Peter, the reason why your perspective on this conflict is completely wrong is because you do not understand Islamic doctrine. If you had even a basic level of understanding of islam and jihad, you would know that the hatred "palestianian" Muslims feel towards Jews and Israel and their efforts to conquer Israel and murder Jewish people is rooted in Islamic doctrine. Islam calls on Muslims to wage war against Jews, Christians, and non Muslims until Islam is dominant. It is literally throughout the Quran and part of all of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence. The anti semitism and hatred of Israel that pervades the Muslim world is rooted in Islamic doctrine, it is not due Israel "oppression." Take the time to learn about Islam before writing about this topic please.
You have it backwards JK. “Muslims efforts to conquer Israel.” Really.
Palestine has been conquered by Israel. If Muslims feel any hatred towards Israeli Jews, it is because they have been under a brutal military occupation of ethnic cleansing, killings and dispossession since 1967. Take the time to learn about the facts on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza the open prison.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Let me guess, you think Islam is a "religion of peace?" This is an islamic jihad against the Jewish people with the ultimate goal of establishing sharia law. It did not start in 1968 or the 1940's. It started 1400 years ago when mohammad, the prophet in islam and considered the perfect man, waged war against neighboring jewish tribes. There was no country of "palestine" that was then conquered by Israel. The reason why israel has expanded since its founding is because then surrounding muslim countries have tried on SEVERAL ocassion to destroy israel because their fucked up religion mandates that they fight until islam is supreme. if you do not understand islamic doctrine or islamic history, you have no idea what is actually driving this conflict.
The story of how Political Zionism dealt with the Palestinian people is not ancient history. Rather, it sets the stage for what is happening in Palestine today and it helps us to better understand both Israel’s systematic efforts to dispossess the Palestinian people of their land and rights. Palestinians remain invisible-their personal stories ignored-or they were objectified and seen merely as a problem to be solved in order to ensure Israel’s security.
take the time to learn about islam and hearing different arguments and perspectives before forming your opinion about this topic. And be open to the possibility that what you think you know is completely wrong and that the people you have been listening to about this topic, i.e. peter beinart, have no idea what they are talking about.
We don’t have to go back 1400 years to understand what is driving this, as you call it, conflict. We just have to go back 78 years, when the new state of Israel ethically cleansed about 750,000 Palestinians burning their villages behind them. In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting millions of Palestinians to a brutal military occupation that continues to this day.
Religion has nothing at all to do with this conflict. Simply put Israel wants all of the land of Palestine with as few Palestinians living there.
you are completely wrong. of course you think that religion has nothing to do with the conflict because you know absolutely nothing about islam. This is from the Hamas charter:
"The Islamic Resistance Movement: The Movement's programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man. It resorts to it for judgement in all its conduct, and it is inspired by it for guidance of its steps."
Hamas, which controls Gaza, literally says that their movement is based completely off of islamic doctrine. But yet you say it has nothing to do with religion. sound like you really know what you are talking about sean!
That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas four times — in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021-killing around 2,750 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
Joel--I've spent some time laying out the argument for why Israel-Palestine should be a binational state for all its citizens based on leqal equality. You can read that here. https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine. As for the suggestion that I take that position because it's more lucrative and a great career path, I can assure you that I'd be speaking at many more college campuses (not to mention synagogues and Jewish institutions) were I a defender of Israel's policies.
LOL. Jews who like Israel are a dime a dozen, but Jews who are willing to serve as tokens for a genocidal antisemitic movement like Palestinian nationalism are worth their weight in gold. Jews like Norman Finkelstein and Miko Peled have turned that grift into a career. You don't seriously expect us to believe you when you say that it would be more lucrative to be pro Israel do you Peter?
Yeah Jews don’t like people who “stand in solidarity” with murderers of Jewish children. It’s not cancel culture it’s consequence culture. Maybe you can get in the professional Israel hating grift?
I stand in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians, but with the government of neither (currently). There is grassroots work being done in Eretz by both Jews and Palestinians that I support. My ideology is binationalism, not Zionism or Anti-Zionism. I believe in one equal rights state that works for both peoples, and there are a number of ways to potentially achieve that, but equality and human rights has to be the foundation.
Jews don’t like people who want to deprive them of their rights no matter what language they cloak their intentions. Jews don’t trust the Palestinians to rule them in equality and if you knew anything about the situation you wouldn’t either: read a book sometime.
Granting equal rights to the Palestinians both within Israel and in the Territories doesn’t take them away from Israeli Jews. That isn’t how equality works. It’s not a pie, where when I eat more, you get less. The question of sovereignty is an important one. Ideally, in a democracy the people are sovereign- all of the people. However in this case, both peoples have a strong nationalist commitment. Perhaps a federation or a consociational system like Belgium would work in a way the 2SS cannot.
Neither Israel nor the oPT are full democracies at the present time. You could say that’s the problem! We need full democracy, real democracy, from the river to the sea, in however many states there are. That’s what I advocate.
Peter, as always I appreciate your thoughtful, sincere, and generative post. I'm sad that some of the replies to your comments smack of smug intolerance and defensiveness. I'm grateful for you work and your willingness to express vulnerability in the face of the unjust attacks lobbed at you. You are a real mensch.
Oh, snarky posts make you sad? Do you know what makes me sad? Murdered Jews on the streets of Jerusalem and POSs like Sean defending their murders. Any thoughts on that, Ged?
Beinart, that voice speaking to you inside is your conscience. Like you said, you are a Jew. You are a member of the Jewish people. Feeling deep in your soul, in your DNA, that you are member of a family, and families stick together and help each other. In your soul, you know, that Israelis are not oppressive apartheid racists. In your soul you know they are working as hard as they can stop murderous terrorists from killing them. It's easy to ignore your conscience when Israelis are successful at stopping the terrorists. now, though, it's almost impossible.
And that bad feeling you've been experiencing? It's called cognitive dissonance. That's wherein new information (like Palestine's evil being shown to the world yet again) conflicts with your beliefs; in this case that Palestine is a virtuous eternal victim that never does anything wrong. If you want to alleviate that cognitive dissonance, wake up and join the rest of us the real world.
If I was as ignorant and depraved as you I wouldn’t try and argue with me either. But if you’re looking for someone with no soul, how about the guy who murdered 7 innocent people for the crime of not being Arab?
Gideon Levy writes every week in the Haaretz Israeli newspaper about the murder of Palestinians by the IOF. Its very obvious to me that you only care about Jewish lives. I care about all human life, Jewish, Palestinian, black or white, no matter the colour of a person's skin or their religious affiliation.
Peter, I have bad news for you. You ARE the wicked son, and you have been for most of your career. You have innumerable columns in this Substack and elsewhere about how Jews don't have the same rights as other peoples and you have repeatedly turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering while constantly swallowing the Palestinian narrative.
I'm glad that you're finally starting to wake up to the truth. It's disappointing that it took seven murdered innocent Jews in the streets of Jerusalem to get you there, but I'm glad it did. One wonders why it didn't happen after the Itamar massacre twelve years ago or the suicide bombing campaigns twenty years ago or any of Palestine's MANY crimes against humanity in between, but I'm glad that it's finally happened for you.
That being said, you still have some work to do, because you have it exactly backwards. It is in fact Palestine that is built upon a structure of racist, illegal violence and because there is so much racist illegal violence against Jews coming from Palestine, a response from Israel is inevitable and in fact a good thing. Palestinians building a society based around murdering Jews and Jews stopping them from murdering Jews
IS
NOT
"OPPRESSION."
And every time you say it is "oppression," you are repeating the false, malicious, dishonest narrative, and in doing so you are bolstering the Palestinian lie and enabling the further murder of Jews. You can disagree with the behavior of individual Israeli soldiers and individual incidents, but the occupation as a whole exists to stop Palestinian murders like this one in Jerusalem. You have it exactly backwards. The occupation is a response to the murders, not the cause. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history is already aware of that.
I'm going to leave you with a few links that you left out of your essay but I think is relevant to this discussion, just in case anyone on this thread actually believes the attacker was a 'lone wolf' and Palestinian society doesn't actually love him and his murderous deed.
No. "Winter". The one who is in urgent need of "news" that will displease, is YOU!.
Talk about cart and horse (not to overlook bizarrely false syllogisms) - "The occupation is a response to the murders, not the cause. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history is already aware of that."
Anyone with slightly more than "basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history" (and a mind slightly open to inconvenient input) is aware of the exact opposite of your conclusion, and concomitantly outraged by your polemic outrage.
Allan, I know you're desperate to defend this latest murder of Jews, but unfortunately, basic knowledge of I/P history states that Palestinian murder and terrorism predate the occupation, the state of Israel, and the existence of the mere idea of Zionism. That is a fact, not an opinion.
Only the desire to not see your intentionally insulting reply go unanswered by facts (readily verifiable in Israeli records) - certainly not optimism that you can be engaged rationally - prompts this posting of a book's title and its (scholar) author: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine -- Ilan Pappe. Peace out.
The Palestinians could have had their own country time and time again, but their leaders have chosen the path and propaganda campaign that one day they will kick the Jews out and control the land from the river to the sea. And for the corrupt leaders, why not? It’s a good gig funneling humanitarian aid to themselves.
After being repeatedly rejected and terrorized, Israelis have become less compromising. After all, how many times can one hit their head against the wall before saying “no more“? The onus is on the Palestinians to make it clear that they choose peace. I remain hopeful that a courageous leader will emerge that recognizes that living in their own country will result in a better future for his people. If and when that happens, regardless of which Israeli government is in place, both peoples will thrive.
Pretty basic:
1) accept Israel’s right to exist (and please, don't say "oslo" -- actually accepting Israel in practice).
2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel
3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel
How exciting for you.!!!! By simply stating that you are against a state for Jews, you get invited to speak at college campuses and pseudo intellectual discussions concerning the “evil” Jews. Not even considering the many liberal evening discussions at “right thinking” New York homes. I am certain that this gives you a certain feeling of self satisfaction since you are now an intellectual whom certain people want to hear. I guess that you want Israel to be a state for all of its citizens similar to Lebanon. I wonder how that plan turned out?
Unfortunately we Jewish citizens of Israel have no intention of allowing anyone
I hear your agony Peter, and we as Palestinians share the same when our young react to all these decades of structural violence with a violent response of their own. That's why anyone who loves Israel today, the nation state, not the mythical biblical entity, must act to stop Israel before it gets much worse. This is why I recently wrote:
As a non-Jew and a non-American, but someone who spent years in Europe and North Africa, I believe that many American Jews still don't under stand how dangerous Israel's corrosive behavior and America's support of it are for the Jewish people in general. When a "bad son" raises his voice to protest the actions of a family that has become corrupted he is not a pariah but a hero who saves the community as a whole.
Peter, Commiserations and some thoughts. Critical thinking requires the examination of the myths people choose to believe. Are those myths valid? What makes them so? A myth involves a broth of thoughts in which people swim, too often, without questioning whether any of the ideas, strictures, rules, beliefs and practices included have a valid ground on which to rest. Unlike the comment below I experience your exploration of your relationship to Judaism to be critically important. It steps beyond the owned and onerous ideology that the "broth of suffering" that those who are of the Jewish tribe have experienced supersedes the same broth that any other tribe finds itself experiencing. In a schoolyard peer pressure and bullying crush differing views. Why, to diminish and/or take away a persons right to dignity and their space to express views different than those in which the bully "believes"? The inherent problem rests in the fact that the bully's ideology steeps them in a broth they refuse to examine. Ironically they accuse those that they bully of being the instigators of the bullying. It takes a great deal of courage for anyone to step outside the broth in which their tribe has been steeped If you do you may be ostracized, criticized, belittled and persecuted for your views. You may even be threatened: ideologically, physically ,psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. You quoted Maimonides. Obviously you feel the pain of speaking to your own tribe in a voice they do not wish to entertain. Does that make it wicked? Though it may seem grandiose this would be my question to Maimonides and you - if his musings applied to the Prophets of the Torah where would Judaism be today? Did any of your tribe feel they were 'wicked 'when their waywardness was pointed out to them? There are many Winters of discontent; hopefully speaking to your own tribe in a quiet, respectful voice will dispel the chill and indignity they show to you - and others- when they threaten you're right to examine any 'broth' in which you might find yourself swimming.
When saying "feel they were wicked" I meant, did the Israelite body politic like or accept it when the Prophets pointed out their own waywardness to them?
I think you do a good job with balancing these two things. You never try to justify the violence but try to understand and explain it. That's the right approach IMO.
Thank you for this, Sam. If only Israeli and diaspora Jewish leaders were wise enough to take your advice.
Peter, the reason why your perspective on this conflict is completely wrong is because you do not understand Islamic doctrine. If you had even a basic level of understanding of islam and jihad, you would know that the hatred "palestianian" Muslims feel towards Jews and Israel and their efforts to conquer Israel and murder Jewish people is rooted in Islamic doctrine. Islam calls on Muslims to wage war against Jews, Christians, and non Muslims until Islam is dominant. It is literally throughout the Quran and part of all of the Islamic schools of jurisprudence. The anti semitism and hatred of Israel that pervades the Muslim world is rooted in Islamic doctrine, it is not due Israel "oppression." Take the time to learn about Islam before writing about this topic please.
You have it backwards JK. “Muslims efforts to conquer Israel.” Really.
Palestine has been conquered by Israel. If Muslims feel any hatred towards Israeli Jews, it is because they have been under a brutal military occupation of ethnic cleansing, killings and dispossession since 1967. Take the time to learn about the facts on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza the open prison.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Let me guess, you think Islam is a "religion of peace?" This is an islamic jihad against the Jewish people with the ultimate goal of establishing sharia law. It did not start in 1968 or the 1940's. It started 1400 years ago when mohammad, the prophet in islam and considered the perfect man, waged war against neighboring jewish tribes. There was no country of "palestine" that was then conquered by Israel. The reason why israel has expanded since its founding is because then surrounding muslim countries have tried on SEVERAL ocassion to destroy israel because their fucked up religion mandates that they fight until islam is supreme. if you do not understand islamic doctrine or islamic history, you have no idea what is actually driving this conflict.
The story of how Political Zionism dealt with the Palestinian people is not ancient history. Rather, it sets the stage for what is happening in Palestine today and it helps us to better understand both Israel’s systematic efforts to dispossess the Palestinian people of their land and rights. Palestinians remain invisible-their personal stories ignored-or they were objectified and seen merely as a problem to be solved in order to ensure Israel’s security.
take the time to learn about islam and hearing different arguments and perspectives before forming your opinion about this topic. And be open to the possibility that what you think you know is completely wrong and that the people you have been listening to about this topic, i.e. peter beinart, have no idea what they are talking about.
We don’t have to go back 1400 years to understand what is driving this, as you call it, conflict. We just have to go back 78 years, when the new state of Israel ethically cleansed about 750,000 Palestinians burning their villages behind them. In 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, subjecting millions of Palestinians to a brutal military occupation that continues to this day.
Religion has nothing at all to do with this conflict. Simply put Israel wants all of the land of Palestine with as few Palestinians living there.
you are completely wrong. of course you think that religion has nothing to do with the conflict because you know absolutely nothing about islam. This is from the Hamas charter:
"The Islamic Resistance Movement: The Movement's programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man. It resorts to it for judgement in all its conduct, and it is inspired by it for guidance of its steps."
Hamas, which controls Gaza, literally says that their movement is based completely off of islamic doctrine. But yet you say it has nothing to do with religion. sound like you really know what you are talking about sean!
WHAT DO YOU know about Hamas?
That it’s sworn to destroy Israel? That it’s a terrorist group, proscribed both by the United States and the European Union? That it rules Gaza with an iron fist? That it’s killed hundreds of innocent Israelis with rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks?
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas four times — in 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021-killing around 2,750 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
They never do, do they?
Mehdi Hasan
https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas/short-history-of-hamas-in-gaza/
Joel--I've spent some time laying out the argument for why Israel-Palestine should be a binational state for all its citizens based on leqal equality. You can read that here. https://jewishcurrents.org/yavne-a-jewish-case-for-equality-in-israel-palestine. As for the suggestion that I take that position because it's more lucrative and a great career path, I can assure you that I'd be speaking at many more college campuses (not to mention synagogues and Jewish institutions) were I a defender of Israel's policies.
LOL. Jews who like Israel are a dime a dozen, but Jews who are willing to serve as tokens for a genocidal antisemitic movement like Palestinian nationalism are worth their weight in gold. Jews like Norman Finkelstein and Miko Peled have turned that grift into a career. You don't seriously expect us to believe you when you say that it would be more lucrative to be pro Israel do you Peter?
Yeah Jews don’t like people who “stand in solidarity” with murderers of Jewish children. It’s not cancel culture it’s consequence culture. Maybe you can get in the professional Israel hating grift?
I stand in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians, but with the government of neither (currently). There is grassroots work being done in Eretz by both Jews and Palestinians that I support. My ideology is binationalism, not Zionism or Anti-Zionism. I believe in one equal rights state that works for both peoples, and there are a number of ways to potentially achieve that, but equality and human rights has to be the foundation.
Jews don’t like people who want to deprive them of their rights no matter what language they cloak their intentions. Jews don’t trust the Palestinians to rule them in equality and if you knew anything about the situation you wouldn’t either: read a book sometime.
Granting equal rights to the Palestinians both within Israel and in the Territories doesn’t take them away from Israeli Jews. That isn’t how equality works. It’s not a pie, where when I eat more, you get less. The question of sovereignty is an important one. Ideally, in a democracy the people are sovereign- all of the people. However in this case, both peoples have a strong nationalist commitment. Perhaps a federation or a consociational system like Belgium would work in a way the 2SS cannot.
How are the Christians and non Arabs treated in Palestine, you git?
Neither Israel nor the oPT are full democracies at the present time. You could say that’s the problem! We need full democracy, real democracy, from the river to the sea, in however many states there are. That’s what I advocate.
Peter, as always I appreciate your thoughtful, sincere, and generative post. I'm sad that some of the replies to your comments smack of smug intolerance and defensiveness. I'm grateful for you work and your willingness to express vulnerability in the face of the unjust attacks lobbed at you. You are a real mensch.
Peter, I think you articulated beautifully the dilemma many of us Jews feel.
It makes me sad to see the snarky (at the nicest) posts on a thread that grapples with very serious matters.
Oh, snarky posts make you sad? Do you know what makes me sad? Murdered Jews on the streets of Jerusalem and POSs like Sean defending their murders. Any thoughts on that, Ged?
Beinart, that voice speaking to you inside is your conscience. Like you said, you are a Jew. You are a member of the Jewish people. Feeling deep in your soul, in your DNA, that you are member of a family, and families stick together and help each other. In your soul, you know, that Israelis are not oppressive apartheid racists. In your soul you know they are working as hard as they can stop murderous terrorists from killing them. It's easy to ignore your conscience when Israelis are successful at stopping the terrorists. now, though, it's almost impossible.
And that bad feeling you've been experiencing? It's called cognitive dissonance. That's wherein new information (like Palestine's evil being shown to the world yet again) conflicts with your beliefs; in this case that Palestine is a virtuous eternal victim that never does anything wrong. If you want to alleviate that cognitive dissonance, wake up and join the rest of us the real world.
I wouldn't even try to argue with you, simply because you are deluded and have no soul.
If I was as ignorant and depraved as you I wouldn’t try and argue with me either. But if you’re looking for someone with no soul, how about the guy who murdered 7 innocent people for the crime of not being Arab?
The so called most moral army in the world have been murdering innocent Palestinians for half a century and more.
Nothing to say about the murder that took place three days ago in Palestine's name, Sean? That's just pathetic, even for you.
Beinart, anything to say to Sean?
Gideon Levy writes every week in the Haaretz Israeli newspaper about the murder of Palestinians by the IOF. Its very obvious to me that you only care about Jewish lives. I care about all human life, Jewish, Palestinian, black or white, no matter the colour of a person's skin or their religious affiliation.
All Lives Matter...the call of the racist.
Peter, I have bad news for you. You ARE the wicked son, and you have been for most of your career. You have innumerable columns in this Substack and elsewhere about how Jews don't have the same rights as other peoples and you have repeatedly turned a blind eye to Jewish suffering while constantly swallowing the Palestinian narrative.
I'm glad that you're finally starting to wake up to the truth. It's disappointing that it took seven murdered innocent Jews in the streets of Jerusalem to get you there, but I'm glad it did. One wonders why it didn't happen after the Itamar massacre twelve years ago or the suicide bombing campaigns twenty years ago or any of Palestine's MANY crimes against humanity in between, but I'm glad that it's finally happened for you.
That being said, you still have some work to do, because you have it exactly backwards. It is in fact Palestine that is built upon a structure of racist, illegal violence and because there is so much racist illegal violence against Jews coming from Palestine, a response from Israel is inevitable and in fact a good thing. Palestinians building a society based around murdering Jews and Jews stopping them from murdering Jews
IS
NOT
"OPPRESSION."
And every time you say it is "oppression," you are repeating the false, malicious, dishonest narrative, and in doing so you are bolstering the Palestinian lie and enabling the further murder of Jews. You can disagree with the behavior of individual Israeli soldiers and individual incidents, but the occupation as a whole exists to stop Palestinian murders like this one in Jerusalem. You have it exactly backwards. The occupation is a response to the murders, not the cause. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history is already aware of that.
I'm going to leave you with a few links that you left out of your essay but I think is relevant to this discussion, just in case anyone on this thread actually believes the attacker was a 'lone wolf' and Palestinian society doesn't actually love him and his murderous deed.
Palestinians cheering and celebrating the Jerusalem attack: https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-celebrate-jerusalem-synagogue-massacre-with-fireworks-sweets/
Al Jazeera honoring the attacker: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn92iUev1K5/
Fatah praising the attacker and cheering the killing: https://palwatch.org/page/32592
Second attack, perpetrated by 13-year-old boy: https://www.timesofisrael.com/2-seriously-wounded-in-another-shooting-attack-in-jerusalem-attacker-neutralized/
No. "Winter". The one who is in urgent need of "news" that will displease, is YOU!.
Talk about cart and horse (not to overlook bizarrely false syllogisms) - "The occupation is a response to the murders, not the cause. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history is already aware of that."
Anyone with slightly more than "basic knowledge of the I/P conflict's history" (and a mind slightly open to inconvenient input) is aware of the exact opposite of your conclusion, and concomitantly outraged by your polemic outrage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_against_Israeli_civilians_before_1967
Ignorance is a choice.
Allan, I know you're desperate to defend this latest murder of Jews, but unfortunately, basic knowledge of I/P history states that Palestinian murder and terrorism predate the occupation, the state of Israel, and the existence of the mere idea of Zionism. That is a fact, not an opinion.
Only the desire to not see your intentionally insulting reply go unanswered by facts (readily verifiable in Israeli records) - certainly not optimism that you can be engaged rationally - prompts this posting of a book's title and its (scholar) author: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine -- Ilan Pappe. Peace out.
Throwing up a book title and an author's name is not an argument. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Thank you
Thank you
The Palestinians could have had their own country time and time again, but their leaders have chosen the path and propaganda campaign that one day they will kick the Jews out and control the land from the river to the sea. And for the corrupt leaders, why not? It’s a good gig funneling humanitarian aid to themselves.
After being repeatedly rejected and terrorized, Israelis have become less compromising. After all, how many times can one hit their head against the wall before saying “no more“? The onus is on the Palestinians to make it clear that they choose peace. I remain hopeful that a courageous leader will emerge that recognizes that living in their own country will result in a better future for his people. If and when that happens, regardless of which Israeli government is in place, both peoples will thrive.
Pretty basic:
1) accept Israel’s right to exist (and please, don't say "oslo" -- actually accepting Israel in practice).
2) agree to a state of their own next to Israel
3) agree to a “right of return” to a new state of Palestine and not to Israel
How exciting for you.!!!! By simply stating that you are against a state for Jews, you get invited to speak at college campuses and pseudo intellectual discussions concerning the “evil” Jews. Not even considering the many liberal evening discussions at “right thinking” New York homes. I am certain that this gives you a certain feeling of self satisfaction since you are now an intellectual whom certain people want to hear. I guess that you want Israel to be a state for all of its citizens similar to Lebanon. I wonder how that plan turned out?
Unfortunately we Jewish citizens of Israel have no intention of allowing anyone
How incredibly honest. Thank you. Thank you.
I hear your agony Peter, and we as Palestinians share the same when our young react to all these decades of structural violence with a violent response of their own. That's why anyone who loves Israel today, the nation state, not the mythical biblical entity, must act to stop Israel before it gets much worse. This is why I recently wrote:
https://sbahour.medium.com/jews-of-the-world-unite-b515da78dad8?sk=3907e148eb84ba34e9affe613e48fc82
So beautifully articulated. I struggle so much with this as well.
As a non-Jew and a non-American, but someone who spent years in Europe and North Africa, I believe that many American Jews still don't under stand how dangerous Israel's corrosive behavior and America's support of it are for the Jewish people in general. When a "bad son" raises his voice to protest the actions of a family that has become corrupted he is not a pariah but a hero who saves the community as a whole.
Peter, Commiserations and some thoughts. Critical thinking requires the examination of the myths people choose to believe. Are those myths valid? What makes them so? A myth involves a broth of thoughts in which people swim, too often, without questioning whether any of the ideas, strictures, rules, beliefs and practices included have a valid ground on which to rest. Unlike the comment below I experience your exploration of your relationship to Judaism to be critically important. It steps beyond the owned and onerous ideology that the "broth of suffering" that those who are of the Jewish tribe have experienced supersedes the same broth that any other tribe finds itself experiencing. In a schoolyard peer pressure and bullying crush differing views. Why, to diminish and/or take away a persons right to dignity and their space to express views different than those in which the bully "believes"? The inherent problem rests in the fact that the bully's ideology steeps them in a broth they refuse to examine. Ironically they accuse those that they bully of being the instigators of the bullying. It takes a great deal of courage for anyone to step outside the broth in which their tribe has been steeped If you do you may be ostracized, criticized, belittled and persecuted for your views. You may even be threatened: ideologically, physically ,psychologically, emotionally and spiritually. You quoted Maimonides. Obviously you feel the pain of speaking to your own tribe in a voice they do not wish to entertain. Does that make it wicked? Though it may seem grandiose this would be my question to Maimonides and you - if his musings applied to the Prophets of the Torah where would Judaism be today? Did any of your tribe feel they were 'wicked 'when their waywardness was pointed out to them? There are many Winters of discontent; hopefully speaking to your own tribe in a quiet, respectful voice will dispel the chill and indignity they show to you - and others- when they threaten you're right to examine any 'broth' in which you might find yourself swimming.
When saying "feel they were wicked" I meant, did the Israelite body politic like or accept it when the Prophets pointed out their own waywardness to them?
I think you do a good job with balancing these two things. You never try to justify the violence but try to understand and explain it. That's the right approach IMO.