Lex Anteinternet: Some additional observations on the Hamas v. Israe...: 1. "Was this an American intelligence failure?" Why does the press keep asking this really stupid question? Hamas didn't att...
Some additional observations, yet again.
It was inevitable that the war in Israel would spill over to the United States in terms of internal politics. That this makes it different from every war since the Anglo Irish War, which also did, makes it unique. North America does have a fairly large Ukrainian ex pat population, and a fairly large population of descendants of Ukrainians, but they're largely out of view, and therefore out of mind. Because of that, people like Matt Gaetz can choose to suggest that we leave Ukrainians to the tender mercies of the Russians, but he can't say the same thing about Israel.
But we now also have a large immigrant Palestinian population in the US, and a significant one in Australia as well. Other Palestinian populations are in Europe. This has given us the shocking, to most people, example of people demonstrating either for Palestine or against Israel, depending upon how you think of it.
Which leads me to this:
I think people will not believe the reports of what happened in Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Beeri. Even though Hamas posted photos and videos on their own Telegram channel. Because these are ISIS tactics. Beheaded babies and burned corpses. Yes, I saw the photos.
I don't care if you are of Palestinian extraction or not, although I frankly feel that this adds fuel to the fire that the further away from the prevailing culture an immigrant population is, the harder it is for the "melting pot" (the antithesis of the currently popular but demonstratively false concept of "diversity is strength" ethos) to work. It can, but it's harder. At any rate, people had no sympathy at all with German immigrants and German Americans who were in support of the Nazis during the Second World War, and Hamas deserves no sympathy either. It doesn't matter if you are of Palestinian extraction or not.
I'd also note that one member of Congress of Middle Eastern extraction keeps a Palestinian flag outside of her door, and as of yesterday, still was. Frankly, no Congressman should keep any flag other than that of the U.S. or perhaps their state outside their door.
None.
This causes me to recall my father, who never liked people using hyphens in their name to identify themselves as something other than American. Half German and half Irish by descent, he didn't like, for example, when people called themselves "Irish Americans", a trait he shared with Theodore Roosevelt.
This also says something about preserving old fights, something many cultures and peoples do.
Palestinians are upset, in part, about something that took place running from the late 19th Century to the mid 20th Century, that being the return of Jews to what is now Israel, as well as the history that followed. The spreading of Jews around the ancient world started as long ago as 586 BC but it got rolling in the modern era in the 60s and of course we can famously date it to 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple. The Zionist movement began the return starting in 1897 with the creation of a modern Jewish state an expressed goal. Palestine, part of the Arab world, but in a region that already had a Jewish and Greek population, was the old Israel, territory wise. Its population was also not uniformly Islamic, having an Arab Christian population, which it still does, and which is hated by Hamas along with the Jewish Israeli population. The Jewish population of the country doesn't necessarily get along that well with the Christian population either. The Palestinian identity itself is hard to define, as the region was so mixed up to the point of Israeli independence. The term apparently wasn't used in modern times, ironically, until 1898, although some argue that Palestinian nationalism was around as early as an 1834 rebellion against Egypt. Like other regions of the coast Middle East during the Ottoman period, the region was inhabited by nomadic Bedouins, still not identified as Palestinians, and then more urban and agricultural people, something true of Lebanon and Syria as well.
For this reason It's occasionally suggested that the Palestinians are not a real people at all, and to some slight extent, and it would be slight, that would have been almost sort of true at one time. Having said that, the people who inhabit Lebanon historically are a different ethnicity. So the Palestinians are a real people, or came to be, and certainly are now.
Palestine, like the entire Middle East, east of Egypt, was an Ottoman possession prior to World War One. For that matter, things west of Palestine technically were as well, although the oddities of colonialism and international politics meant that the British controlled Egypt and the Ottomans really controlled nothing, at that point, further east. World War One brought Palestine under British rule, as a League of Nation's mandate, and brought Syria and Lebanon under French rule the same way. Jordan came to be administered by the British as well, through the Hashemite ruling family, as did Iraq.
Palestine always proved to be problematic for the British and between the wars there was increasing tension between its Jewish and Arab populations, in part brought about by the fact that the British had made promises in the Balfour Agreement which supported, more or less, the concept of Palestine becoming the home for a future Jewish state.
At the time of Balfour's declaration, the Jewish population, even with two decades if immigration, was pretty small and the declaration wasn't really very specific. From a British prospective, they were really dealing with a sparsely populated land. At the same time, however, they made promises to Arabs through their leaders to support outright Arab independence in the Middle East. The two sets of promises were not necessarily irrconcilable, but they weren't necessary easy to deal with on the ground.
The additional problem really was that the land was not the United Kingdom's to give and indeed, in 1917, when made, it was still an Ottoman possession.
Between World War One and World War Two the British had to live with this, which wasn't easy.
By the 1930s Palestinian populations were getting seriously agitated with the direction in which things seemed to be going. In 1936 this lead to a revolt against the British in which the Palestinians demanded independence and an end to open ended Jewish immigration. To an extent, because of the involvement of the local populations, this may be regarded as the first Arab Isreali War, or perhaps a proto war, a sign of things to come. Interestingly, Bernard Law Montgomery had a signficant role in putting it down.
Perhaps because of this, during World War Two, while the British did have armed Arab formations, they were reluctant to really use them. Also during World War Two, the Grand Mufti of Jersusalem came down on the side of the Germans. The nature of the conflict as an ethnic one was clearly drawn.
World War Two created the drive towards an independent Jewish Israel as an unstoppable one, with refugees flooding ino the coutnry. The British saw the handwriting on the wall and looked for a way out of the region, which they succeeded in doing in 1948. Before that, an attempt at imposing a sort of two state solution was made.
Israel delcared independence in 1948 and the Arabs opposed it. In spite of an advantage of arms on part of the Arab armies, and in spite of having established military units of some standing, and in the case of the Arab Legion, partial European leadership, Israel won the war. The war had huge demographic consequences as 700,000 or more Palestinians became refugees and were later unable to return to the lands they'd abandoned or been forced out of. That's the root of the Palestinian discontent today.
The ultimate cause of Palestinian dispersal is mixed, some of it being due to fear, some of it being due to force, and some of it being Israel preventing their return by operation of law. I'm not claiming it was just. But an added factor to it was that the neighboring Arab states did not accommodate a permanent resettlement of the displaced, hoping instead to see Israel defeated in a series of subsequent wars. By the early 1960s the population was radicalizing and in 1964 the Palestinian Liberation Organization formed. The PLO ended up going to war with one of its host nations, Jordan, in 1970 in a war which looked as if the PLO might overthrow the Hashemite kingdom and claim it for its own. Jordan prevailed in the Black September war and the PLO relocated to troubled Lebanon. In 1982, it was driven out of that country, which had been created in the first place as a separate political entity for Christian Syrians, and it relocated to Tunis. Ultimately the PLO came around to the political solution that's in place to day, with the Palestinian authority being a quasi independent Palestinian satellite territory, of which Gaza is part.
What was never foreseen is that Hamas, which is more radical than the PLO and its political expression Fatah, would become the dominant political entity in the Palestinian parliament. It is. Backed by money brought in from the outside, and notably Iran, it thrives on the fantasy of driving the Jews out of what had been Palestine.
Israel has been independent for seventy-five years now. Almost everyone who fought for or against its independence is now dead. The youngest displaced Palestinians are 75 years old. The land that they were displaced from has been in other hands for 75 years. The legacy of this however goes on and on with both sides focusing on a narrow aspect of the history. Israelis, and the country's supporters around the world, imagine an early Israeli history like that glamorized by Leon Uris which ignored the realities of Palestinian displacement. Palestinians remain bitter about being displaced, a bitterness which is aided by their untenable situation in some parts of the Palestinian Authority but fail to appreciate that they made a bad bargain in 1948 by insisting on taking all of the country. Part of that bad bargain is that there is no reason to believe that had the Arabs won in 1948, the result would have been murderous and certainly would have resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine, just as Europeans were expelled from Algeria (and their Berber allies murdered) and the Europeans from Libya. For much of the post 1948 period, and for Hams to this day, Arab goals have been been to expel the Jewish population rather than to live with it, although over time, Egypt and Jordan have relented. Hamas also fails to appreciate that they're as boxed in by the Arab neighbors who claim to support them as they are by Israel.
Impacting the entire matter, both sides, now 75 years into this, rely upon economic aid from the outside. Israel, while often gaining the admiration of Americans for such things as "making the desert bloom" has consistenly relied on US aid from its independence, something that frankly does not make a great deal of sense in an era when US ecnomic fortunes have declined and there is no good reason why a capable foeign nation of this vintage is receiving US aid. Ireland, for instance, was simply independent when it became independent. Included in the aid is military aid, even though Israel is itself an arms manufacuturer. The close economic link to the US makes the US a participant in the Middle East in a way that it would not otherwise be, which in turn has an impact on domestic politics.
Hamas depends entirely on aid from donors and regional states, with Iran being a signficant one. Oddly enough, the relocation of Palestinians to the US is beginning to also have an impact on domestic U.S. politics.
Seventy-five years is not a long time in historical terms, but the reality of this is that Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that is fighting for a fantasy against living people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, for the most part, against the Palestinians. The murderous fantasy is helping to keep a real solution, if there is one, from occurring. No sane people would enter into a bargain with a group whose goals are essentially genocidal. Also helping to prevent it from occurring is the fact that the Arabs are a group of people, not one people, and the other Arab nations really don't want the Palestinians on their land. Egypt is not going to open up the border with Gaza and let them in. Jordan was happy to take the West Bank early on, but it's not clamoring for it back now. Israel, by having the Palestinians within some sort of border, neatly keeps them from being within other Arab borders.
People have talked about a two-state solution for a long time, but no such solution can come about when one party will not think of it. Hamas won't, and now surely Israel will not either.
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So now what?
That's hard to say, but what seems certain is that Israel will go into Gaza and will be unwilling to let the enclave repeat this recent murderous history. Hamas will cause the Palestinians to suffer for holding on to a pipe dream and allowing murder to be perpetrated in their name. The Palestinians will be seemingly unable to grasp this and howl in rage and despair, rather than taking the example of other 20th Century displaced persons, such as the Germans and Poles, and build new lives in their new situation. Of course, unlike the Germans and the Poles, there isn't much for them to build with, but by the same token, there was never much of a Palestine in the first place. Other Arab nations that import labor, such as Saudi Arabia, are unlikely for their part to take in the Palestinian displaced population, even though they share, albeit more remotely than we might suppose, an ethnicity.
