24A016 Palestine, etc by Jim Davies, 4/30/2024

The complexity of the mess in and around Israel is mind-boggling, and all of it stems from the action of a club of governments called the UN, in 1947; it established it as a state. The land area specified (between the river and the sea) was not quite wilderness; it had not been a state since Roman times but used to be part of the then-defunct Ottoman Empire and some of it was owned by farmers and herders who were Arabs. Other parts were owned by immigrant Jews, who had bought land from them. Then the UN carved it up, proposing two states - one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. The Jews accepted but the Arabs declined, saying they wanted it all.

As we know from this ZGBlog, states have no right to exist; so this was not just a Class One Blunder, it was all an act contrary to nature. Nearly eight decades of discord and death have resulted.

Neighbouring Arab states immediately made war against the Jewish one in 1948, but lost. They tried again in 1967, and lost again. Result: a bigger Israeli State.

Gradually, most of those neighbors got used to the idea that Israel was not going away, though two parties did not: a group calling themselves "Palestinians", and Iran. I have not figured out why Iran is so hostile. The other group is fanatic, it continued to harass Israelis violently. In 2005 they were given a strip of land in the South West called Gaza, and told to make the best of it. They didn't; they kept firing tens of thousands of rockets at random in the direction of Jewish settlements. Anti-Jewish hatred is, alas, alive and well - 79 years after the Third Reich was defeated.

Gazans elected Hamas as a kind of government, and their raison d'être is to kill Jews. That's their stated purpose in life. Like Hitler, they are therefore genocidal; Jews (as a state or as individuals) have no such wish regarding Arabs, and indeed the State consists in part of 2 million Muslim Arabs, quite well integrated. So if any genocide is going on there, it's done by Hamas, not Israel.

Then came October 7th, 2023. The horrible torture and murder of over 1,200 Israeli residents by raiding Hamas fanatics is well known. So the State of Israel retaliated. Should it have? What limits apply? Why? - I don't know; since no state has a natural right to exist, why should it have the right to defend itself? Yet the residents certainly do, and they have kind-of delegated that power to the Netanyahu government - which decided to eliminate Hamas, with targeted bombardment, tunnel-flooding etc., waging war until it surrendered or died.

Contrary to Wokist screechers worldwide, it may have done a fair job. It claims it has killed 80% of Hamas militants, but only about 0.5% of unarmed Gaza residents as "collateral damage." If that's true, it's remarkable given that the Hamas murderers have not been so helpful as to wear identifying uniforms. Again, the screechers call it a "genocide", but by definition it's obviously no such thing; if Israel had wanted to kill all Gazans it could have done so on October 8th with a couple of nuclear bombs. The IDF has taken extraordinary care to spare the lives of civilians - far more than the RAF and USAAF did when bombing Germany and Japan in WW2.

Gazans are mostly Sunni Muslim and after Israel withdrew from the Strip in 2005 supplies have flowed into Gaza and before October 2023 living standards had risen quite a lot. Even so, most of the imports were used by Hamas to make a network of tunnels to store weapons including those rockets. Who funded and supplied these smuggled goods is not clear, though Iran is an obvious suspect.

A great tragedy of Gaza is that during the 19 years the population has been self-governing, it could have developed trade with any and all partners in the Mid East and Europe (and perhaps even Israel!) but for the deep hatred everyone harbored. It could even have become an Eastern Mediterranean resort, a rival to Monaco. But it is consumed with its desire to destroy Israel and kill Jews. Hatred is costly.

Very noticeably, not one neighboring Arab country has offered refugee status to Gazan civilians (not even Iran!) and the nearest - Egypt - expressly refused to accept any. This is quite anomalous; Iran is 90% Shia Muslim rather than Sunni, and has encouraged Gazans, but offered them no shelter. Muslim "brotherhood" seems to have strict limits.

All this conflict and death results from the presence in the Palestinian area of a state, with all the paraphenalia of government, laws, controls, armies etc. If the UN had never created one, all the pre-1947 precedent says that had individual Jews moved there without trying to set one up, merely to live and trade with neighbors, no conflict would have taken place. It's another "what-if", a might-have-been, and so another tragedy resulting from the existence of governments.

But instead, those Jewish migrants supposed that having a government would give them a safe haven, a security unknown for over 18 centuries. The last 76 violent years have proved them wrong - providing yet more proof that government doesn't work.