It's Complicated

Random Thoughts on Everything

I Recently came across a post on social media that grabbed my attention.

The post was written by a man whose name I cannot recall, but he was an Arab of the Muslim faith. An articulate man, he put forward his argument for a Palestinian state. It doesn’t matter if I agreed with the points he made … and some of them I did … it was the way he framed the narrative that had my interest. He was able to separate his apparently genuine sympathy and abhorrence of the October 7 massacre and insist he was not in any way antisemitic despite holding views about the land and Palestinian rights, that he knew many Jews would find offensive.

His main point, complicated but true, is that at the time of Israel’s independence the land wasn’t empty. Sparsely populated yes, but not empty. Another truth is that British double dealing, their hypocrisy and betrayal further f**ked things up. In 1921 Churchill decided to ignore the Mandate for Palestine, granted by the League of Nations the previous year. The Mandate included land that is today’s Israel, plus the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. The name Palestine referred to a Jewish State, making it the “national home for the Jewish people” as stated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. However, after enjoying a jolly in Cairo, Churchill decided to appease his Arab friends by gifting the Hashemites the land east of the Jordan River. Possibly on a high of syrupy mint tea and obsequious hospitality, he created a Jordanian State on land that the British government removed from the original Mandate. Some might argue that this area was heavily Arab with no significant Jewish population, but nevertheless it was a stab in the back. If as some claim, Churchill expected Jordan to become a happy home for the Arab Palestinian population, he had limited success due to the usual bitter conflicts and rivalry that seem to dog Palestinians everywhere. When these problems eventually threatened Jordanian stability, King Hussein launched a military campaign. In 1970 he crushed Palestinian troublemakers killing thousands of them, displacing others, and expelling the PLO to Lebanon where they continued to cause mayhem that helped jump-start the civil war and eventually (big round of applause) led to the rise of the terror group Hezbollah.

Yehuda Halevi, considered one of the greatest Jewish poets and a philosopher, was born in Spain in 1075 and he died in Jerusalem in 1141. He was perhaps the first Zionist writing of his longing to return to Zion. Halevi believed that “Jews in exile are like a body without a soul.” This brings me back to the Arab man posting online. I had the impression that he would emphasis with Halevi’s words and emotions. That despite agreeing the Jews have had an undeservedly bum deal throughout history, he still passionately believed we stole something precious from him and his people. He felt with no doubt, that if he ran his fingers through the soil he would feel not the land of Israel, but that of his Palestine.

Many hundreds of years ago Halevi wrote;

“My heart is in the East, and I am at the edge of the West.

How can I taste what I eat, how can it bring me pleasure?

How can I keep my promises or fulfilled my vows, when Zion is held by Edom and I am bound by Arab chains?”

Halevi’s words express a deeply felt disconnect between exile and spiritual wholeness, a yearning for identity and home that had him travel in old age from the comfort of Spain to Jerusalem where he died.

Throughout Jewish history our intense connection to the land of Israel has been ancient, biblical and visceral. To be a Zionist, as my Oxford dictionary states, is to support a Jewish homeland in Israel. Clear and simple.

I sympathise with the Palestinian connection to that same soil, yes separation hurts. But I have greater empathy for Jewish populations who lived in Arab lands, 1,000,000 of them who those Nations willingly exiled, plus the thousands that they happily murdered and stole from. How quickly the world forgets. Seems that a collective amnesia for recent history is a most convenient one-way-street when it comes to Palestinian claims over a sliver of Middle Eastern land the size of New Jersey or Wales. I am trying, but despite that eloquent post of one Arab man, I find it really hard to sympathise with 22 Arab states playing politics with the Palestinians, for whom they truly care little or nothing. The air from Gaza to the Upper Galilee could smell of orange groves or ballistic missiles, it matters not to these States, many of whom have been guilty of ethnically cleansing themselves of every Jew. None have been offered reparation nor apology, or right of return. Speaking of Palestine in 1945, the king of Saudi Arabia told President Roosevelt, that these “energetic Europeans are Jewish is not the cause of the trouble. It is their superior skills and culture.”

More fool the Arab leaders who continue to spread and share their irrational hatred for Jews. Their peculiar need to save face does nothing to inspire future trust, nor can it promote peace between neighbours when Jews deserve to die because they outshine the Arabs.