how far back do we go to determine cause and effect, morally right and spiritually wrong?
If the actors in the past are dead and gone, I would cut off the past and look at the present. This is because I am an individualist, and believe in individual culpability, rather than ethnic culpability, or tribal culpability, or any other form of group culpability.
Given the fact that the ancestors of today's Israelis began purchasing land in erstwhile Palestine in earnest in the 19th century, which accelerated during the early part of the 20th century, culminating in the 1947 UN partition, why look back to the days when the Romans threw the Jews out of Israel? Why not look to the 1947 UN partition?
Surely you are not arguing that the UN did not have the moral or legal authority to divide these former possessions of the defunct Ottoman empire?
Thus, the Israelis (not all of whom are Jews -- many are Christians and Muslims) are fighting to retain land which was legally ceded to them three generations ago.
And, given that 1947 was almost 60 years ago, how many of today's Palestinian suicide bombers were alive in 1947?
I think the answer is zero.
The Palestinians aren't fighting about turf. If it was just about turf, they'd have settled it long ago.
They're Arabs. There is no Arab nation on earth where Jews aren't treated like dirt.
They hate Jews because their religion tells them to hate Jews, and thus, they can't tolerate living in the same land as Jews. See, e.g., Saudi Arabia, where Jews are not tolerated, period.
There are fewer than 1,000 Jews living in Egypt. There are fewer than 100 Jews living in Iraq. Less than 100 Jews in Lebanon. Almost no Jews left in Syria. These are countries which formerly had sizeable Jewish communities, aggregate numbers in the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.
It's not just Arabs. After the Islamic "revolution", 85% of Iranian Jews migrated elsewhere.
Someone upstream made the analogy that Jews are like the canaries in the coal mine. If the civil rights of Jews are not respected, the civil rights of other minorities will not be respected soon, and the civil rights of the less populous members of the majority are not far behind.
If minorities don't have civil rights, then nobody does, because, in that case, "right" comes from power, not law. |
