Goodbye to the Isreal for Whom I Rooted and Supported
Musings
It seems to me that the country of Israel for whom I rooted and supported over many decades since its independence in 1948 no longer exists. I have not made any comments about Israel for a number of weeks as I have been baffled by my own feelings and Israel's actions. I used to be a strong supporter of Israel as I learned the story of how it was founded and it's struggles to establish itself. I understood that this process included pushing aside a number of Palestinians and establishing the country in the Middle East for the Jewish people. But their experiences with the Nazis and other fascist regimes together with the East European pogroms seemed to call for a country where these people could gather and live peacefully with their neighbors. There then followed a number of wars with the surrounding Arab countries where Israel prevailed. All of that made for a great David and Goliath story and I was an avid follower and supporter However now Isreal seems to have turned into a bully. I no longer feel that way.
Contemplations
The establishment of Israel included excesses by the Jewish people moving there and by the Palestinians that wanted to keep them out. There were also such terrorist actions such asMenachem Begin's group that blew up the King David Hotel. Today we would be appalled at that as a gross action by a terrorist organization treading on the lives of innocent people. However, in the turmoil of Israel's creation and the lack of clear action and fair treatment by the British who ruled the country most of those things were easy to overlook.
Israel then consistently built a strong military and became the leading power in the Middle East fighting off multiple Arab nations in its various wars, the six day war, the yom kipper war,etcetera. It was easy to support Israel in these actions as it seemed to be a small country which it's various neighbors weretrying to overwhelm. Of course the neighbors were upset that the Palestinians that had lived there, when the Jewish people emigrated. were cast aside and wound up in camps with no future offered to them. The Israeli answer seemed to be that they should just move to an Arab country and settle. Many of them did move to Jordan and some other locations. However that still left many Palestinians uprooted from their homes in the refugee camps.
There was always a discussion going, at least in Western countries, that this should result in two countries or a dual country where the Jewish people and Palestinians could live next door to each other. However, the Israeli government was not interested in taking care of refugees camps and the Arab countries seemed to offer only minimal aid to those places. Thusthe unsatisfactory situation continued. This led to periodic wars as the Arab countries sought to reestablish Arabs in various parts of Israel. Among these was the six day war in which Israel seized control of the area west of the Jordan river which became referred to as the West Bank. This area was populated almost entirely by Palestinian peoples although it had constituted a part of ancient Israel from biblical days. The Israeli government saw its opportunity to expand and immediately began establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as in the Gaza Strip.
At a successive date, after a number of Palestinian riots and uprisings, Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip and left it to the Palestinian peoples but kept control of the Strip's finances and police structure.
In the West Bank the Israeli government began establishing multiple settlements which grew to considerable size. I believe there are now in excess of 160 Jewish settlements in the West Bank which together total something over 700,000 people.These Jewish settlements are intermixed amongst a Palestinian population of something over 2,700,000 people. The area iscontrolled by the Israeli military and police and the roads to Jewish settlements are connected to Israel and the other Israeli settlements and the Palestinians are not allowed to use those roads. In essence the Palestinian part of the West Bank is chopped up into many small areas which are regulated and controlled by the Israelis. Although the Israeli military withdrew from Gaza and supposedly left it under the control of the Palestinian government it was still dominated by the Israeli government which controlled all of the finances and police structure.
The West Bank was chopped up into many small areas with Jewish settlements going into the West Bank under the guise of the need for security. Although that was the alleged reason it appears that it was then and always has been a way to populate the areas of Judea and Samaria, ancient areas of Israel in biblical time, with Jewish settlers in place of the Palestinians. In essence the war provided the Israeli government with the means to draw those two areas of the West Bank into the country of Israel and itbegan expelling the Palestinians and allowing the settlement of Jewish sellers.
The war in Gaza has been well publicized. It began with the terrorist organization of Hamas raiding a Jewish kibbutz and killing or seizing approximately 1500 people. The response of the Netanyahu government has been to slaughter the Palestinians living in Gaza. They have been constantly bombing and shelling the area back and forth destroying schools, hospitals, residences and anything else they encountered. If the Israeli government has to kill any number of the two and a half million Palestinians that did live there they are not concerned. They are now killing Palestinians at the rate in excess of 40 to one to the numbers of Israelis that were lost in the Hamas raid. It is a totally inhumaneaction in an area which had an apartheid structure run by Israel to start with. The Israeli government does not care. They are willing to destroy the functioning of that area and the people that live there can either try to rebuild or move elsewhere. TheIsraelis have offered no plan for the future of Gaza.
The West Bank is an even more debilitating story. Although the people there are not being slaughtered in mass by a bombing and shelling campaign, they are being consciously expelled from their villages and homes by the Israeli government and settlers on the West Bank. The settlers move in, take over an area, chase the Palestinians off and establish a new settlement. In agricultural areas they take this action by a group of settlers showing up, poisoning the Palestinians wells and killing all oftheir livestock to warn them to move away so that the settlers can move in. The settlers are armed and the Palestinians have very few things with which to protect themselves. The Israeli military is located in the area but does very little to protect the Palestinians. They essentially take care of the settlers.
The actions to the present show a continual seizing of Palestinian territory and the forcing out of more and more Palestinians from their land. There is nothing legal or justified in these actions. it is pure seizure without compensation or justification. It is as blatant as the division of Poland by Russia,Germany and Austria in the 1700s. The monarchs of those threecountries simply wanted portions of their neighbor Poland and so they decided to divide Poland amongst themselves and inthree coordinated actions seized land. They took the entire country of Poland and wiped it off the map. That seems to be exactly what Israel is now in the process of trying to do with Palestine. Bi bi Netanyahu is the new monarch who is busy playing the game of defending Israel while he was really conquering his neighbors and putting them in a state of apartheid. The Western countries have protested constantly but none of them have taken any action to stop Israel from swallowing the rest of Palestine to put it in the country of Israel or leave it as an apartheid area that Israel controls.
Thoughts
The Western countries and particularly the United States could take action to stop this if they wanted to. However the Jewish vote and monetary contributions for causes is strong in the United States and influential in much of Western Europe and none of these countries have taken the steps to withhold aid,refuse to sell weapons or impose sanctions on Israel that would let it know it's isolated in the world and has to revert back to being Israel with the Palestinians as neighbors. There is much talk about a two country solution but no one is taking any steps to force the Netanyahu government to begin its implementation. Indeed Bibi Netanyahu seems to understand that the longer he can keep this conflict going the more likely he is to stay in control of the Israeli government and that is his a primary motive in his actions. It is a sad state. It is unclear to me how it will turn out, although I believe it will have a sad ending for Israel sometime in the future. Regardless, I can no longer be a supporter of the actions of the Israeli government.
Obadiah Plainman
Previously posted editions of this blog can be found at: thoughtscm.com