When we contemplate events, what should be done, whom we should support, and other important matters, a context as well as truthful, objective information is required to arrive at a well made decision.  Resulting stances and actions, persisting over time, may change depending on truthful and objective information.

The History

Our views of the middle east may well lack proper context as we regret and seek to stem the loss of life and horrors being inflicted on various innocent people. As regards the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, we could start about 3,000 years ago because the word Palestine is derived from the word Philistine, which people were in constant battle with the united Kingdom of Israel in the time of David. 

I realize that some people disagree on the notion that there is a Jewish people, a group of people descended from common ancestors.  Yet studies on Kohens (Aaronic priestly class, but not Aaaron – Phinehas – Zadok) show genetic relationships, and any group that is in diaspora for over 1800 years will have fresh elements in the gene pool if it is to survive, not to mention converts.  Make no mistake: this is not simply a religion.  It is a culture, a way of life, a group of likeminded and most often related people. 

The last remnant of David’s united kingdom, Judah or Judea, was literally wiped off of the map by Roman Emperor Hadrian ca. 135 CE when he renamed the region Syria Palestinia perhaps as part of his reprisals for the Bar Kokhba revolt.  From that time until 1948 when the independence of Israel was declared and 1949 when the state was admitted to the United Nations, no Jewish homeland existed and the people of Judea lived in diaspora and although at times thriving, were widely persecuted and horrifically murdered.

It didn’t take long for the newly formed Christian religion to begin dehumanizing the Jewish people.  By 300 CE Christians were using “Christ Killers” to describe the Jews, and were punishing Christians who took on too many Jewish traditions, so called Judaizers.  This seems repugnant to me as a Christian especially since the cross and the resurrection are the primary essence of Christ as King, even over death.

In 624 CE, Islam was born and through many struggles and wars spread very rapidly.  The Qur’an, other than Muslims, tells us that three classes of people, known as “people of the book” can be saved:  Christians, Jews, and Sabeans.  However, the book also warns us not to trust the Jewish people and states that their scriptures are corrupted.  It also tells us that Jesus did ascend to heaven and will return on the last day but that he was neither crucified nor resurrected. 

Jews, Christians, and Muslims did peacefully coexist in various Islamic governments.  Maimonides, a very famous Jewish Philosopher (ca. 1200 CE) writes his “Guide to the Perplexed” from one such setting.  That being said, existence was a matter of toleration and toleration was limited.

By the early 1400’s, the wars and crusades were settling down, and Europe had come through the dark ages left from the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  However, lingering effects and mistrust led to making sure that the Christian nations were really Christian.  This led to events like the Spanish Inquisition which started in 1492, the same year that the thug Columbus set sail for India and landed in the Americas.  The real purpose of the inquisition seems to have been to expose and remove (or eliminate) persons who feigned conversion to Christianity yet inwardly and out of sight were either Jewish or Muslim.

Shortly thereafter, we have more schisms within Christianity as Martin Luther appears on the scene (b. 1483, d. 1546).  I don’t read Luther because I started with his book “Of Jews and the Lies that they tell”.  In that work, one finds some brilliant scholarship that then turns into a hate filled, dehumanizing diatribe against the Jewish people in which he advocates for taking all property and possessions, burning all Jewish houses of study and worship, and enslaving the entire population into forced labor.  We should note that he was not limiting this advice to Germany whence he came but, rather, was doing his best to advise the entire Christian world, and we should make no mistake that the Church itself, the Roman Catholic Church and other churches that had broken from Rome by this time, continued a systematic extirpation of Jewish people and punished Christians for being Judaizers, for adopting Jewish ways – albeit not beliefs regarding Jesus.

After World War I (1914-1918), the League of Nations was formed in 1920 by Woodrow Wilson in his effort to make World War I the war to end all wars.  The collapse of the Ottoman empire led to the League of Nations British Palestine mandate (1923-1948).  (The League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations 1945-1946.)  During that mandate, largely due to the “death penalty” imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I, a perfect storm arose by which Hitler came to power, legitimately, in Germany.  His is not a book that I will read, but the ultimate result was a fully demonized version of Luther’s writings.

If you’ve not read Elie Wiesel’s “Night” or “Night Trilogy” (Night, Dawn, the Accident), you should.  We call this systematic genocidal torture, murder and worse of six million Jews “the Holocaust”.  The word Holocaust comes from Greek with “Holo” meaning whole and Caust meaning burned.  This word is used to describe whole burned offerings to God in the Latin and Greek translations of the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible.  When the Americans liberated Buchenwald, their faces showed Elie Wiesel that they didn’t know what evil was manifest in Nazi controlled areas.  While our soldiers didn’t know, our leaders, long before that liberation, did.  Hate need not be pushing someone from a building; it can also be letting them be pushed or letting them fall when you can stop it.

While all of this was going on, starting in 1897, a Zionist movement was formed whose purpose was to establish a Jewish homeland within the “promised land”, within the Davidic Kingdom’s territory.  The activities of this movement were, at least during the British Palestine mandate, violent and aimed at convincing the British to leave.  Elie Wiesel, in his novel “Dawn” describes the movement as including terrorists, indeed Dawn centers on the activities of a single terrorist cell.  The day before the end of the British Mandate, on May 14, 1948, the formation of the Jewish state to be known as Israel was announced.  War, between Israel and its neighbors, the Arab-Israeli war, erupted the next day, ending in a cease fire about a year later.  On 11 May, 1949, Israel was admitted to the United Nations, have survived a birth of fire. 

I have left out an enormity of details, the whitepaper of 1939, Arab revolts against the British mandates, Caliphates, and so forth.  In doing so, I realize that some bias may exist but, for a short paper, brevity is necessary.

Independent Israel is the most recent context: 28 UN member states never recognized Israel or have withdrawn that recognition.  In many cases, this is not a passive lack of recognition but, rather, a demand for the destruction of Israel and its people; some groups have this demand emblazed on their flags. 

Increasing consumption and demand for oil, cheaply produced in many of the 28 states not recognizing Israel, has increased the wealth, military might, and influence of many of those states just as they are loosely bound together by that lack of recognition and, sometimes, hatred.  Moreover, strained relations between and various alliances of major powers, the cold war as it were, have created further complications to applying pressure to achieve more global recognition of Israel as a state.

Many conflicts have occurred, many have suffered.  Many have died.  The first intifada (uprising) occurred from 1987 through 1990.  By 2000, negotiations on a long-term settlement for Gaza and the West bank were in progress among they key players including the Palestinian groups.  Those negotiations stalled, leading to the second intifada from 2000 through 2005.  In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew forces and dismantled bases from within the Gaza strip.  In 2006, Hamas won control of the Palestinian assembly through what was considered an open and fair election.  Joint rule with the primary West Bank political group, Fatah, failed leading to violent clashes and Hamas taking over full control of the Gaza strip in 2007.

Hamas offered the United States President George W. Bush terms for a ten-year truce with Israel, but not a long term recognition of Israel’s right to exist.  The U. S. did not reply, and we should remember that Yasser Arafat made similar overtures but refused to consider changing the charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization to remove the call for Israel’s existence to end. 

In the time between 2007 and the attack by Hamas on Israel 7 October 2023, it is clear that Hamas was not idle and used that time, and support from probably somewhere in the 28, to strengthen it’s military and subterranean network.  Regardless of the true motivation, this has had the effect of refocusing the world on the unresolved crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. 

The Basics

Hate

I hope that you see how complicated this problem is, and that all sides have valid arguments that need attention and consideration.  That being said, the first absolute in this problem, and in the world in general, is that hate must be taken off of the table. 

Hatred dehumanizes the other party and allows the unthinkable to be actionable.  Paraphrasing Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust is not about man’s inhumanity to man but, rather, about man’s inhumanity to Jews.  Any group that becomes the focus of hate is dehumanized and rendered something to be removed as a manifest evil among good people.  This is not tolerable and must not be on the table.  All humans have a right to exist, and no group of humans is “sub-human”.

While removing hatred from reality is an absolute requirement to achieve any kind of resolution to this and many other problems, doing so is far from easy.  Unity is often achieved in the body politic by demonizing some group and assigning all bad outcomes to nonexistent yet claimed nefarious activities of that group.  Aristotle, in his “the art of rhetoric”, warned us that we could use intentional inflammation of our audiences by knowing their care abouts and making up rhetoric that would inflame them into action that we would guide by using false claims and drawing specious conclusions.  We have yet to listen.

Often leading to hatred of individuals and ascribing those traits to large groups are acts of betrayal.  The Qur’an tells that Islam was betrayed in its early birth stages by certain Jews who were supportive, or at least claimed to be, and then withdrew their support.  That act of a few, for whatever reasons, has been with us since 624 CE, and Christians have been calling the Jews “Christ Killers” since at 300 CE or earlier because some believe that the Jews betrayed Jesus rather than Jesus knowing what would happen when He came among us.

In the broader perspective, and since 300 CE, members of just about every group have betrayed members of just about every other group with whom they interact.  This means that trusting relationships are hard to find, and that hatred is quick to set in because where no trust exists hatred is easy and where hate exists there can be no trust.

Therefore, to take hate off of the table, trust must be established through agreements that are met in the letter of the agreement and in the intent of the agreement.  We must not make agreements that we have no intention of keeping and act as some ancient Greeks who would swear to uphold an agreement “so long as this river passes this landmark” and then set thousands of troops to digging a new course for the river so that it no longer passes the landmark. 

Rhetoric

In the early days of social media, including the time when ISIS/ISIL rose as a group widely known, I participated with a provider as a pro-bono flagger of content that likely broke community rules.  As part of that exercise, I found and flagged videos posted by ISIS/ISIL which required viewing the videos to know that they broke community rules.  I can retrieve those images in my mind’s eye, even as I type this, and only in that way can I commiserate with what soldiers, and civilians, from all sides must see.

A young man, perhaps 13, with a knife perhaps the size of a butcher knife, surrounded by men chanting and humming.  The boy is on the ground next to a living, bound man whose throat the boy slits and then, as the man bleeds out and dies, hacks the spinal cord with that small knife until the head comes off to cheers from the adults.  A man in a cage doused with gasoline, set afire, screaming until he falls and dies.  A gay man constrained by a tire over his head and binding his arms with the hollow filled with gasoline and lit so that the man runs and screams until he dies.  These are real, they are recruitment videos.  They are manifest hate leading to dehumanization and inestimable evil.  This is a side of the rhetoric that we must not forget: the normalizing of hatred, dehumanization, and unspeakable acts.

And the people living in war zones see these kinds of things, and more.  Sometimes they are personal as I’ve described above, sometimes they are impersonal as a bomb or some other weapon with a geographic target, but the carnage and suffering is ubiquitous in war.  Our rhetoric often seeks to take advantage of the visceral reaction people have to these things, to unify and coalesce hatred.  To some extent, this cannot be avoided for those who see and experience such things.  But rhetoric must have a greater purpose than perpetuation of hatred and suffering; it must seek to lead towards a mutually beneficial end to these torments, and not to some horribly repressive state of affairs as the Treaty of Versailles imposed.

For instance, what, exactly, is terrorism?  Oxford Languages gives us “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”  By that definition, the January 6, 2021 capital attack was a terrorist attack, and one wonders what the specific political aims were in the September 11, 2001 attacks on these United States.  The salt of the word has lost its flavor from when civilian hostages were taken (and most often murdered)  or airlines were hijacked.  So, too, the word “radical”.

One also hears the perpetual “human shield” argument regarding “terrorist” activities – that these militant groups position themselves and their weapons among the civilian population thus endangering innocents and creating loss of life when attacked.  This is often called cowardice.  The problem is that if we look at an uprising as in any way legitimate, then we must expect a small force to embed within the community because if they were neatly set apart, they would instantly be wiped out.  If we look to the underground in world war II, or to the right to bear arms in these United States, we must understand that insurgency by its very nature requires brave civilians to participate and shelter the insurgents just as it requires brave civilians to become insurgents.

Thus, our rhetoric is stale and malevolent.  We lack purpose in all of our rhetorical flourish because we seek to harm and not to mend, and we can’t mend if we don’t dare to see the other’s point of view, provided the barrier of hatred is lowered.

And seeing that point of view requires work, real work.  For instance, I spent six months of my study time (about an hour a day) studying the Qur’an in translation and with commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.  While I’m certainly no scholar in that regard, I did gain some understanding and a lot of respect.

Without respect, there can be no trust, and without trust, hate is likely.  Will you go so far as to respect those with whom you disagree?  Even those who have done you great harm?

Our rhetoric must aim towards building respect, showing respect, building trust, being trustworthy, and vanquishing hate.  We’ve a lot to do.

The End Game

I’ve written a lot here, and I suppose you’ve guessed the end game which is ubiquitous agreement that Israel has a right to exist.  We can’t start there because things are complicated and we are dependent on those with whom we disagree, however, that dependency works both ways making negotiations possible because there are indeed alternative sources of oil and gas.

To achieve that end, it must be reasonable which it is.  Our methods, however, need to be concentrated on building respect and trust towards the elimination of hate that is the primary obstacle to our goal.

This goes far beyond Hamas, and we must understand this.  Our tendency to respond to bad behaviors by freezing assets and creating embargo alliances can persuade some to move towards what we think is better, however, it can also anneal alliances of nations who have no trade ties with us and therefore have little concern for our position.  We must remember that we need to build and rebuild respect, and trust. 

Our leadership in these United States have reacted much as I have reacted to heinous deeds done by various malefactors and the cheering on by other nations at our pain.  We must learn from our history and acknowledge our wrongheaded thinking and the harm we’ve done in order to see the path to any sort of healing.  Only through that path can we help others see our point of view that they may engage in the same heartfelt quest, and this cannot be achieved by violence or extortion.