What is unfolding in the two Jerusalems, Israel in general, the Gaza strip, and to a lesser extent, the West Bank, is horrific. It is the fourth, painfully similar, violence in only twelve years.

 

Israel has its defenders, and the defense is grounded in the obvious provocation, and war crimes committed, by Hamas. I’m here to tell you that this is in fact Israel’s fault, and until we acknowledge this, there can be no honest discussion.

 

Hamas, not directly provoked, has fired thousands of missiles into civilian neighborhoods, and Israel shot back. Hamas has killed Israel civilians, but the Israeli counter-offensive has made the Palestinian death-toll ten-fold that of the Israeli, with few Hamas fighters falling as the air-strikes reduce a desperately poor, and insanely over-crowded, piece of land into rumble.

 

Really, rumble again.

 

Just like Hamas’s targeting civilians is a war crime, so is Israel’s disproportionate response.

 

Israel’s defenders must begin to ask themselves the same question they continually ask the rest of us,  “Why is Israel getting more grief than obviously terrorist pseudo-state that Hamas has built?”

 

Well, because people actually expect more from a Democracy like Israel that they would of bunch of terrorists, and because most of us realize Israel is the one with the power to end this.

 

Why does Hamas shoot at Israel? Because they hate Jews.

 

But why are they shooting this week? Because they do every time Israel severely undercuts the legitimacy of Hamas' rival, the Palestinian Authority. This is a power-play, and Israel is proving it power, not by working for a lasting peace, but bombing civilians, which is Hamas' playbook, not the behavior of a civilized people.

 

Israel will never "defeat" Hamas, anymore than the Brits could ever "defeat" the IRA, that's not how guerilla or terrorist wars work. And you can't bomb the most crowded place on the planet without an insanely high civilian death toll, and Israel knows this, so the much touted "warnings" that Israel gives before a bombing are only lip-service.

 

The foundational issue for this hellish round is that Netanyahu has created an apartheid regime, and Traitor Trump helped him. The South African comparison is important, because the ANC only resorted to violence after 50 years of futile reasonableness, and only turned to terrorism twenty years after that. As Israel defines the reality, Israel defines the conflict. So yes, Hamas are terrorists, but Israel is at fault.

 

The legitimate governing body of the Palestinians is the Palestinian Authority. Much (most?) of Hamas' power is the product of Israel’s delegitimizing the PA. Which brings us to the "evictions," really ethnic cleansing, where this round started:

 

Israel has a law that allows Jews to reclaim properties lost in conflicts 1948 or earlier, but Palestinians do not have the same right, so it is explicitly discriminatory. Jews also have a right-to-return, while Palestinians do not, similarly discriminatory. After the 1948 war, East Jerusalem was not part of emergent Israel, and would not become so until the 1967 war. Isreal's claim of that half of the city is rejected by the International Community and even Israel’s most loyal ally, the USA, ignored it until traitor Trump.

 

Trump’s actions had a human cost.

 

Samira Dajani’s family lost their home in West Jerusalem in the 1948 war, becoming refugees in their own land. The family bought their home in East Jerusalem in 1957. Since the 1967 war, they've been at risk, and since 1972 racist Jews have been targeting their home, and the homes of hundreds of other families, but none of that nonsense meant anything until Netanyahu and traitor Trump. Now, Dajani and her husband are elderly, but now face homelessness because have Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing, and she not entitled to demand back the home stolen from the family in 1948.

  

Make no mistake, that's how this round of violence started. Because Netanyahu has turned already troubled Israel into and apartheid state, and the PA has been powerless to stop these “evictions,” this has become the latest flash-point in a decades-long cycle of flash-points. 

 

 

And get this through your head, there will be no Peace until there truly is a Palestine.

 

 

 

1

Comments

  1. Robert Emmett Murphy Jr.May 22, 2021 at 4:15 AM

    So Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement five hours after I spent four hours trying to make sense of the current violence. That maybe the fastest obsolescence in social media history.

    ReplyDelete

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