Why do so many in the West deny that attacks on Israel are antisemitic? (Abid Katib/Getty Images)
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“Great wars in history eventually became great wars about history,” wrote the Israeli-American historian Michael Oren in 1999. It’s hard to think of a country for which this is more obviously true than Israel, though Ireland, Ukraine or even today’s United States might have something to say about that. Either way, the truth of Oren’s insight remains.
History is not some dry mathematical exercise, events mere beads on an abacus. It is built on human imagination: on the myths and ideas that define us. After all, most history today is told as national history — and what is a nation but a group of people who decide they are one? What, for that matter, is an ummah, a diaspora, race or religion? None of these things are facts, but make-believe constructs that are no less real for being so.
And so we return to Israel. On the one hand, we have the brute facts of the past fortnight — the abacus of despair. On 7 October, a coordinated attack by Hamas saw hundreds of Palestinian men break into Israel with the aim of murdering and kidnapping as many Jews as possible. The result was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust; the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history; more than 1,400 dead and 199 captured. Then came the inevitable response: the air assault on Gaza which has killed at least 3,000 Palestinians. And now the fog of war.
Today, a simple recounting of events is all but impossible, each story revealing far more about its narrator than the battle between Israel and Hamas. For some on the Left, for example, it is now “racist” to say the mass slaughter of Israelis was in any way antisemitic. Apparently, to do so is to project European values onto the Palestinians — who do not care about ethnicity, only occupation. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a take come so close to genuine insight, only to fall into the mud at the last. Can there be anything more obsessively Western than such an insistence on framing everything through the lens of colonialism and racism?
However absurd the argument might be, it is now the dominant framing through which history is seen in the West. This racist-coloniser logic runs through the Yale professor Zareena Grewal’s claim, for instance, that “settlers are not civilians” (and so, presumably, legitimate military targets for Hamas). And it is there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.
At the heart of all these claims lies the same grim conclusion: that Israel itself is illegitimate, a settler state which should be wiped off the map as if it were some kind of Levantine Rhodesia. This is the logic behind signs reading “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — not a benign call for national liberation, but a demand for the conquest of Israel itself and, at least according to Hamas, death for the Jews who live there. The founding charter of Hamas is unequivocal on this point.
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SubscribeExcellent article. I keep reading UH for this level of writing.
There is a complex reality about political Zionism rooted in centuries of a lived in experience for Jewish people.
Much of the polemics from the Left and even the Centre Left in recent days has failed to grasp that.
McTague brings this out well.
The Center-Left needs to realize every Left Wing Secular Liberation Theory is based on contradiction that these f’rs are not resolving.
These idiots think the cure to rising prices is taxing the people that control the supply of goods!
I misplaced a comment – can’t delete…
Well, corporations may only supply us our goods because they use government funded services so it is hardly idiotic or unfair to ask those who profit from it to pay for what they use. Even at the rates suggested they are getting a bargain.
When you write, “government funded services, are you rehashing Obama’s recycling of “You didn’t build that.”?
And they will pass those taxes on to the consumer. Such a tax would also be regressive since the less income someone has, the higher percentage of it they spend on buying things.
Exactly , the wars of religious conquest engaged in by Muslims don’t count as colonialism because they are the will of Allah or because their victims in the west were white and therefore had it coming ?
I wonder what the liberal/left think about the reconquista of Spain?
Was it an oppressed people fighting back against colonialism, or white Christian Europeans revealing their Islamophobic blood-lust?
Great point , the latter obviously
I have been in plenty of these kinds of debates.
Al Andalus is considered the pinnacle of tolerance and peaceful coexistence and the Reconquista as a corresponding pinnacle of the opposite.
Several historical studies show that the conditions were, to say the least, more mixed and predominantly the opposite.
No one knows or wants to know that the Muslims were all up around Paris in 712 or that Europe was close to falling at Vienna in 1483 (the Ottomans).
Richard Fletcher’s book on the conquest of Spain points out that where the fighting was most bitter, in Central Spain, and went on for years, the population never recovered . And Spain, like former Turkish Europe, is still under populated. Sicily, 200 years under Arab conquest, ditto.
The Arabs were chucked out of Sicily by the Norman Conquest of 999-1139 AD. There must have other factors involved to result in such a low ‘bonking rate’?
I think you may have been reading the wrong books!
The attempted Umayyad (Arab) conquest of France took place in 732 AD got no further that Tours, about 125 miles SW of Paris.
The Ottoman’s two abortive sieges of Vienna took place in 1529 AD and 1683 AD respectively.
Yes, I just wrote quickly from memory – it was a bit sloppy. It was just for a somewhat larger perspective.
Not to worry, I do that all the time!
Do you believe the story of the origin of the breakfast croissant being to celebrate the breaking of the 1683 Muslim siege of Vienna ? Why were Muslims big on crescents anyway ?
Sadly NO.
If not croissants, what about coffee?
What a refreshingly civil internet discourse
Maybe it’s a pity it didn’t? The mix of European and Middle Eastern civilizations might have been greater than the individual parts. Each side now seems to lack what the other has, economically, culturally, morally and in many other ways.
What not transport the entire population of Gaza to the Irish Republic.?
As I recall you still haven’t fully recovered demographically from the ‘Famine’, so could probably do with the numbers.
Not all civilizations are equally compatible.
To put it mildly.
Which is a great thing. This moronic notion that everyone has to get along is so damaging. It is like homogenising the human race. Hopefully we are not being pasturised at the same time. (Sorry, I could not help myself)
Wars are sad and destructive on so many levels, but it is just the flip side of our creative genius. It is believed that Europe rose and overtook the rest of the world in many endeavours because the continent was not unified, because there was competition. Because there was someone out there willing to say yes when others said no.
We have to stop forcing everyone to live in peace and harmony because to be honest, it is unrealistic and childish. Individuals from anywhere can get along but civilizations absolutely cannot.
It is my belief that the Gaza strip be given to Egypt and they take care of the Palestinians. It is much more sensible than forcing Israel to do it.
Such a sad world view from a sad little man.
That nasty comment seems meaningless except that it makes the point that people can’t get along!
Sad but accurate. Versus the harm that has been done to the world by utopians.
Hahaha and what’s in it for Egypt ?
And, if you accept Jared Diamond’s explanation, Europe runs East-West rather than North-South and had more than its fair share of animals that could be domesticated.
I don’t accept Jared Diamond’s explanation. If you’ve ever used a handcart or a wheelbarrow you’ll know that it’s pretty useful.
That’s true even if you don’t have a donkey to pull it. It would be worthwhile inventing the wheel anywhere, even if there are no draught animals.
Egypt controlled Gaza from 1948-67, as Jordan controlled the West Bank. Now, neither country wants anything to do with the Palestinians. Egypt won’t take the Gazans. Look up “Black September 1970” for the Jordanian experience.
…closest of all in 1683, when King Jan Sobieski “the Fat” of Poland…brought his winged hussars down the Kahlenburg, and fell on the Ottomans like the very Hammer of God before that ancient Christian City, and definitively turned the tide…
…until now…
We shall need another Jan Sobieski “the fat” in the not too distant future.
There were 2 attacks on Vienna that the Austrians repulsed. The first was in 1529, and the second was in 1683. There was no attack on Vienna in 1483.
Do keep up Harry old chap, you’re about 2hrs 10 minutes behind.
Ah but the reconquista of Spain didn’t stop there did it? Yes it threw their muslim rulers out of Spain but it also threw the Jews out (like when Amin threw out all the Asians from Uganda). And then Spain went on to start colonization–That very same year.
1492 Spain threw over the moors. Tossed out the Jews and Columbus landed in Cuba.
So no they are not going to get credit, obviously.
Columbus first landfall was the Bahamas, the Jews were given the choice of expulsion or conversion by the 1491 AD Treaty of Grenada and the subsequent Alhambra Decree of 1493 AD.
The expulsions of the Moriscos ( Moors) did NOT begin in earnest until 1609 AD.
And where did the Sephardic refugees find a welcome refuge? The Ottoman Empire.
Aragon and Castile merged in 1492 as well. And I don’t think the Moors were expelled in 1492, though I could be wrong. I remember reading they were expelled about 100 years later. Again, I may be mistaken.
Again about 1hr 10 minutes behind.
Why ? The Jews had the opportunity to convert . Many took it . Spain defeated the Aztecs so easily because they were helped by the many tribes oppressed by them who were used in vast scale human sacrifices . The Incas while not quite so cruel were massive colonial power themselves . Though oddly historians are not so judgemental about Inca colonialism .
The latter, for sure.. so-called Christian savagery v Islamic civilization and culture.
FGM, public stonings and beheadings, honor killings and rapes, blasphemy laws, endless sectarian warfare…and this is in modern day Islamic theocracies. Far leftists have an unfailing predeliction for supporting some of the worst regimes in history.
A bit of both
You have bought the Western trope about how Islam expanded “shook. line and sinker.” Islam expanded mainly by trade, and people in areas “conquered” by Islam were not forced to convert.
Yours is a comment so willfully ignorant of history that it does not even deserve a reply. So, you’re welcome.
Not so. Read bit more and you’ll see through your own fog. The Moors were never numerous enough to hold and garrison the Iberian penninsula. So they very intelligently opted for a softer approach.
A similar approached was used by the Normans when they conquered Sicily, in the 1050s. And a thousand years before that the Romans, all across their empire.
In these and other cases the original ruling classes suffered, but the farmers and craftsmen were mostly left to get on with it.
So you’re welcome.
Until the invasions by the Almoravids in the 11th century and the Almohades in the 12th century, also from Morrocco.
Spot on!
Very true! Just trying to keep my posts short.
In fairness, for much of history, war and conquest were entirely an activity of the ruling class, who ruled largely by virtue of their martial prowess and maybe aided by some economic scheme. The warriors and leaders of two groups simply fought each other, and then the losers were, depending on the situation, either left in place to pay tribute in whatever form to the winner (the approach actually used by the Romans and the Persians before them), made into peasants or slaves (as the European colonizers did in various places), or eliminated entirely (the Mongols were known and feared for this approach). When one conquered an area to gain its land and resources, it made little sense to kill the people necessary to produce said resources. The peasant farmers and craftsmen that had the knowledge and expertise to produce goods and food simply exchanged one set of masters for another. They also constituted a vast majority of the population because prior to the industrial revolution, you needed a lot of peasant farmers and crafters to support a relatively small ruling class who engaged in political and military activity. You’re not saying anything that couldn’t also be said of most conflicts and conquests between the dawn of civilization and the industrial revolution, when technology increased the productivity of farming and manufacturing by several orders of magnitude, allowing significant portions of the population to do other things, like serve in national military forces. In reality, both the reconquista Spaniards and the Moors would be looked upon as unspeakably barbaric, probably nearly equally so, by modern standards, as both were concerned primarily with controlling the land and its resources for themselves and neither had much regard for the peasantry in general. You’re distorting history to suit your narrative, which, to be fair, is true of most national histories, but what are you going to do? As the author mentions, there’s really no such thing as objectivity when it comes to history.
The Romans were rather good at “subverting the elites,” as I recall. For example Fishbourne Palace and Cogidubnus or whatever he was called.
Hindu Kush
I remember visiting the mosque in Istanbul dedicated to a great saint and colleague of Mohammed, who died grasping the Koran in one hand, and a sword in the other, as he tried to scale the walls of Byzantium.
Certainly, in Al Andalus (Spain) the three religions thrived.. indeed Muslims were better friends to Judaism than Christianity every was. My Jewish colleague in Istanbul has mainly Islamic clients, naturally since Turkish Jews are less than 1% of the population and Islamic Turks are 97% of the population.. It generally comes as a great surprise that Jews and Muslims get on quite well almost everywhere except Israel-Palestine. I winder why that is?
What a rosy — and false — picture of history. Yes, the Ottomans were good, until they weren’t, just like the Muslims in Spain, and the Babylonians before them. They also always had inferior dhimmi status. In the modern areas, there were blood libels and pogroms in Damascus (1840, 1890), Aleppo (1810, 1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jerusalem (1847), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901–02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901–02), Port Said (1903, 1908), and Damanhur (1871, 1873, 1877, 1892).
So not so rosy as you paint.
…the Balkan families whose little boys were taken for the janissaries (unless unlucky, and castrated to become eunuchs in the harem)…and whose little girls were taken for the harem…under the Devscirme system…might give you an argument on this…
…as indeed might the families of young Irish girls taken from your own southern coastline in the C15/16/17th, by Muslim Barbary Corsairs…for the same purpose, and the same Ottoman Turkish customers…until the Royal Navy smartened them up…
…redheads being especially prized, because of their allegedly “licentious nature”…
…the slave trade between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Muslim World started at least a thousand years before the rather brief trans-Atlantic component, about which so much has been written…and lasted longer as did North African Slaving expeditions into Southern Europe, Southern Ireland and South-Western England…
…the whole business running for so long that the great North and sub-Saharan African Empires of that period were built on it for many, many Centuries…
…and indeed the earliest post-Crusade European punitive expeditions against the Muslim World…right back to the Knights of Saint of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta…were undertaken against slavers…
The Oba of Benin bought his bronze from Portugal…for slaves, whom the Portugese took to Brazil…
Yep, that’s why Islam has the death penalty for apostasy, because all those people converted to a backward desert cult (even by medieval standards) due to their love of the religion.
There are I think a lot of reasons for this. Firstly most christian background folks don’t know much about the Muslim world. They are just ignorant. (And that includes a lot of people who do make this point. They pick out stray facts or history ignoring the vast diverse Muslim cultures, nations and empire etc) Secondly, like most colonizer cultures, they are great at placing loss of power as themselves as victims–white planters adjusting to either the end of the slavery, white southeners after segregation and white men now. The British and French regarding former colonies asserting themselves…It ain’t pretty. But if your politics/culture doesn’t tag them as those in power–becuae in our culture they are not. well you won’t see it as coming from that place. How could you? Then in the Black community of course there has long been a threat of embracing Islam/Arab cultures. There are complex reasons for this but the Black Self-Respect movement being tied so closely to it doesn’t hurt.
So no a lot on the Left just view the Islamic world through the lens of their own time, place and culture. The same exact thing can be said on the Right and center though. And as for anti-semitism, the right has contributed to it mightily and violently. Space lasers anyone?
Good to see that you use the freedom given to you in Western culture to advocate for one that, if you lived under it, would genitally mutilate you, force you to dress according to their standards, give you no right to free expression and violently oppress you if you did not go along.
It’s not about whites.
Despite what “locals” might profess, as an Indian I would maintain being colonised by the British was severely, shall we say, sub optimal.
But the British colonisation just cannot be compared to the prior islamic colonialism.
They couldn’t compare to the sheer barbarity , with tens of millions killed.
Or the propensity towards slavery and rape on a massive scale.
Or the utter disregard for science and education.
Or the savage religious bigotry, with so many “voluntarily” converting or mysteriously dying after refusing to do so.
But, our western liberals will happily badmouth western civilization – even though, today, they are as tolerant and civilised as can be, even to their own detriment – while they will refuse to condemn the islamic tyrants who murdered, enslaved and forcibly converted far more.
Yes. Spot on.
The Islamic rule in India was hardly the golden era that Left historians portray it as.
Conversely much good came about from the early EIC days of British presence.
And the sad thing is that the activist Woke lobby from India( just holding press conferences galore in support of Hamas btw) finds easy acceptability even here on UH.
I find such trash on contemporary India being written by the Left ecosystem on a supposedly right- wing and free thinking site, that I sometimes seriously think of cancelling my subscription sometimes.
Yes odd how we sometimes tend to eulogise the Mogul Empire, probably due to fame of the Taj Mahal and the Tomb of Humayun, both essentially Persian buildings.
Then when when you consider that maniac Aurangzeb you understand what a disaster it was.
Even the paragon of virtue for Nehruvian Marxist historiography -Akbar wasn’t blameless. Brutal invoking of Jihad to smash Hemu in Kabul and to take Chittorgarh.
Only Dara Shikoh was the true sui generis tolerant face of Mughaldom, and that’s why he met his cruel end.
I recall visiting Fatehpur Sikri some years ago and being harangued by my (Moslem) guide as to what a paragon virtue Akbar was. It all seemed too perfect!
Ah Chittorgarh and its wonderful Victory Tower or was it two? They reminded me of the Roman Triumphal Arch!
I know little of Dara Shikoh , so thanks for the ‘hint’.
Disappointing days cricket! Probably even worse tonight with the Rugby!
Yes, a day for ” giant killers”!? Suspect we may be in for a shock today( am apprehensive about HP’s absence..)
Chittorgarh still celebrates Holi ( Colours Festival) with red colour to signify the bloody massacre of 30- 40,000 innocents by ” Jihadi” Akbar.
He also took rich pickings for his ” harem” with any woman who survived the ” Jauhar”.
Of course the Left is amnesiac about these matters- it was only a ” peaceful” surrender to the ” natural” tendencies of a victor…
“A gloom in peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head today”.
Did the rugby also go similar?!
If we don’t take some quick wickets and instead get felled by the Kiwis I shall have to go into mourning for a while..
Yes a SA penalty in the dying moments of the game gave them a hard earned victory.
All rather reminiscent of the final 20 years ago against the Aussies, although on that occasion the Gods smiled on us!
Looks pretty tense, lots of pressure on Mr Kohli!
Good luck!
As@ 17.40 BST: Well done, an epic finish!
” Birds are singing, the sun is shining, God’s in his Heaven”! Thank the Lord. Tight though, albeit sweet revenge for the sad event of 2019!
Sadly I must report that out BBC 5 Live extra was somewhat spoiled by our female commentator, who appeared to do nothing but only how to shriek.
I’m not asking for a return to the incomparable John Snagg or John Arnott but ‘we’ must do better.
Strangely enough I agree with you! I am not too keen on ” female” commentators for either cricket or ” the beautiful game”.
Some things are best left to Mars and not Venus!
John Arlott ( presume you meant him)was simply splendid. I used to like Henry Blofeld too.
Yes Arlott….thanks…off to Specsavers!
I did like your splendid expression “Mars not Venus” and no doubt will use it as nauseam!
Henry Blofeld still fighting hard to stop the wretched MCC abandoning the Eton and Harrow match.
Yes, I heard him trying hard to be PC in a July interview with Freddie Gray on Spectator TV… thankfully he gave up midway!
The MCC needs to be disbanded if it decides that? Else why not hold it in India with Mayo versus Doon and North Point Darjeeling versus St Paul’s D for good measure?!
…don’t despair on the Rugby front, Chaps…Six Nations is to come, and we got better match by match. Although I was bloody fed up yesterday!
Why would you do that? Isn’t free thinking and free speaking what it’s all about? Do you prefer to only preach to the converted in an echo chamber? Not much of a challenge and rather boring don’t you think?
I fail to see much intelligence and ability to engage in factual discussion from most who espouse Leftist causes. They usually start with a preconceived ideological “given” and once facts don’t support the ” cause” it gets to personal name calling and slander.
I agree with you about the ” echo chamber”. Frankly I like debate and discussion, but only if it is based on an ability to work out differences.
I.E ” to agree to disagree”. Not a great talent of the Left inclined in my own experience.
Slander?! Really? In that case I agree, you should depart.
What ho! I must have been really irked to be so rhetorical!
And as long as Tom, Mary and Philip write as well as they do, I remain attracted!
Let’s do an Ike and make the problem bigger.
Our world ruling class, for about the last century or so, is an educated class. It rules through a political formula that it is the Ally of the Oppressed Peoples fighting against the White Oppressors. The only question is who the Oppressed Peoples are du jour and who the White Oppressors are. Rule One is that the progressive educated class cannot be the oppressors, even though the worst oppressors in history were the educated Joey Stalin and the educated Mao Zedong. (And hoo boy, did they believe in “endless progress and liberation.”)
Obviously, judging from the kiddies at gubmint universites peacefully protesting against the Israelis, our ruling class has decided that Palestinians are Oppressed Peoples and the Israelis are White Oppressors. You may disagree, but you don’t matter.
Are you agreeing, then, that “oppression” is “the” irreducible fact of life (human as well as nonhuman)? Did Foucault point out to us only how childish liberal democratic aspersions are? How childish, that is, the “idea of progress” is? When the Jewish people are tempted by, and then succumb to, that idea, they succeed in proving only how unshakable oppression is. That seems to be the awful truth.
With few exceptions, Mr. Chantrill, you advance an insistent narrative of sinister dominance by an “educated-elite-ruling class”. Does that educated-elite-ruling class somehow not include the many hard-right top-university- graduate lawyers and MDs–one-percenters or not–who populate the Republican (and Democratic) benches in Congress? Nor the many libertarian or fiscally-conservative owners and CEOs of massive companies and corporations, woke public relations campaigns notwithstanding?
You seem to appropriate and invert Marxist terminology for your own reductive Grand Narrative purposes. I think “Joey” Stalin was a seminary dropout and semi-autodidact, similar in that way to his Austrian-born contemporary, an art-school wannabe who tells of his “struggle” in a famous little book.
Do you suggest a return to some distant past when the elite-ruling-class, and nearly everyone else, was illiterate? Even then, the Elite were “educated” in some sense, taught how to comport themselves and quite literally “lord it” over their inferiors if needed. And are autodidacts part of the problem or solution, perhaps fit for the New Proletarian revolution if they can prove they’ve only read Edmund Burke, Milton Freidman, Ayn Rand, and the Bible?
If you can, please tell me how an Ivy League graduate who inherited $10 million (in the Seventies) and former-or-current MAGA associates such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Paul Manafort, and Rudy Giuliani belong–to the extent they’re reducible thereto for Grand Narrative effect–to anything other than an educated-elite-ruling-class?
Whataboutism ai its finest.
Thanks for the superlative. So anything that dissents from the Grand Narrative(s) or one true thought-tribe that you prefer is
heresywhataboutism? Responding to what I wrote with a buzzword seems like bubble-dwelling single-true-sidedness, though not at its finest.*And while we’re here: What about the other side of the equation? It doesn’t exist? If prominent election obstructionists like Giuliani, Sydney Powell, or Roger Stone spout nonsense that you may want to hear then they no longer belong to the educated-elite-ruling class you acknowledge? All the educated elites and rulers are of the Left?
Quite simply, McTague’s best Unherd article. I have a new respect for his writing after this searingly honest and well-researched account, with perspectives on both history and the nation state that surpass the immediate crisis.
Superb and excellently written piece. It has struck me how many of the “good” people in this country and the West more generally have absolutely no understanding of the Israeli or Jewish condition. This hits the nail on the head and then some.
Those “good” people will soon realize that this is not just about the Jews. It’s about all us infidels! It will be a wake up call when the “Queers for Palestine” ever get to meet their heroes and see first-hand what terror means.
If you’re concerned about us Infidels please also note we qualify as Gentiles (or Goys) as well. In either case we have much the same status as the Austrian artist assigned to so many of us.. I’m not sure if religious slurs advance our understanding that much..
He meant infidels as in not Muslim.
Your misunderstanding reveals a lot about your worldview.
So true, I’ve said the same thing.
OMG exactly! It would not be a pretty sight! But of course, there have to be some queers in the closet in Palestine, living lives of misery.
How about a GoFundMe to buy them tickets and hotel accommodations?
As an American, listening to Ivy League professors, and younger colleagues at the school where I teach (I am 58), I have been in a state of horror and grief the past two weeks. I am not Jewish, but grew up with many Jewish friends – attended many Bar and Bat Mitzvahs as a kid, visited Temple with friends. And my best friend attended Catholic Church with me more than once. I always felt great connection with my Jewish friends, despite our religious differences – there was a shared value system, cultural beliefs, family commonalities.
The HS where I teach is predominantly white, but we have a growing Muslim population, as well as Indian, and Black students, Latino, etc. We have very few Jewish students. In the past week, there have been 4 significant anti-Semitic incidents, including students being beaten up, spit on, and threatened by Muslim students. I am in shock by the events, obviously from kids taking in the words of adults in person or online. But more so, by the lack of reaction from colleagues. I am seeing raging anti-Semitism and NO understanding of the poison of this from colleagues.
A couple of Jewish students I have confessed they are afraid to come to school. It’s like the tide has completely turned in light of this colonialism/DEI narrative, and suddenly Jewish people are akin to white colonialists. I cannot fathom this. We used to always teach The Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Wiesel. By these classic texts have been replaced by student choice books. Sigh, younger teachers think students should have control of everything even though they know nothing.
I wonder as the author so rightly points out, how many of these far left liberals would feel if they had to give their land back to the Native Americans who are the most mistreated people, possibly on earth – destitute, stripped of their culture, their pride, their land. Now alcoholic, suicidal. Or would they feel deserving of bloody murder and rape for the state of affairs on reservations. But that isn’t even really an apt comparison because Native Americans don’t plot and plan to bomb and kill anyone.
How do we fix this? How have Jewish people gone from the victims of the most horrific crime in history – the Holocaust – to colonizers in less than a century? Why is everything Black and White, literally? Colleges are brainwashing young people to believe men can be women, and Jews are colonizers. This is evil.
Last thought, the worst part is when I speak up on behalf of Israel at school, I am looked at as a racist. What is this world we are living in?
When I was teaching in London a five year old boy, born of Algerian parents, came up to me and, quite out of the blue, said, ” I hate the jew”. I asked him why he felt that way and he answered, “They kill my people.”
He had not learned this online, he had learned it from those closest to him. He was five years old. It has been known for a long time that anti-semitism runs deep in many muslim communities. Why has this never been addressed but swept under the carpet?
To try and understand how the Left had come to seize on the narrative that Israeli jews are white colonisers I read a book called, The Left’s Jewish Problem by Dave Rich.
I recommend people read it. Rich makes his case succinctly and underpins it with a great deal of evidence.
Some valuable points made about Hamas’ cult of Islamic colonisation here which might be considered worthy of broadcast by the West’s ‘anti-Zionist’ news media (with a few worthy exceptions).
The author’s last thought in this article is all he needed to write– “Jews are never safe “.
You must always conflate, yes conflate, anti-Zionism and antisemitism. If you hate Israel, if you question its right to exist, then you hate Jews. Martin Luther King, who had many Jewish friends and allies, once said, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism,”.
If your reflex to the above paragraph is “I don’t hate (the parliamentary democracy) of Israel, I specifically hate the Netanyahu government.” That’s a convenient deflection. Israel has had 37 governments represented in the Knesset since 1948, and the majority of the world, especially the 50 Muslim dominated nations, has condemned them all.
If you think the European history of Jewish hatred began in the 1930’s, you’d be off by almost 2 millennium. The emperor Tiberius expelled the Jews from Rome in 19 CE.
My maternal grandfather fled Russia in the late 1890’s to escape the oncoming “pogroms”, which had been coming and going in that part of the world since 1821. A pogrom is defined as “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” Can you imagine a similar term needing to be coined for any other recognized religious group?
Yesterday, in New York City, which has the second largest concentration of Jews in the world, a man punched a woman in the face inside the subway. When this woman asked why he did this, he answered because “you are Jewish”. He didn’t say because “you’re a Zionist (or Israeli) sympathizer “, but specifically because she was a Jew. In the meantime, above ground Palestinian supporters have been burning Israeli flags, and harassing supporters of the Jewish homeland.
https://nypost.com/2023/10/18/man-punches-jewish-woman-in-the-face-on-nyc-subway-in-alleged-hate-crime/
It took the Norman conquest in 1066 before Jews were allowed to emigrate to England. But, Jews weren’t allowed into Sweden until 1681…and weren’t accepted into Argentina until the 1850’s. Jew hatred, or at least wariness, has always existed around the globe…and sadly, it always will, which is why the existence of Israel is essential to Jewish survival.
Lastly, confusingly Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib bemoans her family’s expulsion from Palestine, and identifies as a Palestinian immigrant, yet she was born in Detroit (MI). Her mother was born in Ramallah, Jordan, and her grandmother was born in British Mandatory Palestine. In short, there’s no such thing as a Palestinian refugee, because there’s never been a nation called Palestine.
I would have thought that SYRIA PALAESTINA was close enough?
Well spotted Charlie my boy!
Syria Palaestina was better know as Roman Palestine (circa 2-4 AD), and was Roman controlled. The word “Palestine” doesn’t appear in the Koran and has absolutely no link to the Muslim religion. Nobody really knows where the derivation of the word Palestine came from, but a popular theory is that it’s morphed from “Philistine”, an Aegean people who conquered what is now Israel and Gaza in the 12 Century BCE…but, again, it’s not an Arabic word.
from Wikipedia: Zachary Foster in his doctoral dissertation wrote that “Most scholars believe the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed the provincial administrative name of Judaea to Palestine to erase the Jewish presence in the land,” opining that “it’s equally likely the name change had little to do with Jew hatred and more to do with Hadrian’s romance with ancient Greece.” He adds, there is a “paucity of direct evidence around who made the change, when and under what circumstances”, and that it may be that Hadrian did not “rename” the country but simply “called the place what it was called”
Impressive post. The long and tragic story of the Jewish people is told in the Old Testament. It’s all there for the world to understand, but most people’s minds are closed to truth.
..most are closed to myth and fabrication and wisely so.. even in myth the Israelites were big into smiting indigenous peoples and slaughtering them mercilessly..
All of the above sounds right to me, as well as the proposition that Jews will alas eternally have to fight against people who hate them. However, even if this a typical Western position, of which I’m proud, the moral status of Israel among its many supporters in Europe and the US would be much enhanced if it abstained of and condemn such obviously excessive stances as moving one million of persons like it did some days ago, tolerating routine “mini pogroms” against Arab villages in the West Bank, and deliberately try to weaken democratic pillars like the Supreme Court (the role of which is essential in a constitution-less country).
The Israeli Defense Force is saying, in my words, “move south, there’s lots of room for you do so…because we’re going to come in heavy with bombs that will destroy the network of deep underground tunnels in the north, especially those that enter Egypt. And, we’re pretty certain we know where Hamas hide their munitions, and you don’t want to be anywhere nearby when we strike them.”
Gaza is 141 square miles. Manhattan is 22.82 square miles and has a population almost as large as Gaza. The Gazan civilians have had ample time to move to safety…the IDF know exactly where they’ll be, and will avoid that area, unless Hamas troops have infiltrated it.
Regarding ‘mini pogroms’ in the West Bank. I’ve only read of incidences of strikes against militants. Remember, while Hamas rules Gaza, terrorist organizations Hezbollah and the former PLO rule the West Bank.
Regarding the Supreme Court, my understanding is that the change that is being proposed would make the Israel judiciary more inline with U.S. and Great Britain, where the legislative branch appoints the judges to the Supreme Court. That’s not the case now. I don’t know if this is a good or bad idea.
Garbage.. one isolated incident on a train to prove a point? If there was never a state called Palestine, why did the Romans call Palestine, Palestine? And why does my old Atlas call Palestine Palestine?
It was first named by the ancient Greeks as Philistia (Philistines) and renamed Palestine by the Romans.. and has been known ever since as Palestine.
It was never known as Israel! not even by the Israelites. Israel is a people, descended from Caananites, Hamites and Jebuites, with a common faith now largely no longer practiced. It is not and never was not a country.
Zionism is a movement born of sneaky invasion, terrorism, land theft, apartheid and genocide.. but a very nice movement apart from those minor shortcomings..
The “Levant” is another popular term for the region that includes Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Canaan is another Biblical name given to this same region. But, the region has never been known as a nation of Palestine, and again, ‘Palestine” is no an Arabic word. It’s a region of Arabs…Arab-Muslims, Arab-Christians, Arab-Druze, Arab-Jews, plus the Persians of Iran…not Palestinians.
It’s believed, not proven, because little can be proven about social history that happened over 2,000 years ago, that the Romans changed the geographical name Judea to Palestine, as a way to say, “F–k you! This is no longer your land, it’s ours.” It’s one of many historical middle fingers that the indigenous Jews of present day Israel have endured from their oppressors.
Israel and Palestine is a big and complex issue but personally I am more worried about the forthcoming ethnic cleansing that is going to happen in the UK. How painful will it be and who is going to win: the young, fiery religious zealots or the weak decadent native Brits.
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are we back to the old “rivers of blood” again, ie quotating from the Book of Enoch. Armageddon awaits I guess?
Superb writing and insight. Keep up the great work, Tom.
The author remarks, ” there in the now-common refrain that “Zionism is racism” or even “white supremacy”. In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.” The very fact of the matter, the verifiable truth is that the majority of Israel consists of “people of color”, and has since its inception in 1948. I’ll explain.
Once the United Nations vote for Israeli independence become a done deal, the Muslim-Arab nations were up in arms, literally up in arms. On May 14th, 1948, the brand new country of Israel was attacked by the combined forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Though the United Nations brokered a ceasefire, the Jews of Israel proved themselves to be tenacious fighters. They still are. Before launching their assault, Israelis enemies encouraged those living with the new Israeli borders to flee…assuring them that they could return once the Israelis were defeated. 500,000 Arabs fled Israel, and Israel triumphed. Those are your present day ‘refugees’, who have since multiplied into the millions. Today, there are 2,000,000+ non-Jewish Arabs, most Muslim, who live within Israel as full citizenship, with the same rights as Jews…a fact that’s rarely mentioned by the global press.
At the same time that 500,000 Arabs were fleeing Israel by there own choice, 850,000 Jews were being expelled from: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Turkey, and many other Arab/North African nations. The majority of these Jews formed the core of modern day Israel. These people are undeniably “people of color”, and those who later immigrated from Ethiopia are BLACK.
Interesting, who knew!
I am amazed that people can have opinions about subjects they know little about.
What people? Don’t be coy, name names.
I was very put off by the tiny caption to the photo. (Criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic. That’s a silly accusation, thrown in anger.)
I read the essay anyway. And I’m very glad I did. Growing up in NYC I’m very sympathetic with the feelings of my Jewish friends and neighbors, and their not-unreasonable distrust of the rest of us. And I’ve heard viscious, hateful anti-semitism. Many times. It’s a form of madness really. What Hamas did was beyond madness.
My criticising Israeli policies is nothing of the sort.
Meanwhile, the Israelis will have their revenge. And who could blame them? By hook or by crook, Hamas must be destroyed. For everyone’s sake.
Western media has either forgotten or purposefully ignores the huge role played by the USSR in creating Hamas and the anti-Israeli propaganda that we still swallow today. Even the concept of a “Palestinian” is a Soviet construct. Before the 1960s Muslims living in Palestine were simply known as Arabs, with no distinction between Arabs living elsewhere in the Levant. The purpose of giving those Arabs a distinct identity was to turn Western public perception against Israel; no longer were Israelis an oppressed minority surrounded by Arabs but they were an oppressive majority surrounding Palestinians. The Soviets (and the Romanians, from whom we get the inside story of Kremlin manoeuvres) persuaded Arafat to change his message from the destruction of Israel to the liberation of “Palestinians”. The Soviets understood this oppression story would be far more effective in gathering Western support than the destruction goal. They were right.
There are 22 Arab countries between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean covering approximately 2.5 million square miles. Can they not find room for one small Jewish state the size of Wales?
The Middle East has been part of various empires since the dawn of history. The modern concept of a nation state was thrust upon it, ironically, by Western colonial powers. That doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Maybe imperialism isn’t so bad after all?
Wow, that’s fascinating, thank you. I suppose I should verify it rather than just accepting blindly accepting, however, it sounds about right.
The primary sources for this are the best way to verify it. You can read the testimony of Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian defector under Ceaucescu, and Zahir Muhsein, a high ranking PLO member.
Immigrants dispossessing the natives. Missionary beliefs supplanting the old cultures and ways of living. Crises of resources from co-habitation. Settlers getting state protection with the forceful suppression of local protests. Re-education and reframing of history to make the settlers more worthy than the people they supplant. Cultural battles on beliefs and governance. Fights and wars for cultural dominance. Resistance. Then independence. And then the cycle starts again.
The story of the Europeans into their Empires … the Empires back into Europe. Continual turning tides of migration. Are we the settled, the settlers, or the displaced?
’tis hard to know, isn’t it? A little pinch of white man; wrap it up in black skin, add a bit of blue blood and a little, little bit of Indian..
My take is we’re all the same, ie in any group there’s the good, the bad and the ugly.. in my experience that 3 drawer filing cabinet works better than all the Religiously, Ethnically, Colour coded, Nationally divided filing system.. far fewer drawers for one thing!
That may apply to America but not to the Middle East thanks to the nonsense called religion.
For obvious reasons, I’m always troubled by talk of “solutions” in the context of Jewish history. In any other context, they always come down to trite, simplistic outcomes that only work if you ignore the messiness of history. Nothing could be better evidence of this than the Free Palestine movement, which depends on a comic-book-level understanding of both history and the present—and future—of the Middle East. No wonder it has gained so much purchase amid the shallow catastrophe that is modern education.
So true.
“Intellectually, I knew antisemitism existed, though I had never witnessed it first-hand”. Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election. The 2017 general election was very nearly won by Jeremy Corbyn. Truly none so blind as those who will not see.
If this is correct – and I’m pretty much persuaded it is – then of course there is no solution for either the Jews or the civilised world in the idea that Jews should not possess Israel. Move the Jews anywhere on the planet and they will still face the unique demand from a significant proportion of the rest of humanity to justify their own existence in ways that other peoples simply do not.
It also begs the question as to whether Zionism would no longer be an issue if the Jews vacated the land of Israel now. By extension of the logic in the article, Zionism or an equivalent concept in future would always be what applies to those who accept the Jews’ right to exist as a distinct people in possession of their own nation, and it would always be the basis of the stupid and specious claim that those who oppose this are not in fact racists, as they keep insisting, when in fact they are indeed exactly that.
The other thing that amazes me is that the West still hasn’t publicly taken the step of identifying Fascism in its modern form. The people getting away with celebrating the murder and kidnap of Jews by Islamist terrorists are fascists, and I don’t understand why we’re not admitting that this is the case.
Who is “we”? I don’t mind saying it.
Or should that be “who are we”?!
The Arabs invaded Palestine from the Hejaz in 629, about 1300 years ago whereas the Jews were living in Palestine 4000 years ago.
It is the Jews who are the real Palestinians and the Arabs who are the settlers.
2000 BC! That is a ridiculous exaggeration, and you know it.
…the difficulty that we in the West face is that our public and political discourse is essentially secular…with even those of Christian Faith (or having moral and social standards set by that faith)…see these as private matters of conscience, not as a way of shaping action. And in addition, that faith is inclusive…not just seeking to draw others to it, but also embracing people of goodwill who do not share it, on the basis of conduct.
The difference with Judaism is marked, in that one needs to be born into it…but that with Islam is both marked and terrifying…in that Islam (which means “submission”)…asserts that only by coming to it will one be saved at the Day of Judgement…but if one does not “Submit”…one will burn in hellfire for all eternity…
…and in consequence, if one has not “submitted”…has not come to Islam…is not Muslim…one has no value, and can be raped, brutalised or killed by “The Faithful” whenever and however they choose…and can live amongst them only as second-class people, subject to the “Jizya”, legitimate oppression…at their will.
We cannot grasp that we are dealing with C7th Jihadists who think it their Holy Mission to conquer the whole world, and everyone in it…
…so I’d suggest we need at the least to check our approach against the views of the most uncompromising, flinty and unbending of Evangelical Christians…who might understand how this works in our antagonist’s heads.
If we are dealing with Jihadis…we need the nearest equivalent we can find to C11th Crusaders. Who successfully led the first counter-offensive against those who seek to obliterate us…
The source of this problem was the rank timidity shown by the Israelis in 1967. Had they acted with the audacity of say Ancient Rome, we would not now be vexed by this nonsense.
On capturing Jerusalem they should have IMMEDIATELY demolished both the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and instantly started the construction of the Third Temple. Failure to do so could only be interpreted as weakness.
VAE VICTIS! As ‘you know who’ would have said.
Certainly in the eyes of its Islamic enemies this was indeed a sign of weakness. However, I hope that Israel never stoops as low as the Arabs.
Why on earth construct a temple? What would you do in it? There are ethnic differences between Israelis as well…
God knows! What did they do last time?
‘sold pigeons and goats I think until one of their rabbis whipped ’em out!
Ah yes, the old boot on the neck approach.. yeah, it might have worked I suppose?
It worked quite well in the Emerald Isle for quite a few centuries as I recall.
“Then came the inevitable response: the air assault on Gaza which has killed at least 3,000 Palestinians.”
Does this include the “500” killed at the hospital the other day? Do you have any evidence at all for this 3,000 figure?
Hamas said it so it must be true.
Concerning the impossibility of a Western mind to understand the resorts of the Israeli-Palestinian bloody and unfinishable conflict, I have heard an interesting point from a pro-Israel Arab Israeli. He drew attention to the fact that the great and astonishing victories of Israel toward its Arab enemies were always the fact of people who had a soviet conception of war, giving little attention the human rights and not believing to much in diplomacy, a conception fitted to the Middle East where fact matter more than values, in consequence of what the military success on the field is the sole legitim consideration.
But although I quite agree with that it puts Israel in an extremely complicated situation which has to do with the very split identity of this state, or more accurately the discrepancy between Israel’s geographic place and its cultural affinities, which ensue in a tragical difficulty to explain itself to his own allies. In the Western world, honest observers were unanimous to condemn the terrorist attack of Hamas and almost everyone understood the necessity of a military operation, but the nitty gritty application of this healthy reasoning on the field were radically different. Seeing civilian victims in Gaza is unbearable for a mind who believes in diplomacy or in any kind of soft solutions.
It’s not impossible for a Westerner to understand history, current events and the professions of Hamas. One side has always believed in peace and the other genocide.
If you’re suggesting that Israelis believe in peace they’ve a funny way of going about it! I suppose N¤z¡ Germany believed in a kind of Pax Romana as well? I keep my boot on your neck and there will be peace between us.
Yeah, that might work I suppose?
The point is not understanding history as a theory but the willing to react firmly when it’s necessary, even if at the price of (many) blood, toil, tears and sweat.
..or a mind (heart?) that believes in justice, fairness, decency and morals; a mind that cannot understand why pointless hatred always trumps mutual understanding and effective cooperation.
And the civilian victims in Israel?
Regarding the tragedy of Jewish history, two book recommendations – both about the lost Jewish schtetl of Trochenbrod (which was located in what is now Ukraine):
The Heavens Are Empty – Avrom Bendavid-Val
I Want You To Know We’re Still Here – Esther Safran Foer
Regarding the Austro-Hungarian empire, the drive towards nation states and the odd things that happen during those struggles: https://katharinewrites.com/home/story-republic-heinzenland/
Austria is an interesting place to be if you are interested in discussions about Jewish history and the idea of a nation state. You will still hear quite a lot of Roth-like nostalgic sighing over “everyone having lived together peacefully in the empire”. And also a lot of fear about nationalist thinking – although this is mainly a reaction to the excesses of the Nazi period rather than any lingering trauma from the breakup of the Habsburg Empire. However – at this time, there is clear support for Israel and its national sovereignty: a historical imperative considering the semi-recent past, but quite a contradiction considering the scorn which is aimed at those arguing (for example) for EU power to be rolled back and for the nation state to be strengthened.
Try the Old Testament for the original source of it all.
I mean my Czech Jewish step-grandmother who left Germany as a student because of Hitler and then had to leave Czechoslovakia on the last train out, was rejected in Paris and only got to stay in Britain by the happenstance and the skin of her teeth….she said everyone lived together just fine in Germany. Lots of assimilation. Her mother died in Auschwitz, sent there by the commander her occupied her home who “had known her since he was 5 years old”. So yeah, I don’t think one can trust to much these stories of civility.
And while I’m glad for the writer he’s never actually experienced anti-semitism but anti-semitic violence has topped the violence by religious association since at least I’ve been in college which was quite a while ago.
«In this view, Jews are just white Europeans, a bleakly dark irony of its own.»
I would venture to say that this view of Jews as a people, and specifically the Jews of the State of Israel, is not only present in the anti-colonialist Left and the opponents of Israel in its region (some think that the State of Israel is merely a modern recreation of the Crusader Kingdom of Acre), but that it is also (somewhat paradoxically) widely, though not universally, shared by Israel’s friends on the Left as well as on the Right.
The notion that Israel represents an extension of Western Civilization in the Middle East, whether one views (incorrectly, by the way) that Western Civilization is equivalent to liberal civilization, the non-sequitur that “Israel is the only liberal democracy in an authoritarian and backward Middle East, therefore it deserves special protection from and assistance from other liberal democracies and from liberal-democrats everywhere” is quite common among friends of Israel, even if it merely restates the view that Jews are just white Europeans (they are not, the Jews are a Middle Eastern people).
Directly tied to the (utterly ridiculous) view of Israel as a modern-day Crusader State is the (again, mistaken) notion of a common “Judeo-Christian” culture and that the and the (correct) statement that Christians are treated in Israel the best in the Middle East somehow oblige Christians and the citizens of formerly (though not presently) Christian countries to offer special protection to the State of Israel against its Islamic neighbors. Even if this is a less common view (as I said, there are hardly any Christians, meaning Catholics, left in the godless or churchless West), this is also a mere restatment of the view that Jews are just white Europeans, even if Judaism and Christianity are not only vastly different religions, but are actually mutually incompatible religions (both being also incompatible with Islam).
This puts Israel in a rather difficult position, because on the one hand it does need allies in a region of the world full of States and organizations that would want to destroy it, but on the other hand, when these alliances are conditional (on the part of the West), on the Jewish nation-state and its citizens being something it is not and can never be, viz. white Europeans, that is a serious problem. Not only do Israel’s enemies have a mistaken view thereof, but those who could be Israel’s friends also mistake Israel for something it is not, and make their assistance conditional on their false image of Israel being true.
I really do hope that a long-lasting and satisfactory solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict can eventually be found.
Assistance to Israel is not conditional on their being white Europeans. It is based on the assumption that Israel has a right to exist and any sovereign state is entitled to defend itself from terror attacks.
Thank you so much for this insightful and thought provoking article- which also serves A great example of why I subscribe to Unherd.
I thought this was an interesting article, though it didn’t delve into some of the misapprehensions about history. It mentions the Rabbinical history, and yes, that is the history that is taught in the schools, the exodus and the promised land. There is no serious evidence for that; it is a founding myth. The Israelites emerged from the Canaanites, tribes in Judah and Samaria, now partly the Occupied West Bank, land which Israel always coveted and planned to expropriate, as has been extensively documented by Ilan Pappe.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard in the last 11 days that ‘Israel gave the Palestinians the Gaza strip’, partly to try to (unsuccessfully) negate the claim that Gaza is an open-air prison or concentration camp. If we go back in history, Gaza was a part of the coastal settlements of the Philistines. After the British threw in the towel, Gaza was part of Egypt and was illegally seized in 1967. ‘Giving’ is not really the concept that captures what happened here.
Gaza is now full of refugees and their descendants from the 1948 war when they were displaced from their lands. 90% of Gazans have never met a Jewish person. This historical fact cannot be denied; it cannot be decontextualised in the current conflict. The idea that Israelis are ‘settlers’ or ‘occupiers’ long predates modern critical social justice and post-colonialism. The language of these movements may be colouring contemporary discourse and the sloganising of protestors, but if these movements had never come about, then there would still be the language of ‘settlers’ and ‘occupiers’.
So where does that leave us on the historical injustice of 1948 and beyond? Should Jewish people up sticks and leave? Absolutely not. They are there, they are staying there, and that is the reality. History is not static. Shlomo Sand, in his comprehensive deconstruction of standard Jewish history, The Invention of the Jewish People, puts it well:
“If we want to organize the world as it was two thousand years ago, we will end up with a huge insane asylum. Nor does a religious link to a holy place confer any rights on it: this is true for Zionists today as it was for the Crusaders of yesterday. On this point, I must point out that this position does not lead me to deny the right of the state of Israel to exist. I have said time and again that a child born of rape has the right to live. The fact is there: refugees from Europe in the wake of the terrible Nazi genocide were forced to join the Zionist enterprise, to emigrate and settle on the land of another population. What has been done cannot be undone without creating a new series of tragedies. We can only repair the injustice as far as possible, provide compensation, and above all keep in mind in any negotiation the fundamental injustice inflicted on the inhabitants by the newcomers they had not invited.”
What’s the solution? We’ve been over that one for days. I don’t know, but we can’t go back to just caging Gaza in a new, even more tightly packed, concentration camp. The rest of the world cannot continue to turn a blind eye to their plight.
Gaza is not a “caged concentration camp”, unless you count Hamas as the camp guards. Until this last atrocity at least 20,000 Palestinians from Gaza entered Israel EVERY DAY to work or for medical treatment. Gaza also has a border with its Arab brothers, Egypt, and that border remains closed 90% of the time. Palestinians are not without agency, they are not helpless victims. It is within their own hands to change their future. They can choose peace, to make an independent state that can flourish, as Israel has flourished. But to do that they must give up their murderous, terrorist activities and join the 21st century, not remain in the 7th century.
Give up their murderous, terrorist activities? Seriously? That’s like really, really hoping someone’s pancreatic cancer goes away all by itself.
Indeed, prevention is always more effective isn’t it.. drastic cures cause other problems.. If only the Zionists have tried prevention in rhe firm of compliance with International humanitarian law, followed UN resolutions and behaved magnsmimously towards the Palestinians the current cancer might not have occurred at all?
I’ll let three Israelis explain it. Pick any of them.
Norman Finkelstein – Gaza
Ilan Pappe – The Biggest Prison on Earth
Gideon Levy – The Punishment of Gaza
The unemployment rate in Gaza is 60%.. daily release, via checkpoints is normal from any prison for trusted inmates. And yes, Hamas are the prison guards.. Gaza IS a concentration camp.
How could it prosper when it is blockaded by land sea and air and supplies of essential materials are confiscate? Gaza IS a concentration camp EFFECTIVELY controlled by an occupying force. I have friends there.. their lives are miserable! They are not free. They are prisoners. Just as Jewish capos preyed on Jews in their concentration camps, yes Hamas preys on Palestinians. And just as their German brothers didn’t care about German Jews, their Egyptian brothers don’t care about Palestinians.
I don’t claim to be an expert on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, on the contrary, I’m still learning. However, A couple of things I’ve read stuck in my head. The Palestinians have 20 miles of the Mediterranean that could have been developed for tourism. Also, there are wealthy Palestinians who went to America, made a ton of money, went back and built huge ostentatious mansions. They didn’t go back to help their impoverished countrymen. Neither do other Arab countries want to give them a leg up. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine created refugees Ukraine’s neighbors took them in. That’s not happening with Palestine’s neighbors. Nobody wants them except the protesters, who have never, actually, helped them, and who the Palestinians, actually, would not want. All the time, energy and money that went into carving the underground tunnels in Gaza could have gone towards helping the disenfranchised population. Instead, it has all gone towards trying to destroy Jews and Israel. Hamas and Islam thrive on hatred and destruction and Jews are their scapegoat, blamed for Palestine’s failure to be a successful nation. Jews are scapegoated all over the world, and most of the haters don’t even know why they hate them. It’s just easy to have them to project all the disowned parts of the hater, onto. Try and argue with that.
Well said.
Why was 1948 an historical injustice? Clearly the Arab neighbours of the new Israel thought so because they immediately declared a war of annhilation against israel, telling any resident Palestinians to leave (temporarily) so that they could kill the Jews without Palestinians getting caught in the crossfire. The first war of conquest was lost by the Arab nations as were all subsequent ones. This left thousands of displaced Palestinians, unwanted by any of the Arab nations who were supposedly fighting for them. Jordan threw them out with great loss of life and they fared little better in Lebanon and North Africa.Gaza and the West Bank are self governing but Hamas appear to have the same objectives as Adolf Hitler.. , .
The Palestinians did not agree to the UN resolution in 1947 (Israel doesn’t have much respect for UN resolutions either). They didn’t ask for the settlers on land they had occupied for centuries.
After the war, the land wasn’t handed back. More and more land has been expropriated by Israel ever since. The Israeli foreign minister announced a couple of days ago that more land will be taken from Gaza.
Do we all get to choose what is a myth and what is a fact?
Best to see facts as facts and myths as myths.
Of course.. but it gas to be based of provable facts.. sg the time lines fir the Exodus are all wrong.
Did you mean to use the word GAS, Liam old chap?
Spell check, perhaps? Are you in your cups?
If you’re getting your facts from the bible I’ll probably not take too much notice if them if it’s all the same to you
Exactly.
Why is only Gaza a tightly packed concentration camp? ( apart from its amazingly high birth rate?) There are as many Palestinians in Israel as in Gaza, more again in the West Bank, and a couple of million in Jordan. What does Gaza do with the incredible amounts of aid it gets? Does this intelligent population, rich with the blood of Phoenicians, , Greeks, Romans develop science, universities, businesses, trade through its 30 kilometre sea coast? Why not?
I don’t know what happens to the aid or the size of it. Perhaps you do?
Are you aware that there is an exclusion zone in the water off Gaza? They are not allowed to extend their port or build new ones.
It squanders that aid, and ‘WE’ the moronic West, should STOP subsidising these worthless parasites with immediate effect.
Because they are blockaded by land sea and air and vital resources are denied to them.. also intimidation by Hamas – set up by Israel from the powerless Muslim Brotherhood to counter the PLO and thereby scupper the two state solution – means zero progress.
Do you know how much it costs per inmate to run a jail in the UK or US? How come jails don’t produce scientists and business entrepreneurs? ’tis a mystery!
Because they’re criminals.
Exactly. Islam tells Muslims to breed uncontrollably, so that doesn’t help their quality of life.
Thanks to my uptick the number changed from 12 to 7, taking account of 6 downticks.
I wonder what it is that causes reasonably intelligent* and reasonably well-intentioned* people to downtick a contribution like yours? It is surely fair, balanced, informative and makes valid points? It’s a mystery to me.
* or maybe I’m being too generous, am I?
I’ve been commenting on this issue daily since the beginning. I get hammered on the downvotes. I’ve had my words twisted, been accused of hating Jews, of claiming moral equivalence … I’m used to being called every name under the sun by the identitarian left, but liberals and conservatives are usually more civil.
I’ll leave it to the downvoters to explain their reasons.
In my humble opinion you are fighting your corner well, and clearly demonstrating what ‘free speech’ is supposed to be about.
Good work, and keep it up!
“Gaza is now full of refugees and their descendants from the 1948 war when they were displaced from their lands”
And the number of Jews displaced from their lands in 1948, from neighbouring Arab countries, was greater.
Funny how we never hear about that, eh?
And why didn’t some of the islamic countries accept the Gazans? After all, millions of muslim refugees have poured into Western countries where they have no cultural compatibility.
“90% of Gazans have never met a Jewish person.”
Correction. 100% of Gazans have never met a Jewish person in Gaza.
They are very clear that any Jews in their lands are to be exterminated.
And if they had the power to defeat Israel, them the same would happen in the rest of that region. Every last Jew, down to babies would be treated as their book commands them to.
Meanwhile, 20% of Israel are muslims, who have the same legal rights and even representation in parliament.
Did the Palestinians displace those Jews?
What percentage of the Arabs in Israel are of Palestinian descent?
All your other points have been discussed for days here.
Really?!! 20% of Israel are Muslims? Yikes.
“In every case, how nations obtain their land is always murky, violent and colonial, granted legitimacy only through the slow process of time, power and hypocrisy.”
There is a paradigm-shifting scene in the film based on Dee Brown’s book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, where the US army’s Colonel Miles says to Chief Sitting Bull:
“…the proposition that you were a peaceable people before the appearance of the white man is the most fanciful legend of all. You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent. You conquered those tribes, for their game and their lands, just as we have now conquered you for no less noble a cause.”
And yet, he quotes Moshe Dayan approvingly when Dayan states that Israel WAS taken from the Arabs in a colonial enterprise.
This piece is wrong in fact (Ireland has been a free state for nearly 100 years, for example), incoherent in logic and defeatest in arguing that conflicts are inevitable and interminable, and might is right.
We have examples where peace was hammered out by men of good will. A quarter of a century ago, Israel itself appeared to be on track. But fundamentalism blocked it. It will be harder now. But it always looks impossible until you succeed.
…the blocking of a solution was engineered by Israel when it converted the relative harmless nutjobs known as the Muslim Brotherhood into the visious terrorist Hamas.. the objective was to set Hamas against the PLO.. it worked too.. The powerful often recruit extremists to secure their long-term plans.. often blows back in their faces though, like Al Qaida (set up from Islamic Jihad by the US to fight Russians in Afghanistan), ISIS from anti Assad extremists et al. Extremists are very useful if properly managed but difficult to control after you make them powerful enough with arms, coups and lots of dosh.
The idea of “make-believe constructs that are no less real for being so” rings true. The term “social construct” (in addition to being facile jargon) is often deployed to imply that something was badly built, and in bad faith. As if deliberate or shoddy-and-self-serving architects of Tribe, Nation, and Society etc., independently prevailed in different times and places, but with no underlying connection to something real and fundamental to our human-animal nature.
We are neither stuck with an un-shapeable, primitive us-against-them inheritance nor likely to get altogether free from it. As Yascha Mounk (I think persuasively) contends, we’d better strengthen and support a relatively constructive version of our tribal instincts, because the more backward and vicious versions of in-group, out-group divisions are never far from our streets or collective psyche. Patriotic Universalism anyone?
To me, something being a social construct is less about it being badly built than about its ability to be changed.
That’s why I find recent events quite clarifying. They’ve revealed that people weren’t merely ignorant of the true meaning of decolonization, as many are apparently quite happy to loudly champion the concept’s inherent brutality.
This change in perspective is deeply unsettling – though I also somewhat question whether such people really, truly, understand what they are championing, or if their thinking is simply so abstract as to have left the human realm.
I agree this asserts the urgent need to bolster a more positive expression of our tribal instincts. Otherwise, regressive elements will hijack the narrative and distort the story we want to tell about ourselves.
But I still think that story is mostly progressive. It’s just that we must affirm what truly represents progress, as opposed to an unhealthy fixation on the past masquerading as forward movement.
Yes, changeability is part of it, but to my ears statements like “gender/race is just a social construct” insinuate a certain wrongness too–and not without some just cause.
Far too many reveal a readiness to celebrate wanton violence if the blood is thought to flow from bodies that belong to Oppressors or Colonizers, broad brush tarred as such. But I think these are a slender though too-vocal minority of Lefties, largely made up of callow young ideologues and bandwagon activists. But not as cleanly so as I like for my own reassurance.
The aftermath of two-plus years of enhanced isolation amid growing social unrest is also not helping our zeitgeist. But this idiotic/cruel, black-and-white–or white/people-of-color–divisiveness of heart and mind is not a new thing of course, and the far-Left version has been on the rise for many years.
We need to progress and I do put stock in MLK’s aspirational maxim: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Let it be so!
But I no longer believe in Progress as such, because of the way it gets hijacked (good verb, ma’am) by ruthless or merely material concerns. And I don’t support the cruel “reverse favoritism” of the current woke mob nor the too-uncritical Marxism and pro-eugenics strains of Eugene Debs/Margaret Sanger era Progressivism. A bold stance on my part, I know.
I totally disavow any formal association with most current and past Progressive pieties as I don’t see them as having any correspondence to Classical Liberalism. or anything that is truly liberal. I admit that burn-it-all-down types on both the Left and Right sadden, frighten, weary, and anger me, depending on the day. The mess you have is almost always better to try and fix than the chaotic, bloody alternative. Especially here in the ailing, much-maligned but way-better than-it-could-be West.
Conscientious social evolution and mostly-incremental improvement, sure. Increments don’t have to be miniscule either.
When I was young I would contend we better understood the history behind the 48, 56, 67 and 73 wars, all of which had one instinctively siding with the Israeli’s despite terrible events like Deir Yassin. But from Sabre and Shatila onwards it became less comfortable. Yet still one was always well aware the one liberal democracy in the region was Israel and some of the childish support for various Palestinian militia and thugs of no comparability.
The recent events draw one back to what might have been had the Arab League not tried to quash the UN 47 Declaration that led to partition, or perhaps even more had Abdullah not seen the potential to create a greater Transjordan – of course completely colonial in it’s attitude.
The colonial retreat post War had the British deeply involved in two Partitions that still reverberate today – India and Palestine. And yet what alternatives really existed? At least in India, after terrible murder, an equilibrium was found. Tragically the initial decisions of the Arab league and the subsequent Nakba left a legacy that continues to toxify 80 years later.
As i wrestled with the images of wounded civilians in Gaza, it got me thinking about WWII. I researched and discovered that 600K German civilians died in Allied bombings in WWII, including 80K children. The awful toll of war. But would anyone say the Allied Forces should have left Germany alone because of civilian casualties? Should they? I wonder today.
The Israeli government has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for over 70 years. Equating Israel with the Allied Forces is an entirely false equivalence.
Obviously not.
Jewish history is depressing. Even more depressing is the level of antisemitism being shown while the Holocaust is still within the bounds of living memory. A ninety year old survivor of the Holocaust being dragged out of her home and shot. I wonder what she thought before she died. Did she remember where she was, or did she think she was still in Nazi Germany being dragged out of her house by the Gestapo. To think that in my lifetime, I would see nations building concentration camps (China), a land war in Europe, and a wholesale slaughter of Jews. If I had a time machine and could go back and warn my college aged self, I would never believe me.
Had not the Jewish people risen in revolt against Rome and lost in 79 AD they might well have continued to live in Judea and Galilee. As a thought experiment, could those who typify Israelis as “settlers” have regarded them as an indigenous population in an alternative history?
Great article. I am just not understanding the title. Jews are trapped by western history? I guess that was explained in the article but my insufficiencies did not grasp it. Anyone care to explain?
I understand it as the persecution they faced with anti Semitic pogroms for much of European history.
Others may have a different take.
At its most stark, the Western idea of “progress” is hindering Jews from establishing a safe homeland. Their historical perspective is just different from either Muslim or Western constructs.
How so? Israel has the most sophisticated weaponry in the world, the US guarantees its security, and the West does what it can to prevent Iran from getting nukes.
The biggest threat it faces is from the shift to a multi-polar world order, not the latest academic theories.
How so? Read the article.
So Israel’s security is “guaranteed” at present?
At the end of the article, John McTague says ” the more people in the West choose a history which sees the very existence of Israel as illegitimate, the more Israelis will conclude that … that Jews are never safe”. I take that to mean that there is a negative feedback loop between attitudes in “the West” and attitudes amongst Jewish people. They are not so much “trapped by western history” as trapped by the way people in the West (or at least our chattering classes) have adopted a new fashionable historical view.
Perspectives and attitudes change over time. The older generations who grew up closer to the war understandably had more sympathy for Jews in Israel due to the horrors of the holocaust, so were prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt when conflicts arose.
However for the younger generations the war is now simply part of history, they probably don’t have family members alive today who were involved in it. Instead they’ve grown up watching Israel building settlements on the West Bank and carrying out air strikes in Gaza, and without the personal connection to the events of the war they’re not prepared to overlook the times Israel oversteps the mark and are much more critical as a result
They seem damn keen to overlook the times Hamas oversteps the mark, both in respect of their own people, and towards Israelis.
The numbers explain that.. gross imbalance, maybe 25 Israeli perpetrated murders for every one Hamas/POJ murder..
I think you’re right, though I find those that excuse the crimes of Hamas and those that excuse the crimes of Israel are two sides of the same coin
Please explain.
Israeli Air strikes on Gaza are ALWAYS in retaliation for thousands of rockets fired on its civilians. Hamas are always the initial aggressors.
If you ignore the invasion of the Al Aqsa mosque.. and brutal treatment of those at prayer there.. and the murderous activities of the land stealing settlers, yeah.. no provocation that I can see.
You could argue (and many do) that the rockets are retaliation for the Israelis building of illegal settlements on occupied land.
The PA are much more moderate than Hamas for instance, yet Israelis reward this moderation by constantly encroaching further into the West Bank. The Palestinians see this and think with some justification that violence is the only option they have left
It would appear that Hamas aren’t always the ones initiating the violence
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67173344
If younger people “grew up watching” air strikes on Gaza (and I seriously doubt the video gamer and Til Tok generations give a rat’s), they will have only seen what the media has curated.
One doesn’t need to have a living relative of the period to know about Nazi concentration camps, starvation, cannibalism and Siberian exile under Stalin, mass murder under Mao. This information is a click away on any search engine.
No, the Instagram infants know only “history” as oppressed and oppressor, just as Marx planned. And so do their teacher and their teachers. The non-Arab kids waving a flag they couldn’t identify two weeks ago, screaming though bullhorns and wearing keffiyehs, are doing what is fashionable. Ask any of them who Yasser Arafat was, who Hamas is, what part Iran plays, why Arab states won’t allow Gazans into their countries of origin and see what answers you get.
You let you bias cloud your vision I’m afraid. Just because you disagree with others views doesn’t mean they come from a position of ignorance.
Funnily enough this has been a tactic of the left for the last decade when denouncing the Brexit and Trump votes, claiming it’s largely illegitimate because those they disagree with were too stupid to know what they were on about
Well, BB, please go and ask them and get back to me.
Not true.
Exactly. And they don’t know why they hate Jews.
Editors usually write the header which doesn’t always jive with those who have written the article.
Palestinians do not hate Israelis because they are Jewish but because they are occupying land that Palestinians believe belongs to them. There would be much the same hatred if somehow evangelical Christians from the West had occupied what is now Israel. This is not to say that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis wrong, but that racial anti-Semitism is not at the root of the problem. It is also worth noting that few scholars agree with Benzion Netanyahu’s interpretation of the Spanish Inquisition. See for example, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/27/books/article-of-faith.html.
Thanks, I’ve been wondering when it started.
I disagree. If American Christians lived in Israel instead of Jews they would also be hated.
If the Christians acted in the same manner towards the Palestinians as the Israelis do then I’d expect them to be hated
Irish independence left a million or so Protestants in the North so enraged that they launched an armed insurrection to win a separate statelet of their own — which in course left a whole new minority homeless. ”
And the Protestants in the South? Homeless? Most left and those who stayed were indeed homeless in an anglophobic Roman Catholic state.
Not sure of your point here? Ireland was colonised during the 16th and 17th century with mostly Protestant settlers from Great Britain. Given Great Britain’s treatment of the indigenous population – and its failure to delive Home Rule – Irish Independence was inevitable. Had the Irish Protestants not insisted on a separate statelet of their own based on six of Ulster’s nine counties to ensure a Protestant minority they could have used their influence to ensure a more secular Ireland where both denominations were accepted. James Connolly, excuted after the Easter Uprising of 1916, was foresighted in warning that partition would “mean a carnival of reaction both North and South”.
Didn’t they, the Protestants, dominate the Irish Bar until at least the 1980’s?
I recall attending a formal lunch at the King’s Inn in the early 70’s and there was hardly a Catholic present.
How would you have known? Could you tell by looking at them? I’ve always wondered how the Irish knew which was which.
Why didn’t Israel protect its citizens?
Excellent and insightful article. Thank you for writing.
–
Very true, not a single article has been published to present the conflict from either a neutral or Palestinian perspective – I think this is likely an editorial decision, since the author’s who might offer this take have been conspicuously avoiding the topic. I was personally expecting McTague or Harrington to offer more nuance but Israel is apparently beyond reproach, even on Unherd. Pretty disappointing to be honest, though judging from the comments, most readers seem to be quite happy about this.
I think a major reason that most people here are pro-Israel is that we have never seen Israelis cheer and dance at the thought of slaughtering innocent people. I have witnessed this in my Muslim students who were happy that Palestinians were killing Israelis. I understand that you want neutral unbiased opinions but I’m afraid they’re going to be hard to come by at this time. I think no matter how much aid, infrastructure or help we give to the Palestinians they are perpetually going to cast themselves as victims and, even if there were no Jews to blame, would look for someone else to blame for their failures.
I mean, I can understand where you’re coming from and I think most people in the West have a much easier time empathizing with Israelis (partly due to culture and partly due to the shadow of Islamic terror hanging over their heads), but the situation is a lot more nuanced than it’s being presented (which this isn’t just an English Media phenomenon) and the main reason I come to Unherd is for nuance. If I want a biased take on things, I can skim Guardian headlines (for example) and roll my eyes at them – though ironically, they’re bending over backwards to present everyone as victims in this case (which is kind of true to be fair – credit where it’s due I suppose).
With regards to the chanting and dancing, I’ve seen (videos and interviews of) both Israelis (and American Jews) and Palestinians call for the slaughter of innocents and singing “from the river to the sea” and don’t really think that it’s a persuasive line of argument in favor of either side, though I’ve seen it being used in favor of Israel on Unherd in about 3 or 4 articles (and at least a dozen comments) the last 10 days.
Then there’s also the fact that pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned across Europe, while Israeli ones haven’t, which is a free speech conflict I’d have hoped some big “free speech people” might defend on principle, but that hasn’t really happened.
Ultimately, I do accept that this is just the majority opinion in the West, even if I personally find it unfair.
Thank you for engaging with my comment in a respectful and constructive manner!
This is pure gaslighting from M Lux.
The reason why some people in the West sympathize with Israel is because their objective is not to wipe their enemy off the map. Unlike the other side. Living in peace with our neighbors is a Western value. Killing them is not.
That is exactly the Israeli objective!!! They have been at it for about 70 years!!
..not really doing very well are they? Maybe a change of tack will help? eg…
▪︎Stop murdering thousands innocent women and children
▪︎ Stop stealing land
▪︎Comply with International Humanitarian Law
▪︎Follow UN Resolutions
..it might be worth a try?
Really – that sound so naive. We are quite a barborous bunch (to take just one example – we know the USA carried out torture following 9/11) so we should be careful about patting ourselves on the back and decrying other races and religions with no insight as to how others might see us.
“Barbarous” No spell check Kathleen?!!
Tell that the 3,800 slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza 99% totally innocent of ANY crime, in the last few days alone! ..and to the tens of thousands slaughtered in the last 75 years and to the millions driven from their land and their homes.. If that’s your idea of “living in peace with your neighbours” I’m glad you’re not living next door to me!
Israel is at war with Hamas, which has been in control of Gaza for 17+ years and which has in that time raised a generation to consider Jews to be no better than devils. Of course there are going to be large ‘civilian’ casualties in Gaza, some of whom are doubtless genuinely innocent. Hamas will be to blame for all those the deaths.
During the Battle of Normandy in 1944 US and UK bombing killed 20,000 French civilians. They were not targetted then, any more than the non-Hamas population of Gaza is being targetted now. The blame for their deaths rested squarely with the Nazi occupiers. In fact Israel is going to inordinate lengths to reduce the numbers of such casualties among an enemy ‘civilian’ population, more than any army has ever done before.
To use the same word ‘slaughtered´, which is properly used for the deliberate targetted murder of civilians as Hamas carried out on October 7, for the deaths of untargetted civilians in Gaza is just a piece of Hamas propaganda. Its use is indeed genocidally antisemitic, insinuating as it does that, unlike any other nation in history, the Jews of Israel are not permitted to defend themselves effectively against those who are sworn to exterminate them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing
For instance see this article at link above – israelis cheering on the war in Gaza in 2014, drinking and taking selfies as bombs dropped and Palestinian casualties mounted….
Thank you for writing this. The blindness to Israeli transgressions and the decades of dehumanizing Palestinians is, frankly, scary.
Can we talk about majority opinion in the west given the onslaught of one-sided information that we have been given over the last 100 years? I too read alternative media for nuanace and it is certainly not to be found at Unherd whch is disappointing. I joined Unherd because I believed it to be a free speech platform but edtorial policy is clearly to given unwavering, uncritical support to Israel – whilst not asking what the long-term solution is. Defeat Hamas, reduce the size of Gaza as claimed by one minister, continue settlement in the west bank – but then what? Two states, one state of both Jews and Palestininas or ethnic cleansing and genocide. My sense of the current Israel government is that they are making sure there is no solution on the ground – after all what is the point of settlements in the west bank but to make a long-term solution impossible.
Nuance.
It’s not true that “most Westerners have an easier time empathizing with Israelis”, they’ve been out in the streets in their thousands protesting against Israel.
Simply not true. Israelis gathered to watch and cheer as bombs dropped on Gaza in 2014, drinking, posing for selfies as Palestinian death toll mounted. See link below
The world watches with revulsion as war crimes are committed yet again in Gaza, one of the most powerful militaries on the world targeting defenceless civilians, destroying yet again their schools, hospitals, compounding this by cutting off access to essentials of life : water, food and medicine. Barbaric, inhuman. Palestinians are human beings, yet Israel dehumanises them using genocidal language – ‘human animals’ . https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing
Your guardian article has two photos of the same scene, with 3 men in it, sitting on a sofa. Stop pretending this is in any way equivalent to the horrific scenes of celebration we’ve seen even just in London let alone around the worl.d
It’s almost comical, if it wasn’t tragic.
Frankly they could have ‘bird watching’ for all we know.
The horizon is remarkably clear, and the binoculars look rather too small for long range reconnaissance.
“War crimes”? Really? You’re an expert are you?
Hamas brought war to Gaza, not Israel. Hamas includes civilians in the fight, not Israel. Israel should not have to fight with one hand tied behind its back simply because it has a more powerful military. It’s not a handicap race.
Blatantly untrue:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing
Exactly, Palestinians need a scapegoat as do all the Jew-haters. And they seem to be in denial about the fact that Palestinians would hate them too.
Fair point
Thanks
You’re joking. We’ve been force-fed Pro-Palestinian propaganda for decades. Even Vanessa Regrave’s Oscar acceptance speech – back in 1978(!) – was pure brainwashed agitprop. Watching the program, I remember thinking “why the h*ll is this movie actress using a glitzy award show to spout politics?” She clearly got the ball rolling there, since we’ve been plagued by silly spokespeople hijacking non-related events ever since.
Very true, the Palestinians control the media
Don’t forget good ‘Hanoi’ Jane Fonda!
Perhaps the classic Bimbo, as we used to say in those happy days!
.
Yes, of course. Brainless celebrities with Daddy Issues and bulimia who marry abusers have only proliferated. Imagine what Mae West would have made of such tissue-layered creatures.
So not true, Charlie. It was not her intention to scorn veterans. She was misunderstood and has apologized a thousand times, but has never been forgiven.
She paid a heavy price for that and probably knew she would. She did have the courage of her convictions however misguided, and she has never wavered from her convictions.
People who may have been sympathetic to the Arab cause have probably turned away from them following the events of 7 October. Events do have the ability to change people’s minds. Hamas committed sadistic atrocities that day and in doing so, turned many agnostic people against them.
It’s difficult to be neutral when side seeks the total destruction of the other “from the river to the sea.” You tell me where the middle ground is.
One would think the events of 9/11 might have had some effect on the love affair, also.
Exactly. But I am glad I am not the only Unherd reader to think this. I too was incredibly disappointed with Mary Harrington, but foreign affairs are not her strong point – so why she contributed beats me.
Rubbish.
I’ve seen tons of articles looking at it from the Gazan point of view but nobody is going to look at Hamas war crime from Hamas point of view. You can’t and still represent the suffering of Gaza as a thing. Because if it is ok for Hamas to target not just civilians, but target the most vulnerable the elderly, toddlers, even babies. (And not even settler civilians who might be part of paramilitary or active participants in the problems), but peacenik civilians, the people most likely to argue for a peace deal. If this is ok, then there is no legitimate beef with Israel.
Secondly, this was done by Hamas not Gaza. Hamas position is not Gazas. They were voted in but not as the only rulers and the they enacted a coup d’etat. Their aims are not a resistance movement with the idea of putting together a democratic state for Palestinians. They have no interest in freeing them. They are an Islamist movement. They believe in domination of the world by a what is often called strict but really a twisted version of Islam. Women would be subjugated.LGBTQ would be killed. Religious minorities would be subjugated or thrown out (see the copts, zoroastrians, Druze, yazidis, etc. etc.)
On top of that, even within that subgroup of Islamists they are wildly anti-semitic. They regard the Jews as the doers of all evil, the cause of all war, specifically blaming them for the French and the Communist Revolution. Not only do they treat the Protocols of the elder of Zion as truth, but for some reason they see the rotary and lions clubs as tools for Jews insidious power grab.
If you vaguely liberal. If you believe in human rights. Religious or personal freedom and even a modicum in the rights of the individual, maybe a touch of woman’s rights…then you stand firmly against Hamas.
If you don’t believe in these things. If you believe right makes might and who conquers sets the rule. Then you have no right to scold Israel.
Can you share those ‘tons of articles’ please?
Watching the protests in Arab countries it’s plain to see it’s not women and children who are out in the streets, it’s ALL males who are doing it. And there are a scary number of them. All that testosterone in crazy-eyed males eager to breed and make more Muslims because Allah commands it. UGH!
Where has Elias D’s comment gone. I note Simon S complains his comment has gone. Is Unherd censoring alterantive view points? If they are they should explain what their editorial policy is.
Alternative to what? Unheard is right of center so you should be fine.
..include me out, as Sam Goldwin would say. I see very, very little of any merit to support the pro Zionist view. The simple, undeniable fact that almost defenceless Palestinians are murdered at a rate of 24:1 by one of the most powerful armies in the world kind of speaks for itself..
Oh foolish one!
Perhaps because they know it’s true.
An article with no mention of international law – which over and over has been flouted by Israel – that seeks to justify the current context by pointing out historical anti-semitism. The problem with the author’s narrative is it presents by implication the Palestinians (and those who want a just solution), as anti-semitic rather than concerned to find a just solution that will bring peace to the region. This narrative allows for the dehumanisation of the Palestinians whilst they are being deprived of the very right to life (water, fuel). We have an admission from Israel that the Gaza Strip will be smaller when they leave (again against international law). I don’t know what the answer is but it is certainly not ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Palestinians because of a claimed anti-semitism.
For me (and this is completely personal view) I would like to see a secular state that incorporates Jewish people and Palestinians living side by side supported in reaching this by international bodies who provide funds (and where necessary peacekeeping) to make this a living reality. Better money is provided for peaceful purposes than the billions wasted in weapons and aid. The language used by some Israeli politicians is racist – calling people animals is racist. There is also unequal treatment of the remaining arabs in Israel which suggests that Jewish people are as capable of racism as any other group of people. This racism like anti-semitism needs to be acknowledged and tackled.
No nationalist expects the Protestant population to leave Ireland but they do wish though they would stop their so-called heritage of Orange marches celebrating the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Peace has currently been restored to the six counties (which are not Ulster which would have been 9 counties but then created a Catholic majority). Now the 6 counties can at some point have a vote to return Ireland to its original 32 counties and that may or may not happen. The reason the minority population in the 6 counties took up arms is systematic discrimination and ruthless beatings and killings when they protested for their civil rights.
Zionism does have the features of a typical settler population whether the author likes it or not – and therefore does fuel a narrative around justice both in the west and on the arab street. This was not the case when Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany.
To talk of ‘the fog of war’ is itself selecting a narrative. The drum-beat claim of anti-semitism is very loud in UK, USA and Canada – the denial of the voice of Palestininans almost absolute. The aim is to hide the history of the region from those countries citizens so as to deny the humanism of the Palestinian people in order to inflict disproportionate loss of live. It seems to me the end goal of the very right-wing Israeli state is ethnic cleansing / genocide rather than seeking even a modicum of justice.
The author is seeking our agreement to support war crimes in the name of fighting anti-semitism. It is wrong. Anti-semitism is not trivial and to say that when we try to ask for justice we are either fooled or ourselves anti-semitic is disingenuous. The horror of systematic extermination of Jewish people (and also Roma, gays, socialists) should never be forgotten.
If we trivialise and abuse legitimate criticism of Israel then we downplay the horror of fascism.
Golda Meir put it better than I could:
“If the Arabs lay down their arms, the result will be peace. If the Israelis lay down their arms, the result will be a massacre“.
Once you can guarantee against that – and once Hamas abides by international law – we can continue to talk about justice.
I up ticked this OO but the opposte is displayed . Excellent comment btw.
The voting system is my nemesis!! I’m always complaining about it, as are others. It seems to make no sense. A simple up or down vote would be better, or if having a downvote might deter people from commenting, then just an upvote. Anything has to be better than the current farce.
“From the River to the Sea!” Have you not been listening? The Arabs don’t want a two state solution. They don’t want a secular state incorporating Jewish and Arab peoples. They seek the total destruction of Israel and the area returned to Jordan.
You speak of international law as if you’re some expert. It is not at all clear what Israel’s critics can rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East? Or — most unrealistic of all — fight a “nice” war, with no civilian casualties? General William T. Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: “War is hell.”
It’s easy to sit here in the comfort of our armchairs and call for “restraint” when we pay no price for Hamas’s savagery. Calls for restraint or peace after one side has been attacked reduces the costs of launching such an attack. Hamas can attack Israel at will, murder, torture and kidnap its women and children, rape them and parade their dead bodies naked through the streets whilst “innocent” Palestinians desecrate their bodies and take selfies safe in the knowledge that the international community of bien pensants, immune from such violence, will call for “restraint” or a “proportionate” response.
If America had retaliated with a proportionate response after Pearl Harbor and merely bombed a single Japanese harbour before withdrawing, do you think that would have ended the war in the Pacific and Japan would be the peaceful and prosperous nation it is today? No. Japan paid a heavy price for its belligerence and then chose a different path.
Hamas cannot be negotiated with. It seeks the destruction of Israel. There is no middle ground for them. But it is “restraint” and a “proportionate response” that incentivises Hamas to continue its battle, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be wiped out. Hamas could surrender, it could choose a different path, but it doesn’t.
There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micro-manage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death.
Exactly. Islam is to be feared that’s for sure, and these rabid, Muslim males ranting all over the place make me appreciate that I’m safely out of their reach. It must be terrifying to be a Jew in Israel.
Your understanding of Northern Ireland is so partial, your view on ‘international law’ becomes worthless. Ireland did not originate in ’32 counties’ for starters. As always, self-determination is determined by how the unit of self-determination gets selected. God and seawater need not predominate.
Not sure what you know about Irish history that you haven’t bothered to explain here.
Ireland was a separate geographical and political entity until the 16th /17th Century when Great Britain conquered Ireland and installed protestant settlers – particularly in the region of Ulster. When Irish talk about the provinces of Ireland, they mean Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connaught. These themselves were divided into 32 counties by the British with 9 counties in the province of Ulster. Had the Britsh government divided by provinces then the 9 counties would have meant a catholic majority. So they divided Ulster and took only the 6 counties to create a permanent settler majority that then discriminated against the minority catholic population. Had they not discriminated against the population, and used the B specials to beat and kill (and then the British army) to beat and kill Catholics then it is quite possible the minority population might have been able to live peacably with their protestant neighbours.
Majority populations have a responsiblilty to their minorities – a secular state (rather than a religious state) does help to guarantee minority rights.
Interesting I gave what is a factual account of what happened in Ireland and get a -4 without explantion – this tells me a lot about the supporters of Unherd.
With such a low quality of debate don’t worry I will not be continuing my subscrpition when it runs out.
Oh come on, stop sulking. The voting system is all screwed up.
Stay OO, I like your comments even though our views are unpopular. It is pleasant to see a kindred spirit, Liam O’Mahoney seems another. We are few in number and it is comforting to see that we are not alone. Even Charles has his moments.
You got -4 for a number of reasons. I don’t think we’ll miss your contribution.
I keep saying that religion is the root of all problems in the world including overpopulation, and overpopulation is the major cause of global warming, therefore…………….
The leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1921, Amin al Husseini, based his campaign of Arab nationalism on antisemitism. He whipped up massacres of Jews in the 2 decades prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948 (1929 and 1936 were the most notorious but not the only examples). During WW2 he met Ribbentrop, Hitler and Himmler among other Nazis and visited Oranienburg concentration camp. Hamas – whose co-founder Rantisi promised to remove every Jew from Palestine, consistent with their charter – are the natural heirs to this tradition of Jew hatred.
None of which is to dismiss legitimate criticism of Israel (and there is plenty to be levelled) nor anti-Arab racism that pervades aspects of Israeli society, as racism does in pretty much all Western societies. But to understand the current war and the true horror of the events of 7 October the historical context needs to be borne in mind.
Excellent comment. My comment decrying the continued partisan platform provided by Unherd to the Israel perspective, fueling righteous rage while paying scant attention to the Palestinians’ point of view, and arguing that the path to peace is mutual understanding and forgiveness, disappeared.
I too have been very disappointed with Unherd’s coverage on the conflict.
The Israeli’s get a free pass in the West. If the Russians were doing to Kiev what Israel is doing to Gaza you would never hear the end of it. The rest of the world is noticing and judgements are being made and not in favour of the West.
Brilliant and courageous comment. Wanting a laic peaceful solution is not anisemitic, it’s pure good sense (even if, alas, currently naive).
After the second world war the USA gave money to Germany under the Marshall plan. Whether you think this a good or a bad thing one can’t ignore the aim was not to just take revenge!!
No, however the cynic inside me thinks that this was for a later tilt against Russia. After-all the US occupying troops are there to this very day. The Russians left when Germany was re-united. The West was never interested in giving peace a chance.
I cannot believe your comment has been down voted. The partisan ignorance and heartlessness we are witnessing is breathtaking.
The only bit of your rambling article which makes sense is, “The tragedy here is stark: that the more people in the West choose a history which sees the very existence of Israel as illegitimate, the more Israelis will conclude that Jabotinsky, Dayan and Benzion were right all along — that Jews are never safe, that carnage is always lurking in the dark furrows of history.” Forget the West, finally the world seems to be waking up to the truth that the Balfour declaration was illegitimate, that theocracies are recidivist and that historical injustices to Jews in no way legitimise what they are doing today to Palestinians.
Anecdotal references to children in the author’s neighbourhood being asked to conceal their identity are puerile. If McTague is the Editor, it doesn’t bode well for Unherd.
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I’m afraid I begin to agree with this take.
First-rate analysis.
It should not be forgotten that for Jews and many Christians Israel’s right to exist in its homeland is based on God’s promise to their progenitor, Abraham. Genesis.17.7-8.
One must ask WHO wrote Genesis, and also who or what is GOD pray?
Exactly, true on both counts.
Please read my reply to Charles Stanhope
Genesis is the product of very ancient traditions reaching back to approximately 4,000 years ago. These traditions were worked upon by at least 4 editors over a period of 500 years who believed God was communicating truth and reality in regard to His relationship with His chosen people, Israel. This included the promise of land.
God is the Creator of the Universe who has amazingly involved Himself in this floating ball we call Earth. This involvement includes revelation about how best to relate to Him and each other, summed up in the 10 Commandments. This relationship with Him was broken by our rebellion,sin and unbelief and places us all under His judgment because He is a Holy God. He owes us nothing. But He is also a God who loves us and has made possible reconciliation and rescue from judgement. He did this by coming into this world in Jesus Christ who lived , died, and rose again from the dead. In His living He revealed all we need to know about God. In His death He paid the price for the sin of every person who will ever live. In His Resurrection He destroyed the power of sin, evil and death to separate us from God for eternity.
65 years ago I decided this was a pretty good deal and have believed in and served Jesus Christ ever since.
Next question?
I’m late to the party so you probably won’t see this but I wanted to sympathise with you anyway. Sorry, Mr Whittock, but you’re never going to sell that one. Compare your mythical fantasy to our rational belief in a Big Bang in which everything was created from NOTHING but a small high temperature ball of undefinable but infinitely dense STUFF that was there without concept or purpose but nevertheless suddenly expanded to give us space, matter, time, energy and all the dozens of physical laws that make life possible. Our dedication to scientism is unshakeable. As is our belief that science will eventually provide all the answers. Conviction on that score is effectively a consecration of scientific method. A faith as great as yours. And in practice, it burns more fiercely. We become incensed at any querying of neo-Darwinism. It’s heresy to look more closely at the nature of DNA, or the irreducible complexity of the cell, or the paucity of transitional species. Any hint of a paradigm shift that could involve something even vaguely approaching a deity drives us mad. I’m sorry, more sorry than you will ever know, but that’s how it is.
I think it’s easy for us to be overwhelmed intellectually,and perhaps, spiritually by the cultish fallacies of Scientism. The idea that science is all we need for human progress is downright chilling when we realise how science has been misused in the hands of sinful humanity. Furthermore science may be able to explain the “what”of physical reality,but it is incapable of explaining the “why”. Revelation and Reason,both God given help us with that.As Einstein once said – “religion without science is lame,but science without religion is blind”. I think that to believe the Universe came into existence as a matter of chance takes more faith of the totally irrational kind than to believe it exists by the Hand of our Creator. To Him be praise forever.
I’m actually with you Mr Whittock. To the extent that I have an ever hopeful foot in your camp. I’m sure you understood that my response was intended as irony.
Yes I understood the irony, but I felt my point about the potential damage Scientism can inflict needed to be made.
Oddly HAMAS spelt backwards is SAMAH, which means generosity!
I wonder if they know that. What does it mean frontwards?
It wasn’t that long ago that ‘we’ were being continually castigated for being ISLAMOPHOBIC!
Those days are long gone, heaven be praised!
I fear Islam that’s for sure.
Hi
The poltical and cultural notions of Ben Zion Natanyahu (that antisemitism is destiny) are as mythical as the fixation of large shares of the left in understanding the Israel/Palestine conflict as colonialism, But the essay makes a valid point: Hamas and Israeli right wing reinforce each other.
If Israel is destined to be hated by all her neighbours, relying on military power and US support for survival, then that’s a hard and uncertain road. But if the West Bank Palestinians were given a real homeland of some sorts, then how would Israel be seen in twenty years time? Hamas exists partly because nihilistic extremism becomes for some the only response if all dignity and hope is taken away, so give the Palestinians some dignity and hope.
I have been appalled at the UnHerd response to the tragedy in Israel-Palestine. Where did this largely uncritical pro-Israel sentiment come from?
Of course the establishment of the State of Israel is illegitimate. It was a terrible mistake. I thought thinking people around the world had settled on this decades ago – it is a question of finding a process of transition from the status quo to an inclusive State of Israel and Palestine based on equal rights for all.
But in the past two weeks, it seems like we have regressed back to the 1970s! Israeli occupation of the region seems to have now become legitimate to UnHerd writers. Many of us are very disappointed, to say the least.
…possibly something to do with the raped teenagers and murdered babies…which were planned outcomes, not failures of discipline..?
To which we might add the people who committed those atrocities hate us at least as much as they hate the people of Israel…and will do the same to us if ever we allow them the opportunity…just listen to the chants and look at the expressions on the faces of the Hamas Cheerleaders on the streets of London.
Newsflash…feeding the crocodile just means it gets to you last…
It’s hard to disagree with McTague. As long as there is an iron wall, Israelis will be attacked. McTague doesn’t give equal weight to the reality that Palestinian are attacked constantly and that is increasing their international support. Israel after Rabin’s assassination adopted the idea that military force will win. There is no sign of that happening. Hamas committed hateful acts, when the Israelis’ have clean hands their international standing will improve. But right now about one of five voters in the U.S. are unhappy with the nation that grew out of holocaust and Hamas terrorism hasn’t really moved the numbers. The Zionist project is succeeding, no government is trying to destroy the Jews
If those stats are true then how quickly Americans forget 9/11.
I would make two points:
1. Anyone taking a Netanyahu seriously needs his or her head examined. Some of the others mentioned began their careers as vicious terrorists so I’m not sure about those either…
2. It’s a great pity the Zionists didn’t try the alternative to the policy that led to the Hamas atrocities, namely..
▪︎Compliance with International Law and UN Resolutions
▪︎Adherence to Human Rights standards
▪︎Justice, fairness and decency
▪︎A reduction in their revenge kill rate from 24:1 to something more reasonable like maybe 4:1?
There is no way of knowing if such an approach might have worked.. I guess it’s too late now and we will never know, will we?
One of the strangest things in all this has been the difference between Israeli media and UK media. In Israel, they were on Netanyahu’s case immediately, accusing him (correctly) of having been one of the chief enablers of Hamas and that the attack was blowback from his policies. They have been far more nuanced than our one-sided media in the last 12 days.
There was a mistaken report last week, but tonight it really does seem to be the case that the third oldest working church in the world, the Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City, has been bombed, and has been so while it was sheltering more than 500 people, at least 150 of whom are now dead.
Here, the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, Dr Hosam Naoum, flanked by the other Christian leaders there, confirms that the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital received “specific warnings” by telephone on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to “evacuate the hospital” prior to being bombed on Tuesday, as it duly was.
In the case of the Al-Ahli Arabi Hospital bombing, the line is that since no Palestinian weapon could have killed that many people, then that many people could not have been killed. By pretending to believe that contemptible thing, almost all national British politicians, and the entire official British media, are demeaning themselves, and are insulting their electorate and their audience.
The present Church of Saint Porphyrius dates from the twelfth century, but a church was attested on that site in 425. Saint Porphyrius himself was Bishop of Gaza from 395 to 420. He Christianised Gaza, which was singularly recalcitrant in its Paganism. Well, it was old Philistia, which was why its synagogue did not pay tribute directly to the Temple in Jerusalem, since it was not in the Land of Israel. Think on.
The christians would built Saint Porphyrius, and who you seem to eulogise were the HAMAS of the day.
For nigh on fifty years the had been attempting to destroy all vestiges of Classical Civilisation. Sacking Temples on an industrial scale, perusing their opponents with maniacal violence, banning the Olympic Games in 393 AD, and brutally murdering and dismembering the famed female philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria in 415AD, and so the list goes on and on. Sadly they almost achieved their aim.
If one recalls the antics of such homicidal maniacs as (St)Cyril and his demented PARABALANI, one is not surprised by the barbarism of Hamas, their ‘linear’ descendants!
No one is called Cyril nowadays.
Nor surprising really after the antics of the late (Sir) Cyril Smith, the arch ‘botty bandit’.
You are out of date (at best). The line is that a defective rocket full of rocket fuel falling at high speed is quite enough to kill a lot of people when they are crammed into a courtyard in the open air.
Rubbish – if you believe the authenticity of that “intercepted” Gazan conversation I have two bridges to sell you. As usual the West defaults to the official Israeli narrative. Sad.
You’ll be comforted to know the church is fine as are the buildings around it. Windows are blown out. The explosion, unlikely to be a rocket since there is crater, was at the courtyard/parking lot next to it. Thankfully, the reckoning of dead is lower. More like 150-200.
We don’t know what happened but people who do munitions seem to think it was some sort of misfire that then caught fire. The loss of life is terrible but the one clarity we can assume is that neither the Hamas allies nor Israel were trying to hit the ancient Christian Church or the civilians sheltering there.
Many here will say well either way there should not be a war in Gaza. But there was and continues to be a war over the border in Israel. What is it you expect of Israel? To let Hamas come kill and kidnap their citizens en masse? To let them bomb their cities?
There is no crater, you mean.
Yet another one-sided Unherd diatribe. I continue to see almost no concern for, or attempt to understand, the Palestinians. The path to peace is mutual understanding and forgiveness – not, once again, partisan energizing which ultimately serves only to sink both of Biden’s “teams” into a deeper and deeper rage that risks engulfing us all
I think long quotes from Hamas documents outlining the aims of Palestinians does count as trying to understand them.
Did you understand what the Palestinian quotes said?
And furthermore, the Moshe Dayan quote reveals that he too understood them and the situation. So we’ve got what the Israelis say, and we’ve got what Hamas say. All they disagree about is who ought to win.
Ironically, the lack of an attempt to understand both sides, on their terms and not yours, lies a lot closer to home Simon.
So Hamas represents all Palestinians? And where are the monstrous quotes by Israeli settlers and officials, which include Netanyahu’s wife’s advisor demanding Palestinians have their nails torn out? I honestly despair at this one-sidedness.
The primary concerns of Islamic terrorism are theological, not political. They have made this clear repeatedly. Perhaps you could re-write the Qu’ran and Hadith removing all the anti semitism and anti unbeliever sentiments within. I’m sure no one will mind.
Strange comments on your perfectly reasonable post.
Agreed
That you would call this very balanced article a “one-sided diatribe” says quite a lot about you.
I fear the article you’d prefer to read would denounce Zionism and probably call for the end of the Israel Defence Force.
If that is what you want then your tastes are well-catered for elsewhere.
Why not move Israel? Surely they can make an amazing situation again in a safe location? The Israeli government has the funds, and there are locations in Western countries with the space and safety. Australia could do with another major city.
I was puzzling over this for a while. Bari Weiss pointed out yesterday that Jews are native to that land. Quite literally named after the land, Judea. First Peoples, to borrow leftist parlance.
On Triggernometry? I thought she made some unreflective historical claims. I’ve had a long post in the moderation queue for hours, where I had her interview in mind when I wrote it, particularly with regard to her stating that Israel ‘gave’ Gaza to the Palestinians.
I noticed that too but I won’t nit pick the precise words as I don’t know all the details of how the borders were first drawn out. Perhaps that is accurate or perhaps the borders were agreed based on negotiation. On the point about heritage she is correct though. And it’s morally equivalent to ongoing conversations in Canada, USA and Australia regarding the rights afforded (or not) to indigenous peoples.
I would argue that the first people of these countries have not been actively attacked for the last 50 years (not to say there’s not other issues). Surely the safety of the Jewish people would be paramount?
I agree. But I’d also rather fight to stay in my own country, as opposed to being forced out of it by religious fascists.
Yeah but if you have a choice, it’s plainly impractical to live in a place where you are surrounded by enemies actively attacking you, regardless of being the first people or whatever.
Around 1900 that was thought to be an option.
As I recall the following were considered, Uganda, Cyprus, and even Montana.
However the advent of the Great War and the possibility of getting someone ( guess who?) to conquer Palestine from the Ottoman Turk, changed all that.
Your mask is slipping.
There are more than 50 Muslim-majority countries in the world, several of them directly bordering Israel. Why not move the Palestinians?
The lie is that, for both sides, this conflict is about land. It isn’t.
For Jews it is about their homeland, Judea, home of the Jews for 3500 years.
For Hamas (or Hezbollah – and distressingly many “Palestinian supporters” worldwide) it is about the eradication of the Jewish people.
“Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees,” says the Hamas Covenant, “and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”
Israel has offered to share the land on multiple occasions – they have been turned down on multiple occasions because owning the land isn’t enough. They want Palestine free of Jews “from the River to the Sea”. In other words, a genocide, ethnic cleansing. Another Holocaust.
Anyone who thinks there is a moral equivalence to this is either ignorant or evil.
Not sure. If the Jewish people all lived in South America, would Hamas really care about them? Antisemitism is real, of course, and it is part of the story, but a lot of the conflict is surely similar to other groups fighting over a contested homeland, from Kosovo to Nagorno-Karabakh, to Kashmir. They cannot agree to share either.
Didn’t know I was wearing a mask? I thought I was saying my thoughts clearly? Why would you stay in that region with that much fear and danger? Are you implying I’m antisemetic? I’d welcome them in, I think they’d do great things here.
Or in denial.
There’s plenty of room for Palestine in another Arab Muslim country but nobody wants them, which says a lot about them, doesn’t it.
The BBC, for example.
I don’t understand why they don’t establish a new Israel. Nearly all Israelis can move to other western countries and be safe. The existential threat that keeps getting mentioned is just to Israel, not to the Jewish people who could live safely elsewhere.
I’ve said elsewhere, there are large parts of unpopulated West Australian coastline on the beautiful Indian Ocean for example. I’m sure with the funds the US gives Israel, they could relocate the whole population very comfortably.
I know its not the nicest thing to have to leave your home and historical/religious land, but to stay smack bang in the middle of a region that makes you unsafe seems a bit crazy actually. So many refugees make horrible, unsafe journeys to try and get to safer countries with more opportunities for their families.
Honestly, if it was my family, I would leave.
Even in the “thought experiment” situation of relocating Israel inside say, Texas, we know that they would be attacked and murdered even as they packed up to leave.
As opposed to the current situation?
And as it’s gun-toting Texas probably also on arrival!
For the Israelis, this is where religious and land claims coalesce, as they do for Hamas.
For the critical social justice mob, it is a good question. There would be the obvious complaint that this would be a colonisation of aboriginal lands, so I guess it would come down to an assessment of who is the most oppressed – aborigines or Palestinians? I’m not sure what their current rankings are.
There are 1000’s of acres cattle stations across Australia that have been bought by Chinese companies (amongst other foreign owners), surely the western countries could afford to buy some of these with the aid currently going to defend Israel. No Aboriginal people need to be displaced.
You don’t like Australia do you. You also seem to think that somewhere without wall-to-wall humans is empty. We have enough issues of our own without importing several million Zionist fascists. However the US and UK seemed in a lather about it so perhaps they could be squeezed in there. This however doesn’t suit the religious lunatics trying to organise the Rapture, of which Balfour was one, along with a sizeable slab of US conservative evangelicals.
The world is not run by rational thoughts.
The Jews believe that as long as their safety depends on the forbearance and good-will of their non-Jewish neighbours, the next pogrom is just a matter of time. And they have 2000 years of history to prove it. The Jews of Germany felt safe in a civilised and enlightened country, after all. For the rest, there are 7 million of Jews in Israel (of which half descend from people from North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, btw.). That would make them the 10th biggests US state, or over 20% of the combined Australian population if they moved there. Such a large, culturally different (and very prickly) group of newcomers would cause a lot of friction and resentment, even at best, and would be very unlikely to assimilate. It might work for an individual, but it could not work for a people.
I am assuming you are sincere, and not a troll (though it is hard to be sure). Otherwise it would be enough to point out that no country would accept the population transfer, and there is no chance in hell of it ever happening. The idea of sharing the Palestinians out between the Arab Muslim countries is much less unrealistic, and even that is unlikely to fly.
You talk as if the Jews are the only group ever to have faced hardship.
Britain was invaded numerous times throughout that time, and almost every country would have faced various invasions, battles and massacres within the last millennium. How many Muslims and Christians were slaughtered during the various backwards and forwards of the Crusades? The Rohingya in Burma? Tibet at the hands of the Chinese? American Indians getting done by the yanks?
The holocaust apart, what makes the Jews troubles in that time any more important than any other peoples?
Someone Jewish ought to take this up – I am hardly an expert here. But I’d say the Jewish people has a unique history. Not in the quantity of suffering, no, others have suffered genocides too. But other peoples have either lived in a homeland – or with one to return to, like the Rhodesians – or they have eventually become assimilated and diluted away. Jews have had 2000 years of not having a homeland, stubbornly resisting amalgamation and diluting away, and at the same time living as a kind of tiresome guest in other people’s nations, always vulnerable to resentment or rabble-rousing. As a Pole or German in Britain you have no reason to expect that your grandchildren will stick out and be obvious targets for a pogrom. I’d argue that even dark-skinned people have reason to assume that their descendants will eventually blend in. But Jews can look back over 2000 years of never blending in or quite belonging to the culture around them, and being vulnerable because of it. Surely that makes a difference.
How do the ASHKENAZI Jews fit into that. Surely there must have been some interbreeding with Gentile stock?
After all some Ashkenazi Jews look like the late Peter O’Toole, when by your reasoning they should all look like the late Omar Sharif?
We are not talking genetics here. The point is that culturally Jews form a distinct people with a sense of common belonging, a continuity into the past, and a separation from the peoples they live among. Exactly where their chromosomes descend from is not that important by comparison.
Perhaps we should be talking genetics, it does help to clear the miasma of cultural prejudices.
They seem well assimilated here in Australia, while also maintaining their own culture and socio-economic ties. Any negligible vulnerability they may have here, can’t begin to compare to the vulnerability they face in Israel, current events surely demonstrate. I can’t see how living in a Western country would be a difficulty for them vs that.
But my point is that you only get to say 2000 years of continuous persecution if you include all the various nationalities who happen to be Jewish. If you classed together all the various Christian groups in Africa and Europe you could no doubt point to a much more bloody continuous history of prediction than that the Jews have suffered (the holocaust notwithstanding), but because we treat what happened to the different nationalities as different events rather than lumping them all together because of their religious beliefs they’re just seen as isolated atrocities.
Also just because Jews have never been able to form a majority of the population in a country in order to have a Jewish state isn’t in itself evidence of persecution.
I do not think that makes sense. Again, I do not have first hand knowledge, but Jews seem to see themselves as one people and be treated by others as one people. If that does not make them one people, what would? The same can not be said for Christians – or carpenters.
So if a group of Jews were attacked in Israel, and another attacked in Europe for a completely seperate reason then we’re supposed to link them together as one chain of persecution, whereas if Christians are attacked in Nigeria and a different group of Christians are attacked in Syria then that’s two separate events?
Depends on the reasons, I guess. If a group is attacked because, say, they are running the local drug trade or have just taken over and privatised an important communal resource, then it is not really about persecution anyway (not that some might not claim it, of course).
More realistically we are talking about groups being persecuted because they are different, a minority, and felt to be taking up too much space or being objectionable to the local culture. Which is quite a common phenomenon, Rohingyas, Muslims in India, Jews and Christians in the Middle East, etc. Now this might well be common to Christians in Syria and Nigeria, but the much larger groups of Christians in Europe or the Americas do not have the same experience. Result: Christians do not see themselves as one people united by the experience of persecution, nor does Christian-bashing become a world-wide stereotype for people to lock into. Jews have the unique position of being a stubbornly ‘different’ minority everywhere they live (outside Israel). That means that they *are* united by the experience of being victims of persecution, and it also means that antipathy to Jews, as Jews, becomes a common cultural element for people everywhere to connect to even in places where there is no local source of friction.
It may well be that Christians in, say, Northern Nigeria have a century-long experience of being persecuted by their neighbours, but that experience is limited to the particular social group of Christians in that particular place. It does not resonate with Christians in, say, Paraguay or Italy, nor increase their risk of persecution. For Jews it is different.
And, besides: What is the reason for the attacks on Synagogues in Western Europe? I cannot see any local friction that would cause it. It must be either overspill from Israel – thus confirming that all Jews are seen (and persecuted) as a single people no matter where they live – or it must be simple, generalised hatred of Jews as such.
Thanks for raising some interesting arguments, BTW.
I get it, however, unlike blacks, Jews can blend in. I would guess they feel at home in New York.
No one is saying that it is.
We have the vacant space in Australia. A few of the extra large cattle stations could be bought. Seeing what Dubai can do in a desert shows that money can transform deserts. They wouldn’t need to mix too freely with the locals if they didn’t want to, minimizing the potential friction you mentioned. As for assimilation, from what I can see of Israel, their culture doesn’t seem to at odds with western culture. Much less so than many of the other refugees Australia has taken in, and these would be able to bring in a lot of financial aid with them. You’d be surprised how quickly the Australian government is happy to accept foreign buyers if they have the money. I’m not saying that cynically.
Or anybody who has a lot of money.
No we haven’t. It is mostly a desert and other creatures already live there. We have the worst record of species extinction on the planet. We are already way over sensible carrying capacity limits and continue to devastate what is left of our natural life support systems.
Australia might not have that many people but it is not empty.
Case in point, the Indonesians (not sure of the correct ethnic term for them) traded with aboriginal Australians for centuries but never established a base there. Why leave the fertile lands of Java and Bali for the harsh barrenness of Northern Australia. Every attempt at development the northern parts of Australia has been a miserable failure that frittered away billions.
For all the current zealots protesting across the world, nobody actually wants the Palestinians. It’s all hypocritical.
Would you advocate a few million Palestinians moving to Egypt, say, or perhaps Saudi Arabia? It’s not as far as Western Australia, and they’d find an Arabic speaking, Muslim culture there ready to welcome them.
Its just pragmatic in relation to moving Israel. Iran is pretty far from Australia or USA. I keep hearing about the existential threat, seems unlikely to be solved, why not find a safer place?
‘Ready to welcome them’? When have any Arab countries offered to take in Palestinians? Why have so many refugees from Lybia and Syria headed to Europe? The Arab countries love to play advocate for their oppressed brothers and sisters but never actually seem to do one damn thing for them.
You are joking, are you not? Arab countries don’t want Palestinians.
Would they welcome them?
Agreed. Many comments over the last few days have asked why the other Arab countries don’t take in the Palestinians from Gaza, but none have asked why the yanks won’t build large settlements for the Israelis. It would be cheaper in the long run
Way cheaper, and then Israel won’t be amongst enemies. Seems very logical.
Sorry, but this is highschool debate club level. No one who knows even a bit of history would consider this remotely serious.
I don’t consider it serious, it was merely a childish response to all those suggesting that the Palestinians should desert their lands and go live in Jordan or Egypt instead
Thanks.
Why? Please explain. History shows the shifting sands of empires and peoples. Lands have been divided, states have been created. Is that no longer possible?
Ah but the West, sorry the US, needs a beachhead to protect its energy interests. Biden and unfortunately even Bobby Kennedy are very clear on this.
Seems logical, however, antisemitism is all over the world. Not that it would be as dangerous as where they are now for sure.
Mutual understanding and forgiveness did not work in Yougoslavia, it did not work in Northern Ireland, it did not work in India at partition (it is not working that well under Modi either), it did not work in post-war Iraq or Syria – and all those places started out with much less to forgive. Ethnic cleansing and an acceptance of inevitable injustice might have a better chance, as with Germans in East Prussia, or Greeks in Turkey.
Why can’t the entire population of GAZA be deported to the USA? They’d love it and there is plenty of space, and assimilation would soon follow.
Ask UnherdReader. Or maybe Bili Bob or Nik Jewell. I can only say that that is also unworkable.
It would dilute the Latino population, and perhaps the US would end up speaking Arabic and NOT Spanish.
Doesn’t solve the fact that Israel is still surrounded by enemies.
Conversely moving Israel to Montana might be preferable for all concerned?
Perhaps New York even?
No thanks. You might not have noticed but we have more than enough immigrants, legal and otherwise.
In each place you cite there is a latent amd unresolved legacy of hatred. Violence and vengeance do not work over the long term. Accepting inevitable injustice – compromise – on the other hand is key to mutual respect and understanding. When we acknowledge the intrinsic messiness of life we begin to find calm.
I don’t know what you’re reading but your comment is rubbish.