Cause and Effect

"If we actually look at cause-and-effect we can see that Israel built a fence not out of any racist agenda, but because terrorists were blowing themselves up in the Second Intifada. Terrorists were blowing themselves up -- ironically?-- because they wanted to displace the current inhabitants and settle [or resettle, as they see it], the land."

"Similarly, Israel put in checkpoints in the West Bank in the early 2000s not because it wants to prevent freedom of movement, but because it needs to make sure no bombs or knives are being brought in. As for this latest conflict? Israel launched airstrikes in Gaza because Hamas sent a barrage of rockets into Israel -- 4,000 at last count."

"Hamas started sending rockets into Israel, at least in part, because of an Israeli Supreme Court case over a decades-long property dispute that could see several Palestinian families evicted from their East Jerusalem homes for not paying rent."

In other words, the fraught Israel-Palestine relationship has specific causes -- it's not simply that Israel is a settler-colonial state that's hell-bent on ethnic cleansing the land."

Danielle Kubes, (Millennial personal finance expert, freelance finance writer, Toronto)  

An Arab boy puts up a sign given to his family by a Jewish neighbor in Jaffa, Israel, May 13, 2021. The sign says, in Arabic and Hebrew, "We live together."  Dina Kraft

 

For a sovereign country, Israel submits to a reality that no other country on this planet is forced by circumstances of geography, religion, ethnicity, society, culture and politics to endure. It is a Jewish state, established for a number of compelling reasons; an emotional draw to return to its biblical-era homeland of ethnic/religious origins, and a forced compulsion to establish an ethno-centric haven from traditional and ongoing persecution of impossible dimensions -- again, of a nature that no other ethnic/religious/cultural group has ever been forced to experience.

 

Diaspora Jews, Jews living anywhere in the world from antiquity to the present have had to endure racial and religious discrimination of an intensity that would quell the aspiration of any other group to remain where fate settled them in their migration from their origins as a result of one violent upheaval and occupation after another. Their numbers as a small minority of people within a greater majority of hostile occupants within their ancient homeland in a constant tug of conflict and conquest never enabled their sporadic defences to complete success, forever resulting in exile and migration.

 

Nowhere in the world were they ever accepted with open arms as equals to the prevailing society. Zionism arose inevitably as a recourse to the constant bludgeoning of anti-Jew sentiments almost universally experienced. In the process, living as a minority, Jews learned to keep a low profile, while still managing to excel in any endeavour that the skilled and the capable among them gravitated toward, whether science, politics, finance, art, medicine or any number of professions where high cerebral functioning identified a Jewish presence.

 

Activists who have worked for years to bridge the gaps between Jews and Arabs in Lod have been shocked and saddened by the surge in conflict.  Photograph by Oren Ziv / picture alliance / Getty

 

In the process gifting the world with the talents and enterprise of the Jewish spirit of education and excellence. None of which commended it to the larger, general population, accustomed to viewing Jews as 'outsiders', 'foreign' and mistrusted, a people to whom slanderous accusations of subhuman behaviour clung, as a way of alienating public opinion against their presence, serving to distinguish Jews as whipping-posts of dissatisfaction, where religious and political leaders could point to Jewish conspiracies to control and dominate the world order.

 

Israel came into being as its modern reincarnation because the world body cringed in shame at its disaffection and disinterest in shielding Jews from the plans of the Third Reich to exterminate them as noxious pathogens on the surface of the Earth. Israel had formal 'permission' from the United Nations to 'become' itself. The Jewish presence was never absent from its homeland. The formal establishment of its renaissance drew the spiritually wounded and the soul-weary to their state that offered them haven from a hostile world.

 

The brief interlude when global shame made it impolite to openly practise Jew-hate dissipated as soon as a state meant for Jewish security and pride was established. Another victim other than Jews surfaced, Arab Muslims who gravitated toward the Jewish homeland to claim it as their own. The Judean Palestine renamed by Roman occupation suddenly became Arab Palestine. And these Palestinians declared themselves the original inhabitants of the land, spurning the offer of Partition because they would take no 'part' but all of it as their own.

 

Former occupiers in modern history from the Ottomans to the British, saw no reason to recognize 'Palestine' formally as a nation of Muslim Arabs, content to settle for allowing them to live as settlers on the land, originally from Egypt and Syria. Jews returned to Judea/Israel when the Arab countries in which they had lived for thousands of years: Yemen, Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Egypt Libya, Algeria banished their Mizrahi Jews, confiscating their property, enriching Israel in the process, with their presence. 

 

Dרuze elders in the Galilee village of Beit Jann

Now, Palestinian Arabs inform the world that they are victims of Israel's formation, that the Jewish state squats on Palestinian land. Peace agreement efforts between Israel and the Palestinian leadership have led nowhere and they will always lead to that nowhere, since nothing will satisfy those leaders other than Israel's sudden disappearance enabling the Palestinian aspiration of its establishment from 'the river to the sea'. That leadership whips its constituents into a frenzy of victimization and hatred.

Israel, the apartheid state, has a citizenship comprised 20 percent of Arabs, of a mosaic of minority groups that include Druze, Bedouin, Muslims, Christians, and asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan. Any of whom can aspire to join respected professions in the law, medicine, academia and the sciences as equal members of society. There are non-Jewish diplomats representing Israel, court justices, members of the Israeli Knesset with influence. 

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cling to the position foisted upon them by their leaders; victims.

Old City of Jerusalem: Via Dolorosa (Way of the Cross) and the souq (market) in the Muslim Quarter