Refusal by Muslims to accept Jews as equals is the source of the conflict.

I am copying the response by Chaim Handler on Quora to this question:

Why couldn’t Jews and Arabs get along in Palestine? Is Zionism the source of the conflict?

Handler replied:

Obviously Zionism is the cause of the conflict, just as Abolitionism was the cause of the conflict between the Union and the Confederate States, leading to the United States Civil War. Correcting injustice can harm those who benefit from that injustice, even if that injustice is not their fault. In the case of Zionism, the injustice was 75 generations of subjugation and persecution of an entire nation in exile.

In the words of the Arab mayor of Jerusalem during the late 19th century, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi: “Zionism in principle is natural, beautiful, and just… Who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country”. He wrote this in March 1899 in a letter to the chief Rabbi of France. Of course there was a “but”, and the “but” was just as true as his admission of the justification for ZIonism. He argued that implementation of Zionism would cause upheaval for the Arab population, and it would, without any doubt. That fact was not about to deter the Jews from exercising the rights that even he acknowledged as just.

When the League of Nations decided to implement Zionism as an integral aspect of the Mandate for Palestine, they had to weigh what they termed “the grounds for the reconstitution of the Jewish national home” against the right of what they termed the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” to self-rule, and their verdict was that the non-Jewish communities in Palestine were not entitled to further deny the Jewish People their liberty within their ancestral homeland.

At the time there were approximately 500,000 Ottoman Arabs living in what was defined by the Allied Powers as Palestine. For every one of those Arabs there were at least 25 Jews in the world who had parents, grandparents, great-grandparents… 75 generations of antecedents, all of whom were denied their freedom and persecuted because of their religious and ethnic background. More than a century of “enlightenment” had not led to an end to the persecution of the Jews and there was no indication that the injustices suffered by Jews in the diaspora would end. This could be the last opportunity to put an end to the exile of the Jewish People. How could they allow such a chance to slip away?

Their recognition of the humanitarian crisis caused by anti-Jewish persecution was proven correct in the most extreme and tragic manner barely two decades later, when a third of the Jews in the world were exterminated by the Nazis. The reconstitution of the Jewish national home was not only “just” but necessary. The former Ottoman Arabs populating the Near East were achieving their independence with the establishment of many vast lands from Egypt to the Emirates, including Syria, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, etc.

While the Palestine was to be the Jewish home, it was made clear that the Jewish home was to be governed as a democracy where the civil rights of all were to be protected, non-Jews would have complete religious freedom, and their culture and lifestyle would be preserved. In fact one of every five Israeli citizens is Arab and enjoys full equality and democratic rights, and few Israeli Arabs today regret that their parents or grandparents chose to remain rather than fleeing to lands where they would live under Arab hegemony but lack the freedoms and opportunities Israel affords them.

Certainly Zionism caused conflict, but that fact does not prove that Zionism is unjust. To a great extent the harmful effects of the implementation of Zionism could have been prevented, had the Arabs demonstrated any appreciation for the reality that Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi acknowledged in his letter. Most if not all of the hardships suffered by the Arabs as a result of Zionism were the effect of their futile resistance to what turned out to be inevitable. They didn’t care about the legitimate rights of the Jewish People. They cared only about the privilege they believed themselves entitled to as Arabs and Moslem in the predominately Arab Middle East. They see themselves as the victims of Israel’s failure to allow the Arabs to defeat them, which is really sad and pathetic.

At this stage the conflict is perpetuated only by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians to reconcile themselves to the reality that has existed 73 years. There is no turning back the clock. Looking forward the Palestinians and Israelis can be partners in a mutually beneficial future, or the hardships being suffered by the Palestinians can continue indefinitely. The choice is theirs.

What Hamas Wants

My friends on the left who support Hamas’ attack of a month ago are making a big mistake.

They should read, for themselves, the Hamas founding document.

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

It is a call for butchery and for a Muslim theocracy over the entire world that would specifically attempt to subjugate or kill all Jews, all Christians, all atheists, and those of any other faith as well.

Read what it says about you leftists, or about the idea of a multi-ethnic, secular state in the region between the Jordan, the Mediterranean, and the Sinai peninsula!

These religious fanatics make any right-wing European or American Christian nationalist look like peace-loving moderates by comparison.

Here are a few excerpts. I highlighted a few of them.

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“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”

…

“The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

“Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

“The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

“Article Eight:

“Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

…

“Strategies and MethodsStrategies of the Islamic Resistance Movement: Palestine Is Islamic [W]aqf:

“Article Eleven:

“The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

“This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

…

“Peaceful Solutions, Initiatives and International Conferences:

“Article Thirteen:

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”

“Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

“But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow – verse 120).

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.”

====•======•=====

These are not people you should be allying with!

The dangers of seeking revenge

I didn’t write this, and I’ve never shot at anyone, but this article seems very apt when you think of the bloodthirsty, racist butchery last month perpetrated by Hamas in the region where I once lived.

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Hamas, Israel, and the Dark Power of Vengeance

I know what it feels like to be driven by vengeance in warfare. I also know it can lead soldiers to cross the line.

WILL SELBER

NOV 6, 2023

A teddy bear is seen on the ground near the bomb shelter of a kibbutz home attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Holit, Israel, near the border with Gaza. According to an IDF officer, two grandparents who resided here held the bomb shelter door closed during the attack to protect their grandchildren. All were injured but survived. (Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

I WAS ONE MONTH into my first deployment when I saw my first dead little girl.

It was 2006 in Baghdad, and the Shia–Sunni civil war had erupted in full force. Carnage greeted us daily.

Hers wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen. Hardly. I had already responded to multiple mass-casualty car bombs that ripped through Baghdad’s markets. My boots were often covered with blood as I stepped over and through scores of dying Iraqis crying out for help.

But her murder was different.

Her body was crumpled in the back of an Iraqi Police Ford Ranger, alongside other victims of a powerful Iranian-backed terrorist group, Jaysh al-Mahdi.

We pushed the other bodies to the side of the truck and pulled her to the rear. She had been gagged and handcuffed, and her head punctured by a drill bit. We later found out that she had been raped in front of her family, to punish them for being Sunnis.

Her face still haunts me. At night, when I’m alone, and the demons come, I still see her face—with that puncture hole. Some nights, she comes to me in my nightmares, begging me to avenge her.

All I wanted was to avenge her innocence. But the culprits were my partners, the Iraqi Police. The Iraqi Police were thoroughly infested by Jaysh al-Mahdi fighters because they controlled the Ministry of Interior. I would never get my chance to avenge her death—and I’ve yet to fully forgive myself.

But I would eventually taste vengeance. During my years in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw other atrocities up close and personal. The Taliban, the Haqqani Network, the Islamic State, and al Qaeda routinely murdered, raped, and tortured innocent civilians.

Killing those terrorists was intoxicating. Whether it was in a firefight or planning an operation and watching it unfold, slaying monsters is immensely satisfying. In fact, it is addictive, so I kept going back on six separate deployments.

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THROUGHOUT THOSE DEPLOYMENTS, I learned that righteous vengeance is a potent drug.

That’s not something most people understand. When in polite society, I often speak of the horrors of war, of which there are many. This is the sort of thing that most Americans—especially well-meaning liberals—expect to hear, and want to hear.

Only once have I spoken openly and honestly about the thrill of killing. After a few too many drinks at an upscale party in Washington, D.C., an inquisitive woman asked me, “What’s the best thing about deploying?”

I stared at her deadpan and said, “Killing those animals for what they did.”

The roomful of pleasant professionals looked aghast.

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THESE EXPERIENCES FLOODED MY MIND after seeing the horrific images of Hamas’s October 7 pogrom. Upon seeing the mutilated bodies of innocent children, I started thinking about all the children I had seen slaughtered by similar groups.

My fists immediately closed, and my shoulders furled forward. My jaws clenched tight, an acid taste flooding my mouth. These were the same physiological reactions I had when I saw atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As adrenaline coursed through my body and my rage peaked, I wanted only one thing—vengeance for the innocent massacred in Israel. It is the same feeling that hundreds of thousands of Israeli soldiers likely feel, many of them now in or preparing to enter Gaza.

In the coming weeks, the IDF will face perhaps the biggest military test since its creation 75 years ago. That is saying something for such a vaunted fighting force. They will face a determined enemy who has likely meticulously planned their defense. There will be snipers, attempts to kidnap soldiers via tunnels, human shields, suicide bombers, and likely advanced Iranian weapons (be on the lookout for explosively formed projectiles).

They will be fighting while the world watches intensely. Every exchange of fire will be filmed by ubiquitous cell phones, some broadcast in real time. Every Hamas fighter and supporter will try to paint IDF actions as inhumane so they can be used as propaganda, sapping the West’s resilience in the process.

The IDF will be held to a standard that Hamas is never judged by. It is not fair, and it will inevitably lead to the death of many IDF soldiers. It would be far easier to just fire and forget, civilian casualties be damned. Although my experiences in urban warfare weren’t existential, I often felt enraged when I could not respond in kind. Taking potshots from nearby mosques was very common in Baghdad. In Afghanistan, Taliban fighters would intentionally fire at us from crowded bazaars, then melt into the population, daring us to overreact. In Iraq, Iranian-backed terrorists often handed out toy guns to young boys. I nearly killed a young Iraqi boy during a dismounted patrol because of Iran’s disregard for life. Other American service members in a similar situation did pull that trigger—and were forever haunted.

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WHILE IT IS NOT FAIR that the IDF is held to a different standard, it is also what makes them a fundamentally liberal fighting force. In a recent interview, Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, boasted, “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves.”

This echoes many other terrorists since 2001 who mocked the softness of Westerners for loving life while priding themselves for loving death. Hamas believes slaughtering babies, raping women, and kidnapping Holocaust survivors is their strength, but it will be their ruination.

Hamas’s brutality galvanized public opinion against them. They are now being painted as akin to the Islamic State by many Western leaders, including, most importantly, President Biden. This type of rhetoric provides vast room to maneuver for the IDF. However, the IDF’s righteous vengeance must be properly vectored. IDF sergeants and company-grade officers will have to walk a fine line by harnessing the power of their righteous vengeance in eliminating Hamas while also ensuring they don’t become the monsters they hope to destroy.

It happened to the United States in My Lai and Abu Ghraib. It happened to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales in a small district in Afghanistan. I know American service members who crossed that line after one of their friends was killed. They hungered for vengeance. And to a man, they regret it to this day.

Soldiers cross the line in battle. It happens in every war. When you allow men to kill, some inevitably go too far. That’s because there is a powerful temptation to respond to your enemy’s atrocities with similar brutality. Again: Bloodlust is a very real thing. I know that firsthand. I’ve felt it running through my veins. But it is also perilous. While the IDF must be ferocious and unleash overwhelming force to vanquish Hamas, they must also not lose themselves in the process. The balance is incredibly difficult to maintain, especially in an urban environment where the enemy lurks in every crevice—and after witnessing the most deadly attack against Jews since the Shoah.

The IDF will be fighting to restore deterrence. They will be fighting to destroy Hamas. They will also be fighting to avenge the 1,400 Jews who were butchered. That will motivate them to endure. It will steel their resolve. It mustn’t, however, change who they are.

Israelis love life. And in the final analysis, that is their strength, not their weakness.

Insights from Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader: While Americans Sleep, Our Corporate Overlords Make Progress Impossible

Posted on October 4, 2021 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield

By Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).Originally published at Common Dreams

“Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.

Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.

The quiet harmony between the two parties created by the omnipresent power of Big Business and other powerful single-issue lobbyists is often the status quo. That’s why there are so few changes in this country’s politics.

In many cases, the similarities of both major parties are tied to the fundamental concentration of power by the few over the many. In short, the two parties regularly agree on anti-democratic abuses of power. Granted, there are always a few exceptions among the rank & file. Here are some areas of Republican and Democrat concurrence:

1. The Duopoly shares the same stage on a militaristic, imperial foreign policy and massive unaudited military budgets. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Pentagon budget was voted out of a House committee by the Democrats and the GOP with $24 billion MORE than what President Biden asked for from Congress. Neither party does much of anything to curtail the huge waste, fraud, and abuse of corporate military contractors, or the Pentagon’s violation of federal law since 1992 requiring annual auditable data on DOD spending be provided to Congress, the president, and the public.

2. Both Parties allow unconstitutional wars violating federal laws and international treaties that we signed onto long ago, including restrictions on the use of force under the United Nations Charter.

3. Both Parties ignore the burgeoning corporate welfare subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts turning oceans of inefficient, mismanaged, and coddled profit-glutted companies into tenured corporate welfare Kings.

4. Both Parties decline to crack down on the nationwide corporate crime spree. They don’t even like to use the phrase “corporate crime” or “corporate crime wave.” They prefer to delicately allude to “white-collar crime.”

Trillions of dollars are at stake every year, yet neither party holds corporate crime hearings nor proposes an update of the obsolete, weak federal corporate criminal laws.

In some instances, there is no criminal penalty at all for willful and knowing violations of safety regulatory laws (e.g., the auto safety and aviation safety laws). Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) is trying to find just one Republican Senator to co-sponsor the “Hide No Harm Act” that would make it a crime for a corporate officer to knowingly conceal information about a corporate action or product that poses the danger of death or serious physical injury to consumers or workers.

5. Both Parties allow Wall Street’s inexhaustibly greedy CEOs to prey on innocents, including small investors. They also do nothing to curb hundreds of billions of dollars in computerized billing fraud, especially in the health care industry. (See, License to Steal by Malcolm K. Sparrow and a GAO Report about thirty years ago).

6. The third leading cause of death in the U.S. is fatalities from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics. According to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine study in 2015, a conservative estimate is that 250,000 people yearly are dying from preventable conditions. Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has an effort remotely up to the scale required to reduce this staggering level of mortality and morbidity. Nor is the American Medical Association (AMA) engaging with this avoidable epidemic.

7. Both Parties sped bailout of over $50 billion to the airline industry during Covid-19, after the companies had spent about $45 billion on unproductive stock buybacks over the last few years to raise the metrics used to boost executive pay.

8. Both Parties starve corporate law enforcement budgets in the Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and such departments as Labor, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, and Health and Human Services. The Duopoly’s view is that there be no additional federal cops on the corporate crime beat.

9. Both Parties prostrate themselves before the bank-funded Federal Reserve. There are no congressional audits, no congressional oversight of the Fed’s secret, murky operations, and massive printing of money to juice up Wall Street, while keeping interest rates near zero for trillions of dollars held by over one hundred million small to midsize savers in America.

10. Both Parties are wedded to constant and huge bailouts of the risky declining, uncompetitive (with solar and wind energy) nuclear power industry. This is corporate socialism at its worst. Without your taxpayer and ratepayer dollars, nuclear plants would be closing down faster than is now the case. Bipartisan proposals for more nukes come with large subsidies and guarantees by Uncle Sam.

11. Both Parties hate Third Parties and engage in the political bigotry of obstructing their ballot access (See: Richard Winger’s Ballot Access News), with hurdles, harassing lawsuits, and exclusions from public debates. The goal of both parties is to stop a competitive democracy.

12. Both Parties overwhelmingly rubber-stamp whatever the Israeli government wants in the latest U.S. military weaponry, the suppression of Palestinians and illegal occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands, and the periodic slaughter of Gazans with U.S. weapons. The Duopoly also supports the use of the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council to insulate Israel from UN sanctions.

13. Continuing Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s debilitating internal deforms of congressional infrastructures, the Democrats have gone along with the GOP’s shrinking of committee and staff budgets, abolition of the crucial Office of Technology Assessment’s (OTA) budget, and concentration of excessive power in the hands of the Speaker and Senate leader. This little noticed immolation reduces further the legislature’s ability to oversee the huge sprawling Executive Branch. The erosion of congressional power is furthered by the three-day work week Congress has reserved for itself.

14. Even on what might seem to be healthy partisan differences, the Democrats and the GOP agree not to replace or ease out Trump’s Director of the Internal Revenue Service, a former corporate loophole tax lawyer, or the head of the U.S. Postal Service, a former profiteer off the Post Office who will shortly curtail service even more than he did in 2020 (See: First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat, by Christopher W Shaw).

Right now, both Parties are readying to give over $50 billion of your tax money to the very profitable under-taxed computer chip industry companies like Intel and Nvidia, so they can make more profit-building plants in the U.S. These companies are loaded with cash. They should invest their own money and stop the stock buyback craze. Isn’t that what capitalism is all about?

Both Parties vote as if the American middle-class taxpayer is a sleeping sucker. Politicians from both parties exploit voters who don’t do their homework on voting records and let the lawmakers use the people’s sovereign power (remember the Constitution’s “We the People”) against them on behalf of the big corporate bosses.

Sleep on America, you have nothing to lose but your dreams.

This entry was posted in Banana republic, Guest Post, Income disparity, Legal, Politics, Regulations and regulators, Ridiculously obvious scams, The destruction of the middle class on October 4, 2021 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield.