Every time I see 'Free Palestine', I offer a guaranteed solution to doing exactly that. I say that all that needs to be done is to remove the malevolent Islam driven murdering tyrants who run that portion of Palestine not controlled by Israel and replace them with those who love freedom and individual rights. Strangely, no one seems interested in implementing my solution.
How come such a sophisticated analyst fails to deal with the essence of the "Palestinian" question?
First of all, the notion of "Palestinians" is a fake political term created in the late 1960s by Arafat and the Soviet Union. As long as the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria identify themselves as "Palestinians" there can never be any willingness to live alongside Israel. The "Palestinian" identity is based on opposition to the existence of Israel and Jewish presence in the former territory of the British Palestine Mandate.
Second, there is the religious issue. The religion of Islam explicitly prohibits Jewish sovereignty anywhere, and especially in a land which formerly belonged to Moslems.
This is not a matter of the "Palestinians" making the wrong choices or choosing the wrong leaders. It is a matter of their essential identity.
i. the land did not formerly belong to Muslims and is not essential to their identity. Joining their fellow 'Palestinians' in Jordan would be closer to their identity.
ii. Jewish sovereignty and/or Jews living on that land was the case before Islam and Christianity even existed.
iii. All the British did under the Mandate rule was manipulate the population of the area to favour the Arabs and create a new country (Jordan) which it trained and armed, as well as prevent Jews from returning to Palestine from Europe during Hitler's genocide. Britain then washed its hands of the lot and walked away leaving the mess it created.
Of course, the land belonged to the Jews until the Romans exiled them. But the land did belong to Moslems after they conquered it around 638 CE. In the Islamic mentality, if a land was at any time conquered by Moslems, it remains Islamic forever. Moslems still lay claim to Andalus (Spain) because of that. *** It is not fair to blame the British for the mess in its Palestine Mandate. In fact, it was the Palestine Mandate which directly led to the creation of Israel. The mess was inherent in the situation because the Arabs/Moslems refused, and to this day refuse, to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the area which they consider to be Islamic land. That is not Britain's fault. By 1948, there was no way for the British to deal with the situation. By walking away, they allowed for the creation of Israel.
I really appreciate this excellent summary of what's actually going on with this seemingly never-ending conflict. Due to to my ancestry (largely Mennonite but with plenty of Jewish names), and limited understanding, I am far more sympathetic to Israel - but I just abhor war, also thanks to that upbringing. So for a long time it was hard to be willing to listen and understand what's really going on.
This essay and The Future of Jewish have been invaluable in this learning process. I will continue to wish for peace in that area, along with the rest of the world, most of which current conflicts are a result of Muslim conquest which horribly continues in the country of my birth, Canada. I am totally sickened by the PM who insists that "Muslim values are Canadian values" while obviously having NO IDEA what Muslim values actually ARE. It's simply appalling that this ignorance of Islam has been allowed to continue so long mostly because the 'wokists' think everyone should feel sorry for the poor poor Palestinians while completely ignoring what they and other Muslim-majority countries really want and really DO.
Then recently there was a huge backlash over the 'guidance' of a CBC Muslim-Canadian official who told reporters that they were not to refer to 9/11 as a 'terrorist attack' when there is no other expression for it at all! I hope that will be a wakeup call for Canadians who claim to be 'woke'.
The insistence on endless war as a part of religion galls me and I will never understand why Islam is considered so great. It's totally horrible. More than anything I wish an end to that. More than anything I wish people would keep their religions to themselves and stop trying to force these nonsense beliefs down our throats in the name of their various gods.
And in addition, I wish to remind religionists AND non-religionists of all stripes of the commandments that 'thou shalt not bear false witness' and 'thou shalt not kill'.
excellent reply. I would offer a small detail: The Bible says "thou shalt not MURDER," not "thou shalt not kill." The difference is this: Murder is evil and unwarranted whereas there are times when killing is necessary--as in self-defense of self or others. The Bible has passages about when war/killing is just and necessary.
That's not what my Bible says. I suppose it depends on the translation and the exegesis. Being brought up Mennonite meant that there was no killing whatsoever and no war at all, no defense. That's one of the reasons that so many Mennos and other Anabaptists were tortured and killed for so many years (The Martyr's Mirror). This is one of the reasons that even to this today, the Mennonite Church is considered a 'church of peace' and the reason that many conscientious objectors were Mennos. Are there any others that stick to the plan?
I don't agree with most of the Old Testament! Did Jesus encourage war? Did he fight back? He stated that he came to form a new covenant (testament) which meant to me that the old ways were defunct. And he allowed himself to be killed even though he was unfairly accused.
As a non-religionist, atheist, all of this is moot. I believe war is a fool's game and there is no justification for it. It might be different if I'd ever had had to fight for my life. Now I'm so old I can barely fight with words, lol.
In any case, in today's world war is not fought for righteous reasons but to feed the beasts, money and power. Also there have been many wars that didn't end in killing. Have you ever heard of the War in the Woods, a battle for aboriginal land in northern BC, Canada? Although wikis say it stopped in 1993, it continued in various forms until very recently. Looks like they've won without ever killing OR murdering anyone. And yet, it doesn't seem to be over as the battle continues in court, also without any killing. (Very few news outlets covered this as that was one of the ways that the PTB fought back.)
Once the killing starts, it never ends as you'd know if you'd ever watched a murder mystery or read a book.
What is the difference between 'killing' and 'murder'?
Well, your beliefs are admirable. But the Hebrew Bible is specific about murder versus killing and self-defense. And after a 5000 year history and learning over and over that without self-defense/fighting back, the Jews will all disappear. Before the Holocaust there were only about 15 million Jews in the world. Nearly half of them were exterminated because they had no homeland to run to and no weapons to fight back. "Never Again" was a promise the world made to the Jews, and it has been broken--but the Jews continue to vow, "Never Again." And they mean it. In a world of 8 billion people, there are still only 15 million Jews in the world today (they repopulated but still minuscule numbers) and again we see the genocidal rise to exterminate them--coming mostly from Iran and her proxies and supporters, but increasingly loud voices in Europe and even in America that would applaud extermination efforts at the least, and participate in them at the worst. THIS is what Israel is fighting right now, on behalf of all Jews in the world, and indeed for the Western World which has lost its way and moral compass. It is indeed an EXISTENTIAL battle; the Jihadis truly vow to kill every Jew in the world, and every non-Muslim who won't convert. And we've seen them act on it over and over and over and over. They believe this is Allah's wish, and they believe it deeply. Israel/Jews aren't going to let it happen to them again. So, you can believe what you choose, and the Jews can choose to follow their original Bible and their God-given COMMANDMENTS to fight to survive (indeed, there are passages where God instructs to rise up and strike the enemy throughout).
Beware: The Arabs are past-masters at Lying. Any attempt at this will simply be masking the real facts: The Arabs of Gaza and Samaria ARE The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. The reason Elements in The West support them despite knowing this fact and the fact they are terrorists is that these Elements are virulently AntiSemitic. These two facts will not change.
You hit the nail on the head. The Palestinians are considered part of the anti colonial struggle. Even if Israel treated the Palestinians wonderfully, it would not matter. Israel has the powerful army, which of course it has to have.
Why do people continue to write and give legitimacy to a fake construct known as the ‘Palestinians’? There is no such thing. They are Arabs. The ideology of Palestinianism was created by the KGB and Arafat in 1964. The ideology only went into effect after the 1967 war. Before this it was rightly called the Israel-Arab conflict, which it still is mixed in with Nazi ideology and Islamism. Stop playing the game of giving legitimacy to a fake people. Israel is the land of indigenous Jewish people. There is no ‘Palestinian’ archeology, history, writing or DNA. We need to stop this absurd nonsense.
"A successful Palestinian future would require destroying the mythology upon which much international Palestinian solidarity depends."
The source of that mythology lies in the Quran and Hadiths, (e.g. convert, subjugate, or kill the kuffar, kill the Jews wherever you find them, etc.) there for anyone to read. And those myths have been incorporated as guiding tenets in the constitutions of the PA, Hama, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.
To neutralize the mythology would require heavily redacting the religious texts on which a very religious people (the Muslims) derive their identity. No team of genius psychologists would even try to attempt it. And we think sofa bound pundits can solve it? Who is more delusional, them or the True Believers? the Press? Social Media Influencers? the street and campus mobs? the Academics? the Political opportunists?
The problem is intractable because of an unholy threesome: Western religeo-cultural bias, Islamic religious zeal, and the fuel of PetroDollars.
"A Palestinian state beside Israel is less emotionally satisfying than justice “from the river to the sea."
The slogan, "From the River to the Sea" was never a call for justice. To think it was is to display an incredible naïveté. It is nothing less than a call for the destruction of a sovereign state and annihilation of its people. In a word, a call to commit genocide against a people who had experienced it less than a hundred years ago.
You hit the nail on the head with the whole article, but especially the statement that Israel is granted infinite agency while the Palestinians are granted none. The world excuses behavior in Palestinians that would be unthinkable for Israelis to do. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to drag corpses of Gazans through the streets to be jeered at and spit upon. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to hand out candy and celebrate at the news of Palestinian civilian deaths. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to deny Muslims the right to pray at their holiest sites. It would be unthinkable for Israeli neighborhoods to be so dangerous that huge, red-lettered signs would need to be posted at the entrances to warn Palestinians that they enter at their peril. It would be unthinkable for Israeli teachers to assign students a project to devise math problems based on Palestinian tragedy.
But if an IDF soldier smashes a Christian icon or checks out the lingerie in a Palestinian woman's bedroom, the whole world roars in outrage. That's not to say that these actions are acceptable; it's to say that if Palestinians were judged by the same standards as Israelis, neither side would be in the hot mess it's in now.
Brilliantly written and so true. Until the hatred towards Israel is no longer taught to Palestinian children this will not change. One would think that all the destroyed infrastructure and deaths in Gaza might be a wake-up call to join in a peaceful resolution. Sadly, not.
I wonder if there are Israeli Arabs who could have more of a role in facilitating a peaceful resolution?
You are so right. This is absolutely so. If the useful idiots who form the pro-Palestinian gangs cushioning the Palestinians from accountability and responsibility, brought up their children in the same way, those children as adults wouldn't have the faintest idea how to make a responsible life and survive well. The point is, though, they don't do this for the Palestinian people, they do it for themselves - the moral righteousness they feel is satisfying, even exciting; the fashion they embrace of keffiyeh and even face-covering hoods is 'cool'; the lack of study or thought that has to be applied to what they demand makes life easy. They are, indeed, pathetic. They will certainly be at a loss when this is all over in one way or another.
Doug is correct, however I suspect the reality is that it's not just the 'malevolent, Islam-driven, murdering tyrants . . .' - it's that a majority of the people below them have been inculcated in the same insane death cult beliefs.
I seriously doubt whether there is even a sizeable minority who want compromise and peace.
It must be obvious to the rational world that there is never going to be a 2 State Solution - it's impossible and it has been made impossible by the choices of the 'Palestinians' over the preceding thirty years.
But there are many actors, from Iran, via Turkey to Russia and China who see it all as just another part of the Great Game.
And in the UK, and in the USA, we increasingly see the malign manipulation of activist Muslims trying to direct our own journey. Even when they tell us out loud the destination, we continue to prattle about DEI, about Islamophobia and about the evils of Zionism.
Every time I see 'Free Palestine', I offer a guaranteed solution to doing exactly that. I say that all that needs to be done is to remove the malevolent Islam driven murdering tyrants who run that portion of Palestine not controlled by Israel and replace them with those who love freedom and individual rights. Strangely, no one seems interested in implementing my solution.
I agree. The whole thing is a giant con, and it’s spreading like the plague
How come such a sophisticated analyst fails to deal with the essence of the "Palestinian" question?
First of all, the notion of "Palestinians" is a fake political term created in the late 1960s by Arafat and the Soviet Union. As long as the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria identify themselves as "Palestinians" there can never be any willingness to live alongside Israel. The "Palestinian" identity is based on opposition to the existence of Israel and Jewish presence in the former territory of the British Palestine Mandate.
Second, there is the religious issue. The religion of Islam explicitly prohibits Jewish sovereignty anywhere, and especially in a land which formerly belonged to Moslems.
This is not a matter of the "Palestinians" making the wrong choices or choosing the wrong leaders. It is a matter of their essential identity.
i. the land did not formerly belong to Muslims and is not essential to their identity. Joining their fellow 'Palestinians' in Jordan would be closer to their identity.
ii. Jewish sovereignty and/or Jews living on that land was the case before Islam and Christianity even existed.
iii. All the British did under the Mandate rule was manipulate the population of the area to favour the Arabs and create a new country (Jordan) which it trained and armed, as well as prevent Jews from returning to Palestine from Europe during Hitler's genocide. Britain then washed its hands of the lot and walked away leaving the mess it created.
Of course, the land belonged to the Jews until the Romans exiled them. But the land did belong to Moslems after they conquered it around 638 CE. In the Islamic mentality, if a land was at any time conquered by Moslems, it remains Islamic forever. Moslems still lay claim to Andalus (Spain) because of that. *** It is not fair to blame the British for the mess in its Palestine Mandate. In fact, it was the Palestine Mandate which directly led to the creation of Israel. The mess was inherent in the situation because the Arabs/Moslems refused, and to this day refuse, to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the area which they consider to be Islamic land. That is not Britain's fault. By 1948, there was no way for the British to deal with the situation. By walking away, they allowed for the creation of Israel.
I really appreciate this excellent summary of what's actually going on with this seemingly never-ending conflict. Due to to my ancestry (largely Mennonite but with plenty of Jewish names), and limited understanding, I am far more sympathetic to Israel - but I just abhor war, also thanks to that upbringing. So for a long time it was hard to be willing to listen and understand what's really going on.
This essay and The Future of Jewish have been invaluable in this learning process. I will continue to wish for peace in that area, along with the rest of the world, most of which current conflicts are a result of Muslim conquest which horribly continues in the country of my birth, Canada. I am totally sickened by the PM who insists that "Muslim values are Canadian values" while obviously having NO IDEA what Muslim values actually ARE. It's simply appalling that this ignorance of Islam has been allowed to continue so long mostly because the 'wokists' think everyone should feel sorry for the poor poor Palestinians while completely ignoring what they and other Muslim-majority countries really want and really DO.
Then recently there was a huge backlash over the 'guidance' of a CBC Muslim-Canadian official who told reporters that they were not to refer to 9/11 as a 'terrorist attack' when there is no other expression for it at all! I hope that will be a wakeup call for Canadians who claim to be 'woke'.
The insistence on endless war as a part of religion galls me and I will never understand why Islam is considered so great. It's totally horrible. More than anything I wish an end to that. More than anything I wish people would keep their religions to themselves and stop trying to force these nonsense beliefs down our throats in the name of their various gods.
And in addition, I wish to remind religionists AND non-religionists of all stripes of the commandments that 'thou shalt not bear false witness' and 'thou shalt not kill'.
excellent reply. I would offer a small detail: The Bible says "thou shalt not MURDER," not "thou shalt not kill." The difference is this: Murder is evil and unwarranted whereas there are times when killing is necessary--as in self-defense of self or others. The Bible has passages about when war/killing is just and necessary.
That's not what my Bible says. I suppose it depends on the translation and the exegesis. Being brought up Mennonite meant that there was no killing whatsoever and no war at all, no defense. That's one of the reasons that so many Mennos and other Anabaptists were tortured and killed for so many years (The Martyr's Mirror). This is one of the reasons that even to this today, the Mennonite Church is considered a 'church of peace' and the reason that many conscientious objectors were Mennos. Are there any others that stick to the plan?
I don't agree with most of the Old Testament! Did Jesus encourage war? Did he fight back? He stated that he came to form a new covenant (testament) which meant to me that the old ways were defunct. And he allowed himself to be killed even though he was unfairly accused.
As a non-religionist, atheist, all of this is moot. I believe war is a fool's game and there is no justification for it. It might be different if I'd ever had had to fight for my life. Now I'm so old I can barely fight with words, lol.
In any case, in today's world war is not fought for righteous reasons but to feed the beasts, money and power. Also there have been many wars that didn't end in killing. Have you ever heard of the War in the Woods, a battle for aboriginal land in northern BC, Canada? Although wikis say it stopped in 1993, it continued in various forms until very recently. Looks like they've won without ever killing OR murdering anyone. And yet, it doesn't seem to be over as the battle continues in court, also without any killing. (Very few news outlets covered this as that was one of the ways that the PTB fought back.)
Once the killing starts, it never ends as you'd know if you'd ever watched a murder mystery or read a book.
What is the difference between 'killing' and 'murder'?
Well, your beliefs are admirable. But the Hebrew Bible is specific about murder versus killing and self-defense. And after a 5000 year history and learning over and over that without self-defense/fighting back, the Jews will all disappear. Before the Holocaust there were only about 15 million Jews in the world. Nearly half of them were exterminated because they had no homeland to run to and no weapons to fight back. "Never Again" was a promise the world made to the Jews, and it has been broken--but the Jews continue to vow, "Never Again." And they mean it. In a world of 8 billion people, there are still only 15 million Jews in the world today (they repopulated but still minuscule numbers) and again we see the genocidal rise to exterminate them--coming mostly from Iran and her proxies and supporters, but increasingly loud voices in Europe and even in America that would applaud extermination efforts at the least, and participate in them at the worst. THIS is what Israel is fighting right now, on behalf of all Jews in the world, and indeed for the Western World which has lost its way and moral compass. It is indeed an EXISTENTIAL battle; the Jihadis truly vow to kill every Jew in the world, and every non-Muslim who won't convert. And we've seen them act on it over and over and over and over. They believe this is Allah's wish, and they believe it deeply. Israel/Jews aren't going to let it happen to them again. So, you can believe what you choose, and the Jews can choose to follow their original Bible and their God-given COMMANDMENTS to fight to survive (indeed, there are passages where God instructs to rise up and strike the enemy throughout).
The Hebrew explicitly uses the word "murder".
In today's world, what is the difference between killing and murder?
Beware: The Arabs are past-masters at Lying. Any attempt at this will simply be masking the real facts: The Arabs of Gaza and Samaria ARE The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. The reason Elements in The West support them despite knowing this fact and the fact they are terrorists is that these Elements are virulently AntiSemitic. These two facts will not change.
This essay is 💯 true
You hit the nail on the head. The Palestinians are considered part of the anti colonial struggle. Even if Israel treated the Palestinians wonderfully, it would not matter. Israel has the powerful army, which of course it has to have.
Why do people continue to write and give legitimacy to a fake construct known as the ‘Palestinians’? There is no such thing. They are Arabs. The ideology of Palestinianism was created by the KGB and Arafat in 1964. The ideology only went into effect after the 1967 war. Before this it was rightly called the Israel-Arab conflict, which it still is mixed in with Nazi ideology and Islamism. Stop playing the game of giving legitimacy to a fake people. Israel is the land of indigenous Jewish people. There is no ‘Palestinian’ archeology, history, writing or DNA. We need to stop this absurd nonsense.
"A successful Palestinian future would require destroying the mythology upon which much international Palestinian solidarity depends."
The source of that mythology lies in the Quran and Hadiths, (e.g. convert, subjugate, or kill the kuffar, kill the Jews wherever you find them, etc.) there for anyone to read. And those myths have been incorporated as guiding tenets in the constitutions of the PA, Hama, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad.
To neutralize the mythology would require heavily redacting the religious texts on which a very religious people (the Muslims) derive their identity. No team of genius psychologists would even try to attempt it. And we think sofa bound pundits can solve it? Who is more delusional, them or the True Believers? the Press? Social Media Influencers? the street and campus mobs? the Academics? the Political opportunists?
The problem is intractable because of an unholy threesome: Western religeo-cultural bias, Islamic religious zeal, and the fuel of PetroDollars.
"A Palestinian state beside Israel is less emotionally satisfying than justice “from the river to the sea."
The slogan, "From the River to the Sea" was never a call for justice. To think it was is to display an incredible naïveté. It is nothing less than a call for the destruction of a sovereign state and annihilation of its people. In a word, a call to commit genocide against a people who had experienced it less than a hundred years ago.
You hit the nail on the head with the whole article, but especially the statement that Israel is granted infinite agency while the Palestinians are granted none. The world excuses behavior in Palestinians that would be unthinkable for Israelis to do. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to drag corpses of Gazans through the streets to be jeered at and spit upon. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to hand out candy and celebrate at the news of Palestinian civilian deaths. It would be unthinkable for Israelis to deny Muslims the right to pray at their holiest sites. It would be unthinkable for Israeli neighborhoods to be so dangerous that huge, red-lettered signs would need to be posted at the entrances to warn Palestinians that they enter at their peril. It would be unthinkable for Israeli teachers to assign students a project to devise math problems based on Palestinian tragedy.
But if an IDF soldier smashes a Christian icon or checks out the lingerie in a Palestinian woman's bedroom, the whole world roars in outrage. That's not to say that these actions are acceptable; it's to say that if Palestinians were judged by the same standards as Israelis, neither side would be in the hot mess it's in now.
The endless support for their barbarism reduces the "Palestinians" to an infantile state by their so-called "friends."
Brilliantly written and so true. Until the hatred towards Israel is no longer taught to Palestinian children this will not change. One would think that all the destroyed infrastructure and deaths in Gaza might be a wake-up call to join in a peaceful resolution. Sadly, not.
I wonder if there are Israeli Arabs who could have more of a role in facilitating a peaceful resolution?
You are so right. This is absolutely so. If the useful idiots who form the pro-Palestinian gangs cushioning the Palestinians from accountability and responsibility, brought up their children in the same way, those children as adults wouldn't have the faintest idea how to make a responsible life and survive well. The point is, though, they don't do this for the Palestinian people, they do it for themselves - the moral righteousness they feel is satisfying, even exciting; the fashion they embrace of keffiyeh and even face-covering hoods is 'cool'; the lack of study or thought that has to be applied to what they demand makes life easy. They are, indeed, pathetic. They will certainly be at a loss when this is all over in one way or another.
This is a great article and the world should read it!!
Doug is correct, however I suspect the reality is that it's not just the 'malevolent, Islam-driven, murdering tyrants . . .' - it's that a majority of the people below them have been inculcated in the same insane death cult beliefs.
I seriously doubt whether there is even a sizeable minority who want compromise and peace.
It must be obvious to the rational world that there is never going to be a 2 State Solution - it's impossible and it has been made impossible by the choices of the 'Palestinians' over the preceding thirty years.
But there are many actors, from Iran, via Turkey to Russia and China who see it all as just another part of the Great Game.
And in the UK, and in the USA, we increasingly see the malign manipulation of activist Muslims trying to direct our own journey. Even when they tell us out loud the destination, we continue to prattle about DEI, about Islamophobia and about the evils of Zionism.
In the meantime:
Am Yisrael Chai (& long may it be so)
What an eloquent presentation of Palestinian reality. Nachum: You're the best!