What More People Should Know About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
"Those who embrace such tribal and sectarian hatreds will invariably, in time, aim their guns well beyond the Jewish people. Indeed, if we open our eyes, we will see that they are already doing so."
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While many people talk about how much they know about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (myself included), very few are honest about how difficult it is to think about this saga.
The conflict runs so wide and so deep, with two peoples who have two completely different versions of reality and history. There are good people and not-so-good people on both sides. No group is all positive or all negative, and both peoples are tasked with something they have never done before: run a country in the modern age.
The Palestinians have at no time in history had true self-sovereignty in what used to be called Palestine, the area of which was given this name by the Romans who defeated the Jews in Judea, conquered Jerusalem, and destroyed the Jewish Second Temple in 70 CE.
While the Jews have demonstrated remarkable success in a variety of fields, government has never really been one of them. Yeah, I know, Louis Brandeis served on the U.S. Supreme Court and Moses Montefiore was the Sheriff of London, but on the whole, robust legislative competency is not exactly a feather in the Jewish cap, historically speaking at least.
Even the great historian Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s prime minister, said in a 1998 interview:
“It is completely clear to me that in one area we have failed in Israel — in the area of education. To think that maybe it is suitable for doing good business and maybe even for developing modern techniques, but it is not suitable for the historical task and the political situation we are in.”
“The people of the Left are certainly not suitable for this politically, but many of the people of the Right also do not properly understand the situation, the problems we are facing. And therefore they cannot properly distinguish between solutions and illusions, between the possible and the impossible.”
“That’s why my heart is truly full of anxiety. Sometimes I fear that a hundred years of Zionism might go down the drain because a large part of the current generation is not suitable for the historical role assigned to it.”
Yet here we are today, the Jews with nearly 76 years of an internationally recognized state, and the Palestinians without one, despite the latter having had something like 10 different formal opportunities to finally achieve statehood (if that is indeed what the Palestinians want).
And that is the first thing I wish more people knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It is still unclear if a healthy majority of Palestinians want their own state next to a Jewish one (Israel), for this is the only real option on the table.
I have no doubt that some Palestinians want this; the question is how many, and what they are willing to sacrifice (to give up) for it, such as “the right of return” — the so-called “inalienable right” of the Palestinians to go back to their homes and property from which they were displaced because of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War (which the Arabs started).
Mind you, there is no other refugee group in the world that is afforded this “inalienable right” so I am not sure why the Palestinians are somehow superior to everyone else. According to the UN, at least 100 million people around the world have fled war, persecution, and instability in their home countries for uncertain futures in others, and none of these non-Palestinian refugees have an “inalienable right” to return to wherever they came from just because they said so.
As such, some folks have reasonably interpreted the 1974 UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (which enacted this Palestinian “inalienable right”) as a quasi-legal tool to upend the demographics of the one and only Jewish state by turning Israel into one state for two peoples — and ultimately, an Arab- and Muslim-majority state that, judging by an extensive sample size of history, would likely see the Jews expelled from our indigenous homeland.
Thus, a “one-state solution” is obviously not on the table for the Jews, and Jews have demonstrated both well before the State of Israel was founded in 1948 and thereafter, that the Jews are willing to fight for and even die to maintain our right of self-sovereignty. Hence, the current Israel-Hamas war.
Most logical and history-appreciating people agree that, in theory, a two-state solution is the only plausible option, but they point to “Israeli settlements” and “settler violence” as an impediment to it. This is the second thing that I wish more people knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Land has never truly been a defining issue in this dispute.
For example, Israel dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and North Samaria in 2005. Five years earlier, the Israelis again were willing to sacrifice land as part of the Camp David offer.
With regard to “settler violence,” Israeli settlers make up less than 10 percent of the nine million people who live in the Jewish state. The vast majority of them are 100-percent peaceful, harmless, law-abiding, good-hearted citizens without a single blemish on their criminal records.
Yet still, politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and social media want us to believe that “settler violence” is overwhelmingly pervasive and therefore incredibly destructive. It is not. But many officials from Europe, the U.S. and other countries have been using overly biased “pro-Palestinian” NGO sources, many of which aim to delegitimize the Jewish state, to document “settler violence.”
The actual numbers paint a different picture: In the past year, for example, 13 Israelis were murdered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and 17 in the West Bank — not including those murdered on October 7th, 2023. The number of Palestinian civilians who were killed by Israelis over the same time period is, you guessed it, zero.1
This is not to say that “settler violence” does not exist. It does, and it is unacceptable in any form, amount, or frequency. But it is beyond the pale to overemphasize “Israeli settlements” and “settler violence” for socio-political leverage, to act as if the Palestinians do nothing to incite or contribute to problems in the region (and to not hold them to the same accountability), and to paint all of Israel with terms like “colonialists” or “colonizers” or “oppressors” because of a few hundred people’s actions.
I get it, though, many Westerners are going through a period of reckoning and reconciling with the disturbing parts of Western history. In order to effectively do so, they have over-indexed on buzzwords like “white settler” and “decolonization” and “the oppressed class” and “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” — in some cases justified, by the way.
But it is nothing short of intellectually lazy to apply generic terms to all peoples, in all places of the world based on superficial markers like the color of one’s skin, or the exceedingly vague similarities between certain immigrant groups, or the obscure resemblances among disparate wars.
And that is the third thing I wish more people knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israel is not apartheid-era South Africa. Israel is not the United States or Australia or Canada, each with their own histories of indigenous peoples who exclusively lived on those lands once upon a time. And Israel is not one of the one-time imperialistic or war-mongering European nations.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is uniquely a Jewish-Arab problem, and more importantly, a Western-Muslim one. For many decades now, the West has been suffering from an acute perception gap regarding the Middle East, where key players operate motivated by ideological, mostly religious fervor, in contrast to those in the West who adhere to realpolitik or liberal theories that are based on a belief in the ability to evolve and solve through material means.
The 36-year confrontation between Israel and Hamas, culminating in this current war, bears a similar test case for Western difficulty in comprehending foreign cultures, such as:
The projection of one’s own logic onto the other (in particular the misconception that there is a universal human longing for the same definition of a “good life”)
Differentiating between a society in which ideologies have less weight (Israel) and a society in which they are still powerful (Gaza)
An inability to decipher a society whose perceptions of time, life, and seeing “the other” in its proximity are different
Even then, the questions raised in the West regarding Hamas illustrate deep fundamental cultural gaps: Is it a terrorist organization, a political party, or a social movement? (Actually, all of the above.) Is Hamas more Palestinian or more Islamic? (Both, to the same extent.)
And what is the difference between “political” Hamas and “military” Hamas? (Nothing, it is just manipulative linguistic gymnastics that the organization consciously created for the purpose of deception.)
The West’s perceptive deficiencies have worsened since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2006, which was seen by many in the West as a step in the organization’s evolution that would require it to soften ideologically and practically. Some Westerners presume that radical elements which rise to power are exposed to new constraints and thus moderate themselves.
However, as history shows, such elements sometimes behave in the opposite way: Obtaining power allows them to accumulate more resources, which are used to further promote their ideological vision, as proved by Hitler, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and ISIS.
The remnants of these perceptive deficiencies unfortunately continue to exist through this very day, some four months into the Israel-Hamas war, embodied by the discourse regarding Hamas’ motives and objectives on October 7th. Some hypothesize that the terrorist organization wanted to damage normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which could be one factor, but it also distracts from the true understanding of Hamas — such that jihad is its essence, and undermining Israel on the way to its destruction is the terror group’s purpose.
The difficulty of deciphering Hamas reflects deep problems in the West that fewer and fewer of its members — including those in government, media, security, military, and intelligence — understand the languages and cultures of the Middle East. Relentless attempts to will the Middle East’s realities to “Western conventional wisdom” prompted professor Elie Kedourie, a leading historian of the region, to compare these efforts to trying to make water run uphill.
Erroneously, the West sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as political and territorial in nature. To some Palestinians, this is the case, but for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, their supporters, and their chief sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is primarily religious, and at its heart is the annihilationist fantasy of ending the Jewish state by killing and exiling as many Jews as possible.
It is difficult to compromise when the other side’s stance is, as the HBO talk show host Bill Maher put it: “You all die and disappear.”2
Yet that did not stop the world’s highest-ranking court from listening to a case brought forward by the “friends” of the Palestinians, who have institutionalized compensation for the murder of Jews, made the sale of land to Jews a crime punishable by death, and named hospitals and schools after people who killed Jews.
The Palestinian terror attacks on October 7th were therefore “the consequence of decades of institutionalized antisemitic indoctrination of a population — indoctrination to the point where such murderous acts become regarded as not merely expedient or tolerable, but as necessary and praiseworthy,” as Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada, so aptly wrote. “The systemic nature of the killing and the evident glee with which it was being undertaken by its participants betrayed something darker than war itself. It recalled the things my father’s world had witnessed.”3
“This was not random murder. It was more than some settling of inter-communal scores. It was beyond even brutal military action. These were acts of extermination — the killing of no mere enemy, but of those who, in the killers’ eyes, were less than human, whose very existence was to be viewed as a scourge,” added Harper. “This may not have been a Holocaust in scale, but it was in kind. And, for the Israeli nation, born as it was in the shadow of the Holocaust, it can be interpreted no other way.”
With this in mind, Israel’s war objective — the eradication of Hamas’ regime in Gaza — is imperative. Leaving the job unfinished, with Hamas’ reign tolerated and its agenda contained, has already been tried before and unsurprisingly failed. We know what they call doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Even then, all of us want this war to end, for the remaining hostages, for Palestinians, for Israelis, and for Jews across the world. The vast majority of Israelis want a permanent peace, not just another temporary ceasefire. We’ve had enough of those.
“So, this war should end,” wrote Stephen Harper. “And it should end the same way our war with the Nazis did — by the unconditional surrender of its perpetrators. For we know what history has shown us: that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are always the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Those who embrace such tribal and sectarian hatreds will invariably, in time, aim their guns well beyond the Jewish people. Indeed, if we open our eyes, we will see that they are already doing so.”
“The Fraudulent Case Against ‘Violent Settlers’.” Tablet.
“Real Time With Bill Maher.” HBO.
“Stephen Harper: Israel’s war is just, Hamas must surrender or be eliminated.” National Post.
I would like to add something to the discussion. If one chooses to go into government, especially niche areas, shouldn’t the number one prerequisite be knowing the language spoken in the area. I do remember during the Cold War when knowing Russian was a given. Why, why for decades is there no Diplomats , nor politicians who speak Arabic? How can you run a foreign policy without having any knowledge of what is being spoken? How dare these grovelling politicians, who have no idea what they are talking about be in charge of deciding the future of the Middle East. Until such time, there will always be “East is East and West is West and never the two shall meet “. Shabbat Shalom from a Canadian who really misses Stephan Harper .
Excellent. The pity is that neither the Palestinians nor the left world wide will settle for a solution less than the death of every Jew. This has been particularly distressing in the USwhich has exhibited a level of antisemitism that exceeds my worst imagining and a feckless natioal goverment seemingly prepared to abandon Israel for the sake of electoral college votes in Michigan. I always presumed that the Holocaust could never occur in the US. I now believe that is wrong. There are large elements of the general population and distressingly large numbers among the elite class in the government, media and corporate world who would stand by and cheer as the Jews are loaded onto rail cars for transport to the death camps. At the end of the day there are no reliable allies for Israel and the Jewish people. Israel is on its own and must be self sufficient in its economy, its weapons industry and in its defense. It must be prepared to act ruthlessly in its own interests and ignore the handwringing and protestations of its fair weather friends, particularly the US whose rapid leftward drift will make it increasingly unreliable as an ally or supporter.