On the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, There Is No Such Thing as Nuance
What would you do if 3,000 rockets were fired at your hometown in one week?
Israel and the Palestinians are nearing all out war again, as the 2021 flareup is the sixth time Israel and Hamas have fought since 2005. The violent and chaotic dispute between Israelis and Palestinians has gone on for decades, and events such as Jewish refugees migrating to the British colony of Mandatory Palestine, the 1936 Arab Revolt, the 1948 UN Partition Plan, Israeli Independence & the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Six Day War, two vicious uprisings started by the Palestinians, numerous wars in Gaza, and dozens of terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, are all examples of intense violence that has affected both sides. However, in a decades long dispute as fierce as this one, we must take sides. In the latest round of fighting, 4,000 rockets have been fired from Hamas at Israeli cities in one week. Despite some of our best intentions to be nuanced, we must choose which side to support. We have a duty to choose sides, despite common sense telling us to remain objective. We must resolutely stand with the most innovative and inspiring Middle Eastern nation, the State of Israel, over the anti Semitic terrorism that has threatened her citizens for decades.
Context is Everything
In a dispute as historic and bloody as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, context is everything. It’s always important to know the history and facts, but even facts are often disputed. Israelis claim Arabs in 1948 fled from Jewish soldiers fighting against Egyptian and Jordanian soldiers voluntarily, while Palestinians claim the Arabs were violently expelled from their homes. Israelis claim the Land was promised to them under the Balfour Declaration and the 1948 UN Partition Plan, while Palestinians claim Jews are “colonizing occupiers” of the land, where Jews are using racist and fascistic methods to oppress them. Many, but not all, Israelis also claim every inch of the Land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea was promised to Jews in the Bible, and Jewish settlers have lived in the West Bank for decades, designated for Palestinians, and Palestinians resist this. Finally, perhaps the most difficult obstacle to overcome in this conflict is the issue of Jerusalem. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem is their rightful capital of a future Palestinian state, however Israel disputes this, with Israel claiming all of Jerusalem, including the holy sites and the Arab majority eastern section, as its united capital.
Terrorism is the Palestinian Modus Operandi
Palestinians claim the murder of Jewish Israeli civilians is justified not only because of the “occupation” of the land, but because of Israeli military actions. Palestinians cite the ongoing occupation of the West Bank after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, and the Israeli funded Sabra and Shatila Massacre in Lebanon as reasons for their terrorism. One can support the Palestinian civilians, but calling terrorists “freedom fighters liberating their land from colonizers” is wrong and encourages people, specifically Jews, to be killed. For decades, Palestinian groups like Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade have killed thousands of Israelis by commiting terrorist attacks. After the 1948 UN Partition Plan, the plan which Jews accepted and Arabs rejected which divided the land between both groups, Arab terrorism ramped up. Founded in 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)’s main goal was “liberating the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River” of the Zionist identity, and the group used terrorism to achieve this. From the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games to the 1976 hijacking of Air France Flight 139 to the Ma’alot massacre where Palestinian terrorists killed 31 Israelis at an elementary school, terrorism has become the Palestinian modus operandi. Ask the Left what should be done about this, however, and you will receive an answer similar to the one Jimmy Carter gave in 2014, when he officially called to recognize Hamas as “a legitimate political actor”. Yes, the exact same Hamas group that uses human shields in war and is responsible for suicide bombings and rocket attacks that has killed thousands of Israelis.
This century, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 brought about Palestinian terror attacks such as suicide bombings, stabbings, and shooting attacks on Israelis. Well known suicide bombings that Hamas conducted include the Dolphinarium nightclub suicide bombing, the Sbarro pizzeria bombing, the 2002 Jerusalem Cafe Moment suicide bombing, the Park Hotel suicide bombing, and a suicide bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda St in December 2001. Hamas’ 1988 Charter calls for not just using violent jihad to end the Israeli occupation, but explicitly calls for all of the land of historic Palestine to be returned from the Jews to the Palestinian people. Articles such as 14, 15 and 33 in Hamas’ 1988 Charter call for the complete liberation of all of Palestine from Israel, and using violent jihad to achieve “liberation from Zionist colonization”. This is an open call for re-colonization and genocide of Israelis.
Palestinian terrorism did not stop after the recurring suicide bombings of the Second Intifada. Since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005, Hamas has been firing rockets from its Gaza stronghold at Israeli cities. During on and off conflicts, the rocket fire from Hamas is nearly constant, particularly at cities like Sderot, Ashkelon and Ashdod. In this most recent conflict that started officially on Thursday May 6th, Hamas has fired over 4,000 rockets at Israel, with most of the world turning a blind eye to the Israeli victims of terror.
Apartheid is a Lazy Argument
Not only does the world turn a blind eye to Israeli victims of terrorism, the world often smears Israel as an “apartheid state” in the form of South Africa. Figures from John Kerry to professors to UN diplomats have made this comparison. but the reality inside Israel proper is far different. The definition of apartheid is “a political system in which people of different races are separated” by discrimination. Under South African apartheid, interracial marriage and sexual relations between blacks and whites was banned, nonwhite participation in government was banned, and separate public facilities were made for blacks and whites. In Israel, none of this exists for Israeli Arabs or Palestinians. Israeli Arabs make up 20% of the population, and they live with more democracy and human rights than inside any other Arab country. Israeli Arabs have full voting rights, Israeli Arabs have frequently been the third largest political party in the country’s parliament, Arabic is one of Israel’s official religions, there is freedom for all religions. Can the same freedom of religion be said about countries like Saudi Arabia, which actually has banned non-Muslims from entering Mecca, and has roads leading into Mecca designated for Muslims and non-Muslims? The social justice obsessed Left does not want to admit the answer.
Polls regularly show Israeli Arabs are as satisfied, if not more, to be Israeli citizens than Jews are, and when given the choice, would much rather stay Israeli citizens than join a Palestinian State. They are Supreme Court justices, leading doctors, business executives, and are a part of a rapidly expanding Israeli Arab middle class. The criticism of Israel’s so called apartheid wall has little basis in actual apartheid, as the Group Areas Act was built to segregate Blacks in South Africa. The wall separating Israel from the West Bank was done after Palestinian suicide bombings killed thousands of Israelis, and since the wall’s construction, suicide bombings in Israel have plummeted to record lows. The Left will still call this wall racist and a prime example of apartheid, but what would they want instead, more Israelis to die from suicide bombings? I’m guessing yes, all in the effort to ironically “prevent racism”.
After the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority runs its own legislative parliament, its own law courts, its own police forces, education and health care system. None of this self autonomy was ever granted to Blacks in South Africa under apartheid. It just goes to show that the narratives in the media, academia and from left wing Palestinian activists is not as clear cut as they twist it to be. Israel has its flaws, but apartheid in Israel does not exist, and is another anti Semitic lie to demonize the world’s only Jewish State.
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Light in a Region of Darkness
Israel is not a perfect country by any stretch. The country is regularly hit with fierce international criticism on its government’s occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish settlements, and checkpoints that critics claim “dehumanizes Palestinians”. But this is only part of the (sometimes anti Semitic) story that seeks to paint the world’s only Jewish State as the world’s worst human rights villain. The reality is not as clear cut.
From when Jewish refugees migrated to the Jewish State in the 1920s to the founding of Israel in 1948, Israel has been a country of miracles. The city of Tel Aviv, home to some of the world’s most premier startups, was built starting in 1909 on plots of desert sand by refugees from growing anti Semitism that would culminate in the Holocaust. From the ashes, Israel had more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country aside from the U.S. and China, as of 2012. Israel’s strong spirit of individualism has powered its top notch entrepreneurial environment, and its startup culture has worked on cures from COVID to cancer to building bionic eyes. Israel’s communal spirit has showed the world what true agricultural community is in the model of a kibbutz. Israeli emergency responders are often the first on scene when crises like the 2008 Myanmar cyclone, the 2010 Haiti and 2016 Nepali earthquake. Israel has fulfilled Prime Minister David Ben Gurion’s dream of “making the desert bloom” by using innovative technologies in a desert that is losing water by the day. These are only some of Israel’s many accomplishments, a nation that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of Nazi death camps. But this is only part of the entire picture of why Israel must always be worth protecting.
Colonization or Decolonization?
Leftists and pro Palestinian activists often call Israel “settlers and colonizers”. To colonize a country, empires require a motherland. The Jews historically have had no motherland or homeland after 2,000 years of exile after the Romans exiled the Jews from the land of Judea in 70 CE. While the vast majority of Jews were exiled from the land, the land still had a very small yet continuous Jewish presence. The Jewish people are indigenous to the land of Israel, as Biblical history, sites like Masada and archeological evidence of Jewish coins from the King David era prove. All of these pieces of historical evidence existed before the Palestinian Arabs even had a distinct national identity, and far before the religion of Islam was founded. Islam was founded centuries after the Jews were exiled from the land of Judea. Therefore, with Jews returning to our ancestral land in the early 20th century during British colonial rule, one can easily argue this process was decolonization.
A people cannot be a foreigner if they are originally native to the land, as Biblical evidence and archaeological history prove. The vicious smears against Jews inside of the world’s only Jewish State as “colonizers” is another anti Semitic smear that has little basis in fact. How can a people be settlers and colonizers when they are returning to their own land after 2,000 years of exile? Israel activist Rochman expands on this point, saying “Judaism is not a religion, but the portable suitcase that was created to maintain the Jewish People’s native identity, way of life, culture and connection to the Land. The portable suitcase was created in order to one day rejoin those that never left and revive their civilization”. Palestinians like to claim the land was theirs first, and sure while the Arab population was in the majority for centuries, a small population of Jews never left the Land of Israel. In fact originally, the land had a majority Jewish population before Roman Exile in 70 CE. This begs the question- Which group is really the colonizers and re-writing history to shape their own narrative? Is it the group which has coins and ruins from Jewish historical sites from thousands of years ago, or the group that was created centuries later, a group (Palestinians) that did not even have a national flag or national identity as late as the 19th century?
Jewish Survival is in Our DNA
As the grandson of Holocaust surviviors, I know that Jewish survival over the centuries is in our bones. The total Jewish population globally is less than 0.2%, and our people have been persecuted from the Greeks to the Romans to the Spanish to the Nazis, yet our people have survived and subsequently flourished every time. Our homeland is the size of New Jersey, yet our mere presence in the Land is consistently smeared as illegitimate. Jews are called “colonizing settlers” inside the original land of Judea, as Israeli civilians face suicide bombings, stabbings and rocket attacks from Palestinian terrorists. As Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “If the Arabs put down their guns there would be no more fighting. If the Israelis put down theirs there would be no more Israel." Five decades after she said that quote, it still rings true today. Palestinians have tried to “free Palestine'' by using terrorism to remove the 9 million Israelis that live in the world’s only Jewish State. But we will never let them. Our ancestors survived in the Land of Israel, and we will too.
The countries of China and Morocco have come under criticism for occupying Tibet and Western Sahara respectively, but nowhere near the level that Israel has come under. For hundreds of years, there has been a nonstop effort to delegitimize a Jewish presence in the Jewish Homeland. Countless times, Jews inside the world’s only Jewish State have been called “settlers”, “colonizers”, and yes, even Nazis, the same group that killed six million Jews and was a large part in why the world’s only Jewish State was created. We will not accept this premise. Israel is a nation of miracles, from its healthcare cures on COVID to cancer, to its world leading startup culture, to creating more water in deserts. The other side, Palestinian terrorist organizations, are hellbent on firing rockets at Israeli civilians, while using human shields. The other side cares more about suicide bombings than using humanitarian aid to help an impoverished Palestinian population. Israelis will no longer tolerate Palestinian terrorism. Even in a conflict as deadly as the Israeli-Palestinian one, the pros of Israel far outweigh the cons. Itis a no contest on who to defend. Prime Minister Menachem Begin once said to never be “a Jew with trembling knees''. It is time Jew, as well as every Israel defender around the world, listen to his famed quote, and defend the shining light in a region of darkness; the State of Israel.