Thursday, July 20, 2006
Israel and Hezbollah
The middle east is a good subject about which to have opinions. Almost every day I read letters to the editor of the newspaper I read (Los Angeles Times) from writers having all kinds of opinions on the subject. Some writers complain that other writers assume a "moral equivalence" between Israel and Hezbollah. Some writers complain about the treatment of the Palestinians during the past fifty-odd years of Israel's existence. And there are other opinions.
One of my best friends recently sent me an article by an Israeli who had been a member of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret spy organization. This writer was commenting on the response in Israel to the kidnapping of one soldier by Hamas and two by Hezbollah. He recounted being part of operations in which hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinian boys were kidnapped, interrogated, and put in prison by Shin Bet. Many of them are now still in prison. The writer implies that there is no reason for keeping them there. They have not been charged with any crime. Their status is similar to that of prisoners the United States is keeping locked up at Guantanamo.
I am not religious. I am not Jewish and do not have any emotional or ancestral attachment to a Jewish state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. I am not Muslim and I have no understanding of the attitude that Muslims have toward waqf, or territory that has been converted to Islam and which must henceforth remain as part of Islam. I am not a fundamentalist evangelical Christian and I have no sympathy for the notion that the rapture and the second coming of Christ is close at hand, and that a war in the middle east would be a good way of causing these blessed events to occur very soon, during the lifetimes of living persons. Hence, I believe that I am not biased either in favor of or against Israel. (I may be wrong, but I'm not biased.)
Israel claims that the Hezbollah raid and the kidnapping of the two soldiers was not provoked, that Hezbollah shouldn't have done it, and that Israel is completely justified in its campaign to weaken, if not destroy, the military capability of Hezbollah. President Bush chimes in by saying that "Israel has a right to defend itself."
I can not speak (write, actually) for Hezbollah. However, in the middle east, as elsewhere, every political event is preceded by another event, that by another, and so on back to some unknown past time when it all started. When did it all start? Going back far in history, one could say it all started when some of the Jews in the Kingdom, later Roman Province, of Israel, decided that an itinerant preacher Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah who would deliver them from the oppression of the Romans. Other Jews refused to accept this Messiah; they believed that the Messiah would be a great military leader who would defeat the Romans in battle. One thing led to another and the Romans eventually expelled the Jews from Israel. The two factions, the pro-Jesus and the anti-Jesus Jews, continued their quarrels and rivalry. They've been quarreling ever since.
The pro-Jesus Jews, now called Christians, became the dominant religious group in the Roman Empire. Their religion became dominant in Europe. The other Jewish faction, now called simply "Jews," had to find places to live and occupations to enable them to survive. They encountered hatred and persecution from Christians. This persecution reached a peak in Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's. Millions of Jews from all over Europe were collected by the Germans and taken to extermination camps and executed. In 1941 a passenger ship with a thousand Jews fleeing Hitler's extermination tried to land and discharge passengers at a US port in Florida. An official in the State Department wouldn't allow the ship to land. Other nations in and around the Caribbean also refused to allow the ship to discharge its passengers. Eventually the ship had to return to Germany, the only country that would permit it to land. Most of the passengers later died in extermination camps.
This sad and shocking story led the United States to take an action to clear its conscience. Our nation, under the leadership of President Truman, sponsored a United Nations resolution that created the State of Israel as a national homeland for Jews. (Notice that we still didn't want them here, in the United States.) There was just a small problem with the resolution. The territory assigned to the new country was already occupied by Arabic speaking people, mostly Muslims, called Palestininans.
Of course, the territory originally designated for Israel was small, too small to accommodate the Jews who had survived Hitler's extermination and who now wanted to get out of Europe. The territory had to be enlarged. Two terrorist organizations came into being with the purpose of enlarging the territory of the new country to include all of Biblical Israel, or that part of the British Mandate of Palestine that lay on the west side of the Jordan River. These organizations were Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang. My friend, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, once told me that one organization believed in destroying property but not killing people, while the other believed in assassinations but not the destruction of property. These organizations achieved their goal: they drove the British out of Palestine and they drove the indigenous population out of part of Palestine. There were other organizations, not terrorist, involved in the creation of the Jewish state. Haganah is one that comes to mind.
The attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and by Hamas have to be understood as consequences of the formation of the State of Israel. Israel was created to provide a safe home for Jews of the world as a reaction to the horror of the holocaust and the shame in the United States and other nations of not allowing Jewish refugees to escape Hitler's "final solution." Unfortunately it was created in such a way as to displace several million people from their homes. This displacement led to anger among Arabs in neighboring countries, particularly at this "Zionist entity" foisted on them by the descendants of the Crusaders of nine centuries earlier.
Is there a moral equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah? I think so. Israel was created in part by the action of two terrorist organizations. Leaders of those organizations subsequently became elected to leadership positions by the Israeli public. In trying to redress the grievous harm done to European Jews, the United Nations, perhaps unintentionally, did grievous harm to the residents of Palestine. I think it's time for truth and reconciliation and for hard compromises on all sides. I think that Israel should give up or at least set limiits on the "law of the return," which guarantees Israeli citizenship and a place to live for any Jew in the world who wants it. I think the Palestinians should give up their own "hope of return" to the land from which they were expelled. On the other hand, I think they should be generously compensated for their loss.
Everybone should admit that no one has "clean hands" in this matter. During World War II, the leader of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, openly sided with Hitler's Germany. The United States, along with many other countries, refused to admit Jewish refugees. Many Israeli politicians for years refused to accept any responsibility toward the Palestinian refugees; instead, they asserted that "there are no Palestinians." Arab leaders deliberately left the unfortunate Palestinians in squalid refugee camps as a political ploy to whip up popular hatred of Israel and to further their own political ambitions.
According to what I've read, the cleanest hands are those of Francisco Franco, who invited all Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 to return; some eighty thousand did; Denmark and Sweden, where Danish Jews were smuggled across the channel into Sweden to save them from the Germans; and a Japanese diplomat who issued visas to many Lithuanian Jews to enable them to escape to Japan. The Japanese diplomat was later censured by his government. When I learned about Franco's facilitating the return of Jews to Spain, I changed my opoinion of him a little.
One of my best friends recently sent me an article by an Israeli who had been a member of Shin Bet, the Israeli secret spy organization. This writer was commenting on the response in Israel to the kidnapping of one soldier by Hamas and two by Hezbollah. He recounted being part of operations in which hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinian boys were kidnapped, interrogated, and put in prison by Shin Bet. Many of them are now still in prison. The writer implies that there is no reason for keeping them there. They have not been charged with any crime. Their status is similar to that of prisoners the United States is keeping locked up at Guantanamo.
I am not religious. I am not Jewish and do not have any emotional or ancestral attachment to a Jewish state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. I am not Muslim and I have no understanding of the attitude that Muslims have toward waqf, or territory that has been converted to Islam and which must henceforth remain as part of Islam. I am not a fundamentalist evangelical Christian and I have no sympathy for the notion that the rapture and the second coming of Christ is close at hand, and that a war in the middle east would be a good way of causing these blessed events to occur very soon, during the lifetimes of living persons. Hence, I believe that I am not biased either in favor of or against Israel. (I may be wrong, but I'm not biased.)
Israel claims that the Hezbollah raid and the kidnapping of the two soldiers was not provoked, that Hezbollah shouldn't have done it, and that Israel is completely justified in its campaign to weaken, if not destroy, the military capability of Hezbollah. President Bush chimes in by saying that "Israel has a right to defend itself."
I can not speak (write, actually) for Hezbollah. However, in the middle east, as elsewhere, every political event is preceded by another event, that by another, and so on back to some unknown past time when it all started. When did it all start? Going back far in history, one could say it all started when some of the Jews in the Kingdom, later Roman Province, of Israel, decided that an itinerant preacher Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah who would deliver them from the oppression of the Romans. Other Jews refused to accept this Messiah; they believed that the Messiah would be a great military leader who would defeat the Romans in battle. One thing led to another and the Romans eventually expelled the Jews from Israel. The two factions, the pro-Jesus and the anti-Jesus Jews, continued their quarrels and rivalry. They've been quarreling ever since.
The pro-Jesus Jews, now called Christians, became the dominant religious group in the Roman Empire. Their religion became dominant in Europe. The other Jewish faction, now called simply "Jews," had to find places to live and occupations to enable them to survive. They encountered hatred and persecution from Christians. This persecution reached a peak in Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's. Millions of Jews from all over Europe were collected by the Germans and taken to extermination camps and executed. In 1941 a passenger ship with a thousand Jews fleeing Hitler's extermination tried to land and discharge passengers at a US port in Florida. An official in the State Department wouldn't allow the ship to land. Other nations in and around the Caribbean also refused to allow the ship to discharge its passengers. Eventually the ship had to return to Germany, the only country that would permit it to land. Most of the passengers later died in extermination camps.
This sad and shocking story led the United States to take an action to clear its conscience. Our nation, under the leadership of President Truman, sponsored a United Nations resolution that created the State of Israel as a national homeland for Jews. (Notice that we still didn't want them here, in the United States.) There was just a small problem with the resolution. The territory assigned to the new country was already occupied by Arabic speaking people, mostly Muslims, called Palestininans.
Of course, the territory originally designated for Israel was small, too small to accommodate the Jews who had survived Hitler's extermination and who now wanted to get out of Europe. The territory had to be enlarged. Two terrorist organizations came into being with the purpose of enlarging the territory of the new country to include all of Biblical Israel, or that part of the British Mandate of Palestine that lay on the west side of the Jordan River. These organizations were Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang. My friend, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, once told me that one organization believed in destroying property but not killing people, while the other believed in assassinations but not the destruction of property. These organizations achieved their goal: they drove the British out of Palestine and they drove the indigenous population out of part of Palestine. There were other organizations, not terrorist, involved in the creation of the Jewish state. Haganah is one that comes to mind.
The attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and by Hamas have to be understood as consequences of the formation of the State of Israel. Israel was created to provide a safe home for Jews of the world as a reaction to the horror of the holocaust and the shame in the United States and other nations of not allowing Jewish refugees to escape Hitler's "final solution." Unfortunately it was created in such a way as to displace several million people from their homes. This displacement led to anger among Arabs in neighboring countries, particularly at this "Zionist entity" foisted on them by the descendants of the Crusaders of nine centuries earlier.
Is there a moral equivalence between Israel and Hezbollah? I think so. Israel was created in part by the action of two terrorist organizations. Leaders of those organizations subsequently became elected to leadership positions by the Israeli public. In trying to redress the grievous harm done to European Jews, the United Nations, perhaps unintentionally, did grievous harm to the residents of Palestine. I think it's time for truth and reconciliation and for hard compromises on all sides. I think that Israel should give up or at least set limiits on the "law of the return," which guarantees Israeli citizenship and a place to live for any Jew in the world who wants it. I think the Palestinians should give up their own "hope of return" to the land from which they were expelled. On the other hand, I think they should be generously compensated for their loss.
Everybone should admit that no one has "clean hands" in this matter. During World War II, the leader of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, openly sided with Hitler's Germany. The United States, along with many other countries, refused to admit Jewish refugees. Many Israeli politicians for years refused to accept any responsibility toward the Palestinian refugees; instead, they asserted that "there are no Palestinians." Arab leaders deliberately left the unfortunate Palestinians in squalid refugee camps as a political ploy to whip up popular hatred of Israel and to further their own political ambitions.
According to what I've read, the cleanest hands are those of Francisco Franco, who invited all Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492 to return; some eighty thousand did; Denmark and Sweden, where Danish Jews were smuggled across the channel into Sweden to save them from the Germans; and a Japanese diplomat who issued visas to many Lithuanian Jews to enable them to escape to Japan. The Japanese diplomat was later censured by his government. When I learned about Franco's facilitating the return of Jews to Spain, I changed my opoinion of him a little.
