The compromised international community and the rest of humanity must hold Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his US and European allies responsible for both the October 7 brutal murder of about 1,400 Israeli soldiers, innocent women and children by Hamas terrorists and Israel’s retaliatory indiscriminate bombing of caged people of Gaza resulting so far in the death of over 3,000 Palestinian civilians including women and children.
Netanyahu claims the Jews owned the land of Israel because they occupied it 3,500 years ago before the Arabs he described as colonialists exiled them from the land in the 7th century. That was just an attempt at revisionism. Jews, through Sarah and Arabs through Hagar were siblings. Abraham, their patriarch came from Ur in present day Iraq in search of a land he was told was flowing with milk and honey. His children, including Joshua waged vicious wars before securing a land which turned out to be a desert, with a ring of deep craters, hills and valleys of death.
But Israel’s story is the story of migration in all societies. However, unlike other societies including America, Canada and Australia taken over by new invaders, Israel as admitted by Netanyahu had the support of Christian Zionist sympathisers and of course powerful European nations to take their land back.
In 1947, the UN voted for Palestine to be split into separate Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem becoming an international city. While Israel embraced the plan, it was rejected by the Arabs. With the help of powerful European nations trying to atone for centuries of savagery against the Jewish people in both central and eastern Europe, Israel overpowered the Arab and had by 1967 occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai peninsula while Palestinian refugees lived in Gaza and West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The status quo has remained the same ever since.
With the Norway Oslo Peace Process, Israel and Palestinians after years of bloodletting recognized the quest for self-actualization by both as legitimate and therefore recognized the right of each other for statehood. Not long after, Benjamin Netanyahu then opposition leader called the Oslo accord “a mortal threat to Israel”.
With Netanyahu’s electoral upset in 1996, Israelis accelerated building of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories while frustrated Hamas organized suicide bombers to kill people in Israel. The Oslo deal eventually collapsed. Netanyahu, the longest serving Israeli leader perhaps after Moses has done everything ever since to prolong the nightmare of the Israelis and Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s strategy is the exploitation of the innermost fears of the Jewish people – the survival of their hard won state and preservation of their religion and cultural values. Desperate to retain power after some electoral setbacks in recent years, he formed an alliance with the ultra-right that has always opposed the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
The result was continued expansion of settlements in the Palestinian occupied West Bank. This was to lead to endless clashes between about 700,000 new Israeli residents and aggrieved Palestinians dispossessed of their homes and land. Netanyahu’s periodic police raid left over 300 Palestinians dead with as many in Israeli prisons. The immediate cause of current hostility according to Hamas was the storming of Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam by Israeli police who took away some worshippers.
Netanyahu celebrates Moses’ law of “an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth” despite Ghandi’s warning that such will make the world go blind. He forgets the essence of Moses law for the rebellious Jews with hardened mind was to prevent disproportionate vengeance since one cannot find peace by hating and getting your own back but by forgiveness and grace.
While Golda Meir, 4th Israel’s Prime Minister believed violence was not the answer to violence and lamented that while “Israel can forgive the Arabs for killing Israeli children, they cannot forgive them for forcing Israelis to kill Arab children”, Netanyahu celebrates violence believing Israel was invincible especially after its acquisition of nuclear power with the support of America and Europe who stood against similar quest by other nations in the Middle East including Iraq, Libya and Iran.
Golda Meir confessed “while it is true Israel won all their wars, Israel paid for them”. For her, a leader who does not reflect deeply before sending soldiers to kill is not worth to be a leader, because “there is no difference between the person who kills and the person who send him to kill, if anything the latter is worse”.
But for Netanyahu who last week mobilized 350,000 Israeli youths that have known nothing but violence and intense hatred in the last 30 years, his strategy has always been an appeal to their sense of patriotism before sending them on a mission to bomb not just Hamas terrorists but women and children that constitute two third of caged Gaza residents.
Netanyahu understands that Israel is haunted by the spectre of the Holocaust. As Golda Meir puts it: “Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust. Israel was not created to disappear. Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave”.
Netanyahu was seen last week lionizing some of the mobilized Israeli youths he was sending to Gaza on a suicide mission, which the Oslo accord he killed would have prevented.
As for the US and Western Europe, history has shown they love neither both Palestinians, Israelis, Africans nor anyone but themselves. Their avowed solid support for Israel has largely been driven by guilty conscience. Precisely because of centuries of humiliation and persecution of Jews across Europe, they lack the morale courage to promote cause of justice as Israel, out of a sense of misplaced aggression and fear of another Holocaust, continues to visit sins of Europe on their caged Palestinian cousins in the occupied territories.
It is on record that because Europeans envied the Jews because of their economic success during the middle ages. Jews were denied citizenship, of their rights and barred from holding posts in government and the military by European rulers. In both central and eastern Europe, they were treated as second class citizens confined to the ghettos.
The 1096 crusaders terror and massacre were directed at the Jews. In the 12th century, Jews were falsely accused of sacrificing of Christian children at Passover to obtain blood for unleavened bread.
The resentment and religious prejudices that followed their economic and cultural successes led to their forced eviction from several European countries including France (1112), England (1290), Germany (1350s), Portugal (1496), Provence (1512), and the Papal States (1569). Those who refused to convert from Judaism to Christianity faced persecution during the 1492 Spanish Inquisition.
For 27 years, Netanyahu has played politics of fear to remain in power. Europe’s centuries of anti-Semitic campaign led to six million Jews being incinerated during the Holocaust.
It is therefore time for Jews and Arabs that have more that binds them together start loving each other. On the negative side, I have searched without finding a difference between Hamas terrorist who slaughtered women and children and Jews who bombed women and children put inside a cage called Gaza from where there is no escape.
On the positive side, they should remember that Abraham was the father of both Ishmael and Isaac; that Moses, the father of Hebrew religion was married to Zipporah, a Midianite Arab woman (Exodus verse 21) and that Ruth who became the grandmother of King David was a Midianite from Moab, today’s Jordan ( Ruth 1.1.)
Arabs and Jews are one and the same. They should stop killing their own children. As Golda Meir predicted: “There will be peace between Israelis and Arabs when they start loving their children more than they hate us”.