A Palestinian Jew

I am a Palestinian Jew.  An Oriental or Sephardi.  My mother’s family comes from the Old City of Jerusalem where it had lived for hundred’s of years.  In 1856 they were among the first families to leave the Old City and set up the new suburb of Mishkenot Sha’ananim which formed the nucleus of modern West Jerusalem.  My father’s family come from Syria and Lebanon.  They went to Egypt at the turn of the century.     Our experience is not that much different from that of many Jewish families in the Middle East.  With the rise of Arab nationalism in the twentieth century, the Jews along with the many other non Arabs found life too dangerous in the hot house of Arab nationalism and Islamic ascension.     We were lucky enough to find sanctuary in Australia in 1948.  The number of Jews in the Middle East that were expelled, or fled Arab lands exceeds even the highest estimates of Palestinians displaced by the newly independent Israel.

That Jews have a place somewhere in the Middle East should not be the subject of rational debate.  Every generation of Jews for nearly two millennia has dreamed of its place in Zion.  There has never been in that time, a Jewish prayer service, festival, wedding, birth, or death where that dream has not been part of the liturgy and the culture.  It is wonderfully ironic to hear my peers from the modern left in Anglo Saxon White Australia trying to deny the Jews a place in the Middle East while justly championing the rights of Aboriginal Australians to land that is held sacred from their dreamtime and the memory of their ancestors.  If Aboriginal Australians and Palestinians have rights, so too the Jews who have an unbroken presence in Palestine/Israel that has spanned the millennia underpinned by an unwavering spiritual connection to the land.  In the nineteenth century, though scant population figures are available, Jews predominated at least in Jerusalem and Hebron.  That is until the pogroms of the early twentieth century aimed at extirpating them, long before the birth of the State.   In Israel today, 70% of teenagers have lineage from a North African Arab country.  So much for colonialism.  

In modern times, many nations in the Middle East were cobbled together, although only Israel among them is denied its place in the sun.   Mandated Palestine was broken up and in 1921 was largely given to what is now Jordan (which for a time was going to be called Palestine).  From further subdivision of the Mandated territory two more states were formed, Palestine and Israel.  It is a great irony, missed by most of Israel’s detractors, that the only country to recognise the Palestinian state was Israel.  The Arabs in their zeal to drive the Jews into the sea, greedily ignored the nascent Palestinian state with Jordan grabbing the West Bank (King Hussein of Jordan continued to claim sovereignty until 1988) and Egypt taking Gaza.  And since then, there has not been one day that Israel has gone to bed, knowing with certainty what might await it when it woke the next morning.     No country in the world has had to live with this existential threat on a daily basis for so long. 

Not much has changed.  The Hamas government of Gaza in its charter, has  aims indistinguishable from that of the Nazis.  It calls for the killing of every Jewish man, woman and child.  In their publications, there is no such thing as an innocent Jew or a Jewish civilian.  Every one must be killed.  When Hamas calls for an end to the occupation it is not that of the West Bank of the Jordan, nor any settlements that might be there.  It most certainly is not Gaza which Israel left unilaterally in 2005.    In calling for the end to the occupation, Hamas means the eradication of the Jews.  It does so without shame or apology.  Hamas does not ask for peace.  Peace is the enemy.  It does not want a redrawing of borders or two states living side by side.   Hamas calls for the death of all Jews.  That is their raison d’etre, underpinned by a theology that sees all Jews as apes and pigs.  Hamas has unashamedly taken Hitler’s agenda and is propped up by Iran that will soon have Hiroshima’s weapons. 

To those, like me (and over 70% of Israelis), who advocate a negotiated peace and the setting up of two states, with whom can the Israeli’s negotiate?  Whatever the Palestinian Authority offers with one hand will only be taken back by Hamas with the other.  A negotiated peace is the chimeric dream held by Israel since it came into being 61 years ago.   Should the Israelis perhaps broker a deal where Hamas will agree to murdering only 80 % or maybe just half of the Jews.    Stopping the settlements on the West Bank is irrelevant to Hamas’s aims – it wants only the violent removal of all Jews from the region.  Israel has repeatedly placed the fate of the settlements on the negotiating table and has demonstrated its willingness to remove them, subject to peace.  It returned all of the Sinai to Egypt, first removing its settlements.  It withdrew totally from Lebanon in a vain hope for peace.  It removed all settlements from Gaza.  In 2000 at Camp David it accepted East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital, and the removal of settlements from 95% of the territories it conquered in a war whose aim was Israel’s total eradication.  The offer was flatly refused by Arafat who only offered belligerence and the second Intifada.

When Israel gave back Gaza in 2005, it did so with the explicit hope that a Palestinian state would rise up alongside it in peace.  From the first day of return, Gaza was used as a launching platform for missiles aimed solely at Israeli civilians.   Israel’s response was a partial blockade to pressure Hamas into stopping the incessant bombing of Israelis.   Howls of protest were launched against the blockade rather than against the reason for the blockade.  Then came the rockets and repeated warnings to stop them, but the barrage continued.  Ultimately the choice left to Israel was to agree to ongoing rockets fired at its civilians, or to attack the rockets and those launching them. 

I ask you who now cry that Israel’s response to Hamas rockets is disproportionate, where were your tears when those rockets were being launched at civilian targets in Israel?  Surely if one is genuinely outraged at Israel’s response there must have been a preceeding comensurate outrage at Hamas firing over 6000 rockets at civilian targets with no intention other than the slaughter of civilians?  Surely UNRWA must have howled at Hamas for firing its missiles from the densely populated civilian areas that they are commissioned to support.  Surely there must have been Western street protesters in their tens of thousands frothing with rage at Hamas firing indiscriminately at Israeli civilians while using densely populated areas, mosques, hospitals, and schools as weapon stores and sanctuaries from where they could fire their rockets, knowing that the Israelis wouldn’t hit them there.   I listened for the protests, and the indignation and the UN resolutions, and the headlines, and the learned editorials and the moral commentariat - and heard nothing.  That is to say, nothing except vacuous exhortations for Israel to accommodate its neighbour, which in order to satisfy Hamas, means to self destruct.   So Israel was left alone by the liberal left, by the Church, by armchair moralists,  to withstand 3 years of rocket attacks on its civilians.  Every attempt to stop such murder was howled down as further evidence of Israeli brutality with ne’er a mention of the precipitating cause. 

From the midst of the outrage and ululation I look for those offering Israel a choice in pursuit of normal life within its borders.  My eyes wake each morning hungrily hoping to find someone with a head and a heart who offers Israel an alternative course of action.  There must be someone from among you whose children sleep safely at night, who can suggest what they would do if their own children were spending their lives in bomb shelters.  For each of the 6000 rockets fired on Israel there is only 15 seconds warning before they land.  The outraged protesters have so much good advice but none that results in anything other than a return to the status quo where the genocidal ideologues of Hamas will continue to rain down their rockets because it is their god given right to kill Jews wherever they are found.  The only choices being offered to Israel by Hamas and its supporters in the liberal West,  are as Melanie Phillips put it, to be damned if it protects itself and dead if it doesn’t.

The current tragedy unfolding in Gaza has a clear explanation that is cynically obscured by the pictures of dead bodies and cruelly exploited by the liberal western media.   There is no cycle of violence.   There is nothing circular about this conflict.  Hamas wishes to maintain as its right, the killing of Jews wherever and whenever it pleases in pursuit of genocide.   It wants the right to send rockets into southern Israel, and bombers on to buses, into kindergartens, pizza parlours, discotheques, picture theatres, markets.   It unashamedly does not want territorial compromise, or deals, only the eradication of the Jews.   Israel’s only claim is the right to live secure from genocidal threats.  While defending itself, it will do its best to protect civilians, but it will not tolerate the daily war crimes perpetuated against it for years.  There has never been an order at any level of the Israeli army, to target civilians.   There has never been an order from Hamas that considered that there might exist such a thing as Israeli civilians.   Israel will try fighting by the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules but may not always succeed while its opponent routinely declares that there are no rules for itself. 

The answer to the violence in the Middle East does not lie with Israel aiming its bombs even more precisely.   That will not solve the conflict.  The resolution to the conflict will only come when Hamas and the broader Palestinian movement renounces its century old aim of eradicating the Jews..   The instant that happens, there will be peace, prosperity, and the realisation of the nationalistic aims of all parties.   

Israel must continue to explore all avenues to peace.  But it does not have to commit suicide.   And that is what the commentariat is ultimately suggesting.  Shame on you those who are now howling at Israel’s coarse attempts at defending itself, who previously didn’t find the need to howl at the advocates of genocide.  Shame on you, Church leaders who would have happen to the Jews what they have silently allowed to happen to Christians in Southern Sudan, or Egypt, or Iraq.  Shame on you supposedly moderate Muslims who ignore or excuse the blatant racism expressed daily in schools and mosques to inculcate the lust for more Jew killing into young children.  And most of all, shame on you my peers from the liberal left who remain silent while every day for years Jewish blood has been regarded as without value by the fascist elements within Islam.  Shame and shame again on you, the enlightened thinkers and media commentators of the West who continually report Israel’s response to its existential threats with no consideration of the consequences of those threats being implemented.  You are all complicit.  You have all left Israel with no choice but to fight a war for its survival,  in a battleground of Hamas’s choosing.  You would all do the same and far worse than Israel if your children could never sleep safely in their beds, or if you couldn’t send them on a bus in the morning, knowing that they would come home that evening.    The shame is yours, not Israel’s as it strives to maintain its humanity in a mad neighbourhood that knows of no such thing