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While I was in Israel three years ago, Hamas took over control of the Gaza Strip. Israel had pulled out two years earlier, and the fight was between two Palestinian terrorist groups: Fatah and Hamas. Our Palestinian guides advised us to call home and tell relatives we were okay because there was widespread media coverage of the fighting and they would be worried about us. We were about thirty miles from the fighting at the time and safe enough. Every since, Hamas has been shooting rockets into Israel from Gaza daily. Israel sends fuel and electricity into Gaza, yet Israel is the villain and Hamas the victim in the eyes of the world. It’s Theatre of the Absurd in the mainstream media.
There are 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel and 5.5 million Jews and I was struck by contrasts. Jewish towns and cities are orderly, blooming and booming. Arab towns and cities are strewn with trash, graffiti and idleness.
Palestinian Town in IsraelThe contrast is even sharper in the mostly-Muslim West Bank. It’s a microcosm for the entire Arab Middle East. With huge deposits of oil and the trillions of petrodollars for Arab countries, they remain primitive. Yet, with no oil, industrious Jews from around world have made the desert bloom in Israel. They’ve built a thriving economy, and fought off three invasions by much larger, fanatic, Arab-Muslim neighbors. It’s the ultimate humiliation to have tiny Israel existing in their midst and providing a constant contrast to their backwardness. Rather than taking lessons for their own improvement, they hate Israel with a passion and rabidly plot its destruction.
Arab East JerusalemWhen I’m teaching about the Arab Muslim invasions of 1948, 1967 and 1973 to my US History classes, I tell students to imagine a kindergarten kid waiting alone at a bus stop and being jumped three times by several large, high-school boys. Imagine how the big boys feel after the kindergarten kid thrashes them single-handedly all three times. Their humiliation is unbearable and it’s their own fault.
There can be no such thing as a peace process in Israel without the destruction of Israel’s enemies. Neither Fatah nor Hamas wants a Palestinian State. Palestinians want Israel gone and they’re willing to play victim poster-children for the wider Islamic world’s propaganda against Israel and the United States.
After the 1967 invasion, Israel took territory from Egypt, Syria and Jordan as buffers against future invasions - including the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In the Camp David agreement, Egypt took back the Sinai in return for recognizing Israel’s right to exist, but didn’t really want Gaza. Nobody does. It’s an insane asylum full of Palestinians who have been indoctrinated since infancy with hatred of Jews and groomed to become “shahids”: suicide bombers. Israel pulled out in 2005 but terrorism increased. So much for leftist claims that Israel’s occupation is the cause of Palestinian terrorism.After years of daily rocket attacks against its civilian population, Israel went back into Gaza to take out launch sites, which Hamas puts in or near schools and hospitals. Palestinian terrorists hide behind children, but the UN ignores this and instead investigates Israel for war crimes if civilians are killed.
Hamas is a terrorist proxy for Iran, who supplies the rockets raining on Israel, and who promises to wipe Israel off the map. The United Nations does nothing as Iran builds the nuclear weapons with which to perpetrate a second Holocaust while denying the first ever happened. Under the noses of UN “peacekeeping” forces, Iran supplies Hezbollah with rockets and other weapons in southern Lebanon that are periodically shot at northern Israeli civilians. Why we continue to support an inept and corrupt organization like the United Nations, I cannot fathom.Israel’s strategy now is to blockade Gaza to prevent Hamas from importing more Iranian rockets but Turkey, which had hitherto been the most supportive of Muslim countries toward Israel, is now leading the effort to break the blockade. There’s been a profound policy shift in Turkey’s relations with Israel. Looks like the Turks have stopped westernizing and, by demonizing Israel, are allying with Syria and Iran. Not good for regional stability.
According to its own charter, Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and killing all Jews, yet Turkey’s President Erdogan insists Hamas is not a terrorist organization.
The man has no credibility, but he’s a hero in the eyes of the American and European left and their media sycophants. Meanwhile, President Obama has shined up to Hamas. He’s obsequious with Iran, and he’s distancing himself from Israel.Israel has faced existential threats since its birth in 1948 and met them head on. It will meet today’s threats and tomorrow’s as well. Israel will do what it must to survive. A preemptive strike against Iran - with nuclear weapons - is a very real possibility. This is a nation founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. Israel’s Jews will not submit meekly to slaughter again.
20 comments:
If that was not theology, I wonder what it was. The minute you open your Bible you are getting into theology.
The Jews have been kicked around for many thousands of years. Nearly everyone has had their shot at it, even the Christians and especially the early Catholic church. We are all guilty. None of this is news. The Arabs are just less subtle about it. My biggest fear is that the Arab tribes will get together one day and really try to push Israel and all the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea and the United States will get itself involved in another endless and probably unwinnable war.
We can't always have it our way and sometimes we should just stay out of it. And, yes, lets move the UN to another country and let them go bankrupt without our support.
A very sophmoric look at the mid-east conflict. While Tom sees everything in distinct black/white with no shades of gray, it is, of course, much more complex. (Comparisons of a Kindergartener being jumped by older kids!! How moronic. Explained like a true non-intellectual indeed!!)
Not that Palestinians are innocent victims, and all attrocities commited by them should never be condoned, but I wonder if Tom has ever attempted to see their point of view. That point of view is explained here by Dr. Deborah Flick, the author of the award-winning book, From Debate to Dialogue: Using the Understanding Process To Transform Our Conversations:
As the Palestinians see it, for the year leading up to the day Israel declared herself a state, and for the months that followed chaos and violence reigned. Israeli troops ordered some Palestinians to leave their land permanently. Palestinian villages and homes were demolished and thousands were killed. Other's left their homes out of fear, trying to escape the bullets flying in their neighborhoods between Jewish and British soldiers. These Palestinians had hoped to return home after the violence abated. But that was not to be. Thus, by one means or another 750,000 Palestinians were rendered homeless and forced into settling in surrounding Arab countries and what was later to become the West Bank and Gaza.
They have never been allowed to return. To this day many refugees and their descendents, now numbering about 3.6 million, hold the keys to the houses that were destroyed or taken over by Israelis. Furthermore, the catastrophe continues. Palestinians live in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon, the West Bank, and other Arab countries. With the exception of Jordan, they are not permitted to be citizens of any Arab state. Others are spread throughout the world in the Palestinian diaspora. Israel today occupies much of what Palestinians believed, according to the Oslo agreements, would be their future state, the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian economy and infrastructure is in shambles. People are without food and healthcare. Homes and lives have been destroyed.
In order to grasp the Palestinian view of the conflict, one must comprehend the enormity of al-Nakba, described above, for the Palestinian people. Over 50 years of ongoing dislocation, humiliation, occupation, death, harassment, and insults have left a seething, gaping wound inherited by each successive generation. As a result, Palestinians see themselves as a proud if wounded people struggling to survive and tirelessly fighting the good fight for justice their land.
For Palestinians, Israel is a rouge state, an interloper that confiscated their land and forced them out. Although in recent years reluctant acceptance of Israel has been given in the context of peace agreements, the belief that Israel does not have a legitimate right to exist is still a current running through the Palestinian narrative. Israel is seen as an occupier not only of the West Bank and Gaza but the whole of Palestine. It is seen as a terrorist and expansionist state not satisfied with occupying the larger part of what was original Palestine. Israel wants 100%. And, Palestinians believe Israel wants them out. Out of the country, out of East Jerusalem, out of the West Bank. Those Palestinians who remained in 1948 and are now citizens of Israel (about 20% of the Israeli population) feel themselves to be second class citizens routinely discriminated against despite laws and Israeli claims about being the only democratic nation in the middle east.
It must be kind of pleasant for Tom to drift through life so simple-mindedly.
Also, it is kind of nice for Jews now to be supported by people because they have found somebody else to condemn as a race, and to hate even more!
Old religious books and stories are the whole cause of this conflict, and the sooner they are forgotten the sooner the world will become a more peaceful place. The more they are perpetuated by silly God versus Satan fantasies the longer this conflict will endure.
To make any progress everybody needs to concentrate on reality, on what is actually happening on earth, and on being good to each other because it is what's Right.
Why do we have to pick sides in this stupid conflict? Why can't we all be on the same side — against senseless violence?
People literally spend their whole lives trying and failing to understand the conflict there.
The Israelis may say their ancestors were there first and the Palestinians' ancestors stole their land. But any historical argument from the Palestinians today is essentially the converse.
The important thing is to look to the future. What do we ultimately want to have in the Middle East? I think we all know the answer: we want a stable region where people can live in peace without killing, maiming or abusing one another.
How to accomplish this is ultimately another issue. Does a state called "Israel" have to exist in the Middle East for this to be accomplished? Probably not, although the only way to guarantee peace without Israel would be to deport or murder every Jew in Israel — hardly the ideal solution. Ideally, Israel would become a pluralist, multicultural state accepting of Arab and other minority ethnic groups; alternatively, Palestine, Lebanon and other neighbouring states would have the full control of their territory and the full international recognition they need to prevent terrorism.
I don't know what you would call either of these two positions, but I doubt either of them is strictly anti-Israel or anti-Palestine. Ultimately most of us want peace to prevail in the Middle East. It is just too bad that most of those with the actual power in the Middle East seem to have the exact opposite desire.
It is true that ultimately we will have to take certain positions on the actions of the actors in the Middle East. Those disapproving of Israel's ridiculous and inhumane foray into the Gaza strip are likely to be called anti-Israel; those disapproving of how terrorists in the Gaza strip and other Palestinian territories are likely to be called anti-Palestine. But is it not possible to condemn both acts of aggression and violence, regardless of which "side" is supposedly in the wrong?
When we view the situation in the Middle East as a zero-sum game — one where Israel or Palestine has to win, and the other has to lose — we can never realistically attain peace there. Peace can only be reached when everyone realises that it is in everyone's interest to treat one another with mutual respect. As idealistic and impractical as this sounds, the right position on the question of the Middle East isn't whether you support Israel or Palestine; it's whether you support the right of every person to live in peace and without fear of oppression, or whether you don't.
Even for an admited non-intellectual such as Tom this column is incredibly naive. To portray Israel as an innocent kindergartener being picked on by bullies is beyond dumb. Tom is lucky he has found a profession in teaching in which it is almost impossible to be fired for incompetence.
Unfortunately, when taught by teachers like Tom, the immortal question asked by Bush (Is our children learning?) must be answered with a NO.
Harvey, ALL people are God's chosen people.
As for being old, just be thankful that you lived long enough to see a President who cares more for regular hard-working people than for elitist rich fat cats screwing up the economy, and a President who is making strides to get this wonderful country of ours back to being a respected "beacon on the hill".
Compare those pictures of Palestinian towns to pictures of many poor American neighborhoods and it makes the Arab towns look like Bel-Air!!
Pretty impressive for cities that have been getting bombed by Israel for so many years!
Wow, Tom, you sure do have a lot of Anonymous poster! Your article is comprehensive and black and white, what we used to call "reason" before the Hegelian dialectic hijacked modern thought.
My pastor preached on this a few weeks ago out of Zechariah, about how the Jews will be up against the Mount of Olives and he will use an earthquake to split it in half in Red Sea escape route fashion.
The devil is running out of time and he's working fast to see his goal of a worldwide government come to pass.
Like Harvey said, I hope I'm not around to see that happen.
For the Book of Revelations and the Anti-Christ to come on the scene, the US has to be out of the picture.
Years ago, people scoffed at this thought, but with every passing day I can see the time of the season.
As soon as the US 'officially' withdraws from supporting Israel, one can start counting the days when the US will cease to exist as a powerhouse nation.
Take Britain. The sun never was suppose to set over the Dominion. Yet Britain oppressed the Jews, turned back boats of refugees, and basically abandoned Israel.
Now it is a soon to be Muslim enclave.
US should take notice and see their future via Britain.
Impossible? History is a great teacher, note all great powers fell by being over confident.
Beware of the one who turns their back on God's chosen people. We are but the wild branch grafted in and if we cut ourselves off the vine we will wither up and die.
-tomax7
Anon at 7:09am
"To make any progress everybody needs to concentrate on reality, on what is actually happening on earth, and on being good to each other because it is what's Right."
Anon, did you ever think that maybe Jesus, the Bible and Satan are reality and your 3 dimensional existence here on earth is finite?
If you're basing reality only on what you can touch and see, you're sadly missing it.
cheers
tomax7
The Palestinians who fled Israel during the war did so on their own, and yes it was out of fear because there was a war going on. The Palestinians who stayed are the Israeli Arabs who are there today. Why is it that after 60 years and three generations that Palestinians are still "in need"? Because the oil wealthy Arabs, who are their people, refuse to help them, and refuse to incorporate them into their countries. Why? Because then they would lose their political pawn, the "refugees".
I am angry that Obama is supposedly sending $400 million in aid to Gaza. We are sinking in trillion dollar debt, and he gives away $400 mil? The worst part of it is that Hamas will surely get hold of it and will use it to smuggle more weapons into Gaza.
There will never be peace between Israel and the "Palestinians", as long as they want to be ruled by a terrorist organization, and as long as Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Why should Israel sit down and talk peace with a government who has publicly stated that they want to annihilate them?
Rhonda
Excellent post Rhonda. I just don't see how there can be peace when the Muslim world wants Israel gone. I'm afraid it's going to get a lot worse over there before it ever gets better.
Mushroom clouds around the Persian Gulf are ominous for the entire world, whose interconnected economy is already tenuous. Obama's foreign policy seems not acknowledge that as we drift along toward God knows what.
We are told in scripture to pray for the peace of Jerusalem way before all this. Why? Because there will be NO peace until the Prince of Peace comes back. Plain and simple.
Everything is happening right on schedule. We've got the game plan in our hands already. The problem is not too many are reading it. I've been watching and studying this from a theological viewpoint for more than 30 years. It's amazing at how it's all falling right into place.
Here's just a sampling of what is predicted and this was written in 520 B.C and is relevant for today:
"I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling to all the people around about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and Jerusalem. And in that day (end times) will I make Jerusalem a burdenstome stone for all people; all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it."
Before this it was predicted that Israel would be like dry bones coming to life. That happened in 1948. Nobody saw this coming. They were as good as dead.
The only thing stopping the world thus far, from going into Israel now and taking Her down is us. Take us out out of the picture, and the nations are going to lay seige against Israel. I believe that's exactly why our country was born in the first place. It was all about Israel.
It's pretty clear, anyone going in against Israel is going down. The miracle stories around Israel in 1948, 67 and 73 are jaw dropping starting right with Truman being in the White House at the right time.
Also it does say, as Tom, brought up that "the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." Isa 35:1
Funny listening to religious fanatics talk about fixing a problem caused by....religious fanatics!
"Funny listening to religious fanatics talk about fixing a problem caused by....religious fanatics!"
Funny how those with no answers just go on the attack instead and then do so anonymously. Pretty common around here.
You have a better answer? I'm listening.
Dawn,
Thank you for your most excellent Biblical perspective!
Rhonda
DAWN SAID:
"Funny how those with no answers just go on the attack instead..."
That is what Tom's columns are all about, Dawn. Mean spirited, poorly thought-out attacks with no answers.
DAWN SAID:
"You have a better answer? I'm listening."
I told you my answer - everybody needs to forget about their old religious texts and violence provoing religions. This is the root of all the fighting.
And what was your answer, Dawn? All I saw from you was some fantasy about the "end times" and dopey statements like the United States being born to help Israel. It's all about Israel?
Wake up Dawn, life is here on earth. Look within, forget all that gobblygook you fill your head in and learn to think for yourself. Live now. Please don't tell me you are waiting for a rapture.
In the immortal words of Johnny Cash:
"You're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good"
I wish you the best.
Another biblical prediction:
Micah predicts the destruction of Jerusalem (which at the time was about to be invaded by Sennacherib and seemed inevitable) blaming the destruction on the corruption of the priesthood of Judah.
Jerusalem was sieged, but the destruction didn’t happen.
A century later Jeremiah quotes Micah and tries to excuse the failed prophecy by saying that "the Lord changed his mind" about that destruction.
lol
"Micah predicts the destruction of Jerusalem ...Jerusalem was sieged, but the destruction didn’t happen."
Exactly what Micah said happened. The northern Tribe of Israel was captured and destroyed and Jerusalem was besieged by Sennacherib paying him tributes in 701 B.C. (2 kings 18:13-16).
Go back and read Micah again. Notice 1:6. Notice it says Samaraia (only) will be a heap? But then over to v12 it says evil would come to the "gate" of Jerusalem. That's exactly what happened. Exactly what you just wrote yourself.
It's your understanding that's faulty; not the words of God.
About 100 yrs later God did destroy Jerusalem using the Babylonians but because Hezekiah, who was the King of Judah was a good king and was leading the people back to God he spared them during this particular time.
"This is the root of all the fighting."
No, it's not the bible. It's sin that is the root of all the fighting. It's pride, greed and whatnot. It's not the Words of God.
It's really those who have gone against the Word of God who are responsible; not the Godly ones. You're telling us to throw away the only book with all the answers. That will only compound the problem not solve it.
"You're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good"
I wish you the best."
well that's true. I agree. But you can be "so earthly minded you're no heavenly good also."
Blessings to you as well.
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