Worldwide (and U.S.-wide) celebrations of Hamas’s slaughter and kidnapping

October 9, 2023 • 9:15 am

This post (and probably the next one) will be devoted to the war in Israel and Palestine, an event that has got me deeply depressed for many reasons: murder, hostages taken with no good way to get them back, lack of a feasible solution to the violence, and so on.

But what depresses me most is the worldwide celebrations of Hamas’s attack on Israel accompanied by kidnappings and mass slaughter, most of the dead being civilians. We had demonstrations in Chicago yesterday by supporters of both Israel and Palestine, and they interviewed some of the latter. I don’t mind people coming out to support the creation of a Palestinian state (though now I think it’s nearly impossible), but many of the protestors seemed to be there in support of the slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli civilians. That indicates a complete loss of the protestors’ moral compasses.

When interviewed, they’d say stuff like this:

“We don’t want blood, we don’t want to fight Israel forever. We just want our land back and just free Palestine,” said Wisam Zeidan.

“Freeing Palestine,” to those who are familiar with the use of that phrase, is a synonym for “destroying Israel.” That’s what supporters of Palestine mean when they chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”  The “sea”, of course, washes against the west coast of Israel.

Below is a video of the repugnant Students for Justice in Palestine organization (they favor eliminating Israel) marching in Chicago yesterday. Doesn’t “justice” include the right of civilians to be free from slaughter and kidnapping? Or of Israelis eating pizza to be free from being blown up? Many of the Authoritarian Left utter these mantras simply to go along with the au courant ideology, and are completely ignorant of history (see below).

But Hamas’s charter explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel, and most Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution. They want Israel eliminated. Here’s the results of a 2014 poll conducted by the think that The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and summarized by The Times of Israel (my emphasis below):

Palestinian support for a two-state solution with Israel has dropped to below the 30 percent mark, according to a new poll commissioned by the US-based think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, though most respondents said they were opposed to violent resistance.

Marking a notable shift in Palestinian public opinion, 60 percent of the population surveyed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (55% and 68%, respectively) said that the five-year goal “should be to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea,” according to the poll, a position meaning the elimination of Israel. Meanwhile, less than 30% (31% in the West Bank, 22% in Gaza) would like to “end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to achieve a two-state solution.”

A 2023 poll shows pretty much the same thing, but with the depressing (but perhaps now realistic) result that neither side favors a two-state solution.  The low figures reflect, I think, the view of Israelis that the solution has become untenable (this due to the rejection by Palestine of repeated offers by Israel if two-state solutions), and the view of many Palestinians that a two-state solution would still leave Israel in existence, which is unacceptable (see above).

Support for a two-state solution has dropped amongst Palestinians and Israelis, amid an increasingly deteriorating security situation in the occupied territories.

In a joint poll named the Palestinian-Israeli Pulse, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University, found a significant drop in support for a two-state solution among both Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

The drop saw the support go from 43 per cent in September 2020 down to 33 per cent among the Palestinians and 34 per cent among Israeli Jews.  Among all Israelis – Jews and Palestinian Arabs – the support amounted to a total of 39 per cent. The figures represent the lowest level of support for the long-proclaimed political solution among all parties since the beginning of the Pulse poll in 2016.

Most Palestinians won’t support a two-state solution unless Palestinians get the “right of return”, an untenable solution that would flood Israel with all the descendants of Palestinians who fled in 1948. That “right” would spell the end of Israel since there are millions of these descendants.

Another quote from the Chicago demonstrators:

“The people of Gaza are facing essentially brutality and ethnic cleansing again by the Israelis,” Sankari said. “We’re here to say we want a stop to it. We don’t want the United States to be supporting Israel anymore, and we want freedom and liberation for the Palestinian people.”

“Ethnic cleansing” is risible. There is no agenda of Israel to wipe out the Palestinians; what they are doing is defending themselves by stopping terrorism. If you consider Israeli settlements to be ethnic cleansing, that’s a category error, though one can make a good case that Israeli settlements in the West Bank need to be curbed or cut back. But if you want to see ethnic cleansing, just give Palestinians the “right of return.”

From another site:

The Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine protested against what it calls “decades of Israel’s brutality and violations of Palestinian national and human rights” and calls the attacks on Israel “self defense operations.”

There’s no mention of Palestinian terrorism (decades of it) of course, and the euphemism “self defense operations” to justify kidnapping and killing hundreds of Israeli civilians is sickening. You can see horrifying video of these “self defense operations” at the link at the bottom of this post.

From Chicago’s Channel 9, which gives several long quotes from supporters of Palestine and one tepid quote at the end by a pro-Israel person:

In Chicago, Priscilla Reed was among hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who rallied outside the Israeli consulate. Many waved Palestinian flags or wore keffiyeh, the black and white checkered scarfs that have come to symbolize Palestinian solidarity. Their chants, in both English and Arabic, included, “Netanyahu you will see, Palestine will be free!”

Reed, a retired teacher, said the attacks by Hamas were in response to Israel’s “systemic daily violence against Palestinians.”

Organizers estimate at one point there were about 2,500 people in attendance.

Muhammad Sankari is a member of the Coalition for Justice in Palestine, which organized Sunday’s rally.

“Gaza, which we can talk about specifically, is the largest, the most densely populated place on earth,” Sankari said. “It’s essentially an open air prison. The air, water and land is controlled by the state of Israel. They are being bombed mercilessly right now by the Israelis, so the question is how long should the Palestinians just quietly die before they react?”

The “systemic daily violence” is not by Israel, which attacks only in response to terrorism, but by Palestinians, who regularly strike at civilians via suicide bombing, car attacks, and the like.. Remember this as a generalization: Israel targets terrorists, Palestinians target civilians. And of course “Palestine will be free”, chanted by Ms. Reed, means “Israel will be gone.”

The statement by Sankari is bogus: Palestine would not be an “open air prison” if Palestine didn’t spend money intended for its citizens’ well being and for infrastructure on terrorism, if they both got rid of Hamas, or if they had accepted any of the five peace deals offered them in the last 100 years. (Don’t forget that Gaza wouldn’t even exist if Israel hadn’t voluntarily relinquished the territory.)

One of the faults of those who are criticizing Israel and supporting Hamas in this war is that they don’t realize that Gaza’s (and the Palestinian Authority’s) problems are largely of their own making—driven by hatred of Israel and the overweening urge to eliminate that country.

I can’t help but mention that this kind of ignorance is rife in today’s Phargygula post by P.Z. Myers, who, I predicted, would come out as a supporter of Palestine and denigrator of Israel. You can read his take here, along with the “me too” yammerings of his equally ignorant acolytes, and I won’t repeat them. Just let me add that all these people seem to be forgetting some salient facts. The post is a JAQ post titled “Can someone explain this to me?” (he means Israel’s perfidy). Let me tender these facts to the willfully ignorant Myers, since he doesn’t mention them:

  1. Since the 1930s, Palestinians turned down five offers of a two-state solution, and most of these offers were good ones—that is, offers that would be acceptable by centrists on the issue.
  2. Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution (and now neither do Israelis); most Palestinians want Israel eliminated.
  3. A two-state solution won’t eliminate Palestinian terrorism so long as many Palestinians want Israel wiped off the map
  4. The 1988 charter of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel (see first paragraph). So long as Hamas is there, terrorism will be there, too.
  5. Terrorist attacks have been going on for some time: the violence that occurred in the last two days is simply an escalation of attacks on civilians that have been going on for decades.
  6. Palestinian children are inculcated from a young age in school with hatred of Jews, and terrorism and desire for martyrdom will remain until the propagandizing stops.  This is, of course, a religiously-based form of anti-Semitism.
  7. Until Palestinians depose Hamas as rulers of Gaza, the violence and attempt to eliminate Israel will continue.  Abbas, too, needs to be replaced.
  8. Those who blame the problems of Gaza on Israel not only neglect the diversion of humanitarian funds by Palestinians into terrorism, but the fact that corruption is so rife that the higher-ups in Hamas, Fatah, and even Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PA, are billionaires or millionaires. They have simply diverted money meant to go to poor Palestinians to their own bank accounts. Don’t believe me? Go here, here, here, here and here.  It really angers me when people don’t even know this!

But let me end on a heartening note: most of the sane world is supporting Israel against these barbaric attacks. This support from Germany particularly moved me:

And this. Although Canada is missing in the list on the tweet, Canada’s Prime Minister has issued an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s attacks and a statement of support for Israel.

To see a plethora of disheartening tweets of people supporting Hamas’s actions, as well as a few bracing tweets like the two above, go to this long thread from Elder of Ziyon.

29 thoughts on “Worldwide (and U.S.-wide) celebrations of Hamas’s slaughter and kidnapping”

  1. The authoritative historian Efraim Karsh points out: “the origin of the latest confrontation can be traced to the Oslo Accords of 1993-95, which the Rabin-Peres government viewed as a pathway to peace but the Palestinian leadership considered a ‘Trojan Horse’ (to use the words of prominent PLO official Faisal Husseini) designed to bring about Israel’s demise.”
    ( Full article: https://www.meforum.org/64947/the-death-of-the-two-state-solution )

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  3. The only thing I know about it and that is very little is Israel acquired Gaza in the 67 war. After that they must have given the area to the Palestinians. Why they did this I do not know. I’m guessing they now know this was a mistake. In any case it needs to be removed for security reasons.

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  4. It is very depressing. The Western so called “progressive/social justice” people are morally bankrupt on this issue. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that they’re in bed with antisemitic terrorists. Or maybe they know but don’t care.
    I’m pretty sure these foolish people wouldn’t like it much if Hamas rolled into their towns and started imposing their ideology on them.
    They also seem oblivious to how self-defeating it is to align themselves against the only Western style democracy in the region. It’s baffling.

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  6. Prof: In your fourth paragraph after the SJPChicago tweet, you have the wording “(…rejection of repeated offers of that solution by Israel)”. Should that last word not be “the Palestinians”?

    Thanks for your clarifications in this and other posts on this subject.

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  7. There is a (long-term) commentator over at Pharyngula who was DENYING the fact that women were raped by members of Hamas, next to the bodies of those murdered, and who themselves were then taken hostage, or murdered.

    Also, note that a lot of the “words are violence” crowd either defend or mitigate Hamas’s rape and murder. I’ve seen “feminists” try to mitigate the actions of Hamas, even after the events we have seen. In the UK, we have seen some left wing commentators describe Saturday as “a day of celebration”. We saw “celebrations” on the streets of Western cities, with one in New York showing a man holding up a phone with a picture of a swastika on it.

    These people were in plain sight all along. They were the people calling liberals, atheists, and centrists “Nazis” and “racists”, while they held these terrible views. Apparently, liberals were “extremists” according to them.

    PS – The commentator at Pharyngula has been called out by fellow Horde commentators on numerous occasions for her antisemitism and bigotry. Oddly, or perhaps not, she has escaped PZ’s infamous banhammer. Quite revealing, is that.

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  8. As Sam Harris and others have pointed out about the evils of religion, although Christianity had it’s troubling eras, today it is Islam that is the worst offender. It is dogma of the most stubborn sort.

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  10. ” the five-year goal “should be to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea,” according to the poll”

    “Reclaiming”?

    Let’s be clear about this. All of “historic Palestine” was Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, not Arabic lands at all, save for a few nomadic Bedouins. After WWI, that general area became part of the Mandate system, administered by Britain as the Mandate for Palestine, and by France as the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

    Nationalistic Levantine Arabs petitioned France for a portion of southern Syria to be a homeland and were rejected. That’s right – they felt Syria, not Palestine was their entitled homeland. Afterwards, they accepted the 78% of eastern Mandate Palestine which became Trans-Jordan as their homeland. For decades the leaders of Trans-Jordan publicly declared that “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan”.

    While a Saudi Arab family was selected by the British to rule the monarchy of Trans-Jordan, 99.9% of the people who moved to and lived in Trans-Jordan were Levantine Arabs, ie, Palestinians. All Jews had no civil rights in Trans-Jordan by decree of the Mandate of Palestine and Trans-Jordan (!) and were exiled based on the false argument that Jewish Palestine (Israel) would be exclusively for Jews. In fact, the civil and religious rights of all people were protected by International law in Israel.

    It seems clear to me, at least, that the only people with a historic claim to western Palestine are the Jews whose history in that exact area goes back more than 3000 years, not the Arabs. There are 3000 year-old Jewish gravestones in the Jerusalem Mount of Olives cemetery. And this historic claim is not just an idea, it is explicitly stated in still-existent International law according to about seven International treaties and the Mandate for Palestine itself.

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  11. I learned a lot from your commentary on this topic. I used to have a slightly anti-Israel attitude, but I’ve shifted to a slightly pro-Israel attitude and today I feel a lot of clarity on the topic.

    What should happen?
    Theism dies out and half of the problems in the world are solved. Any other “should” opinions are about ephemeral symptoms of this underlying cause. (Christians don’t like this topic because once the absurdity and insanity of Judaism and Islam are acknowledged, Christianity falls with them.)

    What will actually happen in reality?
    Wars with winners and losers, annexation and shrinking of political borders, ethnicities without their own country. This has been the normal state of the whole world for many centuries. There’s zero chance of Israel being wiped out or massively reduced and replaced by Palestine. The wars already happened and it’s irrelevant who was right or wrong in the past, because two wrongs never make a right. We could cite thousands of other fairly recent historical conflicts all over the world where wrong/unfair things happened and have no chance of being reversed.

    So either two tiny countries exist side-by-side or Palestinians become a stateless ethnic minority in some other country, just like thousands of other small ethnic groups all over the world.

    There are 3 parties in this conflict: Israel, Hamas, Palestinians. The suffering of Palestinians is the fault of Hamas. Hamas exists to promote Islam, not the basic human rights and well-being of Palestinians. Even if there was inter-country peace in the region and Palestine was a spacious, functioning country, Hamas would still be the enemy of Palestinians just like the Iranian government is the enemy of Iranians. The phrase “Free Palestine” should only mean “Free Palestine from Hamas”, but it usually means other things.

    The only path towards a two-state solution is Palestinians eliminating Hamas. It’s hard to imagine that happening at a practical level even if there was a will among the people.

    In conclusion, the only reasonable and likely solution is for the complete dissolution of Palestine as a political entity and for the dispersal of Palestinians into neighboring Arab countries where they can live normal lives with full human rights. This is no different in principle than the situation of thousands of other ethnic minorities in countries all over the world. In practice, the Palestinians will have a better existence than most ethnic minorities in the world because they can share a lot of deep cultural similarities with the majority, like language and religion. The Arab cultures are diverse and already include ethnic minorities living in Arab countries, but they are more similar to each other than, say, ethnic minorities in China, Burma or Ethiopia. All over the world, ethnic minorities are badly treated and marginalized, with a wide spectrum of good and bad. In a perfect world, all ethnicities would have equal political status and the borders between countries would look very different and the whole premise of political power would look very different. So overall, it’s a reasonable compromise for Palestinians to migrate away from the disputed region. They simply become part of a much larger Arab, Muslim and Islamic geo-cultural sphere. Our only goal should be to value all human life equally and rescue the Palestinian people from a horrific situation oppressing them for decades.

    In comparison, in a hypothetical scenario where Israelis were the politically weak side and lost their country, they could not easily assimilate into neighboring Arab countries and live happily ever after, due to the deep ethnic conflict mainly based on religion. There’s nothing inherently worse about Israelis being an ethnic group without their own country compared to Palestinians being an ethnic group without their own country. Both groups have a legitimate claim to the homeland they are currently fighting over. All humans and ethnicities are equal. But in practice, Israelis are a tiny and isolated minority. Like Zoroastrians, they have a tiny religion that is currently not causing any harm to the world (outside of their own people, at least). They don’t have any realistic place to go as a group where they can live as an semi-autonomous entity like Tatars in Russia, Nkole in Uganda, Yi in China, etc. And certainly nowhere in their native Arabian Peninsula region. Population of Israel is 9m and about 7m are ethnic Israelis. That’s smaller than the current refugee crises around the world, but still a large group of people. On the other hand, a large percentage of Israelis have already dispersed around the world and formed small enclaves, often retaining their cultural identity, but that’s not a good situation for any ethnicity since the cultural identity quickly gets replaced by the majority culture. Overall it just seems much more fair for Israelis to have a country in their homeland compared to Palestinians because they are a tiny fraction of larger region defined by the division between Jew and Arab in which Arabs dominate. For anti-theists like me, Judaism vs Islam is Coke vs Pepsi, and aside from religion, Jews and Arabs are culturally (language, food, music, etc) extremely similar, originally coming from the same place as next-door neighbors. So this division should not exist and theism is the only problem, but my opinion doesn’t change the geo-political reality of Jew vs Arab defining the region. So long as Islam exists as a political force, Israel’s statehood is a higher ethical priority than Palestine’s statehood. This entire paragraph was just a hypothetical, abstract, not-practically-relevant aside to help put the topic of ethnicity/homeland/ethics/fairness into perspective.

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  12. I am heartened by the outpouring of support for Israel by responsible governments around the world. Germany’s illumination of the Brandenburg Gate with the flag of the State of Israel is particularly meaningful. Thank you for ending this post on a positive note.

    Indeed. Hamas’s goal is to destroy the State of Israel and to occupy the entire region from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea. We must not be confused about this. The goal is the elimination of Israel. People who support Hamas are complicit in the atrocities that we have all been witnessing. The entire world needs to see the pictures and videos.

    Regarding the possibility of a two-state solution, I sincerely wonder if the opening for a two-state solution has closed. Many, including the Biden administration, continue to hold on to that fading hope, but it may be too late.

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    1. As Efraim Karsh points out, the two-state solution failed because the Palestinian Arab leadership (PLO as well as Hamas) never accepted it—the PLO branch pretended to do so, but in Arabic (and in their entire education system) made it clear that their goal was the elimination of lsrael, to be replaced by their own Arab-dominated state “from the Jordan to the sea”. Hamas is straightforward about this, and its latest rampage against Israeli civilians again reveals its psychology. Rituals of team-spirit with Hamas by western sympathizers who call themselves “Progressive” illustrates their psychology.

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      1. I completely agree that past efforts have failed, largely because the PLO and Hamas have never accepted Israel’s legitimacy as a state. Yet the Biden administration and other politicians, analysts, and organizations (J Street, for example) still maintain that a two-state solution is achievable (or at least their policies and rhetoric reflect that). So these folks and organizations must seem to think that progress toward a two-state solution has failed *so far,* but that a two-state solution is still possible (presumably under new leadership or policies). This is the doubt that I was expressing above, namely, that it may really be too late—even with new thinking. The Swiss cheese of the West Bank has made a contiguous Palestinian State difficult to achieve geographically (and even less so if Gaza is to be included), and this attack by Hamas in Gaza has further dampened resolve.

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  13. This situation leaves me feeling depressed, disgusted and physically ill.

    The directed and deliberate cruelty that has been waged against Israelis over the last few days is depraved and sickening. I’m almost at a loss for words with regard to this situation. I just cannot understand the hateful and vindictive mindset one must have to do this sort of thing.

    I’ve chosen not to watch the videos, as the still photos were upsetting enough. However, I applaud you for posting them as people need to understand the bloodthirstiness and barbarity of these scumbag terrorists.

    People should also understand that most of the victims who were shot will not have died instantly. Real life isn’t like the movies. Some victims may have lived only a few minutes knowing they were dying. Others will have taken a long time to bleed out, and still others will have slowly asphyxiated as their lungs collapsed. There are a thousand other grim fates that anyone with the merest of medical knowledge would understand, and given the numbers involved, many of these will have been realised.

    It’s just all so unnecessary, so terrible and inhuman, but it keeps happening.

    In light of this, the fact that in the West, Hamas still continues to receive support and praise is perverse and reprehensible. I’m baffled that ostensibly ‘progressive’ people can still hold such false and backward views. It’s pure anti-semitism and these people should be called out and ostracised by the rest of us, yet they never are. Not enough people get it – and I don’t get that – but I have had enough of this crap.

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  14. Just when I thought P.Z. Myers had hit bottom… He keeps on digging. A new low for P.Z.? For sure. Will he go even lower? Probably.

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  15. The Hamas terror is despicable and it seems, that it was used specifically by Iran to disrupt the establishing of more official diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    I have a question about the two state solution repeatedly offered though. When I look at the maps of the region, it becomes obvious, that the current Palestinian territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and minor enclaves) can impossibly form a viable state. I cannot see these disjointed enclaves, the majority of which are land locked, form a functioning state even with the best of intentions. I have tried to find the two state offers made, but sadly was unable to find anything conclusive. Did they include an offer for a Palestinian state that would have been viable under realistic assumptions?

    I want to stress, that this doesn’t excuse or justify the violence of Hamas. I am asking about this, because my perspective currently differs from that presented here and so I am interested to learn more.

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    1. You can look up the peace offers; just Google “Israeli (or) Palestinian peace offers.” You can do your own searching.

      Here’s a simple answer: offers to the Palestinian state after 1967 (both Olmert’s and Barak’s) encompassed the whole of Judea and Samaria on the West bank, the whole of Gaza and part of east Jerusalem with a minor adjustments so that Israel was to retain some new towns and villages adjacent to the Green Line. In exchange for the retained new towns and villages Palestinians were also an exchange equivalent area taken from Israel proper. This means that only Gaza would be separated from the West Bank, but there would be no disjointed enclaves on the West Bank. The offers from 1937 and 1947 were even much more generous for Palestinians. This was everything that Palestine was demanding, but then they rejected it.

      It’s easy for you to look up the history.

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      1. Thank you for the information. I had googled various permutations of “two state solution” “peace offer” “Palestine” and “Israel”, but e.g. the Wikipedia entry on the Two-State-Solution doesn’t contain concrete offers and also after working through an analysis of the CSIS (who do fine work on the Ukraine conflict) there was no mention about was was offered specifically and when.

        I apologize for bothering you.

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      2. When I did a search for Israeli peace offers, I found this:

        “Abba Eban’s infamous aphorism that the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace”.

        But history records a different story.

        Obstacle to peace

        Here’s the truth, in brief: since the mid-1970s, the UN has upheld an overwhelming international consensus for resolving the festering “conflict”. Predicated on fundamental principles of international law, it consists of a two-state settlement including Israeli withdrawal to its pre-June 1967 borders, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the vacated territories, Palestinian-Arab recognition of Israel and a “just resolution” for the Palestinian refugees.

        In January 1976, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) offered to negotiate the terms of this “two-state” consensus. With Washington’s support, Israel refused the good-faith Palestinian proposal. Choosing expansion over peace, it has done so ever since.”

        From an article, entitled “Israel has rejected every offer from Palestinians for a two-state solution“

        https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-negotiation-idea-always-fiction

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        1. You had to look really hard for the one peace offer that was rejected not only by the US, but by the UN itself because it didn’t have a guarantee that Israel had a right to exist.

          The vote in the 15‐nation council was 9 to 1, with 3 nations—Britain, Italy and Sweden—abstaining. The two others, China, and Libya—the only Arab member—did not participate. Both apparently would have preferred an earlier Arabsupported version that contained no suggestion that Israel had a right to exist.

          Text Proposes Guarantees

          The defeated text did have such a suggestion in a provision advocating guarantees for all states in the Middle East area for their security and territorial independence.

          And you neglect all the offers that were made and rejected by the Palestinians, which I’ve mentioned before. You are cherry picking an offer rejected evem by the UN that isn’t even mentioned in Wikipedia’s two articles on peace offers: this one and this one.

          You are not posting in good faith, trying desperately to pin the rejection of the peace process on Israel from one article. Sorry, but you are being intellectually dishonest.

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  16. It amazes me how Jerry Coyne, who scorns religion including that of his own Jewish forebears, supports a racist and apartheid state based on the dumbass ideology that Jews like him are the direct descendants of a man (Abraham) named in the Bible. Israel has no historical, legal or moral reason for its continuing existence and subjugation of the Palestinian people. It is based solely on the secularization of the Old Testament.

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    1. First of all, it’s Palestine and Israel that is a “racist and apartheid state”, and I’ve explained that many times (Can Jews live in Palestine? What about Hindus? How are women and gays treated in Palestine versus Israel?) Second, I don’t believe the religious myths, but it’s an undeniable fact that Jews have been oppressed and killed throughout the world BECAUSE of their religious beliefs, no matter how false they are. It’s no more right to kill someone because of their religion than because of their politics. Israel was created as a place where Jews could go without fear of being killed (sadly, no longer true), and it was needed.

      You have no idea what you’re talking about, as evidenced by your use of “racist and apartheid state” and your ignorance of why Israel exists. Please go spout your hatred and ignorance and Pharyngula, where you belong.

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    2. The claim to Israel’s existence is secular, not religious. The Zionist movement was created by Theodor Herzl because Jews were being persecuted in 19th century Europe, so many decided to live in Israel to be safer.

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  17. I suggested a solution on Notes that would require Saudi Arabia & Israel & US to come up with a pile of cash as a different approach. It won’t happen, Arabs in the region don’t give a shit about Palestinians so why should Americans?

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