Peace Never Had a Chance Lawrence Burke
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/peace-never-had-a-chance/
A year ago, a friend asked me if I would join him in Christchurch for the weekly Palestinian support protests. I declined. I pointed out that asking me to do so made it implicit that I was obliged to take a moral stand on the more than 35 conflicts going on across the world today, and to rank them in terms of importance. I also argued that those protesting the Palestinian cause, were unfamiliar with the history of Palestine, up to and including the partition of Palestine to give the Jewish people a homeland. Since then, much debate has taken place, and while we remain friends, our views on the current conflict are not reconciled.
As many as 90,000-plus people — estimates of the crowd vary widely –recently protested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite an appeal by NSW Police to the NSW Supreme Court. What I viewed of the protest on television were the usual Palestinian flags, but more worrying, giant pictures of the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran, a financial and ideological backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, has been and remains committed to the destruction of Israel.
Today, it was heard, both on radio and in the print media that people were comparing the Gazan conflict with the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. While the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has become a travesty beyond words following the October 7 attacks in Israel, the comparison is quite perverse. It is insidious to argue that the deaths caused by the Nazis, which surpassed 55 million people, is in anyway comparative to the war casualties in the Gaza and the West Bank.
The history of conflict in the region, and beyond the borders of Israel and the occupied territories goes back millennia and, as in all conflicts, there is the context of historical antecedents which are often ignored, not understood, or simply not known. Take the Roman occupation, for example, or Napoleon’s failed attempt at the occupation of Palestine, or the Ottomans and Egypt’s attempt to establish a kind of satellite state in Palestine.
The region, has been hostile to the Jewish people since the Jews were expelled under Roman occupation, especially so since Islam’s conquest of the region. In 1917, the Ottomans expelled the entire population of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa (not unlike Idi Amin’s madness in expelling all Asians from Uganda).
If we are to go on media reports, some (not all) of Israel’s military actions in Gaza are to be censured, as are the actions of past historical actors.
In 1943, Saudi King Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud wrote to President Roosevelt stating that Palestine was a “sacred Moslem Arab country” that “belonged to the Arabs.” He accused Jews of seeking to “exterminate the peaceful Arabs,” and hoped the Allies would not “evict” the Arabs from Palestine and install “vagrant Jews who have no ties with this country except an imaginary claim which, from the point of view of right and justice, has no grounds except what they invent through fraud and deceit.” [i] His antiSemitism, coupled with his selective historical knowledge of Palestine, along with its biblical history was as uninformed as all of the Arab States, which declared war on Israel immediately after its existence was proclaimed in 1947.
It is no secret that the Islamic world writes history according to its own precepts, and contradicts its own involvement in the Holocaust and the persecution of the Jewish people. Achcar (2010) captures Arab sentiment in the minutes of a meeting between King Abdul Aziz’s emissary and Hitler:
During the ensuing conversation, the Fuhrer stated that we entertained warm sympathies for the Arabs for two reasons: 1) because we had no territorial aspirations in Arabia, and 2.) because we had the same enemies. After some further statements he added 3.) Because we were jointly fighting the Jews. This led him to discuss Palestine and conditions there, and he stated that he himself would not rest until the last Jew had left Germany. Khalid as Hud observed that the Prophet Mohammed, who apart from having been a religious leader, had also been a great statesman, had acted in the same way. He had driven all the Jews out of Arabia … the Fuhrer referred to the strong predilection which he had always had for the Arab world, gathered from his reading, since his childhood[ii]
It is also no secret that a significant number of people in the West protesting for the Palestinian cause are deftly ill-informed of the history of Palestine. They engage in a kind of selective conscience based protest. They forget the PLO were a terrorist organisation. The PLO was responsible for the hijacking of an Air France flight to Uganda, the used children and woman as suicide bombers, they engage in boat hijackings, knife attacks, shooting sprees, car bombs and assassinations. They carried out the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes. The PLO failed repeatedly in its obligation to implement the Oslo peace accords. They have not been willing partners for peace.
The protesters also forget that in 2005 Israel actively disengaged and withdrew from the Gaza Strip, handing it over to the Palestinian Authority. The result was a bitter and bloody war between Fatah and Hamas in which the latter won control of Gaza. Schools and hospitals were turned into defacto military installations, a vast network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip was used to smuggle munitions and other weapons including, sophisticated war technologies. These caches of weapons were bought with money donated by some Arab states and the West for the stated purpose of helping and supporting Gazans. Twenty years on Hamas’s actions and commitment to the destruction of Israel, not least the October 7 massacres, have turned the enclave into the rubble-strewn dystopia it is today.
The countries in the West (France, Canada and the UK) who are reportedly going to recognize a Palestinian state are dupes in a dangerous, clever game by Hamas and their backers. It is an extremely naïve move. Already, Hamas has said it won’t cease the conflict or disarm until a Palestinian state is recognised. The Arab states of course are purposely taciturn on the establishment of a Palestinian state, as they have been for decades. Recently, there was some chatter among them about excommunicating Hamas from any future statehood moves by the Palestinians, but they’ve never forgiven the Palestinians for supporting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
At what point does one take a side within an understanding of a modern conflict having so many historical antecedents? From Afghanistan to Yemen, there are around 35 global wars ongoing today. Which sides should or could one support? It is not, from my perspective, about taking a side but to condemn all acts of war and aggression, particularly when civilians are the target. I feel a terrible sense of despair when I watch, listen or read about our inhumanity towards one another. And if history is any indicator it will only get worse.
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