By Robert Graef / Herald Forum
Grieving the loss of life and security in Israel and Palestine is matched by anger at the perpetrators. Two kinds of beasts brought it about; Israel’s’ Likud party which doesn’t give a damn about Muslims’ comfort, security or lives, and Palestinians, victims of 75 years of unrelieved oppression, discrimination and dispossession who, through Hamas, failed to count the cost of their butchery.
The commentator who described Hamas’ attack as second only to the Holocaust misled his listeners. They are not comparable, one being Nazi Germany’ international attempt to erase Jews and Judaism from the face of their earth while this newest attack, Hamas’ short-sighted reaction to intolerable oppression.
On one side are the hard-liners of Israel’s Likud Party whose treatment of Palestinians is seen by young liberal Jews as akin to the white South African apartheid policy toward the Blacks whose land they stole. On the other side are three generations of Palestinians who, other than what they see on television, know no other life than oppression and hopelessness.
Three generations ago, the land we are taught to know as Israel, was Palestine, or Canaan, or as the Greeks once called part of it, Philistia. The Romans listed it as Judaea. Its name and borders changed with time but the people that populated it, the Palestinians, stayed through thick and thin; until dispossessed by Israeli expansionism.
For graphic proof, Google “Israel history expansion maps” to see how Israel’s stage-by-stage expansion now restricts Palestinians to bits of their homeland. This brutal, senseless, destructive war cannot be understood without understanding what caused it. Yes, it is a bloody crime, but it had a cause. Think of it as animals being provoked until they bite. Seventy-five years of oppression had emptied Palestinians of all hope of justice, reducing some of them to lashing out.
This war, like all wars, kills and wounds more civilians than combatants, and of the wounded, most of wounds are psychological. While physical wounds may heal, minds don’t forget, and they keep being reminded. Since 1948, Palestine has been in seven armed conflicts with Israel, and after each, Israel grew bigger and stronger. This eighth one will be remembered best, not only by Palestinian victims, but by sympathetic Islamic neighbors.
Whose war is it? Is it a proxy war, Palestine and Israel being client-states of Iran and the United States? Is it an ideological was between Hamas and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud Party? A religious war? What it is not, is a war between the people of Palestine and the people of Israel. Like it or not, we the people of the United States are party to this brawl by virtue of our annual support for Israel, a well-known fact to the world of Islam.
Foreign aid to Israel amounts to approximately $500 per year for every man, woman, and child. Guaranteed military aid over 10 years is pegged at $38 billion, the total making Israel the fifth largest receiver of foreign aid. Measured in dollars per person, it is No. 1. Add over a billion in US Agency for International Development money we pay Jordan annually for operating camps for 1.2 million dispossessed Palestinian refugees, joined by 21,000 more Palestinians squeezed from their homeland each year by Israel’s ongoing expansion.
U.S. foreign aid to Palestine has averaged approximately $400 million per year, an unsteady amount, having been canceled by President Trump and perennially threatened by Congress. Benefits of U.S. funds for Palestinian infrastructure development were undone when Israel cut off water, power and fuel resources to innocent bystanders. When the Netanyahu government passed a law that that struck at Muslim worship by silencing early morning calls to prayer and forbidding the use of amplifiers, reaction was inevitable.
Hamas’ atrocities are unforgivable, easily qualifying as war crimes. But they would not have happened were it not for Israel’s hard-right policies toward Palestinians. Those policies have resulted in eight armed conflicts since establishment of the nation of Israel in 1946, and this current one may not be the last, which raises the question, what will it take to break the chain?
President Obama pointed the way when he followed his comment, “Across the South we have a deep appreciation of history,” with: “(But) We haven’t always had a deep appreciation for each other’s history.” That’s exactly what Netanyahu’s party and Hamas need to study to break the chain.
Robert Graef lives in Mill Creek.
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