The Jews were atypical conquerors in that they returned to their ancestral land of Canaan and purchased the land they settled on. The decolonization crowd wants to remove Jews from their own territory.
The 1939 white paper had more of an effect that indicated. In 1939 the Jews of Europe were looking to escape the murderous Nazi regime and had no where to escape. They were unwanted by most countries. Even Hitler proposed that the Jews should go to Palestine but the British became complicit in their murder by shutting down immigration to Palestine. With nowhere to go, 6 million Jews were murdered and in Palestine the Jews expressed their rage against the British with numerous terrorist attacks.
I find it astounding that Canadians and immigrants are allowed to publicly advocate and support the slaughter of Jewish Israelis! Are they also allowed to advocate the killing of Canadian Jews? What has happened to Canada?
I find that disturbing too, since Canada has laws against hate speech, which these public protests typically involve. Unfortunately Canadian politicians have sold their souls to Muslim Canadians who outnumber Jewish Canadians by at least 20 to one. What's more, Canada has frequently voted against Israel or abstained from voting in UN resolutions condemning Israel.
A satirical article in the "Babylon Bee" was entitled "Harvard Student Leaves Class on Microaggressions to attend "Death To Israel" demonstration."
Pretty much the same academics who say J. K. Rowling and Jordan Peterson are committing hate against transgendered people by quoting biological reality are silent on actual violent hate crimes against Jews in Israel.
Excellent article, as usual James. I think it's important to mention somewhere that not all Arabs hate Jews. The Druze and the Bedouins, for example. In fact the IDF has Druz and Bedouin soldiers, along of course, with Christian soldiers.
I have been warning that Uncontrolled Immigration in Canada would have serious repercussions for several years now. We are now weeks if not days from realizing some of them. Among the first to be impacted will be members of parliament, as well as well-known Mainstream Media representatives. Lone Wolf attacks will be difficult if not impossible to prevent.
The average IQ scores of Muslim countries is typically 83 or less. The average IQs of European Jews is in the 112 to 115 range. The two groups do not mix well.
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Jews who fled Europe after WW-2 had at least as much right emigrate to a country where they were welcomed, as those people now claiming Refugee Status in Canada.
As you know James, I absolutely detest the Woke, but that doesn't mean that they can't be right about some things, like global warming for instance (well not them but climate science). Their reasons may be suspect at some levels (as in a stick to beat capitalism with) but the truth is, massive CO2 emissions cause climate disrupting global warming.
You do not have to convince me that advocating for the killing of Jews in Palestine or discriminating against their 'neo-whitish competitive talent to deny them tertiary education places, or praising Hamas as 'liberators' is not OK in the civil context of a democratic society based around the rule of law and respect for the rights of others; even in ones as decadent, corrupted and forgetful of the Enlightenment that made the modern world, as is to be found now in the old West.
But when we get to 'The Holy Land' itself, this stuff is much more opaque and far more ruthelessly fought over. The democratic niceties, (even after Netanyahu and his gang have finished screwing them over) stop at Israel's border. Everyone is playing for keeps over there and it isn't Queensberry rules.
I wrote the following in the comment section of Quillette's article, 'Israel's New Reality: In these dire circumstances, deterrence will only be restored with overwhelming force.' I pointed out the awful politics of religious warfare...
When the West 'gave' Palestine to Zionist settlers in 1948, the move was bitterly opposed by every Arab state & Muslim country at the time It was made amply clear that the move would never be legitimate & that the creation of an Israeli state would immediately result in war, which is what happened...& periodically ever since.
The gift of Palestine to Zionists has triggered a religious-territorial war & compounding cycle of increasing violence & hatred.
Repeated defeat just makes the losers even harder line & more determined. Muslim fundamentalism & aggression were the result from Lebanon, to Iran, to Afghanistan to the chaos of the Arab spring & the rise of ISIS.
The Zionists got what they wanted, but at a terrible price that they will keep paying, at compound interest, as long as the Zionist state exists
And so far Israel populations have got out of it very lightly compared with their antagonists. In the last 16 years while Gaza has been under the Israel siege, its people have lost around six & a half thousand of their number including children to Israeli weaponry, for the price of around three hundred & thirty security forces/settlers
The resultant funerals in Gaza are frenzied processions of hate, anguish and resolve.
Every single one of those Hamas fighters who went into Israel to create a destabilizing and fearful moment of terrible mayhem knew they were going to die and that some of their friends and relatives would share their fate in the inevitably ferocious Israeli counter-strike. Their brothers and sons will keep taking the enormous casualties until the tide turns.
Israel is a mighty fortress, but so was the Crac des Chevaliers. The Western sponsors are in decline and will possibly disintegrate as their vision of themselves disaggregates (as we note all the time in these columns). Others with absolutely no interest in the fate of an extraordinary but numerically tiny people will fill the vacuum left.
Time is not the Zionist's friend. But even if it were, wars of religious toleration are always fights to the finish, either by absolute common exhaustion or the complete destruction/defenstration of one side. The wretches who created the Zionist state had not the slightest inkling of what they were setting in motion, and now the world is hostage to it.'
“When the West 'gave' Palestine to Zionist settlers in 1948, the move was bitterly opposed by every Arab state & Muslim country at the time It was made amply clear that the move would never be legitimate & that the creation of an Israeli state would immediately result in war, which is what happened...& periodically ever since.”
So.....? Where you going with this? That opposition delegitimizes Israel?
I don’t think you know the history well enough. Here’s an easy to digest half hour summary:
My dear Jim, Thank you for your care and attention to my intellectual development. However, I have been engaged with the arguments over the creation of Israel since the 1967 war, when I was a second year history honors student at Monash university.
I had lots of Jewish peers at uni because Monash is adjacent to much of Melbourne's Jewish community. So I had no problem imbibing their point of view at the time, especially given the spectacular nature of the Israeli victory.
Also, my Jewish uncle was involved in denazification work in Vienna after the war before he migrated to Australia. He had a substantial holocaust library, some of whose volumes I had read by the the age of 15 .
My attitude to Zionism has changed over the last 50-60 years.
The legitimacy question around the creation of the Israeli state devolves into two aspects; i.e., the Zionist arguments directed to the Western pro Israel sponsor groups and the absolute rejection of them by Israel's neighbors in particular and the Muslim world in general.
Initially, the Zionist arguments prevailed, not so much because of their intellectual virtues, so much as on the one hand the post-colonial weakness of and Western strategic suspicion of Arab nationalism, its flirtation with the Soviet Union and a common Christian perception of Muslim 'backwardness', and on the other, the tremendous leverage that pro Zionists lobbies had (and still do) particularly in the US, and particularly as a result of the collective guilt felt in the West in relation to the horrors of the all too then recent Holocaust.
It was a lay down misere for the Zionists, but that happy situation (for Zionists) has changed significantly. The problem of Zionist legitimacy has intensified. Large Muslim populations are now ensconced in the West and the Woke social administrative elite there is on an anti-colonial kick for all it is worth. The holocaust nightmare doesn't have the same effect on generations born many decades later, because history isn't there strong suit.
And the legitimacy question has been reinforced by the steady sequestration of Palestinian lands by increasingly aggressive and fascist settlers who are not in the least interested in negotiating a thing and who routinely resort to force as an answer to opposition, including from within Israel itself. Interference with the rule of law by the Netanyahu government is an exemplar of the genre.
The legitimacy problem for the Zionist state is a thing and a big one that is coming to bite it in a time when the traditional Western sponsors of Israel are increasingly divided, in economic decline and being challenged by new players and old. The post WW2 democratic consensus is declining and fast.
None of this is to suggest that anything good is happening in the Middle East for anyone. It is a rats' nest. All the outcomes are likely to be awful. Religious wars of toleration that Christian culture went through at the beginning of the modern period are returning to bite us at its end. They are always terrible and protracted in a game about non negotiable fundamental bottom lines for which generations of combatants will die in droves.
Christopher, it's not your intellectual development that's lacking but rather your understanding of the history. I thought that this young Israeli tour guide's video was very effective untangling many of the knots that bind us and by "us" I mean anyone who, for various reasons, misses the simple facts of the matter which boil down to a strong bottom line: Israel is a bona fide state, it has a right to exist and to take whatever measures necessary to protect itself and various Muslim states around it and Muslims within its borders don't agree.
The Arab wars against Israel prove this handily but the Palestinian rejection of two-state solutions at Oslo -- how many were there? Three? -- prove it that much more. Trying to attribute the impasse to "increasingly aggressive and fascist settlers" doesn't cut it. Jesus Christ himself wouldn't be welcome there unless he accepted the humiliating woke of dhimmitude.
The video that you're too intelligent or knowledgable to bother with has some striking charts that depict the extent to which the Arab world has ethnically cleansed -- YES, finally a proper use for that term -- their Jewish populations since the mid 20th century. A sample include:
Morocco -- from 265,000 to 2,150
Libya - 38,000 to 0
Iraq - 135,000 to under 10
Algeria - 140,000 to less than 50
Egypt - 75,000 to 100
Yemen - 63,000 to less than 50
Tunisia - 105,000 to 1,050
Syria - 30,000 to 100
And on and on. The Arab world is almost Judenfrei and you can imagine how much Israel must bother Muslims who, harkening to the teachings of the Koran, want to complete the job.
Unless and until Muslims are free to repudiate the Koran, not lie or dissemble about it or play some kind of endless three-card monte about it's supposedly timeless imperatives to conquer the world and eradicate the Jews in the process, we'll have a problem. Israel rides sentinel on the frontier of that problem. The Israelis are not engaging in a religious war unless you call being Jewish doing just that. The Muslims are though. And that's the difference.
I have tried to avoid commenting on these articles do to the volatility of the subject and the inevitable offensive comments that arise. Your intellectual take on this subject is unfortunately lost by many who respond emotionally and not intellectually. There has never been any doubt as to the Zionist objective of the complete absorption of Palestine into the Jewish state. It was clear right from the beginning of the 1947- 1948 war and the Deir Yassin massacre was a blue print for how it was to be achieved. During the past 75 years the number of Palestinian massacres seem to be lost in the fog of history and ignored at the expense of a high profile retaliatory action taken by Hamas against Israel. Readers should be reminded of the brutal Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 in which with nearly 3,000 lives were tragically taken before condemning and passing judgement on the contemporary actions of the Palestinians.
I disagree with "There has never been any doubt as to the Zionist objective of the complete absorption of Palestine into the Jewish state. It was clear right from the beginning of the 1947- 1948 war and the Deir Yassin massacre was a blue print for how it was to be achieved. "
Deir Yassin: The events that took place at Deir Yassin are still hotly disputed. But by their own admission, Arab leadership today acknowledges that the lies created by the Arabs about the fictitious “massacre” were concocted in order to shame the Arab armies into fighting against the Jews, frighten the Arabs, and encourage them to flee.3 The village sits near Jerusalem, overlooking the road from Tel Aviv. Jewish Jerusalem was under siege, and its only lifeline was this one road to Tel Aviv. A contingent of Iraqi troops had entered Deir Yassin on March 13, 1948. Some sources suggest that they were asked to leave. Apparently they did not, since their armed bodies were numerous among the dead after the battle. It was obvious that they were going to try to cut off that road. Doing so would spell the end of Jewish Jerusalem. So on April 9, 1948, a contingent of the Irgun (a para-military splinter group) entered the village. This operation was completely legitimate in the context of rules of engagement, since the Iraqi presence made the village a legal military objective.
Their intent, to capture the village and drive out the Iraqis, was completely clear from the onset, because they entered with a jeep and loudspeaker telling the civilian population to flee the village. Unfortunately, this jeep slid into a ditch, so some of the villagers may not have heard the message; however, many did and fled before the Irgun got to the village. Rather than surround the village and prevent their escape, the Irgun left several routes open for the civilians to flee, which hundreds of villagers used. However, the Iraqis had disguised themselves as women -- it is easy to hide weapons beneath the flowing robes of the burqa -- and had hidden themselves among women and children in the village. So, when the Irgun fighters entered, they encountered fire from “women!”
When the Irgun fighters fired back, they killed innocent women because the Iraqis were dressed like women and hiding behind them. After suffering more than 40 percent casualties to their forces, the Irgun succeeded in killing or capturing the Iraqis. Then, while they were in a group, still dressed as women, having surrendered and agreed to be taken prisoner, some of the Iraqis opened fire again with weapons concealed beneath their women’s clothing. Irgun fighters were caught off guard, more were killed, and others opened fire into the group. Iraqis who had indeed surrendered were killed along with those who had only pretended to surrender and had then opened fire.
When the Haganah arrived they found the dead women and other civilians and thus incorrectly accused the Irgun of murder and massacre. But the Red Cross, which was called in to assist the wounded and civilians, found no evidence of a massacre. In fact, even the most recent review of the evidence (July 1999), by Arab scholars at BeirZayyit university in Ramallah, indicates that there was no massacre, but rather a military conflict in which civilians were killed in the crossfire. The total Arab dead, including the Iraqi soldiers, according to the Beir Zayyit calculation, was 107.
So where did the idea of a massacre come from? The same Arab sources that confess to having urged the Arabs to flee have also acknowledged that Arab spokespersons at the time cynically exaggerated the casualties of the Deir Yassin battle, making up stories of gang rape, brutalizing of pregnant women, killing unborn children cut from their mothers’ wombs by blood-thirsty Jews, and massive murders with bodies thrown into a nearby quarry. The same Arab sources admit that their purpose in these lies was to shame the Arab nations into entering the conflict with greater alacrity, so that the Jews would be destroyed by the overwhelming numbers of Arab invaders.4
The plan backfired. As a result of this propaganda, Arab civilians panicked and fled by the tens of thousands. This was confirmed in the 1993 PBS documentary called The Fifty Years of War in which Deir Yassin survivors were interviewed. They testified that they had begged Dr. Hussein Khalidi, director of Voice of Palestine (the Palestinian radio station in East Jerusalem) to edit out the lies and fabrications of atrocities that never happened. He told them: “We must capitalize on this great opportunity!”
The flight of Arabs had begun many months before Deir Yassin. So Deir Yassin cannot account for those hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sought refuge prior to April 9, 1948. Moreover, while current Arab propaganda asserts that Deir Yassin was one of many examples of Jewish massacre and slaughter, there is not one other documented example of any such behavior by the Jews. By any standard, Deir Yassin was not an example, but an exception.
In sum, it was not what happened at Deir Yassin that caused the flight of tens of thousands of Arabs; it was the lies invented by the Arab High Command and Dr. Hussein Khalidi of the “Voice of Palestine” radio news channel that caused the panic. One can hardly blame Israel for that.
Moreover, we have information from a famous source, Yassir Arafat himself (his authorized biography, by Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker) that the Deir Yassin lies were spread “like a red flag in front of a bull” by the Egyptians. Then, having terrorized them with these stories, the Egyptians proceeded to disarm the Arabs of the area and herd them into detention camps in Gaza (today’s Gaza refugee camps). Why did the Egyptians do this? According to Arafat, it was to get the Arabs out of the area because the Egyptians wanted a free hand to wage their war. Egypt had every intention of conquering the Negev and southern part of the coastal plain. They wanted no interference from the local Arabs.
Deir Yassin was not a massacre; nothing even vaguely akin to what the Jews are accused of ever happened. We don’t know how many Arabs fled as a result of the Arab propaganda over Deir Yassin. Several hundred thousand is a good estimate. Most of them ended up in the Egyptian detention camps in Gaza.
The Irgun has a special place in my family history.
My soon to be father was a captain in the British army, on leave and in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946, having a post cricket game lunch with a Palestinian police team, when a bomb placed by the Irgun blew up and collapsed the entire adjacent wing of the hotel where the British military HQ was.
91 Arabs, Britons and Jews were killed and 46 injured.
Zionists were not going to let the British interfere with their plans, and an economically exhausted Britain and its war straightened government had no stomach for a full on and protracted insurgency conflict.....particularly with Jewish survivors it had rescued from the concentration camps.
For the British it was a rock and hard place conundrum that they no longer had the means or the will to deal with. They did not respond with the vengefulness that one would expect these days from the Zionist successor state. But then it was a post imperial entity with little left to lose, no prospect of winning and was 'going home' to Blighty when it all got too hard.
The Zionist Crac des Chevalier state has no place else to go, so it plays for keeps, until one day it can't. The crusades lasted nearly 200 years, so the Arab-Israel/Muslim-Jew war still likely has a very long way to go before the killing stops.
They got the Zionist message.
But my father would laugh rather bitterly in the subsequent years when Zionists complained about Arab terrorism.
Regrettably the Jews did engage in some acts of terrorism. But there is no comparison between Jewish and Islamic terrorism. Also, the Jews have never engaged in a war of annihilation against another state or ethnic group, like all of the neighbouring Islamic states engaged in to kill all the Jews.
Arabs have great lives in modern Israel, while Jews lives are in danger in the Middle East anywhere outside of Israel.
One side is an openly hateful, genocidal, pre-civilizational group of savages, and the other side is the Jews - perhaps the most brilliant people on the planet who's tiny population has contributed more to civilization the Arab world could ever dream to.
No disrespect meant, James, but I think we can agree to disagree on what Kellyanne Conway might call, "alternate facts". In the words of former US President Donald Trump, "there were very fine people on both sides".
Kemo, there are no goodies and baddies here, just very hard nosed parties in an all or nothing conflict that isn't going to end anytime soon.
The Zionists were determined to take Palestine for themselves against all comers and they had the international support and the European 'advantage suite' to propel their organization, strategy and tactics in ways that were bound to blow away the Arabs..... who were only just struggling out of many centuries of colonial and semi colonial bondage and backwardness, and didn't have the clout or know how to see off the Jewish interlopers, despite having nearly double their population in the territory in dispute.
They will eventually get the Zionist measure, but that could still be a century away. There will be swimming pools of blood to be spilt until then, and most of it Arab. But they will take the casualties as the price for staying in the game.
The jewish people have for the last century been extremely unkind to the West and are overwhelmingly responsible for much of the "woke" ideology ailing it today. In addition jewish organizations and people have pushed hard for the mass migration into Western European and American countries allowing for radical Islam to take over here as well.
We were very friendly to them, we helped them establish their state and gave them an incredible amount of support in both lives and money. Their response was to stab us in the back.
I don't stand with the Muslims but I think it's time the jews be left to solve their own problems.
To say that the "Jewish people have been unkind to the West" is a rather brutal and unfair statement. There's a large, certainly much higher than general population-based proportional representation of Jews in the intellectual, academic and business world including some of the biggest names, now and throughout the 20th century and that many Jews lean left, indeed have been prominent leftist leaders is a commonplace.
But Jews are also strongly represented on the right. In fact, we -- yeah I'm one -- are all over the political spectrum. And, of course, we're not alone wherever our political orientations but are merely part of large, varied mixes of religions and ethnicities. Indeed, these plurality of views and agendas is reflected in the Jewish organizations in America. Some lean left, lots, one might say, at least on some issues, some right and some are a bit of a mix. Not a lot different than American or Canadian society generally.
I agree that leftist Jews have done a lot to contribute to some of the woke ideology that beleaguers us but there are a whole lot of conservative Jews who're amongst the best champions of western civilization too. Your broad generalizations -- [Jews] stabbed you in the back -- are gross over-generalizations and sound ugly.
The data is pretty clear. Even moderately conservative jews are a tiny minority of the jewish population (at very best they're ~1/3) in the West and even among them most are pretty viciously anti-nationalist and pro-immigration.
I stand by my statement that we were stabbed in the back. Yes it's ugly but it's also true.
I'd like to see this data and also how you define "anti-nationalist" and "pro-immigration". Sadly, some today I'm sure conflate today's actual globalism with yesterday's Rothschild tropes which were clearly anti-semitic libels -- weren't they?
I support life. Both the Palestines are being killed from the hands of Isrealis AND Israelis are being killed from the hands of Palestinians. Taking ANY sides only fuels this conflict further. So i hope Camadians say " no" to any war.
The Jews were atypical conquerors in that they returned to their ancestral land of Canaan and purchased the land they settled on. The decolonization crowd wants to remove Jews from their own territory.
The 1939 white paper had more of an effect that indicated. In 1939 the Jews of Europe were looking to escape the murderous Nazi regime and had no where to escape. They were unwanted by most countries. Even Hitler proposed that the Jews should go to Palestine but the British became complicit in their murder by shutting down immigration to Palestine. With nowhere to go, 6 million Jews were murdered and in Palestine the Jews expressed their rage against the British with numerous terrorist attacks.
I find it astounding that Canadians and immigrants are allowed to publicly advocate and support the slaughter of Jewish Israelis! Are they also allowed to advocate the killing of Canadian Jews? What has happened to Canada?
I find that disturbing too, since Canada has laws against hate speech, which these public protests typically involve. Unfortunately Canadian politicians have sold their souls to Muslim Canadians who outnumber Jewish Canadians by at least 20 to one. What's more, Canada has frequently voted against Israel or abstained from voting in UN resolutions condemning Israel.
A satirical article in the "Babylon Bee" was entitled "Harvard Student Leaves Class on Microaggressions to attend "Death To Israel" demonstration."
Pretty much the same academics who say J. K. Rowling and Jordan Peterson are committing hate against transgendered people by quoting biological reality are silent on actual violent hate crimes against Jews in Israel.
Excellent article, as usual James. I think it's important to mention somewhere that not all Arabs hate Jews. The Druze and the Bedouins, for example. In fact the IDF has Druz and Bedouin soldiers, along of course, with Christian soldiers.
Lebanon: TV host calls Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians a ‘very wonderful, beautiful and sweet attack’
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https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/lebanon-tv-host-calls-hamas-massacre-of-israeli-civilians-a-very-wonderful-beautiful-and-sweet-attack
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I have been warning that Uncontrolled Immigration in Canada would have serious repercussions for several years now. We are now weeks if not days from realizing some of them. Among the first to be impacted will be members of parliament, as well as well-known Mainstream Media representatives. Lone Wolf attacks will be difficult if not impossible to prevent.
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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/pro-palestine-demonstration-in-mississauga-on-saturday-calls-for-end-to-bombing-in-gaza/article_20685a08-02d0-5948-b53e-1ddd2bf69883.html
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/palestinian-protest-mississauga-1.6032005
https://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2786711
https://www.mississauga.com/news/hundreds-gather-in-mississauga-s-celebration-square-in-solidarity-with-palestinians-amid-hamas-israel-war/article_c0dcf0ca-07e5-519e-8bbd-53daab9027aa.html
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The average IQ scores of Muslim countries is typically 83 or less. The average IQs of European Jews is in the 112 to 115 range. The two groups do not mix well.
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Jews who fled Europe after WW-2 had at least as much right emigrate to a country where they were welcomed, as those people now claiming Refugee Status in Canada.
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As you know James, I absolutely detest the Woke, but that doesn't mean that they can't be right about some things, like global warming for instance (well not them but climate science). Their reasons may be suspect at some levels (as in a stick to beat capitalism with) but the truth is, massive CO2 emissions cause climate disrupting global warming.
You do not have to convince me that advocating for the killing of Jews in Palestine or discriminating against their 'neo-whitish competitive talent to deny them tertiary education places, or praising Hamas as 'liberators' is not OK in the civil context of a democratic society based around the rule of law and respect for the rights of others; even in ones as decadent, corrupted and forgetful of the Enlightenment that made the modern world, as is to be found now in the old West.
But when we get to 'The Holy Land' itself, this stuff is much more opaque and far more ruthelessly fought over. The democratic niceties, (even after Netanyahu and his gang have finished screwing them over) stop at Israel's border. Everyone is playing for keeps over there and it isn't Queensberry rules.
I wrote the following in the comment section of Quillette's article, 'Israel's New Reality: In these dire circumstances, deterrence will only be restored with overwhelming force.' I pointed out the awful politics of religious warfare...
When the West 'gave' Palestine to Zionist settlers in 1948, the move was bitterly opposed by every Arab state & Muslim country at the time It was made amply clear that the move would never be legitimate & that the creation of an Israeli state would immediately result in war, which is what happened...& periodically ever since.
The gift of Palestine to Zionists has triggered a religious-territorial war & compounding cycle of increasing violence & hatred.
Repeated defeat just makes the losers even harder line & more determined. Muslim fundamentalism & aggression were the result from Lebanon, to Iran, to Afghanistan to the chaos of the Arab spring & the rise of ISIS.
The Zionists got what they wanted, but at a terrible price that they will keep paying, at compound interest, as long as the Zionist state exists
And so far Israel populations have got out of it very lightly compared with their antagonists. In the last 16 years while Gaza has been under the Israel siege, its people have lost around six & a half thousand of their number including children to Israeli weaponry, for the price of around three hundred & thirty security forces/settlers
The resultant funerals in Gaza are frenzied processions of hate, anguish and resolve.
Every single one of those Hamas fighters who went into Israel to create a destabilizing and fearful moment of terrible mayhem knew they were going to die and that some of their friends and relatives would share their fate in the inevitably ferocious Israeli counter-strike. Their brothers and sons will keep taking the enormous casualties until the tide turns.
Israel is a mighty fortress, but so was the Crac des Chevaliers. The Western sponsors are in decline and will possibly disintegrate as their vision of themselves disaggregates (as we note all the time in these columns). Others with absolutely no interest in the fate of an extraordinary but numerically tiny people will fill the vacuum left.
Time is not the Zionist's friend. But even if it were, wars of religious toleration are always fights to the finish, either by absolute common exhaustion or the complete destruction/defenstration of one side. The wretches who created the Zionist state had not the slightest inkling of what they were setting in motion, and now the world is hostage to it.'
“When the West 'gave' Palestine to Zionist settlers in 1948, the move was bitterly opposed by every Arab state & Muslim country at the time It was made amply clear that the move would never be legitimate & that the creation of an Israeli state would immediately result in war, which is what happened...& periodically ever since.”
So.....? Where you going with this? That opposition delegitimizes Israel?
I don’t think you know the history well enough. Here’s an easy to digest half hour summary:
https://youtu.be/XNf40sBcvKk?si=6L8Ujmg61maWFNMz
My dear Jim, Thank you for your care and attention to my intellectual development. However, I have been engaged with the arguments over the creation of Israel since the 1967 war, when I was a second year history honors student at Monash university.
I had lots of Jewish peers at uni because Monash is adjacent to much of Melbourne's Jewish community. So I had no problem imbibing their point of view at the time, especially given the spectacular nature of the Israeli victory.
Also, my Jewish uncle was involved in denazification work in Vienna after the war before he migrated to Australia. He had a substantial holocaust library, some of whose volumes I had read by the the age of 15 .
My attitude to Zionism has changed over the last 50-60 years.
The legitimacy question around the creation of the Israeli state devolves into two aspects; i.e., the Zionist arguments directed to the Western pro Israel sponsor groups and the absolute rejection of them by Israel's neighbors in particular and the Muslim world in general.
Initially, the Zionist arguments prevailed, not so much because of their intellectual virtues, so much as on the one hand the post-colonial weakness of and Western strategic suspicion of Arab nationalism, its flirtation with the Soviet Union and a common Christian perception of Muslim 'backwardness', and on the other, the tremendous leverage that pro Zionists lobbies had (and still do) particularly in the US, and particularly as a result of the collective guilt felt in the West in relation to the horrors of the all too then recent Holocaust.
It was a lay down misere for the Zionists, but that happy situation (for Zionists) has changed significantly. The problem of Zionist legitimacy has intensified. Large Muslim populations are now ensconced in the West and the Woke social administrative elite there is on an anti-colonial kick for all it is worth. The holocaust nightmare doesn't have the same effect on generations born many decades later, because history isn't there strong suit.
And the legitimacy question has been reinforced by the steady sequestration of Palestinian lands by increasingly aggressive and fascist settlers who are not in the least interested in negotiating a thing and who routinely resort to force as an answer to opposition, including from within Israel itself. Interference with the rule of law by the Netanyahu government is an exemplar of the genre.
The legitimacy problem for the Zionist state is a thing and a big one that is coming to bite it in a time when the traditional Western sponsors of Israel are increasingly divided, in economic decline and being challenged by new players and old. The post WW2 democratic consensus is declining and fast.
None of this is to suggest that anything good is happening in the Middle East for anyone. It is a rats' nest. All the outcomes are likely to be awful. Religious wars of toleration that Christian culture went through at the beginning of the modern period are returning to bite us at its end. They are always terrible and protracted in a game about non negotiable fundamental bottom lines for which generations of combatants will die in droves.
Christopher, it's not your intellectual development that's lacking but rather your understanding of the history. I thought that this young Israeli tour guide's video was very effective untangling many of the knots that bind us and by "us" I mean anyone who, for various reasons, misses the simple facts of the matter which boil down to a strong bottom line: Israel is a bona fide state, it has a right to exist and to take whatever measures necessary to protect itself and various Muslim states around it and Muslims within its borders don't agree.
The Arab wars against Israel prove this handily but the Palestinian rejection of two-state solutions at Oslo -- how many were there? Three? -- prove it that much more. Trying to attribute the impasse to "increasingly aggressive and fascist settlers" doesn't cut it. Jesus Christ himself wouldn't be welcome there unless he accepted the humiliating woke of dhimmitude.
The video that you're too intelligent or knowledgable to bother with has some striking charts that depict the extent to which the Arab world has ethnically cleansed -- YES, finally a proper use for that term -- their Jewish populations since the mid 20th century. A sample include:
Morocco -- from 265,000 to 2,150
Libya - 38,000 to 0
Iraq - 135,000 to under 10
Algeria - 140,000 to less than 50
Egypt - 75,000 to 100
Yemen - 63,000 to less than 50
Tunisia - 105,000 to 1,050
Syria - 30,000 to 100
And on and on. The Arab world is almost Judenfrei and you can imagine how much Israel must bother Muslims who, harkening to the teachings of the Koran, want to complete the job.
Unless and until Muslims are free to repudiate the Koran, not lie or dissemble about it or play some kind of endless three-card monte about it's supposedly timeless imperatives to conquer the world and eradicate the Jews in the process, we'll have a problem. Israel rides sentinel on the frontier of that problem. The Israelis are not engaging in a religious war unless you call being Jewish doing just that. The Muslims are though. And that's the difference.
I have tried to avoid commenting on these articles do to the volatility of the subject and the inevitable offensive comments that arise. Your intellectual take on this subject is unfortunately lost by many who respond emotionally and not intellectually. There has never been any doubt as to the Zionist objective of the complete absorption of Palestine into the Jewish state. It was clear right from the beginning of the 1947- 1948 war and the Deir Yassin massacre was a blue print for how it was to be achieved. During the past 75 years the number of Palestinian massacres seem to be lost in the fog of history and ignored at the expense of a high profile retaliatory action taken by Hamas against Israel. Readers should be reminded of the brutal Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 in which with nearly 3,000 lives were tragically taken before condemning and passing judgement on the contemporary actions of the Palestinians.
I disagree with "There has never been any doubt as to the Zionist objective of the complete absorption of Palestine into the Jewish state. It was clear right from the beginning of the 1947- 1948 war and the Deir Yassin massacre was a blue print for how it was to be achieved. "
Below I've cut and pasted a section on Deir Yassin from this essay by DAVID MEIR-LEVI- https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/1501222/posts :
Deir Yassin: The events that took place at Deir Yassin are still hotly disputed. But by their own admission, Arab leadership today acknowledges that the lies created by the Arabs about the fictitious “massacre” were concocted in order to shame the Arab armies into fighting against the Jews, frighten the Arabs, and encourage them to flee.3 The village sits near Jerusalem, overlooking the road from Tel Aviv. Jewish Jerusalem was under siege, and its only lifeline was this one road to Tel Aviv. A contingent of Iraqi troops had entered Deir Yassin on March 13, 1948. Some sources suggest that they were asked to leave. Apparently they did not, since their armed bodies were numerous among the dead after the battle. It was obvious that they were going to try to cut off that road. Doing so would spell the end of Jewish Jerusalem. So on April 9, 1948, a contingent of the Irgun (a para-military splinter group) entered the village. This operation was completely legitimate in the context of rules of engagement, since the Iraqi presence made the village a legal military objective.
Their intent, to capture the village and drive out the Iraqis, was completely clear from the onset, because they entered with a jeep and loudspeaker telling the civilian population to flee the village. Unfortunately, this jeep slid into a ditch, so some of the villagers may not have heard the message; however, many did and fled before the Irgun got to the village. Rather than surround the village and prevent their escape, the Irgun left several routes open for the civilians to flee, which hundreds of villagers used. However, the Iraqis had disguised themselves as women -- it is easy to hide weapons beneath the flowing robes of the burqa -- and had hidden themselves among women and children in the village. So, when the Irgun fighters entered, they encountered fire from “women!”
When the Irgun fighters fired back, they killed innocent women because the Iraqis were dressed like women and hiding behind them. After suffering more than 40 percent casualties to their forces, the Irgun succeeded in killing or capturing the Iraqis. Then, while they were in a group, still dressed as women, having surrendered and agreed to be taken prisoner, some of the Iraqis opened fire again with weapons concealed beneath their women’s clothing. Irgun fighters were caught off guard, more were killed, and others opened fire into the group. Iraqis who had indeed surrendered were killed along with those who had only pretended to surrender and had then opened fire.
When the Haganah arrived they found the dead women and other civilians and thus incorrectly accused the Irgun of murder and massacre. But the Red Cross, which was called in to assist the wounded and civilians, found no evidence of a massacre. In fact, even the most recent review of the evidence (July 1999), by Arab scholars at BeirZayyit university in Ramallah, indicates that there was no massacre, but rather a military conflict in which civilians were killed in the crossfire. The total Arab dead, including the Iraqi soldiers, according to the Beir Zayyit calculation, was 107.
So where did the idea of a massacre come from? The same Arab sources that confess to having urged the Arabs to flee have also acknowledged that Arab spokespersons at the time cynically exaggerated the casualties of the Deir Yassin battle, making up stories of gang rape, brutalizing of pregnant women, killing unborn children cut from their mothers’ wombs by blood-thirsty Jews, and massive murders with bodies thrown into a nearby quarry. The same Arab sources admit that their purpose in these lies was to shame the Arab nations into entering the conflict with greater alacrity, so that the Jews would be destroyed by the overwhelming numbers of Arab invaders.4
The plan backfired. As a result of this propaganda, Arab civilians panicked and fled by the tens of thousands. This was confirmed in the 1993 PBS documentary called The Fifty Years of War in which Deir Yassin survivors were interviewed. They testified that they had begged Dr. Hussein Khalidi, director of Voice of Palestine (the Palestinian radio station in East Jerusalem) to edit out the lies and fabrications of atrocities that never happened. He told them: “We must capitalize on this great opportunity!”
The flight of Arabs had begun many months before Deir Yassin. So Deir Yassin cannot account for those hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sought refuge prior to April 9, 1948. Moreover, while current Arab propaganda asserts that Deir Yassin was one of many examples of Jewish massacre and slaughter, there is not one other documented example of any such behavior by the Jews. By any standard, Deir Yassin was not an example, but an exception.
In sum, it was not what happened at Deir Yassin that caused the flight of tens of thousands of Arabs; it was the lies invented by the Arab High Command and Dr. Hussein Khalidi of the “Voice of Palestine” radio news channel that caused the panic. One can hardly blame Israel for that.
Moreover, we have information from a famous source, Yassir Arafat himself (his authorized biography, by Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker) that the Deir Yassin lies were spread “like a red flag in front of a bull” by the Egyptians. Then, having terrorized them with these stories, the Egyptians proceeded to disarm the Arabs of the area and herd them into detention camps in Gaza (today’s Gaza refugee camps). Why did the Egyptians do this? According to Arafat, it was to get the Arabs out of the area because the Egyptians wanted a free hand to wage their war. Egypt had every intention of conquering the Negev and southern part of the coastal plain. They wanted no interference from the local Arabs.
Deir Yassin was not a massacre; nothing even vaguely akin to what the Jews are accused of ever happened. We don’t know how many Arabs fled as a result of the Arab propaganda over Deir Yassin. Several hundred thousand is a good estimate. Most of them ended up in the Egyptian detention camps in Gaza.
The Irgun has a special place in my family history.
My soon to be father was a captain in the British army, on leave and in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946, having a post cricket game lunch with a Palestinian police team, when a bomb placed by the Irgun blew up and collapsed the entire adjacent wing of the hotel where the British military HQ was.
91 Arabs, Britons and Jews were killed and 46 injured.
Zionists were not going to let the British interfere with their plans, and an economically exhausted Britain and its war straightened government had no stomach for a full on and protracted insurgency conflict.....particularly with Jewish survivors it had rescued from the concentration camps.
For the British it was a rock and hard place conundrum that they no longer had the means or the will to deal with. They did not respond with the vengefulness that one would expect these days from the Zionist successor state. But then it was a post imperial entity with little left to lose, no prospect of winning and was 'going home' to Blighty when it all got too hard.
The Zionist Crac des Chevalier state has no place else to go, so it plays for keeps, until one day it can't. The crusades lasted nearly 200 years, so the Arab-Israel/Muslim-Jew war still likely has a very long way to go before the killing stops.
They got the Zionist message.
But my father would laugh rather bitterly in the subsequent years when Zionists complained about Arab terrorism.
Regrettably the Jews did engage in some acts of terrorism. But there is no comparison between Jewish and Islamic terrorism. Also, the Jews have never engaged in a war of annihilation against another state or ethnic group, like all of the neighbouring Islamic states engaged in to kill all the Jews.
Arabs have great lives in modern Israel, while Jews lives are in danger in the Middle East anywhere outside of Israel.
One side is an openly hateful, genocidal, pre-civilizational group of savages, and the other side is the Jews - perhaps the most brilliant people on the planet who's tiny population has contributed more to civilization the Arab world could ever dream to.
Very diplomatically stated.
No disrespect meant, James, but I think we can agree to disagree on what Kellyanne Conway might call, "alternate facts". In the words of former US President Donald Trump, "there were very fine people on both sides".
Kemo, there are no goodies and baddies here, just very hard nosed parties in an all or nothing conflict that isn't going to end anytime soon.
The Zionists were determined to take Palestine for themselves against all comers and they had the international support and the European 'advantage suite' to propel their organization, strategy and tactics in ways that were bound to blow away the Arabs..... who were only just struggling out of many centuries of colonial and semi colonial bondage and backwardness, and didn't have the clout or know how to see off the Jewish interlopers, despite having nearly double their population in the territory in dispute.
They will eventually get the Zionist measure, but that could still be a century away. There will be swimming pools of blood to be spilt until then, and most of it Arab. But they will take the casualties as the price for staying in the game.
Also, highly recommended history and view of the current conflict.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/25Y3uDLwz2SdMbwZkycy7Z?si=8fa6737d6a6b449a
Leftist college students:
"Black Lives Matter"
"BIPOC Lives Matter"
"Diversity Equity Inclusion"
"We stand in solidarity with all minorities & denounce bigotry in all forms."
What about the Jews?
"F*** the Jews"
"Gas the Jews" (Chant at Sydney Opera House Pro-Hamas Demo,)
"Destroy Israel"
The jewish people have for the last century been extremely unkind to the West and are overwhelmingly responsible for much of the "woke" ideology ailing it today. In addition jewish organizations and people have pushed hard for the mass migration into Western European and American countries allowing for radical Islam to take over here as well.
We were very friendly to them, we helped them establish their state and gave them an incredible amount of support in both lives and money. Their response was to stab us in the back.
I don't stand with the Muslims but I think it's time the jews be left to solve their own problems.
To say that the "Jewish people have been unkind to the West" is a rather brutal and unfair statement. There's a large, certainly much higher than general population-based proportional representation of Jews in the intellectual, academic and business world including some of the biggest names, now and throughout the 20th century and that many Jews lean left, indeed have been prominent leftist leaders is a commonplace.
But Jews are also strongly represented on the right. In fact, we -- yeah I'm one -- are all over the political spectrum. And, of course, we're not alone wherever our political orientations but are merely part of large, varied mixes of religions and ethnicities. Indeed, these plurality of views and agendas is reflected in the Jewish organizations in America. Some lean left, lots, one might say, at least on some issues, some right and some are a bit of a mix. Not a lot different than American or Canadian society generally.
I agree that leftist Jews have done a lot to contribute to some of the woke ideology that beleaguers us but there are a whole lot of conservative Jews who're amongst the best champions of western civilization too. Your broad generalizations -- [Jews] stabbed you in the back -- are gross over-generalizations and sound ugly.
And particularly now.
The data is pretty clear. Even moderately conservative jews are a tiny minority of the jewish population (at very best they're ~1/3) in the West and even among them most are pretty viciously anti-nationalist and pro-immigration.
I stand by my statement that we were stabbed in the back. Yes it's ugly but it's also true.
I'd like to see this data and also how you define "anti-nationalist" and "pro-immigration". Sadly, some today I'm sure conflate today's actual globalism with yesterday's Rothschild tropes which were clearly anti-semitic libels -- weren't they?
Pew: Further, the original use of the term Palestine was meant to describe the region inhabited by the Jews.
TO DIFFER: - Would you believe it meant the area inhabited by Philistines before the Jewish conquest?
I support life. Both the Palestines are being killed from the hands of Isrealis AND Israelis are being killed from the hands of Palestinians. Taking ANY sides only fuels this conflict further. So i hope Camadians say " no" to any war.
Silence is bad but some have celebrated the carnage!