Palestine v. Israel – ‘45 To ‘67 – It’s All Just A Blur To Me
It could also be because I just didn’t care what went on over there at the time.
It probably was because you got force-fed the damn blow-by-blow on the 6 o’clock news casts for YEARS, and that EVERY U.S. President who would taut Middle-East peace would be get a failing grade every time, that I just tuned out the matter as a no-win conflict, as old and as stupid as the Catholic/Protestant fight in Ireland.
Whatever the cause, as the years zoom by, I find myself wandering back to the question and considering the origins of this feud, and whether or not either side is at all justified in their fight for such a itsy, bitsy teeny, weenie piece of desert land on the Mediterranean Sea.
Hitler is the ultimate one to blame, if one is inclined to a singular evil force behind all this.
You try to wipe out an entire ethnic group, and guess what, the survivors get angry and decide to get even, and end up forcing their way in as a knee-jerk reaction to being forced out. It’s human nature, really, if you’re of a type who remembers like an elephant and adopts revenge instead of letting The Big Guy (God) do the work.
Whatever the numbers in the end, the surviving Jews of Europe were determined to keep on surviving, and (this is where my blurriness begins!) just decide one day to return to their ethnic birth place in search of peace for their people.
Fine and dandy, can’t blame them for wanting peace after Nazi Germany’s reign.
But, hang on a sec, there was “No Room In The Inn” of the one that they chose!
The Middle East in general, and what we call Israel specifically, already had chock-a-block, wall-to-wall Palestinians amassed on every square inch of that land, minding their own business, being and doing what Middle Easterners be and do, when, all of a sudden their Biblical cousins “decide” to move back home.
Not a good plan. Was there ever a Plan B? There should have been!
Well, to back track, y’all know how cousins can be, not necessarily kissing ones, especially if there’s not enough room for everyone to play nice. Sure, when the reunion begins, it’s all sweetness and love, but as the cramped quarters start to stretch, someone always gets hurt and starts crying.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this:
What gave the Jews the right to just push the Palestinians aside, in the post WWII search for a “homeland”?
No! I’m not an anti-Semite. Hell, I’m not even German. And I’m so far away from being Palestinian it’s silly, really.
No, I’m just an Irish-Canadian broad who, when viewing the age long fight between Catholics and Protestants in my OWN family, has begun to wonder about the feasibility of the post-war Jewish quest.
It’s all well and good to say that one needs a homeland, but picture this HYPOTHETICAL:
The Quebec French take over English-speaking Canada, and they decide to oust or destroy all Protestant Irish from Canadian soil, and years later, the remaining survivors say to themselves, “Well Hell, that just takes the cake! If you’re going to be like that than we survivors are headed back to Ireland, our original homeland! So umpteen millions of us migrate to Ireland and push the native born Irish out of their land and squish them in a tiny occupied area while we, the displaced Irish Canadians settle in our new “homeland”.
Not fair, huh?
Would there be fights? You betcha!
Would people attack and counter attack, and would innocent civilians die in the cross-fire? Hell yeah!
Ya see my drift here kiddies?
Just because the Jews were ousted from their European homes, does that give them the moral right to oust someone else from their homeland?
And the older I get, and the never-ending failures I see over there, the more I think not.
Which leads me to the Reuters photo above and the long-range missile testing by Iran yesterday.
Can you blame any of the Middle Eastern Palestinians to react with aggression toward Israel, when it was the Jews who created this conflict in the first place and squished the Palestinians into such a small bit of occupied land, that millions have migrated elsewhere in the Middle East, Iran for an example?
I can’t really, can you?
I know $$$ talks and that is how the surviving Jews were able to get the global political community to support their return to Israel; but although there is always muscle behind the almighty buck, there may not have been any moral fibre attached to this idea.
I think we as Westerners need to take a second look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and reconsider who the good and bad guys are in this decades long feud.
If we had taken this issue a bit more seriously after the war (although, I appreciate the chaos which surrounded all of our leaders back then), maybe this “No Room In The Inn” scenario could have been settled in a more amicable way, and the tensions we feel in that region of the world today could have been lessened by our actions back then. Maybe even the anger which Palestinians feel for any country who supports Israel now, may not have been vented at us, on 9/11, as the Infidels, the supporters of the Jewish state.
I just can no longer fault the Palestinians in their reactionary fight to regain what a deposed people stole from them in the first place.
But the Jewish $$$ keeps on talking at the Peace Talks table, and the Palestinians are still forced into the geographic equivalent of a walk-in closet, and the suicide bombers keep pushing those detonator buttons, and the neighbouring countries rife with ousted Palestinians keep threatening missile attacks at Israel, and the bloodshed and the futility of it all continues.
We all thought that WWII was the most destructive act on human beings ever recorded, but one wonders what the tally will be when or if this land dispute is ever settled.
U.N. diplomats can continue to walk out whenever any country denigrates the Jews or their quest for a homeland, but just because the U.N. is based in New York, and just because the Jewish moneyed lobbyists pressure those diplomats to walk out at any Jewish criticism, does not make what they are doing to the Palestinians any better than what the Germans did to them so long ago.
Food for thought, oh, and these munchies are NOT kosher!
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