Great work here and I'm glad you put in the historical context of displaced people. Sadly, little history is taught in American government schools. As far as the public support in most Western countries for the Palestinians, despite propaganda to make it look widespread, it is limited to Muslims, student activists, and the leftist academics who are bought and paid for with ME cash. Most people in the middle can see that Muslim countries aren't tolerant, free, and don't share Western values. Israel may not be perfect, but they share Western values.
Another great analysis and detailed review of recent history. As a Christian who has repeatedly read the Bible, New and Old Testament, I have only one concern. My concern is that most, if not all, of the analysis, written and spoken, ignores the historical facts contained in that book. We know the exact territory God covenanted to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) and that that covenant was, and is, forever. To give credence to man and man's declarations in contradiction of that covenant is futile and will always end in misery, suffering, and death.
Until we, mankind, get back to the truth of God's word, there will be no peace.
I hope and pray that is where you are going with this excellent historical survey.
I wasn't going there, as my main goal was to provide a historical review of where we're at, and to correct some misconceptions.
The audience I write for is a broad, general audience: no matter where you stand religiously, politically or philosophically, my articles should always ring true.
I can write such article, as you hope, but that would be for a Christian audience, that already accepts the Truth about God as the foundation to explore what Scripture tells us about Israel.
But with such an article, I would have to leave the realm of verifiable facts: "God guides Israel". How does one prove that? I am mulling starting another substack, where I would tackle questions of faith, religion, Scripture, exegesis, etc.
That is a whole different field, however, from what I attempt to do here on ArnGrimR, with a whole different way of thinking and methodology required. Yet indeed a very important one. Let me think and pray about that.
Thank you again for the well researched history, and please do consider applying the same skills to a biblical world view of it. We can all pray it opens eyes to God's truth.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: on this topic you are in the wrong.
You head this article “Right of conquest”. When I see the word “right” I expect some explanation of why the act in question is justified morally. But “conquest” is, as you point out, a matter of the strong getting its way by force, no morality involved.
You and those who agree with you apparently want what has not been done yet (the “million or so”, or two million, Palestinian natives of Gaza to be driven out to the desert to die) to be accepted as our new accomplished fact as if 2024 were 1832. Israel already has plans to build a Space-age New City and vacation paradise on the rubble of former Gaza and have the rest of the world say it’s the "Right of Conquest".
In arguing that there is a “right of conquest” (which you conflate with a right to “ethically cleans”) you begin with a long list of instances when a stronger military force has been used not just to subdue the weaker force but to “relocate”, drive out, annihilate, "ethnically cleanse” a civilian population which has been stripped of defenders.
None of these past acts of ethnocide or genocide are any longer justified as having been done out of moral superiority, though one could assume they were so justified at the time. The conquerors wanted them out, so the weak and helpless losers were assumed to deserve it and they were mass murdered and driven away and their former homes taken by force. The new reality thus created became an accomplished fact.
With the exception of the 1948 cleansing by force and murder [“many of them left voluntarily” you said in your previous article] by the 30,000 man Zionist army of the territory they renamed Israel, which you do not include, you conclude:
<< … 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians and Greeks were butchered, raped, starved to death.
<< This is the background behind the story in Israel.
<< It serves as a very strong counter to the idea that the Palestinian violence was a response to the Jewish ‘theft’ and genocide and colonization of Palestine, as we often hear. Because the Palestinians are the victims, remember, and the Israelis the aggressors. But is that true? … >>
Huh? “Counter”? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
You characterize the above long list of mass murders, expulsions and thefts as what they are, that is, a long list of mass murders, expulsions and thefts – genocides, in a word – but you conclude by saying that in the case of Israel uniquely this history is a “strong counter" to the idea that Palestinian violence was a response to "genocide and colonization”. You even put ‘theft’ in quotation marks as if the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and theft of their ancestral land in the West Bank and the building of fortified settlements by Settlers (many from Brooklyn) were not exactly what it is.
This is not a counter argument. This is to say that brutality and theft and colonization is a usual thing and everybody does it so why object to the European and American “settlers", who have military force and nothing else on their side of the argument, doing it to the native Palestinians?
You do obliquely argue for the moral superiority of Judaism over Islam by pointing out the angry imprecations and vows to resist and declarations of Jihad against Jews which the Palestinians use to justify resisting being “cleansed”.
You do not present evidence of brutal and racist hate speech and indoctrination by Israeli leaders or by Israelis who claim to be Rabbinical authorities. There is a great deal of such evidence cited by liberal minded Israelis and others who would rather there be peaceful co-existence now that the 1948 mass expulsion has created a new historical fact. You do not mention 1948 at all, or I didn’t notice it.
In 2019 the Times of Israel published this:
"Embracing racism, rabbis at pre-army yeshiva laud Hitler, urge enslaving Arabs | The Times of Israel" By TAMAR PILEGGI
30 April 2019, 10:17 am
<< Two rabbis at a pre-military religious academy in a West Bank settlement were recorded making derogatory and racist comments about Arabs, defending Adolf Hitler’s worldview, and openly promoting Jewish supremacy.
<< In a series of undated recordings published by Channel 13 news on Monday, Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, the head of the Bnei David academy in Eli, can be heard calling for the enslavement of the “stupid and violent” non-Jews due to their genetic inferiority.
<< “The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best. They’re glad to be slaves, they want to be slaves,” he told a class in one of the video clips. “Instead of just walking the streets and being stupid and violent and harming each other, once they’re slaves, their lives can begin to take shape.”...
<< In another clip from the Bnei David Yeshiva published by Channel 13, Rabbi Giora Redler can be heard praising Hilter’s ideology during a lesson about the Holocaust.
<< “Let’s just start with whether Hitler was right or not,” he told students. “He was the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said... he was just on the wrong side ... “The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.” >>
The Rabbis of Bnei David [a military prep school for many IDF officer candidates] are making the same argument you do, that conquest is their right because the Arabs are weak and should be replaced if they won’t submit to being slaves.
What happened east of the Mississippi in 1832 can’t be called back. But what is happening now in Palestine is a matter for the present and for the future.
I like to share this detailed history and argument by Miko Peled, anti-Zionist son of a famous Israeli General who conquered Palestine in 1948 and 1967.
“If anyone came hoping to hear a balanced presentation they are going to be sorely disappointed. I say this because a lot of things you are about to hear tonight are difficult to hear and also because I don’t believe that a balanced presentation on this topic is possible… “
Miko’s teenage niece was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Miko and his aunt and family saw and still do see this tragedy as the inevitable resistance that people will make to being treated so callously and murderously as the Israeli government treats them. Miko is an Israeli Jew so he’s got the right and is in a position to balance your argument.
I can’t hope to match your diligent scholarship. I don’t want to try.
This is war. War is a fight to the death. In war there are no good guys.
My concern? It’s personal in the final analysis: I fear that fanatics who comprise the Israeli government will launch one or more of Israel’s nuclear missiles and that will cascade into World War Three and the northern hemisphere of this our planet will be uninhabitable forever after.
As a Pentagon study of the mid 1980s said, if there is a nuclear war “The extinction of human beings cannot be ruled out as a possibility”.
Bibi Netanyahu wants the US to destroy Iran. The IDF may attack Lebanon and be opposed by Hezbollah. In that case the IDF will be defeated with catastrophic loss and more of Israel will be seriously bombarded with modern and effective conventionally tipped missiles.
Israel never had a right to exist. It had the violence to exist. But Israel is nothing but a government, and a bad one. I want to see this government gone. I want to see it replaced with a Palestinian state. The people who live in Palestine now will largely be still there when the fight is over. The days of some sort of Indian Removal Act are long gone. I’m glad.
The European and American “Settlers” are leaving Palestine. Good riddance. They threaten me and my loved ones by threatening to burn up the world.
Again, you misread what I am writing, and you project meaning into my words I never expressed. I can see you feel strongly about this topic, which is your good right. (Thank you for voicing your replies, too, I am glad you enter the conversation, so we can see what can be talked out). Yet be cautious when reading things that don’t follow your thinking, or your expectations, that you don’t read meaning into it that isn’t there.
“You and those who agree with you apparently want what has not been done yet (the “million or so”, or two million, Palestinian natives of Gaza to be driven out to the desert to die) to be accepted as our new accomplished fact as if 2024 were 1832”
‘apparently’. Where? What did I say that makes you believe that? On the contrary, my article, and my use of ‘right of conquest’, is looking at the PAST, at the origin of the state of Israel and their gradual expansion until 1967, each time after a war they did not initiate (except the pre-emptive strike during the 6 Days War). I am talking about the right of Israel to exist!
Here is where you REALLY go off track: “(which you conflate with a right to “ethically cleans”)
This is a very serious accusation you level. Where did I ever talk about such right to ethnically cleanse? You read that into my writing. I did indeed mention a series of historical examples of displacement of whole populations, but not to justify ethnic cleansing. I compare with an ACTUAL instance of ethnic cleansing, to point out that was happened in Israel with the Palestinians cannot be called such. I am NOT talking specifically about the current situation in Gaza, either.
I state it explicitly: “It serves as a very strong counter to the idea that the Palestinian violence was a response to the Jewish ‘theft’ and genocide and colonization of Palestine, as we often hear.” This article is NOT meant to justify ethnic cleansing in Gaza today, as you suggested.
And yes, my examples ARE an counter. Who is still talking about the right of the Ottomans to regain Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia? No one. It is a fait accompli we all accept. The Ottomans made a miscalculation, fought on the wrong side (wrong=they lost), and lost most of their lands and population. Arabs and Palestinians similarly made a miscalculation, namely that they could easily plow through the fledgling Israeli state, drive them all into the sea, and retake all the lands, and not just the part the UN partition plan had provided for. They went double or nothing, and when they ended up with nothing, cried foul.
They lost, massively, and refused to accept that. Historical precedence shows that there IS such right of conquest, which is indeed not a right base on morality, but on might. And this is not just a Western concept, but one applied all over the world, at any time.
Next, you decry that I “do not present evidence of brutal and racist hate speech and indoctrination by Israeli leaders.” You also claim I did not mention 1948 at all (or that you didn’t notice it). Well, you didn’t notice, as I spoke about the events of that year in great length, in several of my articles. One was completely focused on the Nakba, and offered a lot of information on 1948! Which shows a certain perception bias, where you don’t notice certain things, but hyper-focus on others.
On the first claim, that I don’t talk about the errors and culpability of Israel, in this case ‘brutal and racist hate speech’, you’re right. I did not talk about that specifically. However, I did point out the vast complexity of the situation on the ground, the many different factions present, and pointed out how this means that you will find a lot of different points of view and opinions (and thus also, actions). You will find in Israel among Jewish Israelis the most vile demands to exterminate the Palestinians, to the other extreme, namely demands that Israel should cease to exist, completely. People say what they say. Look at the actions, and notice how Israel, as a state, has been willing to make very severe concessions, time after time. Even to round up and expel their own settlers, to give up part of Jerusalem again. All in the name of peace.
I want to point out 2 quotes from my series so far:
“It is time we critically examine all the claims, both by Israel, but, mostly overdue, those of the Palestinians a well. But the foundational lies told by Palestinians about the origins of Israel and their own plight are only the beginning, and today form a well-established practice of deception” (part 4)
“But we need to tackle this and all the other topics brought up, and confront not just Israel, but specifically also the Palestinians, with these errors. They have to take responsibility, and change direction, if there ever is to be any hope for a peaceful solution.” (Part 6)
This is key, in my opinion. I also admitted, many times, that Israel made mistakes, and pointed that out. Yet this side of facts is so rarely talked about, and actively ignored.
Next, you cite the son of Miko Peled, and how he himself did not try to give a balanced presentation, stating that was impossible. I tend to agree: there is too much to talk about. Even I had to split up in 8 articles, and still cannot highlight every relevant aspect of this conflict.
So to recap: I am trying to make clear that my goal was to shed light on a very important side of the history of this conflict most people will not know about, at all. We all know about Israel, and their shortcomings. They are widely talked about. Some elements rightly so, as they said and did what they said and did. Other accusations are false, as I showed in several of my examples. I made it a point to express that I am NOT glorifying Israel, that I am NOT ignoring their own faults.
But we cannot have a good conversation about this conflict if we are going to keep the Palestinians out of any scrutiny. I am trying to balance the conversation, balance our thinking about this conflict, by offering a hugely important missing piece.
You write, rather strongly: "Israel never had a right to exist."
I will repeat my previous question to you, which was not answered:
“I am still waiting for anyone to give me a good reason why Israel would have no right to exist.”
What will happen if the current Israeli government is replaced with a Palestinian one? Which Palestinians will step up into leadership positions? Hamas? Fatah? Hezbollah? People who previously stated they want to drive all Jews into the sea? How will that end? Can you guarantee that it won’t end in another genocide?
If you ask me, the biggest threat for nuclear war today is the US government, through their proxies in Ukraine, in their endless provocations and escalations.
Israel is also on the receiving end of provocations. If they attack Hezbollah, would you see that as a justified attack, or not?
I am glad to hear that you do not support genocide. I was very upset to think that. We will have to disagree about the right of Israel to exist. I think no. I define Israel as the Israeli state, a government established in 1948. I don't say that Jews living in Palestine/Israel don't have a right to exist, or to live there – I want to make that extra clear. I think that this present government is bad and should be abolished and replaced with one state where all have equal rights regardless of religion. I believe that is possible and I believe that circumstances are tending in that direction. I tried to make my views on that clear. Writing clearly is a difficult art. Thank you for clarifying.
Great work here and I'm glad you put in the historical context of displaced people. Sadly, little history is taught in American government schools. As far as the public support in most Western countries for the Palestinians, despite propaganda to make it look widespread, it is limited to Muslims, student activists, and the leftist academics who are bought and paid for with ME cash. Most people in the middle can see that Muslim countries aren't tolerant, free, and don't share Western values. Israel may not be perfect, but they share Western values.
Another great analysis and detailed review of recent history. As a Christian who has repeatedly read the Bible, New and Old Testament, I have only one concern. My concern is that most, if not all, of the analysis, written and spoken, ignores the historical facts contained in that book. We know the exact territory God covenanted to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) and that that covenant was, and is, forever. To give credence to man and man's declarations in contradiction of that covenant is futile and will always end in misery, suffering, and death.
Until we, mankind, get back to the truth of God's word, there will be no peace.
I hope and pray that is where you are going with this excellent historical survey.
I wasn't going there, as my main goal was to provide a historical review of where we're at, and to correct some misconceptions.
The audience I write for is a broad, general audience: no matter where you stand religiously, politically or philosophically, my articles should always ring true.
I can write such article, as you hope, but that would be for a Christian audience, that already accepts the Truth about God as the foundation to explore what Scripture tells us about Israel.
But with such an article, I would have to leave the realm of verifiable facts: "God guides Israel". How does one prove that? I am mulling starting another substack, where I would tackle questions of faith, religion, Scripture, exegesis, etc.
That is a whole different field, however, from what I attempt to do here on ArnGrimR, with a whole different way of thinking and methodology required. Yet indeed a very important one. Let me think and pray about that.
Thank you again for the well researched history, and please do consider applying the same skills to a biblical world view of it. We can all pray it opens eyes to God's truth.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: on this topic you are in the wrong.
You head this article “Right of conquest”. When I see the word “right” I expect some explanation of why the act in question is justified morally. But “conquest” is, as you point out, a matter of the strong getting its way by force, no morality involved.
You and those who agree with you apparently want what has not been done yet (the “million or so”, or two million, Palestinian natives of Gaza to be driven out to the desert to die) to be accepted as our new accomplished fact as if 2024 were 1832. Israel already has plans to build a Space-age New City and vacation paradise on the rubble of former Gaza and have the rest of the world say it’s the "Right of Conquest".
In arguing that there is a “right of conquest” (which you conflate with a right to “ethically cleans”) you begin with a long list of instances when a stronger military force has been used not just to subdue the weaker force but to “relocate”, drive out, annihilate, "ethnically cleanse” a civilian population which has been stripped of defenders.
None of these past acts of ethnocide or genocide are any longer justified as having been done out of moral superiority, though one could assume they were so justified at the time. The conquerors wanted them out, so the weak and helpless losers were assumed to deserve it and they were mass murdered and driven away and their former homes taken by force. The new reality thus created became an accomplished fact.
With the exception of the 1948 cleansing by force and murder [“many of them left voluntarily” you said in your previous article] by the 30,000 man Zionist army of the territory they renamed Israel, which you do not include, you conclude:
<< … 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians and Greeks were butchered, raped, starved to death.
<< This is the background behind the story in Israel.
<< It serves as a very strong counter to the idea that the Palestinian violence was a response to the Jewish ‘theft’ and genocide and colonization of Palestine, as we often hear. Because the Palestinians are the victims, remember, and the Israelis the aggressors. But is that true? … >>
Huh? “Counter”? That doesn’t make any sense at all.
You characterize the above long list of mass murders, expulsions and thefts as what they are, that is, a long list of mass murders, expulsions and thefts – genocides, in a word – but you conclude by saying that in the case of Israel uniquely this history is a “strong counter" to the idea that Palestinian violence was a response to "genocide and colonization”. You even put ‘theft’ in quotation marks as if the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and theft of their ancestral land in the West Bank and the building of fortified settlements by Settlers (many from Brooklyn) were not exactly what it is.
This is not a counter argument. This is to say that brutality and theft and colonization is a usual thing and everybody does it so why object to the European and American “settlers", who have military force and nothing else on their side of the argument, doing it to the native Palestinians?
You do obliquely argue for the moral superiority of Judaism over Islam by pointing out the angry imprecations and vows to resist and declarations of Jihad against Jews which the Palestinians use to justify resisting being “cleansed”.
You do not present evidence of brutal and racist hate speech and indoctrination by Israeli leaders or by Israelis who claim to be Rabbinical authorities. There is a great deal of such evidence cited by liberal minded Israelis and others who would rather there be peaceful co-existence now that the 1948 mass expulsion has created a new historical fact. You do not mention 1948 at all, or I didn’t notice it.
In 2019 the Times of Israel published this:
"Embracing racism, rabbis at pre-army yeshiva laud Hitler, urge enslaving Arabs | The Times of Israel" By TAMAR PILEGGI
30 April 2019, 10:17 am
<< Two rabbis at a pre-military religious academy in a West Bank settlement were recorded making derogatory and racist comments about Arabs, defending Adolf Hitler’s worldview, and openly promoting Jewish supremacy.
<< In a series of undated recordings published by Channel 13 news on Monday, Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, the head of the Bnei David academy in Eli, can be heard calling for the enslavement of the “stupid and violent” non-Jews due to their genetic inferiority.
<< “The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best. They’re glad to be slaves, they want to be slaves,” he told a class in one of the video clips. “Instead of just walking the streets and being stupid and violent and harming each other, once they’re slaves, their lives can begin to take shape.”...
<< In another clip from the Bnei David Yeshiva published by Channel 13, Rabbi Giora Redler can be heard praising Hilter’s ideology during a lesson about the Holocaust.
<< “Let’s just start with whether Hitler was right or not,” he told students. “He was the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said... he was just on the wrong side ... “The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.” >>
The Rabbis of Bnei David [a military prep school for many IDF officer candidates] are making the same argument you do, that conquest is their right because the Arabs are weak and should be replaced if they won’t submit to being slaves.
What happened east of the Mississippi in 1832 can’t be called back. But what is happening now in Palestine is a matter for the present and for the future.
I like to share this detailed history and argument by Miko Peled, anti-Zionist son of a famous Israeli General who conquered Palestine in 1948 and 1967.
Miko Peled Seattle. Oct. 1, 2012 - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOaxAckFCuQ
“If anyone came hoping to hear a balanced presentation they are going to be sorely disappointed. I say this because a lot of things you are about to hear tonight are difficult to hear and also because I don’t believe that a balanced presentation on this topic is possible… “
Miko’s teenage niece was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. Miko and his aunt and family saw and still do see this tragedy as the inevitable resistance that people will make to being treated so callously and murderously as the Israeli government treats them. Miko is an Israeli Jew so he’s got the right and is in a position to balance your argument.
I can’t hope to match your diligent scholarship. I don’t want to try.
This is war. War is a fight to the death. In war there are no good guys.
My concern? It’s personal in the final analysis: I fear that fanatics who comprise the Israeli government will launch one or more of Israel’s nuclear missiles and that will cascade into World War Three and the northern hemisphere of this our planet will be uninhabitable forever after.
As a Pentagon study of the mid 1980s said, if there is a nuclear war “The extinction of human beings cannot be ruled out as a possibility”.
Bibi Netanyahu wants the US to destroy Iran. The IDF may attack Lebanon and be opposed by Hezbollah. In that case the IDF will be defeated with catastrophic loss and more of Israel will be seriously bombarded with modern and effective conventionally tipped missiles.
Israel never had a right to exist. It had the violence to exist. But Israel is nothing but a government, and a bad one. I want to see this government gone. I want to see it replaced with a Palestinian state. The people who live in Palestine now will largely be still there when the fight is over. The days of some sort of Indian Removal Act are long gone. I’m glad.
The European and American “Settlers” are leaving Palestine. Good riddance. They threaten me and my loved ones by threatening to burn up the world.
Again, you misread what I am writing, and you project meaning into my words I never expressed. I can see you feel strongly about this topic, which is your good right. (Thank you for voicing your replies, too, I am glad you enter the conversation, so we can see what can be talked out). Yet be cautious when reading things that don’t follow your thinking, or your expectations, that you don’t read meaning into it that isn’t there.
“You and those who agree with you apparently want what has not been done yet (the “million or so”, or two million, Palestinian natives of Gaza to be driven out to the desert to die) to be accepted as our new accomplished fact as if 2024 were 1832”
‘apparently’. Where? What did I say that makes you believe that? On the contrary, my article, and my use of ‘right of conquest’, is looking at the PAST, at the origin of the state of Israel and their gradual expansion until 1967, each time after a war they did not initiate (except the pre-emptive strike during the 6 Days War). I am talking about the right of Israel to exist!
Here is where you REALLY go off track: “(which you conflate with a right to “ethically cleans”)
This is a very serious accusation you level. Where did I ever talk about such right to ethnically cleanse? You read that into my writing. I did indeed mention a series of historical examples of displacement of whole populations, but not to justify ethnic cleansing. I compare with an ACTUAL instance of ethnic cleansing, to point out that was happened in Israel with the Palestinians cannot be called such. I am NOT talking specifically about the current situation in Gaza, either.
I state it explicitly: “It serves as a very strong counter to the idea that the Palestinian violence was a response to the Jewish ‘theft’ and genocide and colonization of Palestine, as we often hear.” This article is NOT meant to justify ethnic cleansing in Gaza today, as you suggested.
And yes, my examples ARE an counter. Who is still talking about the right of the Ottomans to regain Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq and parts of Saudi Arabia? No one. It is a fait accompli we all accept. The Ottomans made a miscalculation, fought on the wrong side (wrong=they lost), and lost most of their lands and population. Arabs and Palestinians similarly made a miscalculation, namely that they could easily plow through the fledgling Israeli state, drive them all into the sea, and retake all the lands, and not just the part the UN partition plan had provided for. They went double or nothing, and when they ended up with nothing, cried foul.
They lost, massively, and refused to accept that. Historical precedence shows that there IS such right of conquest, which is indeed not a right base on morality, but on might. And this is not just a Western concept, but one applied all over the world, at any time.
Next, you decry that I “do not present evidence of brutal and racist hate speech and indoctrination by Israeli leaders.” You also claim I did not mention 1948 at all (or that you didn’t notice it). Well, you didn’t notice, as I spoke about the events of that year in great length, in several of my articles. One was completely focused on the Nakba, and offered a lot of information on 1948! Which shows a certain perception bias, where you don’t notice certain things, but hyper-focus on others.
On the first claim, that I don’t talk about the errors and culpability of Israel, in this case ‘brutal and racist hate speech’, you’re right. I did not talk about that specifically. However, I did point out the vast complexity of the situation on the ground, the many different factions present, and pointed out how this means that you will find a lot of different points of view and opinions (and thus also, actions). You will find in Israel among Jewish Israelis the most vile demands to exterminate the Palestinians, to the other extreme, namely demands that Israel should cease to exist, completely. People say what they say. Look at the actions, and notice how Israel, as a state, has been willing to make very severe concessions, time after time. Even to round up and expel their own settlers, to give up part of Jerusalem again. All in the name of peace.
I want to point out 2 quotes from my series so far:
“It is time we critically examine all the claims, both by Israel, but, mostly overdue, those of the Palestinians a well. But the foundational lies told by Palestinians about the origins of Israel and their own plight are only the beginning, and today form a well-established practice of deception” (part 4)
“But we need to tackle this and all the other topics brought up, and confront not just Israel, but specifically also the Palestinians, with these errors. They have to take responsibility, and change direction, if there ever is to be any hope for a peaceful solution.” (Part 6)
This is key, in my opinion. I also admitted, many times, that Israel made mistakes, and pointed that out. Yet this side of facts is so rarely talked about, and actively ignored.
Next, you cite the son of Miko Peled, and how he himself did not try to give a balanced presentation, stating that was impossible. I tend to agree: there is too much to talk about. Even I had to split up in 8 articles, and still cannot highlight every relevant aspect of this conflict.
So to recap: I am trying to make clear that my goal was to shed light on a very important side of the history of this conflict most people will not know about, at all. We all know about Israel, and their shortcomings. They are widely talked about. Some elements rightly so, as they said and did what they said and did. Other accusations are false, as I showed in several of my examples. I made it a point to express that I am NOT glorifying Israel, that I am NOT ignoring their own faults.
But we cannot have a good conversation about this conflict if we are going to keep the Palestinians out of any scrutiny. I am trying to balance the conversation, balance our thinking about this conflict, by offering a hugely important missing piece.
You write, rather strongly: "Israel never had a right to exist."
I will repeat my previous question to you, which was not answered:
“I am still waiting for anyone to give me a good reason why Israel would have no right to exist.”
What will happen if the current Israeli government is replaced with a Palestinian one? Which Palestinians will step up into leadership positions? Hamas? Fatah? Hezbollah? People who previously stated they want to drive all Jews into the sea? How will that end? Can you guarantee that it won’t end in another genocide?
If you ask me, the biggest threat for nuclear war today is the US government, through their proxies in Ukraine, in their endless provocations and escalations.
Israel is also on the receiving end of provocations. If they attack Hezbollah, would you see that as a justified attack, or not?
I am glad to hear that you do not support genocide. I was very upset to think that. We will have to disagree about the right of Israel to exist. I think no. I define Israel as the Israeli state, a government established in 1948. I don't say that Jews living in Palestine/Israel don't have a right to exist, or to live there – I want to make that extra clear. I think that this present government is bad and should be abolished and replaced with one state where all have equal rights regardless of religion. I believe that is possible and I believe that circumstances are tending in that direction. I tried to make my views on that clear. Writing clearly is a difficult art. Thank you for clarifying.
Typo alert.
To start: there is such think as ‘right of conquest’.
Otherwise, great work on Israel, Ukraine and the attempted assassination.
Fixed! Thank you for pointing that out!
I need a proofreader step when I write, that much is clear! :-D