In response to a Palestinian supporter

With some comments on the religious dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict

You say my assertion that the Jews returning to their ancient homeland according to the will of God is not a serious argument. I believe you are mistaken. I understand that it carries no weight with many people, and is not a serious argument with many, but that has no bearing on its ultimate truth or falsity. Many people think the religious dimension is irrelevant but many people can be wrong.

Also, I am not speaking as an Israeli or a Jew (though Paul teaches that through faith in Christ, Christians become children of Abraham and share the faith of Abraham). Many Israelis would never use such an overtly religious argument, partly because some of them are very secular and do not believe in the reality of God working in history, and partly because other Jews who do believe realize they will get nowhere with it. But, we read in the book of Acts, the 5^th book of the New Testament, that God “hath (has) made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath (has) determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” Thus, all nations have some sort of a divine sanction, yet the Jews occupy a special place in the divine economy.

There are, as you may know, some Christians who believe that with the advent of Jesus Christ the Jews have been reduced to the status of an ordinary people, no better or no worse than anyone else, and God’s special work of providence with them was only preparation for Christ. Many other Christians believe – rightly, I think, and in agreement with what Paul says about the Jews in Romans – that God yet has a purpose for the Jews, as we can see from their literally miraculous survival over the centuries, and in their return to the ancient biblical homeland.

You do not believe this and think it is all irrelevant, but our personal feelings about God’s intervention in the affairs of earth or otherwise are hardly the last word on the subject. God has his plans and purposes and will accomplish them in spite of all human opposition. The return of the Jews to their ancient biblical homeland is one of those purposes.

I and many other Christians see the hand of God in the survival of the Jews over the centuries, in their return to the land, in the establishment of the state and in their God-given military victories over those who would kill them all. This does not mean all Israelis are good or that the Israeli government can do no wrong, or that everyone has to like Israel, but it does mean that all attempts to remove and displace the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland are doomed to fail.

I don’t mean to imply that everyone who criticizes Israel is bad, of course. But those who take up arms to destroy Israel are agents of evil and predestined to fail.

If you are an atheist, and think there is no God, then you probably believe in Darwinism, in which case, since there is no higher moral law, the land belongs to whoever is strong enough to take and hold it. Isn’t that survival of the fittest, elevated to the human plane? In a purely secular scenario the land belongs to the Israelis by right of conquest, according to life in an amoral universe founded on blind chance. They had the strength and the will to endure the rigors of war and build a state while many of the Arabs panicked and fled. Palestinians who were braver and wise and stayed have a better life as Israeli citizens than they would under the PLO or under Hamas and they know that very well.

A Palestinian state would be one more dreary and dismal theocratic or military dictatorship under which the Palestinian people would be robbed and oppressed, but by that time you would have found some other noble cause to take up and would be completely indifferent to their plight.

Plus there are many prophecies in the Old Testament, which say that God will scatter the Jews abroad because of his anger at their sinfulness, but he will preserve them and bring them back to the land and establish them there to honor his covenant with Abraham. These prophecies have been fulfilled contrary to all human expectation. In fact, in the early 1700s and maybe even earlier, Christians looked at the Old Testament and said “According to these teachings, the Jews will someday return to their ancestral homeland.”

I believe it was God himself who gave the Jews their victory in 1948, when many who accepted the idea of a Jewish state were afraid such a state would be destroyed by the Arabs. You can say whatever you like. If you want to speak only of earthly facts, in 1947-48 the Arabs fled, and the Jews stood their ground. The Arabs did nothing to prepare for independence but organize armed gangs to kill Jews (being essentially criminals, they also robbed and raped Palestinian Arabs as well). That alone says who are the real owners of the land.

“The will of God” is not a property deed. Nobody has the right to displace others because of what a 2000+ year old holy book says.

The first Zionists who began to rebuild the land of Israel were most of them very secular. They had some respect and regard for Jewish religion and tradition, but they did not say “The land is ours because the Bible says so.” In fact, many religious Jews were opposed to the Zionist enterprise because they thought only the Messiah could build a Jewish state when he came, and political Zionism was only the religion of men. The claim of the early Zionist founders was that Palestine was their traditional homeland, and that it was desolate, neglected, poverty stricken with much room for development (which was true).

If I am not mistaken, religious territorial Zionism did not become prominent until after the 1967 war, when Israel’s fantastic victories suddenly made aspiration to all of Israel according to divine promises much more credible.

Returning to your comments, your historical analysis of the Palestinians not wanting to kill the Jews until after they had lost their land is completely wrong. In the early phases of Zionism under Turkish domination, a small Jewish minority in complete subjection to their Turkish Muslim masters was acceptable according to Islamic law.

You mentioned an 11% figure for the Jewish population in Palestine, which according to one table I found was the figure in 1922. When the British took control over Palestine after WW1, and the idea of settling in Palestine became much more plausible, and more Jews began to come into the area, Palestinian hostility began to increase. This was not because there was not enough room. It was because the idea of the Jews becoming a majority was an intolerable affront to the supremacy of Islam, the one true faith to which all unbelievers should be subject.

Muslim hostility to the state of Israel is not just a political or territorial question that can be solved by political or territorial compromises. That hostility has a deeply religious basis that no amount of conciliation will ever overcome. Admittedly, not all Muslims are equally committed. Some are less devout, more pragmatic and willing to compromise in private – but the radicals are calling the shots and they are perfectly capable of killing any Arabic traitors who oppose them.

Getting back to the history, Arab hostility and attacks on the Jews began long before the war of 1948 and the exodus of the refugees. Anyone who does not know this simple fact needs to read some more basic history of the period. There was an outbreak of serious riots in 1929 in which Jews were attacked, raped, murdered and their corpses mutilated (sound familiar?). That was before Israel was even a state, before the war of independence, before the flight of the refugees.

Here is a British report on the causes of the riot (and many of the British were anything but pro-Israel, believing that friendship with the Arabs was in Britain’s national interest). I think the report gives a good and objective explanation of the causes for the anti-Jewish riots:

The British-appointed Shaw Commission found that the fundamental cause of the violence, "without which in our opinion disturbances either would not have occurred or would have been little more than a local riot, is the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future", as well as Arab fears of Jewish immigrants "not only as a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots#:~:text=On%2024%20August%201929%20in,victims%20being%20tortured%2C%20or%20mutilated.

A brief description of one of the worst attacks in Hebron (there were others in other places):

On 24 August 1929 in Hebron, Arab mobs attacked the Jewish quarter killing and raping men, women and children and looting Jewish property. They killed between 65 and 68 Jews and wounded 58, with some of the victims being tortured, or mutilated. Sir John Chancellor, the British High Commissioner visited Hebron and later wrote to his son, "The horror of it is beyond words. In one house I visited not less than twenty-five Jews men and women were murdered in cold blood." Sir Walter Shaw concluded in The Palestine Disturbances report that "unspeakable atrocities have occurred in Hebron [same source as above, also from British reports.]

Concerning the source, I understand Wikipedia is not always reliable, but sometimes it is. The British and other historical archives have information on this. Maybe someone could write an academic paper on the subject of corpse mutilation in certain contemporary Middle Eastern cultures.

The Palestinians existed quietly for many years under Turkish occupation because they were content to be ruled by Muslims. But that they should become subject to Jews cursed of Allah, or even be forced to associate on a basis of equality with them, was intolerable, and drove the radicals to frenzies of blind rage (not all Palestinians were Islamic radicals by the way).

The Palestinian Jews were not disposed to take this lying down. They were basically helpless in Europe, but here they had more options, and were not basing their lives on the Sermon on the Mount.

About the Arab failure to prepare for statehood in the interim period of November 1947 to May of 1948, you say they were prevented by the British. I don’t believe that the historical record shows that at all. Over the years since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Arab opposition to Jewish settlements increased as it became clear the Jews would be something other than a docile minority. Many British felt that it was in their greater interest to cultivate friendly relations with the Arabs throughout the whole Middle East, not only Palestine, and Arab oil was even then a significant factor.

Often the British authorities supported the Arab Palestinians over the Jews. Some of them expected the Jewish state to fail and hoped it would, so the British could re-establish their control in Palestine. The British did nothing to prevent the Palestinians from meeting together to form their own state in 1947, and in fact often aided them against the Jews. It was the backward, ignorant and primitive Palestinian leadership which came up with the bungling and incompetent strategy of first killing the Jews, and worrying about the details of statehood later.

You commented that the Arab Israeli wars of ‘48-49, ‘56, ‘67 and ’73 were in fact started by the Israelis by the mere fact of their having come to the land and established a state there. That’s a novel way of preventing war. If the Europeans had not settled in the New World there would have been no American Civil War in the 1860s. If the US had not had a military base at Pearl Harbor the Japanese wouldn’t have attacked it.

Anyway, that land had been controlled by the Turks for centuries, and they seized it by armed conquest. What right did they have to it? When the Turkish empire collapsed there were various schemes floating around as to what should be done with former Turkish territories. The French got Syria and Lebanon, the British got Iraq, Palestine and Jordan in the sort of territorial division of defeated enemies that is a basic fact of power politics and has been for 5,000 years of recorded human history. The British and the French were seeking their own geopolitical advantages, and not looking forward trying to earnestly figure out what would be the best for the local inhabitants 50-100 years in the future.

When the Jews began to return to the land in larger numbers after WWI, what right did the Arabs have to try and keep them out? It was not their land. They had lived in docile obedience to the Turks for centuries without a peep of independence – unlike the Greeks, the Bulgarians, Rumanians and other Turkish-occupied countries that were real countries with real histories and distinct cultures and languages.

This was not the case with the Palestinians. Modern nationalism being a western concept, Palestinian identity for centuries had been centered on local clans, on the pan-Arab Islamic identity, or on their status as Turkish vassals. There was never any Palestinian nation historically, except in negative reaction against Israel. Even Syria, Lebanon and Jordan had their lines drawn for them on maps by Europeans.

The Jews had every right to come to their ancient homeland, it was not for the Arabs to say if they could come or not. And many Palestinians came from the surrounding countries of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt after WW1 for the sake of better opportunities offered by Western British administration and a growing economy inspired by Jewish labor and Jewish capital.

So, according to your theory, the Israelis are to blame for the Arab attacks because they should have stayed in Europe. Maybe the Arabs should have stayed in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, and then there would have been no Arab and Israeli wars either.

You cannot go to war with someone who is not there and the fact the Zionists won proves that the Arabs were right to consider them a military threat (as they continue to be)

The partition plan of 1947 did not give the Israelis any Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian territory. It is common knowledge that the neighboring Arab countries attacked Israel on its first day of independence because they wanted to seize that territory for themselves. This is proven by the Jordanian and Egyptian occupations of Gaza and the West Bank from 1949-1967. They did nothing whatever to foster Palestinian nationalism but ruled those territories with an iron fist. And don’t think the military dictator Nasser was a nice guy either. And there was no hint of Palestinian nationalism against those rulers, because the Palestinians were content to be ruled by other Muslims.

As to the Israelis being a military threat, Israel left alone would have been no threat to Egypt, Jordan or Syria whatsoever. In fact, it was the continuous Arab threat that spurred the Israelis on to military strength. And why is Iran so consumed with hatred? Have the Jews taken any Iranian territory? The Islamic hatred toward Israel has a religious dimension that you and many others refuse to recognize. This means the conflict is at bottom not a matter of land and cannot be solved by some sort of a peace process. Neither were World Wars 1 & 2, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Napoleonic Wars, and countless other conflicts solved by some sort of a mystic peace process.  They were ended when one side was defeated.

Such a strange coincidence that when Israel has conflict with Egypt, its Egypt’s fault. when Israel has conflict with Iran, its Iran’s fault, when Israel has conflict with Jordan, its Jordan’s fault, when Israel has conflict with Lebanon, its Lebanon’s fault, when Israel has conflict with Turkey, its turkey’s fault, when Israel has conflict with Gaza, its Gaza’s fault, when Israel has conflict on the West Bank, it’s the West Bank’s fault….

Israel and Egypt? Egypt attacked Israel in 1948 when no Egyptian territory was involved. In 1956, Nasser had been using the Gaza Strip as a launching pad for terrorist attacks by the fedayeen, and proclaiming his desire to liberate Palestine when it was not his territory at all. The Israel strike in 1956 was amply provoked by numerous hostile acts. Also in 1967, it is well known that Nasser provoked that war, and why? Egypt had lost no territory. Nasser wanted to be military conqueror and hero, and he lost because he was an incompetent idiot and a loudmouthed bungling fool. The 1973 war was also started by Egypt. In all of those wars Egypt was directly at fault and in all of them Israel’s response was justified. Ditto for Syria and for Jordan.

About Lebanon, after the collapse of the government in the Lebanese civil war, Lebanon became a major base for terrorist groups like the PLO. Israel was subjected to frequent attacks, which was not the fault of the helpless Lebanese government, but of the Syrians and the Palestinian terror groups that took advantage of Lebanon’s weakness.

As to Turkey, Erdogan also wants to be the big-shot military leader of the Muslim world. Israel is not a threat to Turkey’s existence, no Turkish territory has been lost.

About the West Bank and Gaza, you may never have read that after the Six Day War the Israelis officially offered to negotiate over the status of the occupied territories, and the Arab League, the official voice of the united governments of the Arab world, responded with their three noes: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation. Israel offered to negotiate the status of those territories. The Arabs refused. Moreover, Israel offered to negotiate the status of those territories. The Arabs refused. Furthermore, Israel offered to negotiate the status of those territories. The Arabs refused. In addition, Israel offered to negotiate the status of those territories. The Arabs refused. Finally, Israel offered to negotiate the status of those territories. The Arabs refused.

Pardon my sarcasm, but this is a point that is consistently ignored by the proponents of the poor, helpless innocent Arab school of Middle Eastern diplomacy.

As to the West Bank, before the first intifada the occupation of the West Bank was not so onerous. There was a lot of going back and forth between that territory and Israel, the check points were not so onerous, a modus vivendi had been worked out, and then the Palestinian leadership got the bright idea of having an intifada. Since then it has been literally impossible for the Israelis to deal with the Palestinians there on a basis other than a strict emphasis on Israeli security.

The same with the Gaza strip. The attack by Hamas was not the only possibility for them. They were not driven to that by the lack of any other alternative. If they had not been crazed by their blind lust for Jewish blood, and if they had not been corrupted by a false and backward medieval ideology, the Palestinian leadership in Gaza could, in cooperation with Israel, have done a lot to improve the lives of the citizens of Gaza.

Think of all that could have been done with the literally hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by a corrupt Hamas leadership that cares literally nothing for the well-being of the Palestinian leadership. How many scholarships abroad, new small business ventures, better housing and schools, all stolen from the Palestinians by a gang of literal Nazi-like criminals.

And what about the additional hundreds of millions of dollars spent on tunnels and weapons? More opportunities to give the Palestinians a normal life down the drain.

It is to Israel’s advantage to have a calm, secure and peaceful Gaza. Sincere efforts to build up a stable and peaceful Gaza would have been met more than half way by the Israelis. But no, justifying their policies on the religious claim of divine right by Islamic conquest, Hamas chose a different path, and brought misery and ruin on the Palestinian people.

If a guy goes to six separate bars and gets into six separate fights, you’d assume the problem was with that guy, rather than him simply being unlucky enough to encounter multiple separate aggressors.

The analogy of the bars is inadequate, because the Jews were not wandering in bars where they had no business. They returned to their ancient homeland, and all of the fights have been provoked by blind enemies motivated by primitive blood lust and religious fanaticism of the worst sort. Ordinary Palestinians who are content to compromise and want only to live ordinary lives have to keep quiet or they will be murdered.