Well, you could be right. I definitely have not experienced anything resembling, nor has my family. Though, my wife is Jewish. By far the largest portion of her DNA is Ashkenazi Jew at 36%. She also has 5% Levant. Logistics was an accident; I went to school to be a Professor of History, intending to teach graduate level Early Christian History. Unfortunately, life didn’t work out as planned. Though, the calming habits of research didn’t abate. I make no pretense about first hand knowledge or even family history in relation to what the Jews experienced throughout the last, say, 2000 years…I can say I am not lazy to the interest. Books are books, take them for what you will…but, within the last 2 years I’ve read The Iron Wall, The Lemon Tree, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War and Gaza by Finklestein. Right now, I’m reading two books Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism by Georffrey Dennis and The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark S Smith, going moreso in the early religious aspect.
I think I could, regardless of whether you are already in the know or not, give a 3-5 hr lecture off the top of my head from the Maccabean Rebellion to Present Day and feel okay about the value of the content. For years, I’ve struggled to understand the background enough to feel I have a grasp on the canonization of the Torah like I feel I about the various Christian cannons, but to assume I’m absent even the basic knowledge of the conflict is without merit. It’s not my primary interest, but definitely a top of the list tangent.
So, that’s the context.
To say the Palestinians are not interested in peace is not accurate. I’ll wholly admit this is a complex issue and each side bears significant blame. But, the key moments appear to be the Balfor Declaration in 1917 pushing for a national home for Jewish people laying the groundwork for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the League of Nations handing it over to Britian in 1920 and a commitment to implement the Balfour Declaration and settlement in Palestine, the creation of the Haganah in 1920 (initially to protect Jewish communities but quickly became a paramilitary organization, the Hebron Massacre of 1929 and Arab Revolt of the 1930s resulting from their land being literally taken and handed to Jewish immigrants, curfews and the British arrest of Palestinian activists…Peel Commission and White Paper of 1939, the 1947 UN Resolution 181 which was rejected by the Palestinians (though, it made the Jewish population of around 7% at the time controllers of almost 70% of the agricultural products and partitioned Palestinians into I think 67 different regions within Palestine) to the 1948 Israel War of Independence or the Nakba (if your Palestinian – The Catastrophe) in which 700,000-800,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes by the Israelis. Nasser, Suez Crisis, PLO in 1964 and the 6 Day War of 1967 (which was about 6 hours long), etc. I get the timeline. I also get how from the Romans evicted the Jews from Palestine originally in 139 BC and finally in 19 AD by Tiberius, an event celebrated previously by Bikki
From an outside perspective, a layman perspective….everyone got along quite well even pre-Crusades until someone started talking about establishing a Jewish state in Palestine in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress founded by Theodor Herzl. That made the Arab population quite concerned, and naturally so. I don’t think anyone would fault them for being concerned about their land. There were Jews there, Christians there, Muslims there at the time and everyone pretty much got along just fine. I get why the call for a Jewish state would be at the forefront with the pogroms of Russia and widespread violence. Jews experienced said violence throughout their time in Europe ….with Christian doctrine at the time that usury (charging interest on a loan) was a sin on par with violating the 10 Commandments allowing for Jews to fill the void and beginning the love/hate relationship throughout Europe through the Medieval Period, scapegoating Jews for Jesus’ demise, etc. I understand the call for a Jewish State. However, I don’t think it unreasonable the current population being agitated at the talk of giving their homeland they live in and cultivate to outsiders who are immigrating in huge numbers. Think of how Republicans act now with Latino immigrants and they aren’t even taking over lands or anything. They just work at McDonalds and at farms in GA and FL for a nickel a day. There was lots of back and forth terrorism leading up to 1948, but it doesn’t change the fact that Israelis forced out almost a million Palestinians from their homes and then gave them to Jewish settlers.
That’s the key point, here. Their land was stolen from them, flat out.
Today, they live in partitioned areas plagued by checkpoints, most not allowed to vote or hold citizenship, having zero opportunity for self-actualization or determination, Israel has been violating international law in stealing settlement land in Gaza and the West Bank, and almost zero rights. It depends on which of the 3 color coded cards you possess, but it is what it is…that’s apartheid. How can you have peace when the controlling side doesn’t even treat you as humans? How can one negotiate a peaceful settlement when the controlling side attributes no value to your life and no claim of any kind to the any of the land by which they literally stole from the population who’d been there for literally almost 2000 years beforehand? October 7th didn’t happen in a vacuum. The response by Israel is absolutely outlandish in its scale and disregard for human life. Fuck man, the Israelis are so trigger happy, they shot their own fucking hostages. We’ve seen some shit happen during wars, but bating people stuck in a car and pinned down by gunfire only to gun down the UN workers going to help the injured is just plain fucked. I do not think Israel is justified in their response and it appears to be genocide, not only to me, but to an enormous amount of the global population.
All I hear in response is God gave us that land and it’s not theirs, it’s ours. From that standpoint, there is zero justification IMO for how this played out. From a DNA perspective, Jewish immigrants from the early 1900s on have less claim to the land than the Palestinians who resided there and are now subject to an apartheid state of Israel. To claim Jews have gone through so much strife, they need a place of their own and that justifies treating the population who owned that place beforehand similar to how Jews were treated by Europeans is thought merit of any kind. I will remind you, pre-Crusades on…Jews and Arab Muslims got along rather swimmingly. European Christians and Jews and European Christians and Muslims didn’t get along at all. To then treat the Palestinians the way the Europeans treated Jews is hypocrisy at its finest.
