East Jerusalem and what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah
When Israel was founded, the Arabs who managed to say within Israel’s borders became citizens. When Israel annexed the West Bank, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula (since returned to Egypt in exchange for peaceful relations) in the 1967 war, those areas were considered occupied territories and not part of Israel proper, so the Arabs there were not given Israeli citizenship.
East Jerusalem is considered by most of the world to be occupied territory. On the face of it I find this a bit odd because East Jerusalem is where the Jewish Quarter was for at least a thousand years. It was Jewish for in excess of a millenium and it was not Jewish for nineteen years – 1948-1967 – and somehow those nineteen years outweigh a thousand
But
Israel is claiming East Jerusalem as not occupied territory but has not extended citizenship to its Arab residents. Right now there is rioting while they evict Arabs in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood for Jewish settlements and there have even been violent clashes at Al Aqsa Mosque.
If Israel wants East Jerusalem to be considered other than occupied territory, it is incumbent on the Israeli government to treat the Arab population there like they are treated within Israel’s borders and not like they are treated in occupied territories. Israel is helping to define East Jerusalem as occupied by their own actions.
I don’t agree with the term Ethnic Cleansing being applied here (which it is) because when that term was first used by Milosevic in Bosnia it was a reference to murdering the indigenous population and that is certainly not what is happening in East Jerusalem. However, ethnic cleansing or not, it’s certainly oppression.
This action is both immoral and stupid. Why it is immoral I’ve already stated. Why it’s stupid is a different question, with several answers:
- It delegitimizes East Jerusalem as part of Israel rather than as occupied territory
- Put another way, it throws away an opportunity to cement East Jerusalem as Israeli
- It endangers new relationships with Arab states
- It strengthens BDS, particularly on American campuses
- It strengthens Iran’s hand
- Internationally with other governments
- Quite possibly with the Biden administration
- On American campuses
- On the Arab street, meaning Arab governments friendly to Israel have to
watch their backs at home
This piece doesn’t mean I’m not a Zionist. What this action means is that being an American Zionist is pointlessly becoming more difficult. Israel is still rather middle of the road or better when it comes to international state-sponsored human rights behavior.
But this is still wrong and it’s still stupid.
05/10/2021 @ 2:48 pm
I did a second indentation for the last four points on the above list. I used the spacer bar rather than the tab and used a dash for the main points and an asterisk for the second indentation points. The software edited it to come out like this.
05/10/2021 @ 3:04 pm
I tried to fix this for you. I used the list function and for the indent I simply tabbed the last entries once, creating the indent. If you really liked it the other way, I can change it back.
Were you able to add the featured image or was that already in your image library?
05/10/2021 @ 11:55 pm
Thank you
05/10/2021 @ 10:21 pm
On this one I could add a featured image from outside. I’m having trouble finding my drafts, though. I’ve got something not quite published in the can.
05/12/2021 @ 1:45 pm
OK, sort of. My business badly affected, my wife’s income fine. You?
I wish it were gaslighting. Human rights norms around the world are pretty bad, particularly outside of Western Europe and Canada. How I feel about Israel’s actions are about how I feel about the Trump-following Republican Party’s actions, for some similar reasons. Our biggest trading partner is probably China and their human rights record is actually worse than Israel’s.Muslims in Israel or the West Bank are not persecuted for worshipping, but the Uyghurs (sic?) are. And the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong residents aren’t firing rockets at Han civilians. China is one example. Executing people for being suspected of drug trafficking in the Philippines is another. This is not a claim that Israel is good, it’s a claim that real bad is way more common than anyone pays attention to.
I don’t live in a place where I talk to people with close Israeli connections often. One of these days I should spring for a Ha’aretz subscription to find out what actually goes on there. I’m more concerned about the reporting than the slant. Like for example I read my Daily Kos emails and I trust them for factual reporting but not for interpretation. They can get pretty naive sometimes, like when someone is too young to know that “taken out and shot” is an old hyperbolic expression and doesn’t mean actually taken out and executed.
I’d like to find out what the Hell security forces were doing at Al Aqsa.
If anything’s going to happen to sour Americans on Israel it will probably happen if Netanyahu gets stupid enough to interfere blatantly in an American election. I don’t put it past him.
I still don’t get why the Palestinians haven’t opened conversations with the Reform Jewish movement. They could easily have done that over citizenship for Jerusalem residents.
05/14/2021 @ 11:02 am
How do you resolve a conflict that was in existence before the alphabet and calendar came into being?
05/14/2021 @ 4:57 pm
It wasn’t. The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.
I could write a book here and I’d rather avoid that. On one hand, Jews and Muslims have lived together peacefully in a lot of places for a long time, but to my knowledge never on an equal footing if one or the other ran things. Where one or the other doesn’t run things, like in the US, we generally get along fine. The Nation of Islam doesn’t fall into this category because as Muslims they are an anomaly.
As to why things are going south in Israel, that’s due to a few factors. One is the growing influence of the Religious Right (which is not the same as here) and the relative intolerance of Russian immigrants. Another is that the conflict has always been violent. A third has been that the Palestinian model for resistance is based on jihad (which is part of the second factor). I’m more conscious of Israel’s track record with Reform Judaism and of non-White Jews than most others here would be.
And a ton of it has to do with neither side really acknowledging that the other side isn’t physically going anywhere. The more intolerant populations on each side really want the other side to go away. That’s not happening no matter how much it’s wished for. Israel isn’t going anywhere under any circumstances. It’s a paranoid nuclear power. And, as I’ve said over and over and over, you don’t achieve progress over there by turning the heat up, you achieve progress by turning the heat down.
05/15/2021 @ 11:07 am
I should further say there are two separate issues in this particular period of conflict. One is the East Jerusalem evictions and the actions on the Temple Mount, where I have made clear I do not take the Israeli government’s side. The other is Gaza. If missiles are launched at Israeli civilians, Israel does what it has to. Any nation that has missiles aimed at its civilians responds militarily and there is no reason for Israel to be an exception. This has pretty much always been my stand: I’ve opposed Israeli actions in the West Bank but supported them against Hamas in Gaza. Hamas’ history of using human shields is long and disgraceful. There is no advantage to Israel for the deaths of Palestinian children in that conflict but every advantage to Hamas for those deaths. When it comes to Hamas I might as well be a right winger. If Hamas were going against any other military on Earth they would be suffering far greater casualties.
05/17/2021 @ 12:29 am
The problem is that it doesn’t keep anyone from kicking in their doors. It just gets people killed.
You’re right; Reform Jews have very little power in Israel. However, they have considerable power in the United States which, as of the latest Pew survey, unexpectedly once again has more Jews than Israel does. Reform Jewish power is concentrated among Democrats. Yes, that would be a good dialogue to open.
05/17/2021 @ 8:31 am
I’d also like to correct something else. The Reform movement is not supportive of “Greater Israel” except for East Jerusalem.
05/17/2021 @ 10:36 pm
“The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.”
Whether religious or ethnic, the disputes and conflicts in and over the area known as Palestine have been going on for centuries:
“…In 40 BCE, the Parthians exploited the turmoil in the Roman world and conquered Syria and Palestine.
The Roman senate appointed Herod I, the son of Hyrcanus’ leading partisan Antipater, king and tasked him with reconquering Palestine.
He succeeded with the help of Roman and Jewish troops and in 37 BCE his conquest of Jerusalem was followed by a massacre of its Jewish inhabitants.
Like Herod himself, his troops were non-Judean Jews who resented the Judeans.
Thus Herod became king over a client kingdom to Rome….”
——Wikipedia
“Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions. Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life. Today, the faith is spreading rapidly throughout the world.”
——Wikipedia
“The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. It originated around the 7th century from Latin script. Since then, letters have been added or removed to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters with no diacritics, digraphs, and special characters. The word alphabet is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.”
——Wikipedia
“How do you resolve a conflict that was in existence before the alphabet and calendar came into being?”
As far as I’m concerned, my question is rhetorically valid and accurate re the temporal references.
05/17/2021 @ 10:51 pm
“It will be a hoot making you guys call me Dr. Amy.”
I hope you know that you won’t have to make me acknowledge your achievement and earned status…
However, there are people here who will take every opportunity to attempt to disparage and degrade your accomplishments, scholarship and your intelligence.
Glad to know that you’re well and in high spirits.
It’s good to have you back, even if it’s for a short while…
I’m looking forward to be able to refer to you as Dr. Amy…
Good luck with the oral defense of your dissertation. (Do they still require that where you’re enrolled?)
Stay well…
05/17/2021 @ 11:10 pm
Upper case Roman lettering (not to mention the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic alphabets) way predate Islam.
Amy,
The fact that the Palestinians chose Jerusalem as their capital decades ago means basically nothing. Anyone could have chosen Jerusalem, that doesn’t give them rights to it. Palestinians have never been a national actor and have only recently been considered a people at all. In the 1940’s, if you saw the term Palestinian in a newspaper, they meant Jews. If anyone has legal rights to any of the territory it’s Jordan.
In terms of my answering my own question, no,actually. You could figure that out by reading the post. Yes, I believe that East Jerusalem is and should be part of Israel, but I also believe the Arab residents of Jerusalem should be Israeli citizens by virtue of living in Israel proper, which would make confiscating their homes illegal under Israeli law. In fact, the post is about that. Kind of hard to miss.
Ok when Israel kills civilians? Where? In Jerusalem, as thuggish as they were they used rubber bullets. If you launch rockets at civilians all bets are off. I’m not at all inclined to criticize Israel for retaliating. If any other nation on Earth were presented with rockets aimed at their civilians, they’d kill way more civilians than Israel has.
I think the focus of the American government is in the wrong place. Israel’s actions in Gaza were provoked, their actions in East Jerusalem were not. The closest Israel comes to apartheid is actually in East Jerusalem. They are mistreating an ethnic/religious group who are long-term residents of land they claim not for military reasons but as theirs. They have claimed it as theirs, not part of negotiations, for over half a century, and they are treating long-term residents of what they blatantly define as their country in a substandard manner. The West Bank has been negotiated over the years, though never successfully, and by both sides. East Jerusalem has had different status. The fact that the Wall was there and the fact that Jews lived there for 981 out of the past thousand years and the fact that when Israel didn’t control the area no Jews (not Israelis, Jews from anywhere) were allowed to visit our most holy site means that the Israelis consider East Jerusalem very differently than they consider the West Bank – or perhaps I should say that Israeli Jews differ a lot on their opinions about the West Bank but not about East Jerusalem. The world didn’t force the Jordanians to allow Jews to visit the Wall, and the loss of East Jerusalem is the consequence. But that means that Arab long-term residents of East Jerusalem should be treated like Arab long-term residents of the rest of Israel proper.
Amazing how people don’t think about consequences. Also how in some ways Hamas has gotten the Israelis off the hook because now they can feel like victims instead of like oppressors, which is what they are in East Jerusalem. So now everyone’s looking at Gaza. Great.
05/17/2021 @ 11:58 pm
“The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.”
Whether religious or ethnic, the disputes and conflicts in and over the area known as Palestine have been going on for centuries.
You keep wanting to hang my quarry on the ‘religious’ angle.
I never said or suggested that my reference to conflicts in the region were religous in nature or orientation.
The history is clear, there have been conflicts and conflagrations between Jews and non-Jews for thousands of years.
As you have put it the conflicts may have been ethnic in nature or origin but they were conflicts nonetheless.
For purposes of my question, you would do well to leave religion out of the conversation.
I didn’t bring it in and there is no reason for you to have done so…
05/18/2021 @ 5:52 am
CORRECTIONS!
You keep wanting to hang my query on the ‘religious’ angle.
The history is clear, there have been conflicts and conflagrations between Jews and non-Jews in that region for thousands of years.
05/18/2021 @ 8:11 am
Sure there have. But the Palestinians aren’t necessarily the descendants of previous combatants. Most conquering powers haven’t been from the neighborhood. Babylonians to a certain extent, same with Assyrians, come close. Persians don’t, though the Persians conquered the Babylonians, not the Jews. Greeks weren’t, though the Greeks the Jews eventually rebelled against (successfully) were actually sort of Hellenized Assyrian proxies. Romans weren’t. That’s the last Jewish conflict with rulers. During the Crusades, the local Jews living in what is now Israel fought alongside the Muslims against the invading Christians. Jews didn’t fight the Turks, who weren’t from the neighborhood either. So really there isn’t a long history of Jews fighting Arabs, Muslims, whatever grouping you want to use.
05/18/2021 @ 8:14 am
Well, the last Jewish conflict with rulers prior to the British.
05/18/2021 @ 11:04 am
“But the Palestinians aren’t necessarily the descendants of previous combatants.”
That may be so.
However, some. Jews who are indigenous to the region can trace their heritage back through the centuries to the time if the nomadic tribes of Israel.
It is the Jewish/Hebrew people of the “promised land” who have been in conflict with somebody over the same piece of real estate since the times of the Old Testament and beyond.
05/18/2021 @ 1:24 pm
Sure. It’s historically a strategic piece of land so a lot of people have wanted it. Who has wanted it has varied. So yes, it’s been contested land on and off pretty much forever. But the current conflict is not ancient. And religion has a lot to do with it. From a genetic standpoint, the Palestinians and Jews are more closely related to each other than either are to the Iranians, and yet the Iranians are a serious player in the conflict, which is entirely out of religious identification. And the last time that land was fought over for itself as opposed to being part of a larger package, it was a religious conflict known as the Crusades. And the conflict has become more religious recently as the secular Jews who were behind Zionism and the eventual foundation of Israel find themselves with a growing ultra-Orthodox population who have religious interest in the West Bank. This is in part because from a religious standpoint Israel was founded a bit backward. The ancient core of Jewish tribal land between three and four thousand years ago (really twice during that period) wasn’t the coast but the West Bank. That’s a primary reason the ancient capital wasn’t coastal but was Jerusalem, which is inland.
05/18/2021 @ 3:31 pm
“The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.”
“The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.”
Aren’t you being somewhat self-contradictory here?
Seems to me that the place rightfully belongs to the people (Palestinians?) who occupied the land before it was stolen (by the UN?) from them and ceded to the Jewish Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
“So no, I don’t take any shit the UN deals out as legitimate international law.”
Does this include UN Resolution 181 which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, with the full backing and support if the United States?
Please explain and clarify these apparent rhetorical contradictions.
Then, take another run at my question:
“How do you resolve a conflict that was in existence before the alphabet and calendar came into being?”
05/17/2021 @ 11:23 pm
Amy,
What will your doctorate be in and what kind of doctorate will it be?
Getting that one’s a long road. My wife’s a professor who’s run doctoral programs before. I know what’s involved.
05/18/2021 @ 5:56 am
“What will your doctorate be in and what kind of doctorate will it be?”
Yes Amy…
Inquiring minds would like to know.
05/18/2021 @ 2:09 pm
Amy,
That I think it’s OK for the Israelis to abuse, oppress, torture, and terrorize the Palestinians is pure bullshit.
As far as the UN is concerned, there have been more anti-Israel resolutions from there than anti any other member state, by a huge margin, no matter what any other state does. There is also only one state in the UN that is not allowed into the rotation for a seat on the Security Council. So no, I don’t take any shit the UN deals out as legitimate international law. If they treated, say, Sicily like that, you’d feel the same way.
The Palestinians are not historically a people and a whole lot of people who identify as Palestinian don’t have long-term (meaning more than two generations or so) roots in Palestine, including Yassir Arafat who was not born there. When Jews arrived in numbers and started to make agriculture work in what was essentially desert, that created jobs (and allowed the land to support a much larger population), and that meant a lot of people coming from Syria for work, all of whom are now Palestinians. That kid from Brooklyn had ancestors in Israel for over a thousand years and no other ancestral homeland. That ancestry is recognized pretty much universally, including in the Qur’an.
That being said, I’m still in favor of two states because the fact on the ground is that Palestine is where these people live, they have no desire to leave, and they have no ability to leave. Each side is stuck with the other, like it or not. Anyone from either side – and there are plenty on both sides – who doesn’t acknowledge this is engaging in wishful thinking, typically wishful thinking with bloody consequences.
The Palestinians aren’t getting the Jews out of Israel. The Israelis are not getting the Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza. Now what?
I’ve asked the same question for years. How do we get there from here? I’ve also attempted to answer it, but no one has a reason to listen to me. The one thing I’m sure of is that sending missiles out of Gaza won’t do it; in fact, sending missiles out of Gaza is one of the best ways to prevent it. The result will be a lot of people killed, including presumably a lot of Palestinian kids, with zero to show for it except the visceral satisfaction of having struck a blow. But it’s a token blow and a damned high price to pay for making it.
I am not advocating doing nothing. I’ll probably be accused of that, but I’m not advocating it. The question is: What is most likely to move the chains? Who is vulnerable to what? What enables people to get away with what they get away with?
Think of Trump for a minute. How Trump was successful is that whenever he did anything outrageous he did something else outrageous that would take the first thing out of the news cycle. Hamas essentially just did that for the Israeli government by taking attention away from Jerusalem and planting it squarely on Gaza.
Now, take American liberals, Jewish or not, who are sympathetic to Israel’s existence. What’s going to get their thinking against Israel: Israel defending themselves against missiles striking and killing civilians or Israel refusing citizenship to Arabs who live within what they view as their actual borders?
05/18/2021 @ 3:40 pm
CORRECTIIN!!!
“The alphabet predates Islam. And this is more an ethnic than a religious dispute to begin with.”
“But the current conflict is not ancient. And religion has a lot to do with it.”
Aren’t you being somewhat self-contradictory here?
Seems to me that the place rightfully belongs to the people (Palestinians?) who occupied the land before it was stolen (by the UN?) from them and ceded to the Jewish Zionists who advocated the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
“So no, I don’t take any shit the UN deals out as legitimate international law.”
Does this include UN Resolution 181, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, with the full backing and support if the United States?
Please explain and clarify these apparent rhetorical contradictions…
Then take another run at my question:
“How do you resolve a conflict that was in existence before the alphabet and calendar came into being?”
YOU MAY DELETE THE PREVIOUS ERRONEOUS COMMENT.
05/18/2021 @ 3:42 pm
NOT MY DAY AT THE KEYBOARD:
CORRECTION!!!
05/19/2021 @ 12:18 am
I’ll start by taking another run at your question by replying, again, that this particular conflict, between these two parties, is not ancient. Between Jews and others who wanted the territory is ancient, but the nature of this one is different. And yes, religion does have a lot to do with it. If a Muslim people returning to their ancient homeland was the issue, we wouldn’t have seen anything like this. How that would probably have gone down is consulting the Qur’an, seeing that it identifies the land with a particular people (which it does, Jews) and either the verdict would have been unanimous or split, possibly in a sectarian way like Shia and Sunni, but with a lot of Arab support to whomever was returning.
Up until fairly late in the Zionist venture, when fighting started, the land wasn’t stolen or conquered. The people who lived in that particular Ottoman Empire sparsely populated backwater were primarily tenants. The land was owned by Turkish landlords. And Zionism began before the British took Palestine from the Turks in WWI. How Jews got the land until pretty late was by purchasing it. They were basically well on their way to buying a country. Actually, not necessarily even a country but a homeland because I don’t think anyone around the time of the Balfour Declaration thought that they wouldn’t remain part of the British Empire.
Why the land wasn’t so sparsely populated by 1948 was because of Jewish immigration which didn’t only increase the Jewish population and also because the Jewish immigrants (not the pre-Zionist Jews in Palestine, who were not a non-existent population and many of whom lived in the Jewish Quarter in East Jerusalem) managed to develop agriculture which allowed for growing crops in the desert. That meant the land would support more people. With Jewish immigration and new agriculture came jobs, and with that came Arab immigration from Syria.
After WWII, the UN tried to divide Palestine between Muslim and Jewish areas/nations. The Jewish area designated by the UN was smaller than the pre-1948 borders which were decided by combat in 1948. The Jews immediately accepted. The Arabs refused. War broke out and Jews, whom the Arabs expected to force into the Mediterranean, ended up with a bigger country than they would have settled for if they were offered peace.
How can I reconcile the UN and the UN? The same way we can endorse the party of Lincoln without endorsing the party of Trump. In 1948 the UN was not in the habit of picking one nation for almost all its condemnation based on who that nation pissed off rather than on any objective behavioral criteria. You of all people should be able to get the concept of law unequally applied. Regardless of what you think of Israeli behavior (or what I think of it, as there’s a lot I don’t approve of, as I’ve made clear for eleven years of blogging), there is no question that their condemnation at the hands of the UN is way, way out of proportion to their actions as compared to the actions of the rest of the UN membership.
Where do we live right now? In the US. Like the rest of the Western Hemisphere, it was taken by outsiders who had no pre-existing presence or prior residence. Like the rest of the Western Hemisphere with the possible (and probably faulty) purchase of Manhattan Island, none of it was bought and instead it was all conquered. Treatment by the invaders of pre-existing residents completely eclipses Jewish treatment of pre-existing residents in Palestine (or, in some cases, other pre-existing residents). Our entire hemisphere’s national existence is substantially less legitimate than Israel’s. How much UN involvement have you seen in the treatment of First Nations? Have you seen UN condemnation of Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs? They get persecuted for Muslim worship. None of which excuses Israel, which is what I know I”m going to be accused of, but that isn’t my point; my point is about the UN, not Israel. I’m not looking to give Israel a pass because they’re Israel, but I’m not about to support the policy that only Israel shouldn’t be given a pass because they’re Israel.
05/20/2021 @ 10:30 am
“I’m not about to support the policy that only Israel shouldn’t be given a pass because they’re Israel.”
If it weren’t for the UN and the US, there would be no Israel.
The idea that Israel is being treated as unjustly by the UN as black people are treated unjustly by the police is disingenuous at best.
There’s a universe of difference between being subjected to profiling, selective enforcement, and double standards as black people are in this country and being held to higher standards and lofty expectations as might be said of Israel and its relationship with the UN.
The UN was established in 1945 Three years later the UN created Israel.
The UN was to be the paragon and embodiment of international peaceful coexistence and cooperation.
When Israel was brought into existence the expectation of many was that Israel would be a model of democratic sovereignty in the region and an example for the rest of the world to emulate.
Instead, Israel has been anything but exemplary.
It has yet to fulfill all of the conditions for statehood articulated by the UN at its inception.
Not the least of which is the adoption of a viable democratic constitution.
In my view, Israel has adopted the attitude of a spoiled brat gone rogue in defiance of the paradigm upon which Israeli sovereignty rests…
I’m not competent or qualified to speak definitively or authoritatively on the matter, however, that’s what it looks like to me.
05/20/2021 @ 3:36 pm
The UN didn’t create Israel, at least not successfully. Israel had to fight a war, declare independence, and be recognized by various nations, including the US and the USSR. The US was not a military supporter of Israel until after the 1967 war. Israel won that air war with French Mirages.
Israel is a country that at times (particularly lately) acts like a spoiled child but is subjected to selective enforcement and double standards by the UN and has been for years. The number of anti-Israel resolutions exceeds the number of resolutions criticizing all other member states combined, and Israel is the only member that cannot serve in the rotating Security Council seat. Neither of these is remotely justified by Israel’s human rights record when compared to those of the rest of the member states. Hell, within the last seven years that Syria has had a civil war, far more Palestinians have been killed in Syria than by Israel, and no one even bothers to be aware of it, nor does the Palestinian Authority complain about it.
There are no circumstances under which Gaza under Hamas will not attack Israel given the opportunity. The only offer to come out of Hamas in recent years is a temporary moratorium on not attacking Israel. The only option Israel has for the safety of its citizens, regardless of the power imbalance, is to compromise the ability of Hamas to kill Israeli civilians as much as possible. That there are going to be deaths when they do that is inevitable, so they do what they can to avoid killing civilians. From a military standpoint, Israel’s actions in Gaza have involved more efforts to keep civilians in the combat zone (which has to be where civilians are because of where Hamas operates from) from being killed than any military in Earth’s history has made to avoid killing civilians.
I blame Israel for a lot, just not the same things. About most of what happens in the West Bank or East Jerusalem I agree with Amy. Not all of it, but most of it. I agree with her about the evictions in East Jerusalem and at this point, not having researched it but intrinsically having problems with the idea, I agree with her about Al Aqsa.
And as I type I find that they’ve just announced a cease-fire.
Now let’s see what happens in Jerusalem.
05/20/2021 @ 4:27 pm
US Department of State
Office of the Historian
Creation of Israel, 1948
“On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day.
Although the United States supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favored the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had assured the Arabs in 1945 that the United States would not intervene without consulting both the Jews and the Arabs in that region. The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May 1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region. Great Britain wanted to preserve good relations with the Arabs to protect its vital political and economic interests in Palestine.
Soon after President Truman took office, he appointed several experts to study the Palestinian issue. In the summer of 1946, Truman established a special cabinet committee under the chairmanship of Dr. Henry F. Grady, an Assistant Secretary of State, who entered into negotiations with a parallel British committee to discuss the future of Palestine. In May 1946, Truman announced his approval of a recommendation to admit 100,000 displaced persons into Palestine and in October publicly declared his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Throughout 1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine examined the Palestinian question and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control administered by the United Nations.
Although the United States backed Resolution 181, the U.S. Department of State recommended the creation of a United Nations trusteeship with limits on Jewish immigration and a division of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab provinces but not states. The State Department, concerned about the possibility of an increasing Soviet role in the Arab world and the potential for restriction by Arab oil producing nations of oil supplies to the United States, advised against U.S. intervention on behalf of the Jews. Later, as the date for British departure from Palestine drew near, the Department of State grew concerned about the possibility of an all-out war in Palestine as Arab states threatened to attack almost as soon as the UN passed the partition resolution.
Despite growing conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews and despite the Department of State’s endorsement of a trusteeship, Truman ultimately decided to recognize the state Israel.”
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel
Many, if not most, historians and scholars would agree that UN Resolution 181 created the state of Israel. I’ll go with that assertion.
Again there would be no Israel without the UN and the United States….
BTW
Can you say “oil”.
05/19/2021 @ 1:42 pm
The plot has now thickened. Hamas did the Israeli military a serious favor by launching those missiles. It turns out that the Israeli military has a list of Hamas’ military infrastructure they’d like to destroy, particularly tunnels, but they had no access without starting aggression. Hamas did it for them, giving them an excuse to enter Gaza. Israel wants to stay in Gaza long enough to destroy as much of the infrastructure as possible. The international outcry is over deaths, of which the number I keep hearing is approximately 219. So now the Israelis are trying to destroy infrastructure without killing civilians – which they were trying to do all along given how tiny a number 219 is for this many days of war – while Hamas is in desperate need of dead civilians, preferably kids. In the 2014 war, estimates of Palestinian deaths in Gaza range from about 2100 to about 2300. That was over 20 days. So far this conflict has been about 10 days – half as long and 1/10 the deaths.
What happens next is a good guess in part because the violence has spread to elsewhere. If the Israelis gave citizenship to Arab Jerusalem residents most of this outside of Gaza would go away. Unfortunately I think they’re too stupid and bullheaded to do that.
05/20/2021 @ 9:04 am
Please, keep trying!
Alan can’t afford to lose a valuable contributor because of technical difficulties….
05/21/2021 @ 5:55 pm
Amy,
It is wrong for me to trivialize deaths.
If attacking Gaza is a violation of international law, so is launching missiles at civilian populations. Are you telling me that Hamas launched in response to killings? Can you name anywhere that wouldn’t respond militarily to missiles launch at its civilians under any circumstances?
You are more familiar with what happened on the ground before the fighting than I am.
Sure I think that Hamas is immoral, and I think that Israel is becoming more and more immoral. Actually, I think so do you. But my point is not really about Hamas’ morality. It’s more about stimulus/response. I could call them stupid but in reality in one respect they aren’t:
This action will gain them political points among the Palestinian population of the West Bank. More than anything, this is an electoral move. But whatever it is, the response to it is absolutely inevitable.
But from an international standpoint it’s a distraction. The Israelis have no moral leg to stand on in terms of what they’re doing in Jerusalem. But they do in Gaza because they can’t have missiles hit civilian areas without trying to eliminate the ability of Hamas to launch them. No one at home will permit it. So now the argument is over Gaza. It’s not an argument that can be won. If missiles are launched from Gaza at Israeli civilians, the IDF will respond, and nothing will stop that. No international pressure, nothing. Even if Iran develops nukes and uses them, they can’t use them without killing millions of Palestinians. And if they did that they would be committing suicide. Israel has a nuclear triad.
The truth about the UN is that the anti-Israel resolutions are likely to diminish now because most of them have been introduced by the Arab world and the Arab nations are growing more accepting of Israel, which may in the long run help settle Palestinian statehood. The reason Israel can’t get access to the rotating seat on the Security Council is that that decision isn’t determined by the whole membership, it’s divided into regions, and the other states in Israel’s region have voted to keep them out. So the UN may start normalizing when it comes to Israel. When I say that the UN has treated Israel with a double standard, I am not necessarily saying that the UN should criticize Israel less as opposed to criticizing other violators more. In fact, criticizing others more would be a better bet. But singling out one country with a world full of violators isn’t acceptable. It means the UN has very little moral authority with Israel or with any country that supports Israel when it comes to Israel, and that list is growing rather than shrinking because of international trade and technology.
But my overall point is the point I made in the post. Israel is doing something terrible in East Jerusalem and the world isn’t paying attention to East Jerusalem at the moment because Hamas has switched the focus to Gaza. Everyone’s worried about Gaza. The arguments in Congress are all about whether Israel has a right to defend itself or bomb a high-rise or continue fighting. What they are not about is Israel treating a minority in a seriously substandard manner within what it considers its national borders. This isn’t an occupation issue, it’s a civil rights issue. You’re talking to me about Al Aqsa, at least in the other thread. I agree about Al Aqsa. I agree about what it does to Israeli moral authority. It’s why I wrote this post.
But in writing this post I did not write it in the way you would. Our approaches are very different. You write about right and wrong while I write about consequences. If I’m talking to someone I disagree with politically, and this is true of all my political writing, I’m most likely to write it in terms of what is self-defeating for their gaining what they ostensibly want. I’m not interested in having an argument with someone Jewish about how much they view Palestinians as enemies, I’m interested in telling them that regardless of what they believe, the only thing they can possibly accomplish that’s positive is figuring out how to live with a population they can’t eliminate or get to leave. The population is there. That’s a fact. They can’t do anything about the fact that the population is there. That’s also a fact. Now what? Do you think that with 20% of the Israeli citizenry being Palestinian you can treat the residents of East Jerusalem like crap because they’re Palestinian? Do you think you can do that while improving relations with nations who are also Arab? Get real. I may not be able to persuade you that your stand is immoral but I have a decent chance of persuading you that your stand is stupid. (The “you” is generic.)
By the way, the same is true of Hamas: The Israelis are there, they aren’t dying and they aren’t leaving. You can’t physically get them to do either. That is a fact. If you launch missiles at civilians you will trigger bombings and incursions that you can’t stop. And then the fighting will stop and the Israelis will still be there and 219 people or whatever the count is will be dead and you’ll be out of 60 miles of tunnels or whatever the IDF destroyed. There’s death, there’s destruction, and the chains don’t move. It doesn’t matter what I think of the morality of this. Yes, Hamas could eventually get control of the West Bank, but the chains won’t move there either. It was one thing when you might have been able to isolate the Israelis but that is less and less possible, in part because of trade relations and in part because a lot of Israel’s neighboring states are scared to death of Iran and view Israel, rightly, as an ally. Why are they afraid of Iran? Because Iran wants to replace their governments with Iranian-style theocracies. Who else in the area wants to replace their governments with Iranian-style theocracies? The Muslim Brotherhood. Who is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood? Hamas. If Hamas gains power in the West Bank, the Palestinians will get less Arab support than they get now. For their own survival, area governments will support Israel, their ally, over Hamas, the group that would like to replace their governments.
I used to have screaming fights with Markinjapan about Israel and then one day I asked him what he’d like to see ideally as the ultimate resolution. It was barely different from what I’d like to see. That was unexpected but telling.
05/22/2021 @ 6:30 pm
There’s another element to understanding what’s going on over there. There is I think a mentality among the Palestinians who want to drive the Jews out (or most of the Jews, depends who you ask) that they are analogous to the North Vietnamese during the late sixties and early seventies: If our resources get bombed, we’ll rebuild them, and we’ll do so again and again and again until the Americans get tired of this and go home. Which is what happened. But the Israelis of 2021 are nothing like the Americans of 1972, nor will they ever be. They’re at least as fanatical about the land and likely to get more so, because birth rates are highest among the highly religious and in addition to the reasons the secular Jews aren’t leaving they have the additional motivation of viewing the land as given to them by God. This will not end with any large population being evicted, regardless of how many kids are killed in the attempt.
05/22/2021 @ 11:30 pm
Amy,
I didn’t make a generalization. I said
“I think there is a mentality among the Palestinians who want to drive the Jews out” as opposed to “I think there is a mentality among the Palestinians.” I was quite clear that I was referring to those who want to drive the Jews out and only those who want to drive the Jews out. I do not believe for an instant that all the Palestinians want the Jews out. If I believed that I wouldn’t continuously say that Israel keeps blowing it in the West Bank, which I have been saying for as long as I’ve blogged, and you met me pretty early in my blogging history, I believe in a conversation with a guy by the name of Jerusalem Mike.
As to the Jews who really believe that God gave us the land, that’s an observation, not a defense. The point I’m making is that those Palestinians who want to drive the Jews out and have the mentality similar to that of the 1960’s North Vietnamese are kidding themselves. It won’t work. It doesn’t matter whether I want it to work or you want it to work. It simply won’t. That’s not who the actors are. Not just the religious actors either; it’s just that the religious actors have an extra dimension to how important staying in Israel is to them.
As to the Palestinians’ right to exist, I have made that point over and over and over. No one is going anywhere. No one is going to kill the other population or evict the other population. Recognize that and deal with it. They are going to exist and they are going to exist where they are.
You and I disagree a lot about Gaza. Far less about the West Bank. I keep repeating that the Israelis have been mishandling the West Bank. They’ve done a great job of shoring up Hamas support there. There is no reason at all to be humiliating and disrespectful while enforcing anything. It gets the Israelis nowhere, it sabotages their own goals, and it’s immoral. Showing blatant enforcement bias toward settlers is no different than White cops in Kenosha welcoming White vigilantes carrying rifles.
I don’t think either side really understands the buttons they’re pushing of the other. Israelis live in a respect-rich environment, not that they’re respectful toward each other but that no one anywhere thinks they’re incapable. They also devote nearly zero energy to manners/politeness. Palestinians do not live in a respect-rich environment and so they value the scarce commodity. Casually humiliating guys in a respect-poor environment in front of their wives and kids is going to generate hatred. That’s inevitable. It’s why dissing is dangerous in some American neighborhoods – because you don’t play games with a scarce commodity. But you have to take the trouble to figure out that it’s scarce. Jews, on the other hand, have lived for centuries without safety. I don’t mean safety from arrests, I mean safety from having your neighborhood murdered. Palestinians in Palestine/Israel experienced that once, to my knowledge, in Deir Yassin. But it’s not a fear that they live with in the West Bank or in Gaza. I’m not making a point about comparative persecution, I’m making a point about pushing buttons. A big Israeli button is safety. In a country full of Holocaust survivors’ kids and the children of people who experienced persecution in other Middle Eastern countries, Africa, the Soviet Union, they worry about safety a lot. Menachem Begin traded the Sinai Peninsula for safety. Jews spent two thousand years, actually a bit more than that, not being able to do much when their safety was threatened. But now they’re armed to the teeth. Threaten them and they’ll grab their Uzis and scream Never Again. Hamas has a threat to Israel in its charter. They literally exist to push that button. The time they got the biggest reaction pushing that button wasn’t sending missiles into Israel, it was the revelation about the High Holy Days kidnapping plot with the tunnels. That revelation by itself effectively eliminated the Israeli Left as a viable political force at the time. Israel goes nuts when hostages are taken. When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage, while he was in captivity there was a picture of him on the bimah (front stage platform area) of my Temple in North Carolina. The obsession with him was big enough to cross the Atlantic. The threat of lots of hostages being taken turned a whole lot of more or less centrist Israelis hard line.
As long as those two buttons keep getting pushed, neither side is going to feel much like negotiating seriously.
I’m not placing blame here. I’m not playing favorites with this statement. I am assessing the situation. This is what is likely to happen or not happen, this is why. This is what triggers that reaction, this is why.
05/25/2021 @ 10:09 am
My former rabbi from NC just published something on Facebook. I was completely unaware of this when I brought up the Vietnam analogy, which was just obvious to me:
“…..a conversation that took place between two retired Israeli generals and Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of the Vietnamese Communists’ victories over the Japanese, French, and Americans.
“When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me “You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?”
“The generals were intrigues. ‘And what do you tell them?’
“‘I tell them,’ Giap replied, ‘that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.’”
So I am apparently not alone in my thinking. However, I also make the same point in the opposite direction.
06/04/2021 @ 1:58 am
It finally occurred to me that there’s a good way to illustrate what Israel is reacting to in Gaza. As I think I’ve said in the comments, here or elsewhere recently, there are apps tracking missiles into Israel out of Gaza. There are enough apps that they have online reviews, the phenomenon of the missiles has been that frequent over time. So I downloaded one.There are records of the warnings, warning after warning, each one with a time stamp and a destination. Look at that list and understand that every one of them represents an attempted murder of civilians, keeping in mind that the first ones were launched without an immediate military provocation in Gaza.