Sunday, November 5, 2023

Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians.

 To go on record, I am not Jewish. I am a fourth generation American of Polish extraction with a Roman Catholic background, though I am not a religious practitioner of any sort.

I was born in 1949, the year after Britain liberated Palestine. What a mess.

Here are the overriding salient points that I see.

1. The Jews have been reviled for over two millennia, victims of bigotry, prejudice, and persecution.

2. The Jews of Europe were abandoned by the world in the 1930s and 1940s.  As a result, six million of them—6,000,000 men, women, and children—were slaughtered by the Nazis. We turned them away from our shores. We denied them the right to go anywhere, including Palestine.

3. The United Nations created the Jewish-Palestinian problem in 1948. The UN initiated an untenable situation and has been blaming Israel for it ever since. The UN handed the Palestinian Jews the shitty end of the stick and the Jews have been beating the Palestinians with it ever since.

4. The Israelis have treated the Palestinians like others treated them, with bigotry, prejudice, and persecution.. The nation of Israel has applied an inverse corollary of the Golden Rule. It is not only despicable, it is not sustainable. The Hamas attack was only to be expected.

5. As for the 2023 Hamas War: Israel needs to destroy Hamas or, failing that, to create such an object lesson that the Palestinians will not permit the rise of such a terrorist agency again. The majority of the Palestinians of Gaza are, at the very least, complicit in allowing Hamas to come to power. And while that attack may be understandable, given Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, it was purely stupid and self-defeating.

 6.The Israel-Palestinian situation is a UN-created problem, a world problem. It needs a solution that is going to require more real estate than has been made available by the UN. The world needs to step up and pay for the mistake it made. The world should buy some suitable region from an existing country and offer it to the Palestinians. Maybe the Sinai. Maybe a slice of Jordan. Maybe Texas.

7. Jerusalem should be an international city under UN administration.

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