, you did not read the Israel Declaration of Independence , which invited the cooperation of all the surrounding countries to develop the region and live in peace.
I guess Zionist terror after WW1 to create Israel and intentional terror by Zionists after WW2 against the Palestinian population is developing the region and living in peace.
Zionist terror like the attack on Jews in Jaffa in 1920, the obliteration of the Jewish community in Hebron in 1929, or the driving out of Jews from the so-called Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem in the 1930s? Is that what you mean?
Or after World War II, when the Arabs besieged western Jerusalem, and no food was getting in and the Jews were starving? So the Hagana attacked the villages serving as bases for Arab forces that laid siege to the supply route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, is that what you mean?
What about all the religious Zionist soldiers who embrace Torah (just not your Neturei Karta brand)? What about all the soldiers who have taken upon themselves to start putting tefillin every day?
The Irgun actually gave a 60 minutes warning to the British army prior to detonating the bomb. And it wasn’t the whole hotel , only the wing housing the British administration.
In the pre-state period (1920s-1940s), Zionist paramilitaries like Irgun Lehi, Haganah and Palmach engaged in terror against British authorities, Palestinian Arabs, and internal Jewish dissenters to advance their political goals. Targets included security personnel, government figures, civilians, and infrastructure. After Israel's establishment in 1948, the (IDF) and other state security forces continued to employ violence against Palestinian and neighboring Arab populations during the 1948 war, there were approximately 50,000 Zionist forces fighting against at most 3,000 Palestinian-led guerrillas and 2,000 to 4,000 volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army. And although Plan Dalet, which detailed the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian villages, wasn’t confirmed until March 1948, villages were already being targeted by December 1947. According to https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timeline/overallchronology?synopses%5B%5D=160&nid=160, Haganah and Irgun launched random military operations on villages such as al-Tira and al-Abbasiyya on December 12 and 13, respectively, killing and wounding dozens of villagers. The terrorization of Haifa also began in December 1947, leading up to 20,000 of the city’s Palestinian residents to seek refuge in Egypt and Lebanon.
Zochrot writes that by February 1948, Haifa became the location of “the first pre-planned, organized expulsion of an Arab community by the Haganah.” Inhabitants were ordered to leave, and those who stayed had their houses destroyed — “thirty houses were demolished, and six were spared for lack of explosives.” Between 60 and 80 Palestinian people were killed, and those who survived “were driven out.”
The first step of Plan Dalet was which involved taking the Tel-Aviv–Jerusalem road, which had been blockaded by the Palestinian militia in February 1948. Ultimately, every Palestinian village along the way was destroyed or taken over, but the village Deir Yassin is considered to be one of the most notorious massacres of the war. After ordering the Deir Yassin village inhabitants to leave via a loudspeaker, the Irgun and LHI Zionist forces proceeded to slaughter everyone who remained. According to https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210415-remembering-the-deir-yassin-massacre-73-years-later/, between 100 to 250 Palestinian people, including children, were murdered over the course of several hours. This despite the fact that Deir Yassin had signed a nonaggression pact with the neighboring Jewish Givat Shaul settlement Ultimately, it was the residents of Givat Shaul who showed up and stopped the slaughter once they heard about it.
Absolutely correct! This also is why they keep calling Israel "The Occupation" as I argued in my substack piece, Deconstructing the Occupation (https://open.substack.com/pub/schecter/p/deconstructing-the-occupation?r=1wpgf7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). And why Daniel Greenfield argues there are no civilians in Gaza, where Hamas is embedded in the clan structure and nearly the whole population is willingly locked into its murderous program. See his piece reproduced in Israel National News: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/391525. The West should keep out of a situation they do not understand and simply back Israel until it demolishes Hamas, conquers Gaza and rules there.
Your last paragraph is spot on. Westerners who support Palestinians/Hamas are denying them agency when they deny the atrocities which Hamas proudly filmed on GoPro cameras. It’s maddening listening to the denials.
Thanks. A good article. It seems that 'oppressed peoples' are allowed, even encouraged, to be as infantile and discriminatory as they like. That is their non-white privilege, you might say. While 'oppressors' must not only suffer all indignities with complete equanimity but perpetually apologise for their relative strength, prosperity and maturity. It's like an extreme version of a campus-wide DEI agenda: never satisfied until the perfect state of (unequal) equity has been achieved.
Such an excellent article, and I love your point-blank style. I wish you would have included that the "oppression" the Pal. Arabs experience that somehow excuses all of their atrocities and warmongering is in fact "oppression" of their own making -- 1) the oppressors of the "Palestinian Arabs" are their own "leaders," but more importantly, and this is key to the whole conflict, they are not responding to "oppression" at all! They are responding to their own Islamist ideology that does not tolerate Jewish (Dhimmi) sovereignty in land conquered by Muslims (1,400 years ago), and especially the very land where Jews originated as a people/nation (the case could be made that Zionism is the most successful de-colonization project in history). It is world sympathy for this fake oppression and fake narrative that justifies in so many people's minds that on some level the Pal. Arabs are entitled to "fight back" and that they are entitled to land that is not theirs in the first place and never has been. The reality is that far from being the victims fighting back, they are the perennial aggressors who cannot/will not give up their ideological charge to defeat, destroy, subjugate the Jews.
And getting back to Golda, her prophetic statement in 1973 defines where we were prior to 1948 and today -- "If the Arabs lay down their weapons, there will be peace. If the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will be a massacre." It's not complicated.
I have one problem with this article and that is this sentence: “Palestinians are a real people with real world problems”. Really are they a “real” people. What makes them a “real” nation. Actually they are bunch of tribes and clans who live in this region. They are Arabic. They Muslim. They are Sunni Muslims. But that is where the similarities between them end. They don’t marry between the Tribes or the Clans. There is deep distrust between them. The only thing that unifies them as a political entity is their enmity towards their hated “Zionist entity”. Once they (G-d forbid) meet their goals as a political entity of destroying Israel they will start killing each other. They already do. The ONLY thing that unites them is their hatred of Jews and Zionists and the state of Israel. That it is a 100 year war with the Zionists and will end at some point when they manage to destroy Israel. They are not interested in a peace deal or any agreement at all. Any agreement with them is just a catapult to the next phase of their war. Anyone who thinks otherwise lives in LaLa land and needs to wake up quick.
Everything else in this article is 🎯.
I guess you could say that all peoples and nations are really just a group of tribes who have decided to call themselves a unit. The point, I guess, is that it is not really for outsiders to determine the legitimacy of a group's identity. Like when people say, "Jews don't deserve a nation because they are a religion, not a nation" ... it is based on both (in this case) ignorance of the complexity of Jewish identity but also the refusal to recognize people if they don't fit into the boxes we like to put people. That's my thought. Anyway, thanks for reading and I appreciate your comment.
Pat, thank you so much for your empathetic outlook. Keep yourcolumns coming, they are very much appreciated.
Strictly speaking Israel required terror to have existence. Israel is in existence today due to terror. We have history as a record that neither the colonial power nor the Zionist nor the Arabs sought common ground. We are now reaping the benefits of rejecting Torah.
Huh? Do you mean Nazi terror, centuries of European terror, Islamic terror against their Jewish population?
Apparently, you did not read the Israel Declaration of Independence , which invited the cooperation of all the surrounding countries to develop the region and live in peace.
I guess Zionist terror after WW1 to create Israel and intentional terror by Zionists after WW2 against the Palestinian population is developing the region and living in peace.
Zionist terror like the attack on Jews in Jaffa in 1920, the obliteration of the Jewish community in Hebron in 1929, or the driving out of Jews from the so-called Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem in the 1930s? Is that what you mean?
Or after World War II, when the Arabs besieged western Jerusalem, and no food was getting in and the Jews were starving? So the Hagana attacked the villages serving as bases for Arab forces that laid siege to the supply route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, is that what you mean?
What about all the religious Zionist soldiers who embrace Torah (just not your Neturei Karta brand)? What about all the soldiers who have taken upon themselves to start putting tefillin every day?
Bombing the King David hotel is Holy then.
The Irgun actually gave a 60 minutes warning to the British army prior to detonating the bomb. And it wasn’t the whole hotel , only the wing housing the British administration.
In the pre-state period (1920s-1940s), Zionist paramilitaries like Irgun Lehi, Haganah and Palmach engaged in terror against British authorities, Palestinian Arabs, and internal Jewish dissenters to advance their political goals. Targets included security personnel, government figures, civilians, and infrastructure. After Israel's establishment in 1948, the (IDF) and other state security forces continued to employ violence against Palestinian and neighboring Arab populations during the 1948 war, there were approximately 50,000 Zionist forces fighting against at most 3,000 Palestinian-led guerrillas and 2,000 to 4,000 volunteers of the Arab Liberation Army. And although Plan Dalet, which detailed the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian villages, wasn’t confirmed until March 1948, villages were already being targeted by December 1947. According to https://www.paljourneys.org/en/timeline/overallchronology?synopses%5B%5D=160&nid=160, Haganah and Irgun launched random military operations on villages such as al-Tira and al-Abbasiyya on December 12 and 13, respectively, killing and wounding dozens of villagers. The terrorization of Haifa also began in December 1947, leading up to 20,000 of the city’s Palestinian residents to seek refuge in Egypt and Lebanon.
Zochrot writes that by February 1948, Haifa became the location of “the first pre-planned, organized expulsion of an Arab community by the Haganah.” Inhabitants were ordered to leave, and those who stayed had their houses destroyed — “thirty houses were demolished, and six were spared for lack of explosives.” Between 60 and 80 Palestinian people were killed, and those who survived “were driven out.”
The first step of Plan Dalet was which involved taking the Tel-Aviv–Jerusalem road, which had been blockaded by the Palestinian militia in February 1948. Ultimately, every Palestinian village along the way was destroyed or taken over, but the village Deir Yassin is considered to be one of the most notorious massacres of the war. After ordering the Deir Yassin village inhabitants to leave via a loudspeaker, the Irgun and LHI Zionist forces proceeded to slaughter everyone who remained. According to https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210415-remembering-the-deir-yassin-massacre-73-years-later/, between 100 to 250 Palestinian people, including children, were murdered over the course of several hours. This despite the fact that Deir Yassin had signed a nonaggression pact with the neighboring Jewish Givat Shaul settlement Ultimately, it was the residents of Givat Shaul who showed up and stopped the slaughter once they heard about it.