Ever since Israel began its defensive mission to destroy Hamas- shortly after they committed the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust - there has been little else but death, destruction, homelessness, and starvation for the people of Gaza.
Day after day – night after night the images broadcast from Gaza are heart rendering. It isn’t easy to watch people who until October 7th were just living their lives - now suffering the loss or serious injury of parents, children, neighbors, and friends; the bombing of residential buildings, schools, and mosques; hospitals filled with the sick, elderly, and the disabled of war. Tears down bloody faces seem to be flowing continuously. There are body bags and mass graves all over the place. There are people that keep running from one area in Gaza to another to escape what seems like endless bombing. Hospitals and relief agencies do not have nearly enough personnel to help these people out.
To the typical compassionate observer, the call for a cease fire makes eminent sense. I would be demanding it too.
Demanding a cease fire seems to be an increasing phenomenon as the numbers of dead keep rising along with those images. How can it not be demanded when over 26,000 Palestinians have being killed by Israel’s military. Is that not genocide?
No it is not. And the call for a cease fire is an unjust call.
First because Israel is responding Hamas’s October 7th bloody massacre of 1200 innocent Jews and the taking of 240 hostages. Hamas promised to keep doing that until Jewish Israel is replaced by Islamic Palestine. More importantly is the fact that there is a root cause for all this devastation. And it is not the so-called ‘occupation’ that Palestinians and their sympathizers keep saying it is.
The root cause is their initial rejection of the UN partition of mandated Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state - the original ‘2 state solution’.(They did not call themselves Palestinians back then.) Instead all of Israel’s Arab neighbors attacked the fledgling Jewish state - trying to finish what Hitler started by driving the Jews into the sea. That is how Israel came into being. It won that war and declared independence. The Arabs that fled became refugees living on the West Bank which was then under the jurisdiction of Trans-Jordan (They have since dropped the Trans part of their name.) Jordan governed that area until 1967 when in Israel won another victory over its neighbors and captured the West Bank.
I am not going to participate in the blame game here. There is a lot of controversy about why those Arabs fled in 1948. I tend to believe that there are a variety of reasons for their hasty departure. Be that as it may, a lot of Arabs decided to stay and live in the new Jewish state.
Guess what happened. Israeli Arabs are flourishing. Their standard of living is far better than Arabs living in other Arab countries. They have voting rights and representation in the Knesset. Asked whether they would move to a Palestinian state should that happen, the vast majority of them said no They would stay put in Israel. Had the Arabs that fled in 48 stayed in Israel they would have had the same fate. (Israel would have had a huge demographic problem now because of their high birth rate. But that is beyond the scope of this post.)
Problem is that Palestinians are not educated that way. Their root cause starts with ‘the occupation’. That is the message they keep regurgitating. A message that keeps being repeated in the UN. Which is what UN Secretary General António Guterres meant when he said the Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum. That is what drives the Protestors to call for a cease fire. What about Hamas’s brutal attack? Well, remember, ‘this did not happen in a vacuum’.
Let me once again make clear that indiscriminate killing of Palestinians is evil. But that is not what Israel is doing despite the high number of Palestinian casualties. Israel had no intention of killing a single Palestinian in Gaza. They did not go to war with Hamas until they massacred 1200 innocent Israelis took over 240 hostages.
Hamas’s goal is to eradicate Israel and replace it with Palestine. A goal supported by the vast majority of Palestinians. They are indoctrinated to blame the Israeli occupation for all their suffering. The October 7th bloody massacre and hostage taking was fully supported by over 80% of them. In both Gaza and the West Bank.
It is because of all this that a cease fire cannot happen. If Israel stops now, it would threaten their very existence.
(I do support a temporary cease fire in exchange for the hostages. Even though it would give Hamas the opportunity to regroup and rebuild. Getting the hostages back is worth the price. As long as Israel resumes the war after that and completes their mission.)
What about all that carnage? What about the over 26,000 Palestinians that have been killed amidst all of that devastation?
First of all among those 26,000 casualties (which could very easily be a Hamas inflated number) - as many as 10,000 of them were not innocent. They were Hamas terrorists wearing civilian clothing and hiding in plain sight among the civilian population. It is also well established that Hamas embedded themselves in densely populated areas of Gaza. Using residential buildings, schools, and mosques and hospitals as a shield for their terrorist bases of operations.
There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that if Palestinian leaders would really want peace with Israel we could have a cease fire in an instant. All they have to do is to stop trying to massacre us. But they have promised to do the opposite.
There can be no clearer indication of their resolve than what was just revealed about UNRWA, the UN relief agency. Which feeds and provides humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians in distress. The vast majority of them are Palestinians. Some 1200 of them are members of Hamas. And 12 or 13 of them actually participated in the October 7th massacre.
It may not be their fault for having been indoctrinated to hate us for the wrong reasons. But Palestinians do hate us and see us as the source of all their problems and want us all out or dead.
So as I have said in the past, having pity of such people is something I cannot bring myself to do. It would be like having pity on German citizens during the Holocaust who saluted Hitler with pride and sent their children to become a part of ‘Hitler Youth’. This doesn’t mean I think they deserve to be killed. But for me - it does mean not feeling all that sorry for them.
My sympathy is reserved for the families of the innocent Israelis that were slaughtered on that October day, those still being held hostage, and their families.
If all of the good people whose sympathy for the Palestinian suffering is legitimate and the reason they are demanding a cease fire would realize all of this, I don’t think they would be doing it.
But they don’t. Which is why these protests are spreading and even finding their way into city council meetings. The Chicago City Council is now considering a resolution calling for a cease fire.
I would like nothing better than a cease fire. The problem of course is that it would only be Israel that would honor it in the long term.
Israel cannot afford that kind of cease fire. I do not believe that (aside from Palestinians and the progressive left that hates any free market democracy that is successful) the vast majority of good people demanding it - truly understand why Israel cannot accept it.
The problem of course is how to get the message out. How can a public whose compassion for human suffering be educated to understand the real root cause? Not the Palestine version of it – bolstered by the daily images coming out of Gaza and the increasing number of protesters demanding a cease fire?
That I can’t answer.