no such thing as "unprovoked"

 

War again and eternally inevitable. Israel will never accept that brutal oppression of people whom we hate because they hate us is not peaceably viable national policy. 

"Why do they hate us so?" is the question, and is where the answers lie.

!!Surely nobody is a greater expert on the Middle East than a retired octogenarian who as a middle-grade Naval officer spent an indoctrination week at United Nations Headquarters in spring 1969, listening to the Israeli ambassador and the Palestinian representative explain their respective views and positions on the Israel - Palestine issues!! I came away observing that the issues are irreconcilable, and over Time I've grown more and more convinced of that. Each side is set life or death in concrete with no desire to compromise. It is a human problem with no practicable human solution.

From the Palestinian perspective, their cultural heritage of land and people was taken from them when the world powers created the State of Israel in 1948, as their way of making right the horrors visited upon Jews in Europe during the Third Reich. It was an unconscionable action, that cost world powers nothing, but cost the Palestinian people everything.

Their fellow Arab powers logically refused to cooperate and absorb displaced Palestinians, resulting in their permanent mass concentration into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where they have for 75 years been fighting in protest and brutalized by Israel. There are no rules, no humanity, no morality. Hatred reigns.

From the Israeli perspective, the Jewish people have been cruelly persecuted by non-Jews for millennia. They have looked to establish or re-establish a Jewish Homeland in the land that their Scriptures say their God promised to Abraham and led Joshua to conquer as their Promised Land. To them, Haaretz, the land belongs to the Jewish people and is inseparable from the Jewish people, who have never relented in their fight to claim and reclaim it. The land is theirs, God-given, is their perspective.

A problem is that Palestinians, who are not Jews, do not accept, and will never accept, that the Jewish God gave Palestinian land to the Jews. Only a Judeo-Christian half of the world accepts this. 

A fact is that White world powers were racist in deciding who would be displaced: Palestinians are Brown, and at the Time they were relatively helpless.

A problem is that nation-building through the conquest of territory, is the history of human civilizations. Wars are conducted to seize and have territory, it's the way humans are. It's how the Jewish Promised Land was possible in the first place: Joshua's partially successful conquest of the Holy Land by massacring Canaanite inhabitants and taking their land. It's how the Jews lost their Holy Land in history, Assyrian conquest, Babylonian conquest, Persian conquest, Roman conquest, Islamic conquest. Zionism has always maintained ownership, but pragmatically the land belongs to whoever occupies it at the Time, it's the way of human history. At the moment, the land belongs to Israel by disputed international proclamation, but Palestinians were displaced homeless and have been left homeless. 

Conquest is how empires were established and how empires have fallen. Australia was taken from Aboriginal Australians; New Zealand from the Maori. The United States came into existence by forcibly taking land from indigenous people, Indians, Native Americans: we are White, they are Brown, what will we do if Native Americans move to break out of their Indian Reservations and reclaim the land we took from them? We will not allow it to happen. The British Empire was created by conquest and fell to peoples reclaiming their heritage. The Roman Empire rose by conquest and fell to conquest. The Soviet Empire rose by conquest and, almost uniquely in history, fell almost bloodlessly to unthinkable sudden collapse and dissolution. 

The will of a wealthy nation is expressed through armed forces; the will of impoverished people is expressed through terrorism. 

There is no such thing as "unprovoked" and unless they are either accommodated or eliminated, a people in endless despair in unendingly oppressed and internationally enforced status-quo will eventually explode. There are no surprises in human adventure, only inevitabilities. 

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Genesis 6:5-7, The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.”  

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But we do not need God to destroy us, we can destroy ourselves.

RSF&PTL

T

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https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/8/there-is-nothing-surprising-about-hamass-operation

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/palestinians-are-showing-that-they-will-not-be-erased