Yesterday, we were treated to the news that Hamas had officially violated the ceasefire when they took credit for killing three Israelis in a terrorist attack. However, there is some consternation of both sides as one side blames the other for violating the cease fire. Essentially, this is where this conflict has gotten us. The last couple of months has been a microcosm of the last 75 years since Israel was officially established by the United Nations in 1947. First, let’s take a step back for a second. The vast majority of animal behavior is predictable on some level.

Our cats and dog fight like, um, cats and dogs. One of them gets along with him (the dog) better than the others, but the dog weighs 100 pounds. He wouldn’t really hurt any of them, but they don’t know that. More importantly, they constantly fight with each other. You would think they could join together in common cause against the dog, but they can put aside their differences to do this.

This is where things are at in the Middle East. When you look at what Hamas has done it would appear that it is unprovoked. There were no direct preceding events that led up to their terrorist attack in October. However, there were tons of preceding events. Just like with my cats, there is a reason why one attacks the other. It may look like the victim was just minding their business, but it wasn’t always that way. The aggressor was responding to a time when he or she was the victim. So, even a seemingly isolated event has roots in something.

All human behavior is predictable. Even sociopathy is predictable and understandable once you get a fuller appreciation for it. Our ex-president’s behavior is predictable. Hamas’s behavior is predictable. Israel’s behavior is predictable. We respond based on previous experience and the facts on the ground as we understand them. If our experience is that you can’t be trusted and that you will attack beyond the scope of the current conflict then my response is certain to reflect that. So, here we are.

What is also predictable is our collective response. People that criticize Palestine are called Islamophobic. People that criticize Israel are called anti-Semitic. If you were to somehow criticize both then you would just be the world’s biggest bigot. This is where we are at. We cannot have a frank and honest conversation because those labels are going to be thrown around quicker than it takes you to finish this paragraph.

I fully understand the emotions involved. I feel deeply for the Israeli AND Palestinian people caught in the middle. Having empathy means actually mentally putting yourself in their place. Some have questioned why innocent people would not put themselves in harms way and turn in their neighbors if they knew they were Hamas and what they planned to do. How safe would feel turning in your neighbors? Maybe we could relocate across town in that scenario or in another state. These folks cannot.

On the Israeli side, they know they are the target of the Arab world. Most of the countries around them vacillate between reluctant tolerance and out and out hatred. If we put ourselves in their shoes it would make perfect sense to lash out at those folks to at least demonstrate strength and resolve. Knowledge and wisdom are two different things. Knowledge simply means I know all of this stuff. I’ve studied history enough to know this. Wisdom means I also know I don’t have a solution available. Humility also comes into play here. If they have been going through this since 1947 it makes perfect sense that someone would have suggested simple and obvious solutions before.

Dangerous territory, but I’m going there…

NOTE: Let it be known that I’m pretty much a heathen.  My father and grandfather were pulpit pounding, Bible thumping hell fire and brimstone preachers, and I got more Jesus and God pounded into me before I was 6 than most people get in a lifetime.  In my early adulthood, I took a hard look at Christianity, even taking classes in theology for my own edification.  The conclusion I came to in my early 30s was that deity-based faiths are pretty much mythology wrapped in threats of fiery death if one didn’t comply with certain precepts in those faiths.  I rejected this mythology in favor of a more tolerant approach to all faiths (and no faith).  Since then, I’ve followed my own path, studying everyone from Thomas Merton to Shunryu Suzuki, who brought Japanese Soto Zen buddhism to the US in the 1950s.  This is the perspective I bring to this discussion of the decades long conflict in Palestine, now commonly known as Israel.

I bring this up as I have had a number of conversations this past week or so after violence erupted in Israel again, where Israel is using war planes and missiles to indiscriminately kill Palestinians in Gaza as Hamas retaliates by firing uncontrolled rockets back at Israel.  Depending on who you talk to, Israel is simply defending itself or committing genocide, and to say it out loud, those opinions are pretty much divided between Jewish and non-Jewish.  Also, social conservatives almost always land on the side of Israel, some because they’re Bible thumpers, too, or just taking everlasting Republican positions.

The Israeli government always talks about how complicated all this is and they’re simply trying to stop terrorists from attacking them.  They like it complicated, because what they are really doing is committing genocide, and they don’t want you to see that.  That’s right; the very people who suffered mightily in the European holocaust are doing exactly the same thing to the Palestinians and have been for decades.  Before you go hair on fire, here’s the definition of genocide as defined in 1944 by a Jewish Polish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin:

“More often [genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong.”

This definition has been widely adopted and refined by legal and historical scholars and referenced in international law.  The court that has jurisdiction over Palestine/Israel is the International Criminal Court, and the definition of genocide in Article VI of their governing statute is:

“…includes various acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” as such, including:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

By this definition, the Israeli government is, and has been, committing genocide against the Palestinian people by taking their property and ghettoizing where they remain, restricting movement, limiting employment, viciously enforcing draconian laws, indiscriminate killing, and even restricting their access to water.  That’s right, since 1967 it is illegal for Palestinians to access any water from the Jordan or the West Bank or even to collect rain water. The Israeli courts twist the laws against the Palestinians and are tools for taking property from them.  The more I study this issue, the more outraged I become.

In this last week, I’ve had some pretty tense discussions on social media and other forums, and I’m shocked at how so many of the people I’ve engaged simply parrot Israeli talking points.  Let’s be clear here.  Israel, with the backing of the United States and Britain, have annexed 100% of Palestinian lands since 1948, killing untold thousands, and committed atrocities that rival those of World War II and other violent conflicts.  The US sends about $4.5 billion a year to Israel, over 90% of which is for war making.  In contrast, the US sends the Palestinian Authority $500 million, over 75% of which is for humanitarian purposes.  Oh, and Trump even cut that off for the 4 years he infested the Oval Office; that order was reversed in April of this year. Since they started taking land in 1948, over 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes into refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere.  In 1948 alone, Israelis destroyed and depopulated 700 Palestinian villages.  Israel has never, despite the UN declaration they used to take Palestine, officially recognized a Palestinian state or the right of Palestinians to live within its borders.

The excuses I’ve heard?  “Oh, those people in East Jerusalem are being evicted over a real estate dispute,” and, “The Arab world is huge; they can just move to another country,” and, “Israel is simply defending itself,” and “Hamas are terrorists firing rockets supplied by Iran,” and “So and so broke into a Jewish family’s house and murdered all of them.”  Oh, and then there’s this nugget, “There’s no such thing as Palestine; Palestine is the invention of the British.”  That’s pretty rich, since the name Palestine is derived from the Greek Philistia, which was the term used to describe these lands by Greek writers 3,000 YEARS AGO. It goes on and on, with excuse after excuse, most word for word propaganda from the Israeli government and its mouthpieces.  Essentially, normally good people rationalize the genocide happening in Israel by cherry picking information or outright lying to support their predispositions.  It’s pretty amazing.

“There’s no doubt again here this is ‘incremental genocide,’ as Ilan Pappé says. It’s been going on for a long time, the killings, the incredibly awful conditions of life, the expulsions that have gone on from Lydda in 1947 and ‘48, when 700 or more villages in Palestine were destroyed, and in the expulsions that continued from that time until today. It’s correct and important to label it for what it is. I want to emphasize today [that] these killings are part of a broader set of inhuman acts by Israel constituting international crimes, carried out by Israel over many years, going back to at least 1947 and 1948. They include crimes that aren’t talked about that much in the media or the press, the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and apartheid. These crimes can be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court and are defined there.”

The tragedy of this conflict is that the very people who suffered such mammoth atrocities and genocide at the hands of the Nazis are doing, and have been doing for decades, the same thing to the Palestinians.  AND, they’re doing that with American tax dollars.  That simply has to stop, and I’m going to keep talking about it.