If you go back to my posts from before October 7, you’ll see that I have always favored a two-state solution to resolve the enmity between Palestine and Israel, although I knew that such a solution had been proposed several times by Israel—and rejected by the Palestinians. Now, however, it’s not a viable solution to the problem, despite many touting it as an exigent and workable solution.
That suggestion is, I think, misguided right now, though perhaps some day it might work. On the Palestinian side, it’s clear that they want a one-state solution (“from the river to the sea”), and that one state will be Palestinian. What would happen to the Jews in such a solution? Well, they can all be deported (I think Bill Maher joking suggested using a “Jew Haul” system), but most people think that a one-state solution that contains both Jews and Palestinians would inevitably lead to a massacre of Jews as well as the extinction of Israel. I doubt that anybody in Israel except for a few far-left nutjobs now favor a one-state solution.
On the Israeli side, while many once favored a two state solution, they no longer do. It’s simply unthinkable, after October 7, to imagine a Palestinian state rubbing up against a Jewish one. The fear, of course, is terrorism. If Hamas ran that state, forgetaboutit. They’ve already vowed to repeat the October 7 massacre over and over again. And the Palestinian Authority, otherwise known as the corrupt and terrorist-promoting government of Mahmoud Abbas, is not a viable negotiating partner (neither is Netanyahu, as he isn’t trusted by many Israelis but also shares Israel’s correct assessment that a two-state solution is not worth considering now). First, the war has to end and then—and this is the tough part—there have to be honest brokers and negotiators on both sides. Given the Palestinians’ complete aversion to a two-state solution, though, I simply can’t imagine it happening. What Palestinian government will guarantee to live peacefully beside Israel with no more terrorism, especially since Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews and love martyrdom almost from birth?
I wrote the above because the article below, from Tablet, will make people see why a two-state solution is presently inviable. For a long time I and others have thought there were two groups of Palestinians: the terrorists sworn to extirpate Israel, and the “regular” people who just wanted to live their lives in peace. And I assumed the latter group was far more numerous than the former. But this is likely an illusion given the polls showing an increase in support for Hamas and a decrease in support for the Palestinian authority and Abass (see here and here). Those same polls show that many Palestinians admire the October 7 attacks as a sign of resistance, not an episode of brutal butchery.
And it’s not just Palestinians: it’s Arab-world wide. Here’s the results of a poll I posted about recently, one taken by the The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, and it shows widespread support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in every country in the Arab world (Egypt and Iraq show lower but still substantial support:
Given all this, who could possibly confect a two-state solution that would work? Certainly not one with Hamas involved. My view now is that Hamas still should be defeated and dismantled, but what happens next is shrouded in mystery. But any solution has to allow Israel to be free from terrorism.
Right now I agree with Douglas Murray on the two-state solution below (I don’t agree on anything pro-Trump said, especially by the moderator!) I’d forgotten that the Palestinian Authority had agreed to pay the families and perpetrators of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The article below is infinitely depressing because it shows that not just a small group of Palestinian terrorists participated in the October 7 massacre. Instead, many, many civilians, including Palestinian children and even old men on crutches. The conclusion adumbrated by Jews who were interviewed—many of them Jews who used to work for peace with Palestine—is that Palestine is riddled with people who approve of the massacre and would participate in another one if given a chance. When the title says that October 7 is a “pogrom”, they are using this definition from Wikipedia: it’s not really a genocide, but a mass attack on one group, not necessarily, I think, with intent to wipe out a whole ethnic group—which is of course what Hamas intends in the long run:
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews.[1] The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement).
This article is one in a series from Tablet, “Hamas’s war on Israel“. Click below to read. It’s not super-long, and it’s very enlightening.
I’ll just give quotes. First, the overall take. (Quotes are indented; my own remarks are flush left.)
Survivors’ accounts, video evidence, and the interrogation recordings of apprehended Palestinians paint a damning picture of the complicity of Gazan civilians both in the Oct. 7 attack, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and 240 people were abducted to Gaza, and its aftermath. It is one that has sparked a debate in Israel that challenges the inclination to draw distinctions between ordinary Palestinian civilians of Gaza—often referred to in Israel as bilti me’uravim (uninvolved)—and their terror leaders. For many, Oct. 7 reeked of something that Jews have been familiar with for centuries; a phenomenon where not just a vanguard, but a society at large participates in the ritual slaughter of Jews.
Around 700 Palestinians stormed Barad’s kibbutz of Nir Oz—less than a five-minute drive from Gaza—that day, CCTV footage shows. The overwhelming majority of those, estimated by Eran Smilansky, a member of the kibbutz’s security squad, to be around 550, were civilians. They were largely unarmed and not in uniform. Some of those civilians carried out wholesale acts of terror themselves, including rape and abduction—and in some cases, the eventual sale of hostages to Hamas—while others abetted the terrorists. Others still simply took advantage of the porous border to loot Israeli homes and farms, including stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels in agricultural equipment.
Similar scenes played out in several of the more than 20 brutalized Israeli communities. In one video that has become emblematic of the debate around the “uninvolved,” an elderly Palestinian man with walking sticks is seen hobbling at an impressive clip along with the rest of the mob through the breached gate of Be’eri.
Differentiating between terrorists and civilians is tricky, particularly since Hamas terrorists often wear civilian clothing, a tactic evident in the ongoing war in Gaza. However, other indicators help make this distinction, such as the absence of weapons and the fact that many were filmed crossing the border barefoot or even on horseback. Even senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk readily admitted that Gaza civilians had taken part in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
One video shows a group of men in civilian clothing beating a soldier while a separate image shows another group of what appears to be civilian men celebrating atop the smoking husk of a burned-out tank. In the infamous 47-minute terror reel of the Oct. 7 atrocities, Palestinians in civilian clothing are seen beating elderly hostages with sticks. Another repeatedly screams “Allahu akbar!” as he decapitates a Thai farm worker with a garden tool.
Barad’s speed camera in Nir Oz includes images of a Palestinian girl riding a stolen bike. In another, a Palestinian woman is seen pointing out Barad’s neighbor’s home to a uniformed terrorist. An image captured later shows a resident of that home being hoisted onto a motorcycle to be taken into Gaza.
But it’s the testimonies of the survivors that provide the clearest evidence that Oct. 7 was not just a terrorist attack, but a pogrom.
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Then there are the Gazans who worked at the kibbutzim. Yohanan’s husband, a farmer, is one of many people in the Gaza periphery communities who hired Palestinian workers from Gaza. Like many others I spoke to, Yohanan believed that the terrorists were acting on inside knowledge obtained by those Gazan workers. Israel had gradually raised the number of work permits in the months leading up to Oct. 7 with an estimated 18,500 Gazans working in Israel before the onslaught. The thinking behind the policy was that economic incentives to the residents of the Strip would sustain the fragile peace. Hanan Dann, from Kfar Aza, told me that he was “glad that workers from Gaza were coming to Israel to have jobs and meet Israelis, to see that we’re not all devils.”
In several of the devastated communities, detailed maps were found on the bodies of dead terrorists, maps that residents say could have only been drawn up by people with intimate knowledge of the area. Gazan workers relayed an extensive range of information to Hamas that enabled the terror group to plan its attack with extraordinary meticulousness, including the identities and residences of security heads, the locations of electric boards and communications systems and how to disable them.
The workers’ betrayal left an indelible mark on the surviving kibbutzniks, leading many to reexamine previously held beliefs about their Palestinian neighbors. Nir Oz, like many of the other ravaged kibbutzim in the area, was home to scores of peace activists, many of whom volunteered for a program known as Road to Recovery, driving sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Many now believe that while there are Gazans who want to live in peace, they do not represent the majority; or, as one survivor summed it up to AFP, “there are more who don’t want us alive.”
Irit Lahav, whose parents were from Nir Oz’s founding members, described the community as a “peace lovers’” kibbutz. “It broke my heart. How can we ever get over this sense of betrayal?” Lahav, who shuttled Palestinian cancer patients several hours from the border with Gaza to their treatments in central Israel, told me. “The Palestinian public simply hates us.”
And this is the conclusion of one disaffected Israeli:
Not everyone, however, was surprised by the involvement of Gazan civilians. “I don’t differentiate between them and Hamas,” Nir Shani told me. “Let me know of one Palestinian in Gaza who tried to save a Jew and maybe I’ll change my mind.”
That’s a good question.
Here’s a peace worker betrayed:
Batya Holin is a photographer and peace activist from Kfar Aza, which alongside Nir Oz and Be’eri, was one of the heaviest-hit communities. Holin had developed a friendship with a Gazan photographer, Mahmoud, with whom she arranged a joint exhibit last year of photos of her kibbutz and his village in the Gaza Strip. On the morning of Oct. 7, Mahmoud called and interrogated Holin, asking her how many soldiers were in her vicinity. That was when Holin realized that Mahmoud had given the photos of her village to Hamas. “Whoever says there are people there who are uninvolved, here is the proof,” she told Israel’s Channel 13 News. “They are all involved. They are all Hamas.”
There’s more documentation of civilian involvement, including not just the participation of civilians in the attack itself but also their approbation of the hostages and bodies of Israelis brought back, and, finally, their involvement in other ways. Here’s an example of the last two:
In one viral video, the near-naked and bloodied body of Shani Louk, an Israeli German who was abducted from the Nova music festival but who was later declared dead, is seen being paraded through the streets of Gaza in the back of a pickup truck. Hordes of Palestinian civilians are cheering, spitting and slapping Louk’s deformed figure while chanting “Allahu akbar.” The last tranche of hostages to be released in November’s truce saw crowds of Palestinians line the streets, jeering as the Red Cross ambulances passed by. The aunt of released hostage Eitan Yahalomi said that after the arrival of her 12-year-old nephew into Gaza, “all the civilians, everyone, beat him.”
IDF Sgt. Adir Tahar was murdered and decapitated during the invasion while manning a post near the Erez border crossing. His father, David, was forced to bury his son’s body without his head. An interrogation of two Palestinians by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency revealed that the remains of the head—which had been mutilated until it barely resembled a human skull—were kept in the freezer of an ice cream store in Gaza. One of the men had tried to sell the head for $10,000. The man in question was a Palestinian civilian and not a Hamas operative, Tahar told me. The Shin Bet did not respond to a request for confirmation in time for publication.
“If we previously believed that there was a chance for peace, we’ve lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population,” Goldstein-Almog added.
“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
–Golda Meir
Full quote is
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
The first part no longer applies, or won’t for quite a few years.
The ideal requires an alignment between Israeli/western/secular values with what the entire Arab world want, and how they see it philosophically. There’s a mismatch. It is incurable for as long as Islam is a Thing.
Mine on the two state idea a few weeks ago, posted earlier here:
“Westerners have to disabuse themselves of the hallucination that “all they want is peace and their own destiny” rubbish which sells in the West but is disengaged from reality. It defies all the evidence when it comes to the “burn everything down and impoverish all” reality of Third World Socialism and defies all understanding of political Islam.
Could it be that a part of the world, the Middle Eastern Islamosphere, an area that has been in some kind of war almost continuously for ALL OUR LIVES, and mainly poor despite oil, evinces a different set of base values than the rest of humanity? Could it be?”
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-suicidal-stupidity-of-a-two-state-solution/
It was GAZA which declared war against Israel, not just Hamas.
Ralph Nader was good and quick to call the October 7 massacre a “counterattack.”
Perhaps he would care to debate Gad Saad on the matter.
IIRC, Nader has Arab ancestry.
Both of Ralph Nader’s parents were from Lebanon.
The Tablet article is demoralizing and makes clear that a durable peace may have to wait generations. Palestinian youth has been poisoned by anti-Israel and antisemitic teaching, and today’s Israelis will long remember the October 7 betrayal by the Gazans they trusted.
Two pieces of news this morning. First, the US has reportedly cut off funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) after they were directly implicated in the October attack. Second, Israel is planning a one kilometer no-mans-land with in Gaza on the Israeli border.
The US should vacate the air base on Qatar. They are way up on the “kill the Jews list”
Qatar is a terrorist hideaway.
HUGE Zionist as I am, I think we need to keep Qatar “in the tent” as much as possible. Complicated reasons for that, but it is my position.
D.A.
NYC
A few days ago, Dr. Coyne posted a link to a Tweet from an Israeli soldier who participated in a door-to-door sweep of the homes of Gazan civilians. I tend to avoid Twitter links, but I read that one. And what was reported in that Tweet was that virtually all Gazan homes held military materiel – guns, ammo, rockets, explosives, etc.
I also read the wiki entry on the 2005 Gaza election where Hamas was voted into power and found it salient to the oft-repeated news reports on the waning popularity of Hamas pre October 7th. These reports implied that waning support of Hamas was indicative of growing support of peace, and that there was a distinction to be made between Gazan civilians and Hamas terrorists. But what the wiki entry made clear was that while support for Hamas might not have been universal, support for other equally terroristic parties was essentially just that. Of a number of political parties, only one had a platform which appeared to be seeking peace with Israel. As best as I could make out, that party got less than 5% of the vote.
Gazan civilians are willing human shields; they willingly abet Hamas with munitions, with silence to the outside world, and now we know they were active celebrants, spies for, and participants in October 7th. In my opinion, which is mine, is that there is no difference between Gazan civilians and Hamas operatives with regard to the ethics of warfare.
That Tweet from the Israeli soldier also mentioned something else – that while some Gazans lived in poverty, most lived in comfort at a standard of living above that of many Israelis, and certainly higher than almost all Arab nations. One has to wonder exactly where their grievances arise.
And this implies to me that the Palestinian mind is very different from us in the West. Their hatred of Israelis in particular and Jews in general is the product of 100 years of conditioning, of religious and social inculcation in carefully-groomed resentment, of false claims of exclusive indigeneity and land ownership, and worst of all, a fixation on martyrdom. They live to kill and die by sacrifice. They belong to a death cult. And they have been telling us this for decades. It is time we listened.
There is, it seems to me, no tenable solution to this situation outside of blistering war, save mass exodus into surrounding countries. Lord knows Egypt and Jordan owe an enormous moral debt to Israel for the multiple wars of aggression they have waged. It is time, imho, to call those markers in. Gazans have already been under Egyptian control. West Bank Palestinians were all happily Jordanian citizens for two decades.
The Arab nations fomented and cultivated this cult of death. It should be their responsibility to remedy the situation, not that of Israel.
“Their hatred of Israelis in particular and Jews in general is the product of 100 years of conditioning…..”
not quite. 2000+ years is more like it.
This is such a departure from Jerry’s post. “Mass exodus” is profoundly euphemistic. Forcing people out of Gaza into Sinai is a form of ethnic cleansing. Let’s not equivocate, Ginger.
Gaza was ethnically-cleansed of Jews in a peace treaty, which the Gazans have abrogated. Gaza then reverts to Israeli territory. Israel has the right to expel terrorists, and by any definition, the Gazans qualify.
If you have a better idea, which doesn’t involve eternal war and the eventual extirpation of the Gazan population, I’d love to hear it. Egypt bears a huge moral responsibility for these people. Why are they not accepting a single refugee?
Mass exodus (even if voluntary) just is ethnic cleansing, Patrick. There is nothing inherently wrong with that as long as they are allowed to take their children with them. That’s what happens when a polity within a country can’t bring itself to cooperate economically and peacefully with the majority and both sides can’t abide consensual sexual assimilation. (The Israelis already ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews. Why not Arabs, too?) Absent ethnic cleansing, the alternative to perpetual insurgency is genocide. Given that insurgencies nearly always eventually win if they don’t run out of money, the dominant faction will choose genocide, often in the guise of maximally suppressing the insurgency, as the preferred alternative. Expulsion really is better for everyone, including the expelled. Unless they do the sensible thing: face reality and play nice, maybe accepting cash for docility if they aren’t too numerous now or in the future. Or unless they win, and do the same to their erstwhile oppressors.
The tricky part is that Gaza is not currently part of Israel. So to expel anyone from the enclave, Israel would have to occupy it (again) through Right of Conquest and impose Israeli law (again.) I don’t know if it wants to spend the effort to do that or will it be content with sealing it off from Israel —not from the world, just from Israel— , just as South Korea seals itself off from the North and to Hell with the North Koreans. That alone might not stop the rockets and the death squads…but everything is trade-offs. The important thing is that mass exodus from Gaza whether compelled or voluntary is not a morally unthinkable proposition.
YES YES, Gingerbaker!
They learn the hatred from birth, through childhood. It is their RELIGION – literally. (See Koran).
We are unaccustomed to religious edicts and “common truths” like that in the secular world.
See my article above.
D.A.
NYC
Apparently there no word in Arabic for “compromise.” It’s not a concept in their culture.
Starting nearly 30 years ago, Commentary published thoughtful criticisms of the Oslo “peace process” which predicted exactly what came to pass: an increase in the frequency of Arab terrorist attacks inside Israel in the 1990s; then the 2000-2005 intifada; the PA’s double-dealing and indulgence of terrorism; Hamas and the incessant rocket and other attacks from Gaza, leading up to the pogrom of last October 7. The evidence shows that I (among others) was wrong to dismiss the Commentary arguments at the time; the Likud party in Israel,, whatever its other defects, was on the side which understood matters correctly. In recognition of this empirical consideration, one cannot avoid looking seriously at that side’s position today.
Norway and its naivety in the Oslo Accords is a lasting stain on the Country. Yasser Arafat just took their money and they were too stupid to see it despite many many Norwegians knowing the truth.
And now the ICJ has sided with South Africa, in a ridiculous and cowardly decision to go along with openly anti-semitic elements in the West. I despair!
“i heard it on NPR” this morning that The Gambia brought a suit in the ICJ against Myanmar. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide_case.)
I wonder what the U.S.’s position is on that. The U.S. kvetches about Myanmar (and Russia and China too, eh?), but I gather won’t submit a case in a court the jurisdiction of which it is not inclined to accept and to which it will not submit.
It’s too bad Israel gave Sinai back to Egypt. They could’ve sent the Palestinians there and said, “There’s your state.” Or they could’ve given it back to Egypt and said, “They’re your problem now.” Is it ethnic cleansing? Sure. But EVERY nation is built on ethnic cleansing.
With respect to the complicity of the so-called civilians of Gaza with Hamas:
Who exactly built the tunnels? I’ll bet it was not the Hamas fighters.
What Hamas tunnels? The 15,000 UNRWA employees at 300 places in Gaza never
knew about them. The other 2 million Gaza inhabitants never knew about them. The tunnels must have been secretly created by elves in the dark of night.
A pogrom — I think a lot of us have been using that term since the Oct 7 events were made public, really, since the the murders and kidnapping of civilians and those early images of (Gaza-Palestinian) civilian celebration & participation. I have tried to explain this to my friends who can’t understand the depth of (Jewish-Israeli) rage.
This message fits the article:
The UN relief agency operating in Gaza said Friday that Israel had accused some of its staff of being involved in the October 7 attacks, and that their contracts would be “immediately” terminated.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Israeli authorities provided the agency “with information” alleging several of its employees participated in Hamas’ murderous rampage into southern Israel, when the militant group killed at least 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 others.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/26/middleeast/unrwa-fires-staff-members-october-7-attacks-intl/index.html
Absolutely – UNRWA has sacked a dozen staff for alleged involvement in the 7 October atrocities. The evidence must be compelling for it to have done so.
Richard Hanania’s take on this today:
A similar principle [to the heckler’s veto and the assassin’s veto] applies in geopolitics. The only way two sides can have peace is if there is no major faction within a society willing to disrupt the process, or, if one does exist, their neighbors and co-nationals will work to crush them. When the broader population cannot do that, we can say that extremists hold a “spoiler’s veto” over the process.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-palestine-cant-deliver-peace
This goes beyond the faint hope that a majority of Palestinians might come not to support Hamas or the other jihadist elements. Even if they were to, they can’t or won’t crush the spoiler’s veto…and neither will the Arab countries and their own jihadist factions. He argues that even if there are elements in Israeli society that also try to impose a spoiler’s veto, the best course for the rest of us is to recognize that one side — Israel — is simply a better culture and do everything we can to ensure that it wins. You don’t have to be Jewish to hold this view: all Westerners should. There is no role for the “both-sides-ist” view that Israel isn’t doing all it can to secure a peaceful two-state solution either. Even if that view were true, it is simply irrelevant particularly after the pogrom of 7 Oct.
In this light, and germane to Jerry’s post about civilian participation in the pogrom and in the continuing war, Hanania argues there is a good case to be made for depopulating Gaza, by non-genocidal means of course. (Ethnic cleansing is not in itself genocide.) It would make the spoiler’s veto that much more difficult to exercise on behalf of the jihadists.
For ethnic cleansing to be feasible, at least one state has to be willing to take in Gazans. Maybe if the situtation of cvilians gets dire enough in Gaza one or several states will step up. While this can’t be ruled out it does not seem likely.
RE: “There is no role for the “both-sides-ist” view that Israel isn’t doing all it can to secure a peaceful two-state solution either. Even if that view were true, it is simply irrelevant particularly after the pogrom of 7 Oct.”
What happens this year and thereafter is related to what happened earlier, to what was done by Israelies and Palestinians before the Oct 7 massacre. So in my mind, Leslie, you are going too far with the quoted passage.
Also Netanyahu has admitted that much (assuming that he was quoted correctly):
quoted in: Ezra Klein: Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden? New York Times, Jan 26, 2024
https://archive.is/h6c2U
Canada is preparing to welcome thousands of Gaza refugees. Word is many of them will work in our rocket factories.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/israel-west-bank-gaza-2023/gaza-tr-measures.html
Of course you kill the peace activists. If your goal is the continuance of conflict and the eventual destruction of Israel, they are the most dangerous of your enemies.
Also relevant:
Ezra Klein: Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden? New York Times, Jan 26, 2024
https://archive.is/h6c2U
A two-state solution is dismally unpopular in Israel. A Gallup poll found backing for it among 25 percent of Israelis. The Israel Democracy Institute posed the question to Jewish Israelis with even more torque: Would you support a two-state solution if it were the only way to continue receiving American assistance? A majority said no.
To my mind, also worth reading:
John Mearsheimer: The future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the new Afrikaners. in: Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor (eds.): After Zionism: One state for Israel and Palestine. London, Saqi Books, 2012, 135-153
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/PalestineFuture.pdf
Here is Wiki’s summary of a historic episode that could be relevant.
“The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey (Greek: Ἡ Ἀνταλλαγή, romanized: I Antallagí, Ottoman Turkish: مبادله, romanized: Mübâdele, Turkish: Mübadele) stemmed from the “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations” signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece),[2] most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.”
Whatever its drawbacks, the 1923 population exchange presumably reduced the
possibilities of spoiler’s veto behavior in Turkey and in Greece. It also had the
happy effect of establishing (or reinforcing) the rebetiko style in Greek
traditional music.
There’s a popular idea that the way to peace among warring factions can start from small beginnings: mixed groups of employees, volunteers ,or inhabitants working together for a common cause. When individuals learn to lean on each other or get to know each personally, once unlikely alliances and friendships bloom. Most prejudices can’t withstand repeated contact. We share not only a common humanity, but all the concerns and strengths that go with that.
It’s a common sense solution which has often worked. But common sense demands that we recognize when it can’t.
The Gazans — the whole Arab world — is still stuck in an Honor Culture mentality. The values and underlying assumptions are different than those of the modern West. When I think of the fools who try to divest the world of “colonialism” without understanding the mindset of those they’ve labeled oppressed, I despair.
This article was heartbreaking.
Very good post, I commend you.
Not only is this article heartbreaking but it made me very angry. At the core of this is Islam, the most dangerous threat to civilisation. I stand firmly in unconditional support of Israel and Jews worldwide. And I re iterate, I am Islamophobic in all definitions of the word.
Me also.
I’ve thrown this out in the past, but not in awhile. Since everyone wants to define Islamophobia as hatred of Muslims, a new word is needed for greater resolution. It may not roll off the tongue as well, but I propose Islamoloathia. It’s a loathsome religion.
Thanks for posting this important article, Jerry. One note: It’s not just a “a few far-left nutjobs” that favor a one-state solution. In 2014, Caroline Glick, an Israeli right-wing writer, published “The Israeli Solution; A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”
At the core of this is Abrahamic religion. Not just Islam, but all three of the Abrahamic religions. Without the underlying presumption that there is a supreme being and that he/she/it/they prefer one faction of squabbling humans over another, this conflict either would not exist or could be resolved rationally.
Depressing indeed. I don’t see how there can be a true peace of any description anytime soon given that the Gazans seem to be stewing in multi-generational hatred and appear obsessed with a false narrative of turning back the clock to a mythical golden “Palestine”.
What a tragic shame that the Israelis who were working for peace were betrayed in such a cruel and horrific fashion by the Gazans that they helped and befriended. I predict that sometime in the unforeseeable future the Gazans will want peace too.
The peace in Northern Ireland gives me hope.
Re: pogroms:
NPR recently on the passing of Norman Jewison:
http://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1226251709/norman-jewison-director-of-moonstruck-fiddler-on-the-roof-dies-at-97
The topic of racism was emphasized, and rightly so, re: Jewison’s film, In the Heat of the Night, ” featuring dialogue between Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger.
Then, a host uttered the following about “Fiddler on the Roof”:
‘Then came in 1971 with “Fiddler On The Roof,” a story of romance clashing with traditional values when a Russian Jewish father is faced with the challenge of marrying off three of his daughters.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “FIDDLER ON THE ROOF”)
TOPOL: (As Tevye, singing) Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play?
INSKEEP: (Singing) Tradition.’
Not one blessed word about the ever-present threat of pogroms, and the pogrom forcing them out of their village.
Then:
‘Now, before agreeing to direct that movie, Mr. Jewison had to clear up confusion about his name.’
JEWISON: “I thought, oh, my God, they think I’m Jewish. What am I going to do? And I guess I have to tell them.”
Who are this “they”? Pray tell, what possible bearing did this “confusion” have on the prospect of his directing the film? Did this “confusion’ exist prior to “Fiddler”?
Here is my idea:
All of those currently living in Israel move to the Ukraine, and take their weapons with them. Two problems solved.
/S
The sad thing is, I don’t think there is any solution.
Are you OK Doc Coyne?
Haven’t heard from you for a few days, hope all is well.