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On Israel and ‘Root Causes’
According to today’s Hamasophiles, Gaza’s leadership is justified in their terror attacks against Israel because “Zionists stole their land.” Before that, the British “stole their land,” which they seem to forget.
Of course, the Brits stole the land from the Ottoman Empire in the first world war. Well, kind of. The sultan decided the region wasn’t populated enough, so he imported Arab Muslims from other regions, such as Yemen and Syria, creating many of today’s “Palestinians.” In other words, Gaza’s ancestors stole it from the Arabs, Jews, and Christians who already lived in the region.
The Ottomans stole it from the Egyptian Mamluks, who inherited it from Egypt’s Ayyubids, who had stolen it from Frankish Crusaders. Those short-lived Christian rulers had stolen it from Fatimid Caliphate, which was preceded by several other caliphates. Which had stolen it from the Byzantine/Roman Empire.
Before that, Rome stole it from the Jews, who stole it from the Greeks, who stole it from the Jews, who were given it by the Neo-Babylonians, who had stolen it from the Assyrians, who had stolen it from the Jews.
People who rely on root causes always stop the historiography the second they discover a group they don’t like. Funny how that works.
Published in General
Yes yes yes
Indeed. Thanks, Jon.
I like people who say the Jews/Hebrews were there first, but “most” of them left. I always like to ask, how many would have had to stay to give them a claim to the land?
Seeing the craziness on college campuses the past few weeks brought out another vent in my local paper today. To quote Mugatu…
That doesn’t make sense. Britain didn’t steal the land, the Ottomans didn’t steal the land, they conquered the people and ruled over them without displacing them as a matter of policy. (This is also what the British did in India, btw.)
Finding the displacement of people bad doesn’t make one a Hamas supporter, that also makes no sense.
Any criticism of Israel in just defending itself is antisemitic.
Some cultures must be displaced, either for their survival or the survival of the invaders. That is common throughout human history. We are witnessing an invasion in the US today.
Some of the Palestinians were likely forcibly displaced during the 1948 war. Doesn’t justify anything at all. Just speaking about the facts.
Hamas’ goal is to displace the entire region of ‘Palestinian’ from the river to the sea (read Israel) of Jews. They’re quite clear on this.
Yabut how is defending Palestinian Rights meaningfully countered by a take down of Hamas? It’s a misdirect, possibly unconscious/unintentional, but a misdirect nonetheless.
How is it done without taking Hamas down?
I won’t argue, but that would take more than a ‘take down’. Can Hamas be taken down without taking Palestinians out? That’s the question.
How would Hamas exist if “Palestinians” didn’t support it?
Hamas will have to answer that question.
That depends largely on what percentage of Palestinians are Hamas.
Indeed, and why. Hamas is a result, not a root cause.
Edited to add:
It’s worth asking why Hamas has grown in influence. When the Oslo Accords were signed it was the Left leaning secular PLO that was dominant in Palestinian politics. The PLO still runs the Palestinian Authority, but has just about zero influence. How did that happen? Why?
(And why think about it? Because it would be a lot better imho if Israel was dealing with the PLO in Gaza rather than Hamas. The situation today in Gaza was inevitable, frankly, once Hamas attacked Israel, took hostages and killed civilians. It has to be more than a battle for fickle Western public opinion. But what?)
When the displacement is self-inflicted by Arabs who could not abide the thought of having Jewish neighbors and instead wanted to kill them to the last man, woman, and child, it behoves morally sane people to show the displaced no sympathy for their self-inflicted plight. That other nations could have easily absorbed them, just as Israel absorbed the Jews driven out of Iran, Morocco, and other majority-Muslim nations of North Africa and the Middle East, and didn’t for decades is another factor that makes this argument void.
If that were true, the Anatolian Greeks and East European Germans (among many others) would be so obsessed with murdering Turks or Russians that they would also be a sick and dysfunctional society unable to cut their losses and make the best of their circumstances.
Hamas is the result of ideology, indoctrination, and choices, not the inevitable result of past and current events.
But Hamas’ dominance was not inevitable.
No, it was voted. Maybe even legitimately.
In the 2007 municipal elections. Something like 15 years ago.
It is dominant (at least in part due to a paucity of alternatives) today. That was not inevitable.
Moderator Note:
Please be a little more respectful of your fellow Ricochet members.At least you understand that much. The Gazans made it happen, and also turned Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion best-sellers. Hmmm…. maybe bad ideas, like the vilification of Jews and the lies told to support that vilification (“offspring of monkeys and pigs…from the river to the sea… they massacred civilians in Lebanon in 82…they poisoned our wells…they bombed that hospital…”.etc. ad nauseum) have consequences. And maybe you, Jerry and [redacted for rudeness] should stop playing cheerleader for the propagators of those lies.
Nor was it likely, absent the ideology, indoctrination, and choices* that I mentioned. The Palestinian experience is not exceptional in the annals of human suffering, but the choices made in response have been unusually self-destructive (Israel didn’t help with their idiotic attempt to use Hamas against the PLO during the first Intifada, but the soil in which Hamas took root was already thoroughly fertilized).
* some made by Arab ‘allies’ on the Palestinian’s behalf, especially in the three decades immediately following the first war, ironically in pursuit of pan-Arab ambitions….but even then, the Palestinians made the choices they did in Lebanon and Jordan, and even (indirectly) in Kuwait and other Gulf countries.
Yeah, that’s nuts.
Means lift the occupation. That’s what it means.
They did kill civilians in Lebanon in 1982.
In 1947 and 1948.
As opposed to closing the health system down by destroying power systems?
Sure.
The thing is, when bombs are falling around you it’s probably human nature to blame the people dropping the bombs. What do you think?
Vilifying Palestinians for being human about this probably isn’t helpful.
Much more to the point (imo) Hamas would not have been dominant today if the PA had delivered what it promised.
It’s the PA’s failure that was the biggest factor in Hamas’ rise.
And it failed because Oslo had three core issues: borders, refugees, Jerusalem.
Israel went through the motions of ‘negotiating’ about borders. It didn’t do that with the other two issues. Of course the PA failed.
If you want to say that Palestinians are the victims of their own government I’m not going to fight you.
Probably the only solution to the problem of an elected government that forgets to have new elections is…Israel.
They’re spoiled for choice.
?
Repeating blood libels, that Jews did the killing of Druze and Lebanese in the war in 82 and lies about well poisoning do not help your case.
https://palwatch.org/page/4126
The important part for this debate:
Note: Sabra and Shatila are Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In 1982 during the first Lebanon War, a massacre at Sabra and Shatila was committed against Muslims by Christian phalangists in Lebanon. The PA has a longstanding policy of falsely accusing Israel of committing the massacre or actively helping to carry it out.
https://palwatch.org/page/7020
“Vilifying Palestinians for being human” … uh, no. I’m attacking those among them who are Islamonazis because they are Islamonazis. Let me use that same logic for you. Gosh, when the rockets are falling around you, thousands of them, over and over again since 2005, you might.. decide, after 1,400 people are attacked without warning, by gangs of violent thugs who are not identified with uniforms as and do not deserve the name “soldier” (a war crime), driving vehicles not marked as military vehicle (also a war crime), raping, torturing, looting (more war crimes), you ought to put those rabid dogs down.
The PA/PLO ‘failed’ before they began by giving the Palestinians false hopes or expectations about the refugees; like I’ve mentioned elsewhere, that issue was settled over seventy years ago, and the choice to artificially prolong and institutionalize that refugee status (first by other, supposedly pan-Arab nations, then by the Palestinian organizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and to certain extent the Gulf countries) was a calculated decision in pursuit of larger aims. It was never going to happen, and the PA/PLO was fully cognizant of this fact (which was probably the real reason for the second Intifada, peace was a bigger threat to their power base than ‘failure’.
As for Jerusalem, I remember that the conventional wisdom in diplomatic and academic circles was that the faction offering 95% of the West Bank was more than willing* to jettison the Palestinian neighborhoods as well as the Muslim and probably the (predominantly Arab) Christian quarters of the Old City, with the Temple Mount area being the major stumbling block, and some type of joint sovereignty mechanic being considered as a workaround. During this time, this faction was in power and ascendant, with international pressure on their side against domestic opponents, and years of (mostly) peace to use against the warnings of hardliners. If something along these lines were presented within a larger peace deal, its highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Israelis would have been willing to scuttle the deal, so long as Israel had security control over the Wailing Wall and at least some sort of symbolic sovereignty over what is underneath the Dome of the Rock. It was the second Intifada, and the realization that the Palestinians were unwilling to accept any realistic terms and willing to resume terrorism when they believed it suited their purposes, that drove Israeli opinion toward Netanyahu and similar parties, who promptly proceeded to do their best to ensure that such generous terms could never be offered again, even when their political opponents won future elections.
*This was before birth rates between Israeli Arabs and Jews stabilized, and the demographic issue was explicitly noted as a primary factor for their willingness to compromise in this area.
When they erase Hamas, Palestine can choose new leaders.