***
In a since-deleted post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Blinken seemed to back a ceasefire. “Turkish Foreign Minister @HakanFidan and I spoke further on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel. I encouraged Turkey’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages by Hamas immediately,” the secretary of state wrote.
Doesn't this remind you of Biden's sanctuary offer to Ukraine's president, who replied "I need weapons, not a ride?"
They've got their finger on the pulse of the world.
***
***
Some Middle East History
Israelis think their homeland has been taken from them and they want to live there. People from Palestine feel their homeland has been expropriated for someone else's cause and they want it back. One might argue that all conflicts arise from the ebb an flow of borders.
The current Middle East savagery has a couple of significant notions that have slid by under the radar as accepted fact, at least in the faculty lounge. One is the remarkably vicious "decolonization" concept, a blithe "weeding out" idea where colonizers are deracinated by any means possible.
This is an article that questions the very idea that Israel is constructed by colonizers. (From the WSJ):
'The colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.
It doesn’t take long to read or listen to anti-Israel advocacy before the word “colonial” or “colonialism” is hurled at the Jewish state.
After the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, “Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle.”
According to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard, Israel is undertaking “colonial retaliation.”
An academic cottage industry is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise in “settler colonialism,” and Hamas itself is partial to the term.
The use of the word “colonial” in all its forms isn’t meant to accurately describe reality or clarify anything; rather, it is a term of abuse wielded to delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.
The “colonial” smear can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.
First of all, the original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t sent by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit of the homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many cases, didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought, say, to establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities routinely carried out against them on Russian soil.
They thought of their venture as a return to a place that Jews had inhabited for thousands of years.
Indeed, the colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.
The Jewish people have had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became fundamentally identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land was a locus of the Jewish faith — the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the place where many religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed; the object of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in Jerusalem”).
There is a reason that Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed in the early 20th century.
On top of this, Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution.
The Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love their own.
In one sense, Israel’s ultimate offense is to have won defensive wars fought against antagonists seeking to wipe it from the map.
As for Gaza, Israel ended its occupation nearly 20 years ago. It wanted to wash its hands of the place as much as possible, an understandable impulse but one that has proved unsustainable. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and then expelled the rival Palestinian group Fatah in a factional war. In total control, Hamas proceeded to make Gaza a base for conducting armed operations against Israel.
Israel’s failing here wasn’t so much heavy-handedness — although it took measures to protect itself from the threat in Gaza, as did Egypt — but the naïve belief that it could reach a de facto accommodation with a Hamas that would misrule Gaza for its own ends while not becoming too dire a threat to Israel.
Its mass terror attack on Israel ends that delusion.
If nothing else, the accusation of colonialism is very telling. There is one country in the roll call of nations that doesn’t deserve to exist. One people that doesn’t deserve a homeland. One people who, despite being subjected to hideous persecutions over the centuries and being constantly attacked today, is supposedly guilty of every possible crime.
And it happens to be Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
The Hamas attack was just a taste of what it would do to Israel if it had the power — extricate an indigenous people from their homeland in the most brutal fashion possible, in the name, of course, of anti-colonialism.'
The current Middle East savagery has a couple of significant notions that have slid by under the radar as accepted fact, at least in the faculty lounge. One is the remarkably vicious "decolonization" concept, a blithe "weeding out" idea where colonizers are deracinated by any means possible.
This is an article that questions the very idea that Israel is constructed by colonizers. (From the WSJ):
'The colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.
It doesn’t take long to read or listen to anti-Israel advocacy before the word “colonial” or “colonialism” is hurled at the Jewish state.
After the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, “Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle.”
According to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard, Israel is undertaking “colonial retaliation.”
An academic cottage industry is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise in “settler colonialism,” and Hamas itself is partial to the term.
The use of the word “colonial” in all its forms isn’t meant to accurately describe reality or clarify anything; rather, it is a term of abuse wielded to delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.
The “colonial” smear can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.
First of all, the original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t sent by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit of the homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many cases, didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought, say, to establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities routinely carried out against them on Russian soil.
They thought of their venture as a return to a place that Jews had inhabited for thousands of years.
Indeed, the colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.
The Jewish people have had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became fundamentally identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land was a locus of the Jewish faith — the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the place where many religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed; the object of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in Jerusalem”).
There is a reason that Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed in the early 20th century.
On top of this, Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution.
The Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love their own.
In one sense, Israel’s ultimate offense is to have won defensive wars fought against antagonists seeking to wipe it from the map.
As for Gaza, Israel ended its occupation nearly 20 years ago. It wanted to wash its hands of the place as much as possible, an understandable impulse but one that has proved unsustainable. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and then expelled the rival Palestinian group Fatah in a factional war. In total control, Hamas proceeded to make Gaza a base for conducting armed operations against Israel.
Israel’s failing here wasn’t so much heavy-handedness — although it took measures to protect itself from the threat in Gaza, as did Egypt — but the naïve belief that it could reach a de facto accommodation with a Hamas that would misrule Gaza for its own ends while not becoming too dire a threat to Israel.
Its mass terror attack on Israel ends that delusion.
If nothing else, the accusation of colonialism is very telling. There is one country in the roll call of nations that doesn’t deserve to exist. One people that doesn’t deserve a homeland. One people who, despite being subjected to hideous persecutions over the centuries and being constantly attacked today, is supposedly guilty of every possible crime.
And it happens to be Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.
The Hamas attack was just a taste of what it would do to Israel if it had the power — extricate an indigenous people from their homeland in the most brutal fashion possible, in the name, of course, of anti-colonialism.'
**
The 'colonizing argument' looks like a straw man. This article may be a little too easy and the points moot. The nation of Israel was legislated into existence by the well-meaning West after the Holocaust, essentially partitioning a large property absorbed in a war, into two states. Displaced people will always have a legitimate complaint.
But there are more extenuating circumstances. That 'property' was originally taken over by the Ottomans in the 1500s--that is, it was invaded, occupied, governed, and taxed by the Ottoman Empire, originally founded by Osman Gazi, a Turk, and expanded over the centuries to include the Middle East and North Africa. Gradually, the empire began to erode but the final blow was its misadventure in joining Germany in the First World War where the empire was destroyed, its territories absorbed and occupied by various Western allies.
That is to say, it lost its integrity, as it had in the 1500s.
There are a lot of lessons here. Don't fight wars. If you fight a war, don't lose it. If you lose it, expect a lot of changes. And, if you complain about the results 500 years later, don't expect intelligent sympathy.
1 comment:
Very Interesting analysis of Hamas
Biden is incompetent
We Gave Ukraine 1.6 trillion dollars isn’t that enough ?
Biden will go to war over Tiwan I believe we gave them enough money and equipment the Island so much that it would sink
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