I’ve always loved all things history. Mainly economic and political history, but also including some military history. So I was pretty interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
I can’t really say that one side has a monopoly on moral behavior. Both have behaved quite badly. However, over the years, as I’ve read and seen more and more, I’ve become less and less sympathetic to the Israeli side, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians. Especially as they are by far the weaker side. I originally got interested in this as a military conflict. But then I realized that this is not really a “military conflict,” sort of like how a 12th grader beating up a 3rd grader and taking his lunch money is not really “a schoolyard fight.”
I think the thing that bothers me the most about Israeli behavior is the hypocrisy. A lot of other countries and militaries behave brutally. But they don’t pretend or claim that they are all sunshine and flowers. Israel does. Basically, when it comes to Israel, I’ve learned to go by their actions, not their words. Some examples:
Israel continually claims to want a “2 state solution.” But then they keep grabbing Palestinian land. That’s the land the Palestinians are supposed to build their supposedly future state on. Claiming you want a peaceful “2 state solution” and then doing everything in your power to sabotage that is hypocrisy.
Israel got the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 “6 Day War.” Israel claimed that this was a defensive war. But when you actually look at what happened, you see that Israel struck first, and struck first MASSIVELY with their entire air force. This is like WW2 Japan saying that Pearl Harbor was a defensive action.
Also, during the 1967 war, Israel attacked the crap out of the USS Liberty, an American navy spy-ship that was nearby and listening in on the war. Even though it was a clear day and the ship was flying a massive American flag and Israeli fighter planes had flown over it several times – positively ID’ing it as American, the Israeli air force and navy proceeded to attack it for several hours, almost sinking it, and killing 34 American sailors and injuring 171. Aside from bombing the crap out of the ship, the American survivors claim that Israeli gunboats machine-gunned the lifeboats full of American sailors. They would have sunk the ship, too, and probably killed all the sailors, had a Russian navy ship not come on the scene to investigate. Israel then said “Oh, sorry, we didn’t realize that was an American ship.” Ummm, bullshit.
And the reason they attacked the USS Liberty? I read a book by one of the surviving officers from the Liberty, who speculated that the Israelis wanted to sink the Liberty because they knew it was a sophisticated spy-ship and it could monitor some things that the Israeli government and military did not want the world to know. Two items he listed were that, first, Israel was preparing to invade Syria to capture the Golan Heights. And second, that Israeli troops were at that moment perpetrating a war crime in the Sinai, killing several hundred Egyptian POW’s. At first I thought the second explanation was unlikely (stupidly, I believed the Israeli army claims about purity of arms and all that). Then a few years later, several Israeli parliamentarians stood up in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) and said “Why yes, we did kill several hundred prisoners of war in the Sinai in 1967. And we did it in 1956 too.” I see!
And in this latest war in Gaza, two things stood out for me. First, an Israeli ambassador saying that the Israeli army is so peaceful and careful to avoid civilian casualties that they deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Huh? Every report on the current fighting, including Israeli reports, say that the vast majority of Palestinian casualties have been civilians. Over 1,000 of the 1,400 dead Palestinians have been civilians, including hundreds and hundreds of children. (Meanwhile, only 3 of the 59 Israeli dead have been civilians – the remaining 56 dead Israelis have all been soldiers). UN refuge areas hit and destroyed, schools destroyed, hospitals bombed, over a thousand homes deliberately targeted and destroyed. Every single one of these is considered a contravention of the laws of war. Nobel Peace Prize?
And then I saw a video of a bunch of Israelis dancing and singing “It’s a school holiday in Gaza because all the children there are dead!” Wow!
But the thing that’s worst is that the US seems to have a weird battered wife syndrome relationship with Israel. No matter what Israel does, America supports it and pays for it. Pays in terms of money (several $Billion/year). And pays in terms of world relationships and even pays in terms of blood – a lot of the conflicts the US has gotten into in the last few decades have been for Israel’s sake and because of this mulish support for Israel.
Even after Israel literally blows up a girls school in Gaza, killing dozens and injuring hundreds, and a vegetable market, again killing dozens and injuring hundreds, you have the spectacle of American politicians rushing to show their support for Israel. From both parties (apparently, that is one thing that unites Democrats and Republicans). And sending piles of American taxpayer dollars there. Just how much “campaign donation” money are they getting from AIPAC anyway?
And Israel is the only country in the world that can attack and insult a sitting American president and secretary of state, and almost all of congress will side with them. John Kerry proposed a cease-fire that Israel didn’t like, so the Israeli government and media all attacked him and some even called his proposal a “massive terrorist attack.” Wow! (I had gotten used to Israelis calling anyone they didn’t like “a terrorist” – but I never expected they would call the sitting US secretary of state that). Even more weird was that he, the secretary of state of the world’s supposedly only superpower, then had to get in front of the cameras and say that nobody was more pro-Israel than him. As an American citizen, watching my government officials grovel before a foreign power that was actively insulting them was a bit hard to stomach.
Of course, the Palestinians have some really odious people in their midst, and a lot of the Islamists in the Middle East are downright scary. But at least with those clowns things are clear-cut. Some of them don’t even try to pretend to be in the 21st century. Some are literally trying to recreate the 7th century. (Although to be fair to the Palestinians, it’s the ISIS goons in Syria and Iraq who are going for the 7th century stuff, not Palestinians. The Palestinians give the impression that they only want to go back to the late 19th century).
So the hypocrisy factor is not the same. And all those dead and injured Palestinian children (watch some of the videos, if you can) have nothing to do with any of that. Although I’m sure that many of the Palestinian children that do survive this war will be some of the most extreme fanatics we’ll see in the next couple of decades, based on their childhood trauma.
Israel acts the same way – “God gave me this land” religious fanaticism combined with thuggish brutality – but Israel then turns around and pretends to be a civilized 21st century society. I guess that’s the part that annoys me the most – the hypocrisy of it.
