Transform “From the River to the Sea” from Extermination to Peaceful Co-Existence
For an almost incalculable number of years spanning centuries, and in more modern times, tensions between Arabs and Jews have spilled over into the streets and onto college and university campuses in the United States and throughout the world.
In particular, this overt tension has been most profound since Hamas attacked and invaded southern Israel during a youth concert for peace on October 7, 2023, killing over 1200 people of several nationalities, wounding many more, and kidnapping an estimated 250 hostages.
Since the incursion, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have killed a reported 65,000+ Palestinians and starved many more within the Gaza Strip and on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River territory including mainly innocent civilians who were not involved in the attack. This has caused severe conditions related to the bombing of medical facilities, homes and other shelters, depletion of food, drinking water, and fuel, and rampant disease.
The history of the Middle East, and especially between Palestinians and Jews, abounds with blame, recrimination, and retaliation, and an escalating perpetual cycle of mistrust and violence. And there is indeed plenty of justifiable blame to go around on multiple levels and sides.
If one views the conflict, however, as a binary with either the Palestinians or the Israelis as either the victims only or the oppressors only, then one does not fully understand the histories or the issues. We must, instead, think in nuanced and non-binary ways.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Only hours after the results revealing the Likud Party’s lead in obtaining the most seats – 30 to its closest competitors’ 24 of the Zionist Union (formerly the Labor Party) — in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) in 2015, the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the U.S. sent an email message to millions of U.S. residents congratulating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what was to result in his re-election for a fourth term. The announcement included a congratulatory petition for people to sign, and stated in part:
“The people of Israel have spoken: Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu was just reelected to office, in a sweeping victory for those who value freedom and democracy around the world.”
In 2022, the Republican Party’s response was similar in that Netanyahu, still leader of the Likud party, secured a clear parliamentary majority with his right-wing and religious allies, ending a period of political stalemate and allowing him to return to the premiership for an unprecedented sixth term. This victory was celebrated by Republicans, many of whom have consistently expressed strong support for Netanyahu and the state of Israel.
Yes, the 2015 election was a “sweeping victory,” but not for those of us “who value freedom and democracy around the world.” Right-wing politicians who run and rule by fear and division stand as the only winners in this travesty: those hardliners who promote intolerance, hatred, xenophobia, and racism – those “deciding who counts as a human” according to Marcus Aurelius.
Only four days prior to the 2015 election, Netanyahu and his Likud Party were trailing in the polls. Just 48 hours before the election, Netanyahu, as a last-ditch desperate effort, finally told his truth: that he would never support the establishment of a Palestinian state “on his watch,” while increasing Israeli so-called “settlements” on the West Bank.
Netanyahu-watchers had long suspected what turned out to be his previously voiced disingenuous interest in a “two-state solution.”
Netanyahu turned Israeli democracy into a platform of hate and suspicion by warning his right-wing supporters that the opposition parties had been bussing legally registered and politically left-leaning Israeli Arabs to the polls “in droves.”
We have seen over the entirety of Netanyahu’s rule that his brand of extremism is based on divisions, which is terrible thing for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the world.
Members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition promote no real alternatives to negotiated settlements other than war. To remain in power, Netanyahu talks tough to exert his brand of hyper-masculine bravado like every other warlord going back through time.
Has the Abused Child become the Child Abuser?
Scan the psychological literature and you will find numerous case studies of abused children who grow to become child abusers, those tormented children who eventually become tormentors themselves.
I have to ask myself, “Have some of us taken on the characteristics of our abusers by perpetuating the abuse? And what role does internalized oppression play in this equation?”
Does Netanyahu and his government’s policies and actions toward the Palestinian people mirror the oppressive treatment Jews have suffered for literally 3,000 years? In addition, are these policies actually self-defeating to the nation of Israel?
Netanyahu and his government’s current course has threatened the viability of the release of Israel’s hostages held by Hamas. It could further destroy the possibility for the enactment of the Abraham Accords, a treaty for mutual cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Even though weakened recently by Israeli attacks, Israel’s policies still embolden the terrorist state of Iran and its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis) to further threaten and attack Israel and Western countries in Europe and the United State. And it could push the more moderate Arab states, such as Jordan, Egypt, U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and others to move closer politically and ideologically into the arms of Iran.
The government’s policies have forwarded Netanyahu’s goal of killing, at least for the near future, the possibility of the creation for a safe and stable Palestinian homeland, which, ironically, if implemented, could help to guarantee Israel’s security needs as well.
It has further distanced the remainder of the world from supporting Israel, while ensuring even more and larger mass protests around the world than we saw during the past two years or so on college and university campuses and in cities against the mass casualties inflicted by the Israel Defense Forces on civilian populations in Gaze and the West Bank.
Israel’s murder of innocent civilians and humanitarian atrocities has turned Israel into a pariah nation around the world!
Concentration Camps
Concentration Camp: “a camp in which people are imprisoned or confined, commonly in large groups, without trial….Usually, those people belong to groups the government does not like.”
Throughout the collective history of concentration campus, we can identity some general conditions including brutal working conditions, insufficient supplies of food, clean water, sanitation, rampant disease, inadequate medical services and medications, lack of freedom of movement outside the limits imposed by occupying forces, rescinded human and civil rights, and in many instances, military incursions, armaments, bombardments, and death.
As a queer person, but primarily as a Jew, it hurts me to feel compelled and justified in listing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River not as virtual concentration camps, but, instead, as actual ones because these areas meet most of the conditions for concentration camps listed above.
As Jews, with our long and tortured history of forced conversion, expulsion from our lands, and eventual murder, we should by now understand the concept of oppression by committing to a moral mandate of never treating people as we were so cruelly and brutally treated.
“NEVER AGAIN” must also apply to Israel’s murder of civilians in the Gaza Strip and in the theft of land in the West Bank by so-called “setters,” which is simply a sanitized name for Jewish extremist land thieves.
There is an unlimited amount of blame to go around. The process in the establishment of the modern state of Israel by the western powers with the United Nation was tilted against the best interests and needs of the Palestinian people.
Israeli governments, past and present, created tight quarters for the millions of Palestinians. The Israeli government has severely restricted essential goods and services (humanitarian aid) from entering the Strip, has blockaded coastal ports, and has bombed and destroyed residential areas killing thousands of innocents during hostile times.
The Hamas “governing” body has been intransigent by refusing to recognize the state of Israel, and it has continued to lob missiles into Israeli territories killing and injuring many over the years. It has also refused to negotiate in good faith with Israeli officials to attain a sustained peace settlement.
It has manipulated its own civilians as human shields from Israeli bullets and bombs. It has squandered incoming aid for its own uses by building underground tunnel shelters for its fighters and diverting funds intended for humanitarian relief for the purchasing of armaments rather than food, shelter, and medicine.
Most other Arab nations have subsequently abandoned the plight of the Palestinian people over the many years of struggle.
The United States and other western nations have, for the most part, provided Israel with unconditional support with their shipments of armaments and other wartime and peacetime goods and funds. These governments have placed insufficient pressure on Israeli governments to proceed with restraint and with negotiating plans for the eventual freedom for the Palestinian people in either a one-state democratic and free country or in a two-state solution.
A central tenet of Jewish tradition is Tikkun Olam: meaning the transformation, healing, and repairing of the world so that it becomes a more just, peaceful, nurturing, and perfect place. I ask us, then, to join and go out into our lives, and work for Tikkun Olam. Let the abuse stop here.