The only one to blame
Harvard students don’t actually know everything.
A letter from Harvard University student groups blaming Israel for violence in the region has drawn a backlash from prominent alumni and US lawmakers.
The letter, authored by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, stated that students “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.
Glad they’re not dogmatically absolutist about it.
“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” the letter added.
And what was going on 75 years ago? 76 years ago? 77, 78, 79? That might have given Jews the idea that they needed a Jewish nation?
The fighting was going on in the 19th century when the Ottomans still owned the place; the story that Jews just suddenly showed up on that pile of sand and rocks and started jackbooting all over the natives is ridiculous.
Don’t think the apartheid label is entirely unfair, but it ignores any subtlety.
I’m astonished how absolutist many of my friends have become on this issue. I’ve been using the “mute” function of Facebook a lot in the last few days.
There has been mismanagement and misrule of the area for generations, yet with Israel being the governing body for the last 75 years (with USA a willing assistant), it is right to give overwhelming – not far short of complete – blame to them.
I suppose we’re supposed to take the latest Hamas attack as some sort of uncontrollable “LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!” moment?
Holms @#3:
Israel is a creature of WW2, just as is modern Vietnam, Both, each in its own way, is a product of a colonial war. But a crucial difference has been that the Palestinians have been the defenders against what amounted to a series of colonial invaders: Ottoman Turks, followed by Jewish refugees, which gave the said Palestinians a great moral advantage: the same as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) over the French, and the Americans and their allies. They were the defenders of their homeland against invasion.
Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam, giving his cause enormous moral advantage.
The Hamas perpetrators of this latest atrocity have set back their own cause, just as the US did with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. This must put the rest of the Palestinian leadership on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Colonial wars have to be presented to the world as being just causes. Those who forget that do so at their own peril. Nothing can possibly justify the massacre of innocent babies, children, and their non-combatant mothers.
How many times since 1967 did a US president say “I stand with the Palestinians” when they were attacked by Israel? And then, after saying that, shipped weapons to Palestine because “Palestine has a right to defend itself”?
Since most attempted explanations of why things happen are misconstrued as justifications for what happened, let me first state that I am not justifying Hamas’s killing of civilians. Nor am I even a supporter of Hamas generally. But any moral judgment of the Palestinians has to be placed within the context of their existence, specifically the conditions imposed upon them by Israel. Furthermore, their feelings about Israeli civilians must be understood in relation to the feelings of the state of Israel and Israelis generally towards Palestinians. Is it less immoral to blast a Palestinian child to death from a distance with artillery than it is to shoot an Israeli child at close range with a rifle? Did all the Israeli sharpshooters with telescopic sniper rifles who knowingly shot Palestinian children and medical personal during the (initially peaceful) 2018 Great March of Return receive international condemnation?
Has the battle between Israel and Palestine gone back and forth since 1967, with one side winning and then losing, off and on? Or has one side tended to enjoy a preponderance of power over the other since that time?
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-iopt/report2018-opt
… in case i screwed up the html coding again.
Islam is unusual among modern religions in that it contemplates a death penalty for apostasy. If you’re a Jew and say you’re not a Jew anymore, they’ll say “Well, I still think you’re a Jew. But come back any time you want to talk about it.” If you’re a Catholic and say you’re not a Catholic anymore, they’ll say “No Communion for you! But come back when you’re ready to repent.” If you’re a Muslim and say you’re not a Muslim anymore, they say “Off with your head.”
The same one-way ratchet works for territories. Although there was never an actual country before the State of Israel in the I/P territory, this area was passed back and forth to whatever empire was in vogue at the time and needed to pass through it to get somewhere else, and some of those empires were Muslim. So once Muslim, forever Muslim, and despite the two previous empires being French and British, and farther back Roman, Greek, etc. – and none of them think Palestine once was and thus forever must be theirs – Islam says “off with their heads.”
Al Qaeda and ISIS wanted to recapture Spain. They talk about the demise of Al-Andalus as the “disaster of 500 years ago.”
Nobody needs to believe me when I say this ideology cannot permit Jews to control a single inch of the territory that has been occupied by Jews continuously for millennia before Islam was invented. Just listen to Hamas; they say it.
https://www.memri.org/reports/covenant-islamic-resistance-movement-–-hamas
Papito,
What’s your point? The PLO was a secular organization. Most Palestinians were secular. Hamas was assisted by Israel in its early days as a more radical rival to the PLO.
If the fundamentalism of Hamas, Wahhabism, fundamentalist Islamism is such a menace, why does the CIA and the State Department keep using jihaadists in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.,?
Speaking of the Christians in Spain and their tolerance of other religions …. well, it goes without saying.
Are you saying that the Israelis have been more than happy to live and let live with the Palestinians and share the land with them only to have their generosity spit upon?
Did the Muslims forcibly convert all the Christians in the Balkans when they ruled there?
Jews under Islam were treated no worse than Jews under Christianity and sometimes better.
What does any of this have to do with the conditions of life in Gaza and the ongoing thefts of land in the West Bank?
There’s gotta be an implicit premise I’m missing here, like that all governments have sci-fi mind control of their subjects or something.
This time, Hamas is releasing video of the rockets launching. From between apartment buildings and in urban spaces. So they can squeal about civilian casualties after those pesky Jews dare to shoot back. 5,000 rockets, and a large-scale assault across the border, are NOT spontaneous demonstrations against ‘oppression.’ They are Hamas continuing the genocidal war against Israel that has been their primary aim since the founding of the organization.
One of the points about old-fashioned Katyusha rockets, is that the launching gear is light, and even disposable. They can be launched from the back of trucks that are driven away afterward. So, perhaps, we could criticize the Israeli practice of attacking launch sites after the fact. The trucks have gone from the schoolyard or the hospital parking lot by the time any response arrives. But every Israeli ‘outrage’ starts whenever Hamas needs news coverage.
Me, it seems like you’re grasping at straws. Any straw will do, no?
The Israelis, in 1948, were ready to live and let live with the Palestinians according to the United Nations partition plan (Resolution 181). Most Muslims, in and out of the affected territory, were not.
That is why the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq launched all-out war against the new Jewish nation the day after Israel declared itself a nation. They lost.
Sometimes when you make war against somebody you lose. That is not the fault of the victors; it’s yours for starting the war. FAFO.
Today about 20% of Israeli citizens identify as Palestinian or Arab. They are primarily descended from the 20% of Arabs who did not flee during the civil war and the war of 1948. They have full citizenship rights, including voting and holding office. They are far safer and more prosperous than Palestinians in the territories ruled by Palestinians.
“Jews under Islam” is the point of Hamas and like minds – there can be no free Jews in formerly Muslim-ruled territories, only Jews under Islam. Israelis have the right response to that threat: “you and whose army?”
Looks like I totally misinterpreted the title of this post! Apparently “the only one to blame” is the Palestinian side!
As you were.
I don’t think I have a very good grasp on the situation now, and never have. Some histories say that the Palestinians welcomed the Jews from Europe in the 1910’s but after the Shoah, the survivors from Europe arrived en masse and started pushing them out which led to the war and conflict. I also see the stories of the IDF bulldozing generational Palestinian homes for new settlements; and the Likud likening Palestinians to rats and referring to them as subhumans. I have heard that Hamas is popular because they have taken the role of providing the social services that the Israeli government neglects. But, every time that the flareups happen like this, it begins with rocket fire on civilian territory from Hamas into Israeli settlements where high casualties take place and I just can’t see how it’s justified. There is a high degree of propaganda in all the news, either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestine.
I have a personal bias for Jews because the worldwide hatred for them is so persistent and has been so deadly to millions of Jews, but I don’t think that’s at play in my revulsion of what Hamas has done in the mass rapes, the murders of women and children (with reports of beheadings of toddlers!) I don’t know what the peaceful resolution might be for that part of the world, but attempts are being hobbled by the irrational hatred most of the world has for the Jewish people, and the especially virulent forms it takes in Iran (funding Hamas) and Saudi Arabia. It baffles me, honestly.
I remember a proposal at one time that a homeland be created in Saskatchewan following the Holocaust. I don’t remember why that was rejected.
I get the impression that nobody really cares about the Palestinians. Certainly not the right-wing Israeli government, and not really Hamas. And even other Arabic countries seem to use Palestinians mostly as pawns, to be thrown aside when they can make favorable deals with Israel. As for Iran, its main goal seems to be to destroy Israel; the suffering and death of Palestinians is useful to that end.
Who is actually standing up for the Palestinian people, trying to make their lives better?
I haven’t read it, but there’s a book called None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948 by Harold Troper and Irving Abella, that might answer that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_Is_Too_Many
There is a criticism I have seen not of the Palestinians, but of all the other Arab countries.
It points out that in the ethnic forced displacements in Europe post WWII and in India/Pakistan post partition, the refugees were accepted in their new homes, often the homes of the other ethnicity who had been driven out.
In the Arab countries many Jews were driven into Israel, but the Palestinians were not accepted to become citizens of those countries and the homes of the exiled Jews were not used to house the exiled Palestinians.
It is almost like the Arab governments wanted the Palestinians to permanently remain a political wound with no healing.
To what extent is this a valid criticism?
I think the permanent homelessness of the Palestinians as a strategy or ploy has been a lively topic forever.
@Jim, I’ve stated the same. Around 700K Palestinian Arabs left their homes in Israel; around 900K Jews left their homes in Muslim countries around the same time, 650K of whom settled in Israel.
Sure, the Palestinian refugees could have moved into those abandoned (confiscated) Jewish homes, but… from the perspective of those countries, many of whom participated in the attempted eradication of Israel the day after its birth, that would be giving in. They agreed with Hamas that Jews must never be allowed to have a state, and no land once controlled by Muslims can ever again be controlled by someone else. Accepting the refugees would seem to them de facto collaboration with Israel.
The ongoing misery of the Palestinians serves them much better. And it’s free.
The attempts at colonisation and reconquest by of Ireland by those that my own Irish ancestors called ‘the strangers’, as in the nostalic and classic song lyrics of the Irish emigres and refugees all over the world, has been going on since the 12th Century. Judging by that, the Israel-Palestine imbroglio is only in its early days. It could have another dozen or so centuries or so to run before it finally settles down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt7NdiFeYJA