Last summer I visited Hebron, one of the darkest and most hate-stricken cities in the West Bank, a place most tourists visiting the Holy Land for a sun-drenched Levantine holiday would not dream of setting foot. Six years ago I took my mother to Beirut and even down to Beaufort Castle overlooking Hezbollahland and the Israeli border area, but I would not take her to Hebron. This is a city where a few hundred Jewish “settlers” make their home at the bottom of valley surrounded by Palestinians who have been trying, sometimes violently, to drive them out for a very long time.
Eve Harow drove me there. She works as a professional tour guide and knows the area well.
“Hebron’s a tough place,” she said. “I could never live there.” She agreed, however, to take me in her car.
Eve is a tough lady, but Hebron is tougher. She, too, lives in a settlement in the West Bank, not in Hebron, but in a “mainstream” one, Efrat, a small California-style town in the Gush Etzion bloc that functions more or less as a suburb of Jerusalem. You can drive from one to the other in just a few minutes.
Efrat
I will not present an argument here for or against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. That’s not what this is about. I’m perfectly capable of arguing both sides of that question, and my own opinions are mixed, depending in part on which “settlement” we’re talking about. The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the illegal trailer outposts on remote hilltops, the Jewish towns just over the 1967 armistice line that may or may not one day be annexed to Israel, and the Jewish sector in Hebron are all very different places and subjects that should be argued about and analyzed separately.
‘What do you think of Hebron?” I said to Eve as we headed south out of Jerusalem. Like so much of the Middle East, it’s a problem without a solution that makes me want to throw my hands in the air and give up.
Eve Harow
“It’s a microcosm of the Middle East,” she said. “It really is. There are a few Jews and a lot of Arabs. If Jews are not allowed to live there because they were once driven out, then that validates the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Ethnic cleansing is wrong no matter who is the focus. We didn’t throw the Arabs out when we came back in 1967 even though they thought we would.”
We reached the West Bank in minutes. The hills loom right over Jerusalem. You can easily see, if you go there, why Israel insists on retaining defensible borders if and when a Palestinian state comes into being.
West Jerusalem from the hills of the West Bank overlooking the city
It would be so easy to bombard the city with artillery, as the Jordanian army frequently did when it controlled the area before the 1967 war, and it would be no more difficult to fire crudely-made rockets into the dense population center below. It’s impossible not to think about this on the road from Jerusalem toward Efrat and Hebron.
“So,” I said as Eve and I drove. “Why live in Efrat, or anywhere beyond the Green Line for that matter?”
“Because I think Jews should be able to live in Judea,” she said, referring to the southern half of the West Bank.
“What about the Palestinians here?” I said. “You say Jews should be able to live in Judea, but most people who live here are Arabs.”
“There have a right to live here, as well,” she said. “I think they can gain a lot more from living in peace with us than they can by waging war against us. I hope that one day they understand that because we’re not going anywhere. I want to live in a world where Arabs don’t want to kill me, not because they love Jews but because it doesn’t advance their own interests. I want to live in a world where they think about what’s good for them rather than what’s bad for me.”
“Don’t you worry that, since you live in Efrat rather than, say, Tel Aviv, that you might get forced to move?” I said.
“No more than I fear for the whole state of Israel,” she said.
Efrat in the foreground and Bethlehem in the background
Efrat, though, is more tenuous than Tel Aviv. Jews can only be forced out of Tel Aviv by a conquering army–a fantasy event that is never going to happen–but there’s a chance the Israeli government might one day order residents of both Efrat and Hebron to move back inside Israel’s official borders.
“Lots of people in Israel think you’re a major part of the problem just by existing out here,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. They don’t want to face the truth that they’re hated just as much as I am. The PLO was founded in 1964, three years before we came back here. When they talked about liberating territory, they weren’t talking about Efrat. We didn’t have Efrat then. They were talking about Tel Aviv. Israel is considered a racist genocidal state. Not just the settlers, but all of Israel. Sometimes I feel like I’m living inside a horror film. One of the most insulting things you can say is that I’m against peace because I’m a settler. I live here. I have seven children and three grandchildren, and if there isn’t peace then I’m the big loser. It’s the little people who pay the price. It’s the little people who go to war, and it’s the little people who get buried.”
Few places in Israel were quiet during the second Intifada, and even fewer places were as dangerous as the roads leading from Jerusalem to the settlements.
The road from Jerusalem to Efrat
The tunnel between Jerusalem and Efrat was a particularly dangerous stretch of road during the second Intifada
So many Israeli civilians were shot at that most had to wear the same kind of helmet and flak jacket that I had to wear while embedded with combat troops in Iraq.
“I only wore the vest once,” Eve said. “I cried the entire time and never put it on again.”
*
Hebron is tough, but Efrat is easy. Jews and Arabs in that area may not particularly like one another, but for the most part they manage to muddle through in their parallel but separate lives without bothering each other or getting in each other’s way. They don’t live in the same towns or on the same streets like they do in some parts of Israel, but they use some of the same roads and shop at some of the same grocery stores. They almost never get into fights. Gone are the days when Israelis wore flak jackets on their way to work in the morning, and gone are the days when Palestinians waited for hours at a long series of checkpoints to get where they wanted to go. Gush Etzion is now sedate. Violence is all but unheard of.
Efrat may or may not be attached to Israel proper if and when a peace treaty is signed. It wouldn’t be hard to attach it to Israel. It’s just outside Jerusalem and part of a geographically contiguous bloc.
Hebron is different. Hebron is stressful. Hebron is in the heart of the West Bank. The Jewish community there is too isolated and too far away to ever be annexed during a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Violence may not be a daily occurrence, but the threat of it hangs constantly in the air, and I could feel it before I even got out of the car.
The road in from next-door Kiryat Arba was under Israeli army control, but it passed through residential and commercial Palestinian neighborhoods.
The road into Hebron
Everyone on the street could plainly see Eve’s Israeli license plates, and the posture from some of the young men walking by was palpably hostile.
The road into Hebron
Most communication between humans is non-verbal. It’s conveyed through body language and is the same across cultures. I wasn’t imagining the hatred directed at me from some of the Palestinian men on that road. It was obvious.
I am not paranoid around Arabs, not after having lived in an Arab country. Nor am I paranoid around Palestinians. I’ve met too many to count in Israel and was never once stared at in a hostile manner in Ramallah, perhaps because it was obvious, at least to some, that I was American and not Israeli, at least while I was walking around and talking to people. On my way into Hebron, however, no one could have known that I was American. Thanks to the plates on Eve’s car and the glass between me and them, they naturally assumed I was Israeli. And I felt their hatred as though it were heat.
Just a few weeks after I left, several Israeli civilians in a car much like Eve’s—including a pregnant woman—were shot to death on that very road by Palestinian gunmen.
She introduced me to David Wilder, a spokesperson for Hebron’s Jewish community. He grew up in New Jersey, but has lived in Israel for 35 years. He first visited during a one-year program in college and said it changed his life, so he came back after he graduated and has been there ever since.
David Wilder
“Why live here instead of in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem?” I said. A muezzin sang out the call to Muslim prayer from a minaret.
“I get to the States more often than I get to Tel Aviv,” he said. “And I don’t go to the States frequently.” He laughed. “I didn’t grow up in a religious family. I had a secular Jewish identity. I didn’t make contact with religious Judaism until I came to Israel. My wife is Israeli, and her story is similar. After we got married we decided we wanted to contribute something and to actually do it rather than talk about it. And we decided that if Jews should be able to live in a place like Hebron, we should go live in Hebron.”
Houses in the Jewish sector of Hebron
“So the purpose of the Jewish community here is to maintain access to the tomb, right?” I said, referring to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest site in all of Judaism after the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs
“That’s certainly a primary reason,” David said. “Hebron is the first Jewish city in Israel. This is where Abraham came 3700 years ago. He lived here. All the patriarchs and matriarchs lived here. King David started the Kingdom of Israel here before he went up to Jerusalem. And with very few exceptions, Jews have always been living here. The last time there were no Jews here before the riots in 1929 was back in 1100 when the Crusaders threw all the Jews out and replaced them with Christians. The Christians have since been replaced with Arabs. But otherwise there were always Jews here. This community is part of a chain that goes all the way back to the beginning of Judaism.”
Hebron, circa 1929
The Tomb of the Patriarchs is roughly 2000 years old. It was built by King Herod. There are caves underneath that were off-limits to Jews and Christians for hundreds of years after the Mamluks invaded from Cairo in 1260 and threw out the Christians. In 1267 they declared the building a mosque.
“We share control of the building with Palestinians,” David said, “but they tell us straight up that if they can throw us out of here that they won’t let us back in the tomb of our patriarchs. They say it’s a mosque and that only Muslims should pray there even though it was built by King Herod, who was a Jew. If we don’t stay here, none of us will even be able to visit.”
Inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs
Jews and Arabs famously get along well in the Israeli city of Haifa. They live in the same neighborhoods, on the same streets, and in the same apartment buildings. They eat at the same restaurants, attend the same schools, work for the same companies, and drink beer in the same pubs. They can get along. Haifa is proof.
Israelis and Palestinians don’t mix much in Jerusalem, but they get along reasonably well for the most part in the places where they do overlap, such as Jerusalem’s Old City, and their relations are civil if less warm than between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs in Haifa.
In Hebron, though, they’re like anti-matter and matter.
“Do you have any contact at all with the Palestinians here?” I said.
“Today?” David said. “Virtually none. There used to be contact. Relations between Jews and Arabs used to be good. Most relationships were positive. But in 1929, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, began inciting the Arabs. The Jews here were warned to gather weapons for self-defense, but they said no, the Arabs are our friends, they will protect us. They protected us in 1921, and the Jews here were sure they’d be protected again. So they didn’t take up weapons. And they were defenseless.”
Some Jews returned to the city following the six day war in 1967. Jordan had controlled the territory for the preceding 19 years, but lost it when Israel reconquered the area after Jordan’s attempted invasion hit the rocks of the Israel Defense Forces.
“When we came back in 1967,” he said, “we had reasonable relations between Jews and Arabs again. There were business relationships, personal relationships. We could walk around the city unarmed and there were no problems. Things weren’t all lovey-dovey, but people got along. Things started to change in a bad way during the first Intifada in the late 1980s. The PLO began rounding up Arabs who were seen talking to Jews and accusing them of being collaborators, so pretty soon the Arabs stopped talking to us.”
While it’s not true that the first Intifada consisted entirely of civil disobedience and rock throwing, the second Intifada was nevertheless much worse than the first. The second consisted almost entirely of suicide bombings and rifle attacks. The road from Jerusalem to Gush Etzion was ferociously dangerous, but Hebron degenerated into a war zone.
“They shot at us for two and a half years from the hills around us,” David said.
“What did they use?” I said. “Sniper rifles? Regular rifles?”
“They shot at us with both,” he said. “A sniper shot and killed a baby in the head right on this street. They shot into my apartment a number of times. We warned during the Oslo Accords that if Arafat was given control of the hills around us that we would be shot at. People said we were panicking, that we were hysterical, but we were right.”
Memorial for a baby shot in the head by a sniper
Some Israelis in Hebron have tried to rekindle ties with their Palestinian neighbors, but David said most attempts have been ineffective.
“They don’t want us here,” he said. “They say they don’t want us here, and they believe that someday we’ll leave, if not because they drive us out then because our own people will force us out. Mahmoud Abbas says that no Jews will be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. Arabs live in Israel, but he insists that no Jews can live in Palestine.”
He and I walked the streets of the Jewish quarter. I looked up into the hills and wondered how clearly we might be seen if anyone was looking at us through a sniper scope.
Palestinians live in houses on hills above Hebron's Jewish sector
“My kids were almost killed out here when somebody shot at them,” he said.
And yet he continues to live there. It’s true that the people who shot at his kids hate Jews in Tel Aviv just as much as they hate Jews in Hebron, but at least Tel Aviv is outside rifle range. And no Israeli government will ever order Jews to leave Tel Aviv. A future Israeli government might, however, order the Jews out of Hebron.
“Those are Arab houses up there?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s nobody living there now, but that’s an Arab house. The last man who lived there was a nice guy. A few years ago a 17 year-old kid jumped down from up there into the playground with a knife.”
Palestinian homes above a Jewish playground in Hebron
“Fortunately he was caught,” David continued. “When asked what he was doing, he said he wanted to kill somebody. When asked who he wanted to kill, he did what he was told and said he wanted to kill an Arab. That’s why he jumped into a Jewish playground! According to the law here, any conflict between Arabs has to be handled by an Arab court. It can’t be handled by us. So we sent him home.”
“Do you feel safe here?” I said. Hebron is not scary, but nor is it comfortable. The worst thing about standing at the bottom of the Jewish section of town isn’t the fear of getting shot, which is small, but the disturbing awareness that many people who live in the houses above hate your guts so completely that it takes an army to keep them away.
Israeli army guard tower over Hebron
“If you’re afraid you can’t live here,” David said, “but Jews in Israel are targeted no matter where they live. I know who lives around us, and I know what they’ve done. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it many times. Somebody put a teddy bear out here in the market that had wires sticking out of it. It was a bomb. They were hoping one of our kids would pick it up. So the army closed the market.”
He took me around the corner and showed me a destroyed home that Israelis recently occupied before the army threw them out.
“When we came back in 1967,” David said, “there was nothing here. Everything was destroyed. More recently we asked if we could move into empty buildings that were old Jewish property. The government, of course, wouldn’t let us. But after the baby was killed by a sniper, we moved in anyway. We put some apartments in here. And after five years the army evicted us. A year later two families who didn’t have anywhere else to go moved back in, one here and one at the other end. After they were discovered, the government sent hundreds of Israeli soldiers in to pull them out. The soldiers came in with sledgehammers and destroyed everything.”
House where the Israel Defense Forces evicted settlers who lived there illegally
Nobody gets to live in that building, not Jews and not Arabs, so the building is wasted and ruined. An entire swath of the old city is like this. Hebron would be a beautiful place if everyone could live together peaceably like they do elsewhere, but they can’t, so it’s not.
“These buildings,” he said, “without any doubt, belong to us. The courts accept that. But they won’t let us use the buildings because then there would be more Jewish families here. Some people don’t think we shouldn’t be here in the first place, so they certainly won’t let us grow. Palestinians have 97 percent of this city. They can build whatever they want wherever they want, but we’re not allowed to build anything.”
“There are, what, 800 Jews here?” I said. “And as many, if not more, Israeli soldiers? Why are there so many soldiers protecting so few people?
“It’s true that they’re here to protect us,” he said. “They’re also here to protect you and the other visitors. The main reason they’re here, though, isn’t to patrol this area, but to patrol the other side of the city. They go over there and arrest terrorists before they can blow themselves up in Jerusalem. They’re protecting the entire country and making sure Hamas doesn’t take over the area. If the Israeli army wasn’t doing that, Hamas would have taken over a long time ago. And everyone knows it.”
He took me to a memorial for the victims of the 1929 massacre. Sixty seven of Hebron’s Jews were killed in late August that year. Houses and synagogues were vandalized. Hundreds, though, were saved by Arabs who not only refused to participate, but hid would-be victims from their rampaging neighbors in their own houses.
Memorial for the 1929 massacre in Hebron
Memorial for the victims of the 1929 massacre
“The killers did horrible things to people,” David said. “They castrated men. An Arab working at a bakery put his Jewish boss into the oven and baked him. They cut off women’s breasts and horribly raped them. These are the easy pictures to look at.”
A young victim of the 1929 masscre in Hebron
“What was the, quote, ‘reason’ for the 1929 massacre?” I said.
“It was incited by Mohammad Amin al-Husayni,” David said.
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and ally of Adolf Hitler
Husayni was the infamous mufti of Jerusalem who sided with Hitler during World War II and recruited Muslims to fight for Nazi Germany. “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” Husayni said, and his people did.
Husayni inspects Muslim soldiers who fought for the Nazis
“There have been a number of reasons given,” David said, “but the real reason was that he hated Jews. He and his Arab followers later expected Rommel to invade in 1942 and kill everybody. There were Arabs here, though, who defended and saved Jews. There were Arabs who saved Jews as if they were part of their very own families.”
Surely there are still Arabs in Hebron who would save Jews, or who at least wouldn’t hurt them. Not everyone is a homicidal maniac. Hebron would be a much darker and more violent place than it is if they were. Such people keep a low profile, though, for the most part, and don’t have much sway in Palestinian politics. Perhaps they will later, but today they do not.
The terrible events of 1929 still hang over the place, and the bloody-minded hatred that triggered it has yet to be extinguished. It happened back in the days of grainy black and white photography, but it was not so long ago. It is still within living memory. Just a few weeks ago, Al Aqsa TV, the Hamas channel in Gaza, interviewed a Palestinian woman from Hebron who not only remembers that massacre, she’s proud of that massacre. And she said she’d like to see it repeated.
“Allah willing,” she said to the interviewer, “you will bury (Israel), and massacre the Jews with your own hands. Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron. We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them.”
Today the Jews of Hebron have an army. That army keeps Jews and Arabs apart in order to minimize violence. The security measures, though, have all but ruined parts of the city. It reminds me of no place so much as Baghdad a few years ago when sectarian Sunni and Shia militias “cleansed” neighborhoods of the other and American soldiers had to canton the city with gigantic walls to keep them apart.
A wall separates Jews and Arabs in Hebron
“During the second Intifada a suicide bomber blew himself up down the street and killed a couple from Kiryat Arba,” David said. “He came very close to killing a group of 50 kids who were visiting. So the army closed the stores here so nobody could use them as a base for terrorist attacks. It went through the Supreme Court which okayed it, and they’ve been closed ever since.”
The doors in the Arab neighborhoods immediately adjacent the Jewish area have all been sealed. No one can go in or out, and no one can walk on those streets, not even people who own property on those streets. The doors are covered in spray paint. The area is utterly ruined.
Hebron's derelict sterile area
Human life is surely more important than property and the right to move freely, but security here comes at a terrible cost to the city in the absence of peace and civil relations. What the Israeli military calls the “sterile zone” was once a vibrant ancient city. Today, it looks like a ghost town, as though everyone had been driven out by a violent catastrophe, which is pretty close to what happened. These streets are in Hebron’s old city, a part of town that would overflow with thousands of tourists and pilgrims from all over the world if it weren’t a slum made hideous by hatred and war.
“So what do you think?” Eve asked me as we drove through this zone on our way back to Jerusalem.
“I think this,” I said, meaning the permanently closed streets that had been emptied at gun point, “is very disturbing.”
The sterile area in Hebron between the Jewish and Arab parts of the city
“So do I,” she said. “Have you talked to anyone else about Hebron?”
“I talked to an Israeli soldier who served here,” I said. “He didn’t like it. He hated it, actually. He hated what he had to do here.”
“They usually do,” she said.
Israel’s capital city once looked much like Hebron does now. The 1967 armistice lines slice right through the heart of Jerusalem alongside the walls of the Old City. There is no chance the borders of a future Palestinian state will match that line precisely, but if Palestine acquires any part of Jerusalem as its capital, a border will by necessity be drawn somewhere in that urban environment, so the two sides had better truly make peace if it happens.
Because Hebron, historian Yaacov Lozowick wrote, “is what happens when Israelis and Palestinians agree to divide a city, but can’t agree to live together in peace. The blame for lack of peace is irrelevant: each side will doubtlessly say it’s all the fault of the other, but the result won’t be any nicer thereby. The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East need urgently to visit Hebron.”
Postscript: I’ll be returning to the Middle East in two weeks, first to Israel and then, unless something dramatically changes, to Egypt. I will need your help for travel expenses, and I haven’t asked in a while, so please pitch in as much as you can so this project will be financially viable.
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Good reporting. I think I have to re-read this before making a comment, it’s a lot to digest.
Michael: Excellent article, worthwhile reading it. It’s most apparent that no peace shall come to that part of the world unless the Arabs decide they will accept peace. If the Arabs accept that Israel has the right to exist, that Jews have the right to live in that land, that killing Jews is wrong and must stop, that railing against Jews and Israel must stop, then perhaps peace shall come there. I’m very certain that Israelis want peace as long more so than anyone else. I’m also certain peace will not come to that land because Arabs do not want it. There’s nothing Israel can do to effect peace because that would be a one-sided offer and also be committing suicide as a nation.
So, the IDF has to stay strong and guarded ready to beat back attacks against its nation. No amount of posturing by Obama or Europeans will change the calculus of that region.
“…We didn’t throw the Arabs out when we came back in 1967 even though they thought we would.”
In fact, in the aftermath of the 1967 war, the Arabs of al Khalil were fully expecting that the Israelis would massacre them all.
Moshe Dayan told the mayor of the city that they should not worry.
So does anyone have any idea why on earth the Arabs of al Khalil should have thought that the Jews would massacre them in 1967?…
Michael, excellent as usual but curious to know why no mention of Baruch Goldstein.
Norden, I had forgotten that the Goldstein incident took place in Hebron. It didn’t come up while I was there, so I wasn’t thinking about it when I wrote this.
I’d like to go back and cover the city from the Arab side. They have most of the city, but it surely sucks for those who own property in the “sterile” area, especially if they’ve never bothered anybody.
Israel has made many mistakes, blunders, over the years.
In 1948, we should have expelled all the Arabs from the new State.
In 1967, we should have pushed the Arab population out of the West Bank & into Jordan, this applies especially to Jerusalem. And, we should have blown up that damn mosque.
We should never have given Egypt the Sinai in return for a phoney temporary truce. The same applies to South Lebanon, the withdrawal was a major blunder.
Do I even have to mention Oslo? What a stupid idea to bring back the PLO & Arafat.
Now, I know Mr Totten will take exception to my comments.
Mr Totten is a nice guy, he’d like to see a ”fair” solution.
Fair, however, is not a Middle-Eastern concept.
Many Israelis are nice, Western people just like Mr. Totten.
I read the words of Ms. Harow, what a nice lady. But, her ”niceness” her desire for peace, is seen by Arabs as weakness, as a lie, or as just plain stupid.
In the Middle-East, more than anywhere else, all that matters is winning.
Terry, you will not advocate ethnic cleansing on this blog, not against Arabs, not against Jews, not against anybody. I mean it, and I will not tell you again.
#7 Michael Totten.
Hey, it’s your blog, you get to make the rules. I knew you wouldn’t like my comments, which is why I rarely comment anymore.
For the moment, it’s a sterile discussion anyway since no imaginable Israeli gov’t. would agree with me either nor is it possible given current political realities internationally.
However, how can you reconcile your support for a two-state solution when that means a Judenrein Palestinian state in which Jews are forced out of their homes?
I’m not trying to be a wise guy either, it’s a serious question.
Terry: no imaginable Israeli gov’t. would agree with me
You got that right.
how can you reconcile your support for a two-state solution when that means a Judenrein Palestinian state
I don’t think Jews should be driven from Palestine any more than I think Arabs should be driven from Israel.
#9 Michael Totten.
You are indeed most well-intentioned and I’m not being sarcastic either. Like I said, you really would like a ”fair” solution. But there is a problem of non-reciprocity here. In Israel, the gov’t. protects Arabs & anyway, we don’t have armed militias or terrorist organizations, with the very rare exception of a few crazies, Jews don’t attack Arabs. Arabs are safe everywhere in Israel.
But, who would protect Jews living in a Palestinian state? Without the presence of the IDF, Jews would be attacked non-stop & eventually driven out of their homes. It is the official position of the PA that there will be NO Jews in Palestine. And, what recourse would we have anyway? International or American security guarantees are worth absolutely nothing (Gaza, S. Lebanon, etc.). Should the IDF enter a sovereign Palestinian state to protect Jews, you can imagine the international outcry.
I suppose much of this is a moot point since we will not be withdrawing from the West Bank any time soon, the Palestinian attempt at the UN will come to nothing except perhaps another intifada.
On another subject, are you up very late or very early?
Michael,
I agree with you far more than I disagree with you, but Terry has a larger point here.
You may not allow talk of ethnic cleansing on your blog, but that does not mean that a situation may not occur where Israel may have to do it to avoid a second Holocaust. There are plenty of Israeli Arabs, who, with help from outside Islamists, could rise up and create widescale massacres, terrorism and general havoc across the country – think Hebron 1929 writ large.
The Arabs, as you often indicate in your own writing, are so obsessed with their Jew-hatred that it often overrides their desire for survival – this is how you get mass murdering suicide bombers. Combine such hatred with 100,000 rockets and (who knows) maybe some chemical/biological weapons, and it is not inconceivable that to avoid a second Holocaust, Israel might have to do something far bloodier than ethnic cleansing, if you know what I mean.
Ahh! Very cool. I was in Hebron last week (I ignored your admonition not to go…sorry about that, Michael =) in both the Arab part and Jewish part. Glad I have this article to supplement my experience there!
In David Roberts book “The Holy Land” republished in 1850, he describes Hebron as a ruined town ocupied by about 50 Jewish families.
I have no solution to anything.
Barry Meislin writes, ” So does anyone have any idea why on earth the Arabs of al Khalil should have thought that the Jews would massacre them in 1967?…”
Some assumed we followed the same tribal cultural rules they did; we don’t. The PA’s President Abbas admitted a few years ago that his family fled Safed in 1948 because the Arabs feared the advancing Jews would take revenge on them for what the Arabs had done to the Jews of Safed in 1929. The wave of hatred that led to the massacres in Hebron washed up the hills to Safed where there was yet another massacre of Jews, albeit on a smaller scale. It’s similar, but not identical to, what psychiatrists call “projection” – mentally assigning one’s own flaws, fears and transgressions onto another.
“When we came back in 1967,” [David Wilder] said, “we had reasonable relations between Jews and Arabs again. There were business relationships, personal relationships. We could walk around the city unarmed and there were no problems.”
That’s not what I experienced when I visited Hebron one Shabbat in 1971. Staying at a military compound where most of the Jews resided while Kiryat Arba was being constructed, we walked to the Cave of the Patriarchs through an Arab part of town but with an armed escort. What I sensed in the eyes of some of the Arabs we passed was pure hatred.
Totten writes, “… but if Palestine acquires any part of Jerusalem as its capital, a border will by necessity be drawn somewhere in that urban environment, so the two sides had better truly make peace if it happens.”
One can only hope that any “division” will simply slice off the old refugee camps and Arab settlements that were incorporated within the city’s boundaries in 1967 but were never part of the city proper. Any attempt to divide within the Old City or to reassign once Jewish neighborhoods (but made “Arab” under Jordanian rule) to Palestine will soon enough render the city unlivable for Jews. To the mythical “everyone” who “knows” that peace requires that Jerusalem be divided, one must ask: Where and when in history has *any* city served as the capital of two states, hostile or friendly?
Another great report, Michael. The only thing missing (or perhaps I just missed it) was the antagonistic Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and his role in damaging relations between Hebron’s Arabs and Jews. There are a couple of fascinating accounts of the collision of personalities that occurred when Levinger and his group moved in.
* The West Bank Story by Rafik Halabi
* The Cursed Blessing: The Story of Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank by Shabtai Teveth,
* The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg
Ethnic cleansing?
More like ethical cleansing.
To their neighbors, the Jews are like the Crusaders. Interlopers, pure and simple.
With everything that implies.
It is their moral, ethical duty to end this Crusader occupation.
What’s that you say? Jews are not Crusaders? Jews are returning to their homeland, not occupying it?
Heh, that’s precisely why Israel’s Partners in Peace (Inc.) have been putting so much energy into their “there-is-no-Jewish-connection-to-the-holy-land-there-was-no-temple-in-Jerusalem-Jesus-was-a-Palestinian campaign.
Nope, sorry, Jews aren’t Jews.
Jews are Crusaders.
And they will meet the same fate. It is fated. It is willed. It is destiny. It is a moral necessity.
File under: “Hey, how ’bout them Peace talks?!!”
And just in case anyone might harbor any doubts:
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=223181
(Though to be fair—and one must!—there are conflicting reports that the man was either drunk when he made these uncharacteristically truthful remarks, or that he spoke in Arabic-spiced Yiddish, with a mouth ecumenically full of babaganouj and pickled herring, so that no one can be absolutely sure what it was he actually said. To be sure, the foreign language press is reporting that he—thoughtfully—reaffirmed the Palestinian Authority’s absolute dedication to the peace talks with Israel and the need for a two state solution.)
Michael’s report, as always, rings true. I can not emphasise the negative reactions of my son and his friends when they served in Hebron during their compulsory service in the IDF. It is the only place that I have avoided during many years of IDF reserve duty all over the West Bank.
The only solution that I can think of is to hand the whole city over to the Mental Health unit of the Ministry of Health. Everyone there, Jews and Arabs seem highly disturbed.
Michael–I usually admire your work but I thought this was very one sided and that you romanticized what is in many ways a story of retrograde colonialism.
Just because an ethnic or religious group long ago held control over a piece of territory doesn’t justify a claim to it in 2011. If it did, you would have Italians trying to reconquer Libya (actually they did that to the consternation of the rest of the world), Muslims trying to reconquer Spain, Mexicans claming California, and Russia swallowing Poland. Needless to say the world would be a very nasty, violent place.
I’m sure it was easy to be taken in by Wilder, with familiar colloquial English and stories of siege that tickle one’s testonerone levels a bit. But think about what he’s basically telling you…he is a SERVANT of HIS god, who has clearly spoken to him and told him that it is his duty to further the cause of a CHOSEN people (~0.1% of humanity) by settling in a major urban center deep in the territory that the world widely acknowleges will (must) form the core of a state of an antagonized people. The earthly consequences are irrelevant (if they were relevant he wouldn’t so callously endanger his children in this biblical quest), because an unseen diety has commanded him to act a certain way. These sorts of people, no matter how outwardly “American” or “liberal” they might appear, shouldn’t be defeneded with other people’s sons (armed with yet another people’s taxes), let alone lionized by a good writer who have seen enough injustice to know better. They are a major barrier to a peaceful resolution of one of the world’s most enduring and destabalizing conflicts.
You seem to take the view that because there aren’t that many (800) settlers it’s no big deal, that if the Palestinian neighbors would just chill out everything would be fine. Now you’ve been to Hebron, I’ve only read about it. And I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt I suppose because you are going to do a piece from the perspective of the Arab residents. But by most accounts the number of settlers is the least of the issue; rather it’s the vast, unequal ecosystem of occupation that makes daily life a nightmare in the West Bank. But from what I’ve read life for a Palestinian is as if New York was as follows: (1) The prime stretch of Union Square and Flatiron neighborhoods were totally off limits, occupied by heavily armed foreigners who outwardly wished to annex the rest of Manhattan. (2) The businesses of the Financial District and Midtown were shut for “security reasons”. (3) Disciplined but trigger happy soldiers made regular daytime patrols of the avenues and conducted nightime raids of locals apartments. (4) All decent long distance roads (the FDR Expressway, the Westside Highway, the Bruckner Express, etc) were closed off to all but the Union Square residents, and crossing them risked arrest. Residents need a license, nearly impossible to get, to take a taxi (5) Going to a scarce, low-paying job in Brooklyn required a special permit which was difficult to get and could be summarily revoked at any time.
New Yorkers were about to lynch Mayor Bloomberg when the snowplows were a few hours delayed this winter. Imagine how a they would feel if they woke up and their city was like I described?
And I thought you uncritically ate from the settlers’ hands with the logic that without a permanent Israeli settler (and military) presence in (and possession of) the holy shrine that Jews wouldn’t have access to the site. Christians of all stripes have unfettered access to Bethlehem because they’re NOT at war with the residents of Bethlehem. They visit by the busload. In a proper Palestinian state, formed by a just and honorable peace deal, I have little doubt that busloads of Jewish tourists could eventually visit the Hebron shrine. The problem is that there’s not going to be a peace deal unless we shove aside chauvanistic theocrats like Wilder. Wilder would I’m sure prefer if his settlement was more secure but don’t confuse that for a desire for peace. He wants land–all of “Judea and Samaria”, plus maybe Suez for good measure, if he were to have his way. Something’s got to give and I’m personally sick of huge swaths of the globe being destablized, year in and year out, by this sordid little conflict. The neutral people of the world, not to mention the reasonable people of Israel and Palestine don’t deserve to be held hostage to the biblical fantasies of confused New Jerseyans.
I’m 51 years old. At no time–not for a single second–during my life has there been even the remotest resemblance of a functional “state” in Judea other than Israel. Why does anyone cling to the fantasy of a “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict? That conflict is itself completely one-sided in origin and, for the most part, continuance. Israelis simply want to live. In peace if possible, but live nonetheless. Arabs–and those who back them–are driven by God-alone-knows what demons to attempt at every moment and with every fiber of their beings to destroy Israel and kill Jews.
To sum up: you can’t have a “two-state solution” to one-sided conflict, even if there was a second state in the Holy Land.
I would suggest that after every terrorist attack from the West Bank or Gaza, a square km of whichever should be annexed to Israel, and the people there should be removed, and if appropriate, paid for their property. If the Arabs are fighting for land, they they would have to stop fighting by illegal means to keep the land. People who didn’t want to lose their land would then like the terrorist activity to stop. If a person wanted to live in Israe, after his property was annexed, perhaps that would be allowed, if they were of “good character. If they wanted to continue to live in non-Israeli Palestine that could also be permitted.
I hold that would not be ethnic cleansing. If the square km selected nearby Jewish settlements first, then there would be no ethnic cleansing. Even if some Arab owned land was included, the owner cold be compensated if he elected to leave Israel, and if not a terrorist, he could be given a choice where to live. On the off chance that a Jew committed the terrorist act, a square km of Israel could be devolved from Israel, again with compensation if necessary to the land owners. Would that be ethnic cleansing?
It is odd that Arabs who brag of past and future murders complain so much about how they are oppressed.
Kent: Michael–I usually admire your work but I thought this was very one sided and that you romanticized what is in many ways a story of retrograde colonialism.
I didn’t romanticize anything. I just quoted what David and Eve said and did not feel like arguing with them.
Nothing about Hebron is romantic. Nothing. Everything about it is creepy and hopeless.
The reason it seems one-sided to you is that I didn’t quote Arabs. The only way I could quote Arabs, though, is to go back on a second trip because the two sides don’t mix, and I had no access to the Palestinian side. I did, however, show that the Israelis negatively impact Arab-owned parts of that city and made the point that many Israeli soldiers hate what they have to do there, a point ratified by my guide Eve.
I would like to go back and cover the Palestinian side and maybe I will if I can find someone to take me there. Eve couldn’t do it because she’s banned from setting foot on that side.
I would have argued with Eve and David if they said crazy or deranged things–such as support of Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, or whatever–but they didn’t. And I’d likewise quote Palestinians straight if they eschewed similar crazy talk from their side.
So you support resettling the Germans who were ethnically cleansed out of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia after WWII back to their ancestral homes east of the Oder-Neisse line? The reason the Allies forced those Germans to relocate out of the lands given to Poland was because they recognized that the driving force behind the invasion of Poland was to regain lands awarded from Germany to Poland after WWI. By forcing those Germans to leave, the Allies hoped to cut off any future revanchism.
Or do you support SOME ethnic cleansing, but not others?
The entire “Palestinian” problem is manufactured by the unwillingness of Jordan/Egypt to assimilate the population they had annexed in the West Bank/Gaza, after their aggression against Israel was repulsed. Germany assimilated its ethnically cleansed population, but Arab countries ghettoize “Palestinians” in camps rather than allowing them to assimilate. What if they hadn’t done that? What if we had two generations of refugees from those lost territories in camps around Germany, festering and nurturing perpetual grudges against Polish “pigs, apes, and dogs”, with religious leaders teaching them that it’s God’s will that one day they will one day put those rabid animals down?
Why is there one set of rules for Germany and another for Jordan/Egypt/Syria?
Why is there one set of rules for Poland and another for Israel?
Why is it that Ethnic Cleansing was seen as the only way to end the cycle of revanchism, but here on your blog it’s not only wrong, it isn’t even subject to discussion?
Mr. Totten,
We have family friends who used to live in Hevron over 30 years ago, before the “peace process” started. This was before there was a Jewish school there. They sent their kids to school in Jerusalem, a 45 minute drive north. They hired a local arab with a van to drive them. On the way back they would stop in Bethlehem and the Jewish kids would buy candy from the Arab shops by Rachel’s Tomb. They never had any problems at all, and there were no roadblocks, checkpoints, or sniper protection barriers on that road between Hevron and Jerusalem.
That is peace.
Why? The arabs knew that the Israelis had won the wars and were not to be trifled with. They were cowed. Once the Israelis started negotiations with terrorists and started talking about retreating from Hevron and the ‘territories’, the arabs got a new message: that Israel is now weak and can be destroyed. In their mind a willingness to surrender land is weakness, and weakness is an opening to attack, which will bring more concessions and more weakness. So they started murdering Jews.
The “peace process” as it has played out over the past 20 years is a recipe for endless death. The only way for there to be actual peace is for Israel to stop negotiating with terrorists, stop conceding, stop talking about retreating, and start killing terrorists until the arabs get the message that Israel is not weak and the Jews are not leaving. Then everyone can live in peace and arabs can drive Jewish kids around again without any checkpoints.
Mr. Totten: a note on your caption “A wall separates Jews and Arabs in Hebron”
I also have been to Hebron.
The Arab residents of Hebron are allowed to enter the areas where Jews live but not vice versa. Enter as in walk right by the IDF without even showing ID. Jews cannot enter the Arab areas.
I have seen this firsthand.
The Monster: Why is it that Ethnic Cleansing was seen as the only way to end the cycle of revanchism, but here on your blog it’s not only wrong, it isn’t even subject to discussion?
Neither you nor anyone else will advocate war crimes on my blog. Not only does is severely offend me personally, it will reflect very badly on me if I allow such comments to stand. Those who have any respect for me will cease and desist. Those who don’t will find themselves banned, their comments deleted, or both.
Blatantly racist remarks are also prohibited just as they are on other civilized blogs. I am American and this is 2011, and I expect a certain standard of decency.
I strongly suggest you not argue with me about this because you are not going to win.
Akiva: The Arab residents of Hebron are allowed to enter the areas where Jews live but not vice versa.
Not today, they aren’t.
“I would have argued with Eve and David if they said crazy or deranged things–such as support of Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, or whatever–but they didn’t. And I’d likewise quote Palestinians straight if they eschewed similar crazy talk from their side.”
Michael, I have been reading you since about 2004 (I first found out about you through Charles Johnson, when he was still sane.). I can guess that you were somewhat more liberal pre 9-11, and that event shook you up and moved you to the right. However, the above statement shows what seems to be remnants of the pre 9-11 Michael Totten — that of moral equivalency.
There is simply no moral equivalency between Israelis and Arabs. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Only Israel is threatened with extinction, and therefore, everything they do, and I do mean everything – is geared toward pure physical survival, and that would include nuking Arab cities if it came down to it. The Arabs, including the Palestinians, cannot say the same. Israel has massive military power, and if she wanted to drive the Palis into the sea, could have done so by now.
I met Rabbi Kahane a couple of times. I am not religious, but I very much believe that the Jews have to be tough and indeed, ruthless to survive the Arabs, or they will be butchered to the last. Kahane, more than anyone else, popularized the phrase “Never Again”. All he wanted was survival. But dealing with Nazi savages that surround Israel, he knew (as we are finding out now) that only by being tough, and indeed brutal, would Israel survive.
So please stop this crap of comparing him to the Arab extremists. Arab extremists want to kill Jews because we are Jews, and frankly the vast majority of Arabs back them. Kahane believed in what he did precisely because it was necessary for survival.
It’s not the same thing, Michael. Don’t fall into the trap set by the leftist elites of the world.
27. Michael J. Totten
Ok, the arabs had access to Jewish areas in Hebron in 2007 and 2009 anyway.
19. Kent
Have you been the Bethlehem?
For the past 15 years the Palestinian authority has turned a blind eye to Muslims attacking and harassing Christians in order to kick them out of the city. Bethlehem used to be majority Christian, in the past decade it has become majority Muslim, and they brag that Churches have been “conquered” and turned into Mosques. You know, like the Muslims in Hebron did to the Jewish tomb complex Herod made and to a certain hill in Jerusalem.
When Muslims are allowed to control Jewish religious shrines they don’t allow access and call it a mosque. This was the case in Jerusalem before 1967, and the case when Shechem was given to the PA in the 90s, and will be the case if Israel gives Hebron to the arabs.
Good grief, Eric. Kahane’s party was banned in Israel. I know Israeli right-wingers who don’t hesitate to call him a fascist. (Are you aware that he called for an end to Israeli democracy?) So don’t accuse me of left-wing moral equivalence for not being a fan.
I realize this topic tends to drive people to extremes. I’m getting an earful of the other extreme right now, only in email rather than here. I’d like to ask everyone to please try to dial it down and move at least an iota in the direction of center.
Barry Meislin @ 3,
Because that’s what theywould have done to the Jews had the circumstances been reversed.
If memory serves, the Grand Mufti was Yasir Arafat’s uncle.
None of you get it.
You keep talking about secular problems, secular solutions, this massacre, that possibility for revenge, what’s in whose best interests, and “why can’t we all just get along?”
None of that matters.
This is a theological problem.
It is playing out on a secular stage, but it’s a theological problem.
You may be able to find Muslims who aren’t very good Muslims, but the good Muslims get to BE good Muslims by following the Koran and the Hadiths.
Haysani didn’t just say “kill the Jews wherever you find them”, by saying it, he directly QUOTED THE KORAN.
The problem isn’t Arabs – there are a lot of Arabs who would never dream of hurting a Jew. The problem is theological: every Arab who wants the Jews dead are Muslims first, Arabs second. This isn’t a Jewish-Arab problem, this is a Jewish-Muslim problem and IT CANNOT BE SOLVED.
There is no resolution because resolution requires Muslim theology stop being Muslim theology. It requires Muslims to repudiate the Koran, the Hadiths, the sunnah.
I’ve written about this in the past, and I’ve just written about it again, but I don’t expect anyone here to understand it.
http://skellmeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/hows-that-workin-for-ya.html
Michael J. Totten @ 22,
Perhaps that’s not the only thing they hate about what they do there. Perhaps they hate forcing Jews away from their own property, so the Muslims won’t kill them.
@Kent,
“rather it’s the vast, unequal ecosystem of occupation that makes daily life a nightmare in the West Bank.”
I just returned from the West Bank and I visited Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. I just got a slice of life there, but it no way did it strike me as a “nightmare.” In fact, Ramallah is awesome, and is quite pretty with it tree and flower-lined streets, 7-story shopping malls, nice stores, cool cafes, and fat people driving nice cars (no, they are not dying of starvation).
I also went through one of the dreaded checkpoints. There were about 15-20 Palestinians on the bus with me. We got off, passed through a metal turnstile, put our things on a conveyor belt for x-rays, walked through a metal detector, and flashed our passports/IDs to the guards. It was just like airport security (or what an international border would look like, which is what many there say they want anyway), and it took no more than 15 minutes for everyone together. I know sometimes the checkpoints are worse, but considering that buses between Ramallah and Jerusalem leave roughly every fifteen minutes and are packed with people, I’m going to guess that my experience was more common.
Things in Bethlehem and Hebron weren’t as spruced up as Ramallah, but they were still nicer than most places in Jordan. And given the nice cars people drove, the busy shops, etc., life may be more difficult than need be, but is far from a nightmare.
The situation there is dicey enough without needing to say that “daily life is a nightmare,” adding unneeded hyperbole to a complex issue.
Michael,
Like it or not, events are going to prove that Israel must be ruthless to survive. Events will prove that Kahane was right, like it or not. You know Lebanon better than almost anybody else in the USA. You also know that in both Hezbollah and Gaza, the Islamonazis will fire thousands of rockets from residential neighborhoods. This could paralyze and destroy Israel if not stopped quickly.
Israel will have to bomb these neighborhoods and accept that thousands of Arabs will have to be killed, or there will be a second Holocaust. And to hell with minimizing civilian casualties, since the UN, the EU and NGOs, as well as the world leftist media will scream bloody murder if even so much as one of their beloved Palis are killed.
Israel has two choices Michael – the catastrophic choice (the one above) and the cataclysmic one (Shoah #2). Not difficult to figure out which is preferable.
Akiva, noting how things were so much more peaceful 30+ years ago notes, “Why? The arabs knew that the Israelis had won the wars and were not to be trifled with.”
Absolutely true. Those who today moan about the “humiliation” of checkpoints ignore or are ignorant of the fact that during the first 20 years of the “occupation”there *were no checkpoints then. Gaza sometimes a problem but the “Green Line” existed only on a map; the territory was wide open. After the 1967 war, and even after Egypt and Syria gave it their best shot in 1973, Israel emerged triumphant. When during the War of Attrition along the Suez in 1970-71 the IDF took on the Soviets manning the missile batteries and even Soviet pilots flying “Egyptian” aircraft, Israel conveyed a simple message: “Don’t mess with us.” (I miss those days.) When did those checkpoints go up? After Oslo, when Arafat and his “Tunisians” started their terror campaign.
There is a problem with your thesis, Steve.
I’ve never met a Kurdish Muslim who didn’t feel a strong bond with Israel. And I’ve met plenty of Arab atheists who hate Israel so badly they can’t think straight when the topic comes up.
The Arab-Israeli conflict began as a war of competing nationalisms–secular Arab Nationalism versus Zionism. The Islamist aspect of the conflict is more recent. It’s there, and it’s powerful, but it is only part of the story. There was a time not long ago when the Islamist aspect wasn’t significant, and the conflict pre-dates it.
Kyle: I just returned from the West Bank and I visited Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron. I just got a slice of life there, but it no way did it strike me as a “nightmare.” In fact, Ramallah is awesome, and is quite pretty with it tree and flower-lined streets, 7-story shopping malls, nice stores, cool cafes, and fat people driving nice cars (no, they are not dying of starvation).
I agree. Ramallah is a very nice place and much better than anything I’ve seen in Jordan. This surprises almost everyone the first time they see it.
Eric: Events will prove that Kahane was right
You defeat your own argument by pointing out that the biggest threat to Israel comes from far away missiles rather than Arabs who live in houses next to Israelis.
Meir Kahane was a political totalitarian so much at odds with Jewish and Israeli culture and morality that his own government banned his party forever. Israel has all kinds of crazy political parties, even Islamist political parties, so this is not something that was done lightly.
The man was a complete and utter lunatic. He said Israeli democracy should be abolished and replaced with a theocracy, and he thought a second Holocaust was inevitable in the United States.
Michael,
Your sense of history doesn’t go back far enough.
Most of the people in this discussion aren’t thinking back farther than the fall of the Ottomon Empire and the Balfour Declaration, a time when Arab nationalism wasn’t doing exceedingly well, a time when British and French interests had forced Islam, cowering, into a corner and even poor Arab Muslim farmers were happy to sell their land to wealthy European Jews.
You think this problem started with Theodore Herzl and his political Zionism. It doesn’t.
Insofar as the Kurds feel kinship with Israel, or atheist opposition to Israel, sure, you’ll find outliers (and there are good reasons those outliers exist), but outliers aren’t what drive the bus.
I was an atheist once. And even when I was an atheist, I held ideas that were peculiar to what was once (and is again) my Faith. I couldn’t let them go. They were too deeply ingrained.
Islam is a not just a culture or just a religion, it is the fabric that keeps people warm at night. Even atheists who have left it behind haven’t left it behind.
The bus is driven by a systemic ideological problem, a clash of theological worldviews that exists on a very basic level. Haseyni quoted the Koran because he believed it. Everyone he taught believed it – that’s why they killed Jews.
This isn’t simple biological racism that can be educated away.
It is not political prejudice that can be negotiated away.
This is theologically driven – Muslim salvation and eschatology depends on the destruction of the Jews. This is ETERNITY they’re talking about.
Moot point anyway because the Palestinians have made it very clear that they have no interest in negotiations, borders, or any of that. So things stay as they are for now.
I understand the importance of Hebron and its Jewish ties. At some point though the Israeli public may decide that they are tired of sending their children to defend the small community when there are more important borders to defend. I am not advocating or wishing that but it might happen.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Very interesting article. What I probably enjoy most about Michael’s articles (as someone else noted a few months ago) is his “Here’s where I went, this is what I saw, and this is what I heard” approach. It’s refreshing.
——
Skimming some the comments, I am reminded of the ancient proverb, “Whom the Gods would make mad, they first interest in the Middle East peace process.” Two or three of the commenters above are well on their way to madness.
Michael noted that this topic tends to drive some people to extremes. There are many other topics, too, that tend to drive some people to extremes. It’s simply a “bell curve” phenomenon.
Michael has more patience than I do.
Arabs have a religious and a cultural hatred of Jews. The so-called Palestinians have stated their intent to have a state completely free of Jews. They do not mask their hatred in any way (classrooms, media, etc.). The world only accepts their antisemitic behavior because they are a hostile, beligerent people determined to set the world on fire. My impression is that Mr. Totten sides with (sympathizes with) the arabs over the Jews. I guarantee you that Mr. Totten would side against me “IF” I stated that I (as an American) do not want palestinians moving into my neighborhood. So why side with the palastinians about not wanting Jews to move into theirs? Hatred is the issue and both parties MUST abandon it for there to be peace.
Israel does not hinder Christians or muslims from freely practicing their religion (well, muslims are not allowed to do jihad and kill others). However, all muslims do hinder Jews and Christians from practicing their beliefs.
When one group wants to convert you at the edge of a knife or through severe persecution, then peace shall never be achieved. AND this is why the muslims can NEVER be placed in authority of the world’s most sacred religious sites.
/plants tongue firmly in cheek
We already have a perfectly good roadmap to Mid-East peace as proposed by Our Leader, 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. We give San Francisco and Berkeley to the Palestinians, the Israelis get the West Bank and Gaza. Problem solved.
Win-Win. And we won’t even notice a change in the rhetoric that comes out of New Franciscostan.
While reading the comments, Wretchard’s Third Conjecture keeps coming to mind.
Our last-ditch effort the previous decade may well turn out to have been in vain; but, I feel that we were obligated to try, or become what we fought.
The future may very well be decided, one way or the other, in Israel in the next couple of years.
I too have been to Hebron, and I feel your reporting is lacking. There is no mention of the ongoing settler violence against Palestinians (particularly those Palestinians whose homes, schools and businesses abut the Jewish sector). You replied to an earlier comment that you didn’t have the opportunity to speak with any Palestinians on your visit, but certainly a little research could give you a sense of the situation- settler violence against Palestinians in Hebron (including the elderly and children) is documented by the US govt and many objective news outlets. Instances of this violence can also be seen on youtube.
Michael
Your reporting is unparalleled. There is no else like you. For that reason I feel bad about writing for the first time on your blog to critically discuss one comment you made. Your comment back in #38 does not square with known scholarship.
Islam was a major factor right from the start of the conflict. Haj Amin al Husseini rose to power because of his hereditary religious position and as early as 1930 exerted influence through the World Islamic Congress, which had far more ambitious plans than setting up a state in Palestine. If you have time, please read a well-researched book, The Mufti of Jerusalem and National-Socialism, by Jennie Lebel, a Yugoslavian Jew. She describes his Islamic-Nazi nexus – I noticed you published the photo of Haj Amin reviewing a volunteer Muslim SS division (Handzar) he helped recruit. By the way, Haj Amin was said to be of Albanian descent, his red hair and blue eyes also stood him well in Nazi circles, as they made him an honorary Aryan. Ironically, in 1948 he tried to set up an Islamic state in Gaza, just like Hamas.
Michael,
I don’t know if you are planning to come to Tel Aviv during your upcoming trip to Israel, but I would be more than happy to host you a bit while your here. I don’t know how much I could inform you about politics or history, but I can show you where the best place to get a drink is. Also, I haven’t yet donated to your blog, but I would be more than happy to donate a beer or two while you’re here.
Are you bringing any of your books with you? I would love to purchase one.
-Jonah
Twitter: @jonahbalfour
You “just forgot” about Baruch Goldstein?
Goldstein is Hebron’s most famous alumnus, bar none. He moved there, got radicalized by Kahane there, and walked into a mosque there and killed 29 unarmed Palestinians — men, women and children — with an automatic rifle. He kept firing for nearly 10 minutes, hunting people through the site, until a desperate worshipper crept up behind him and brained him with a fire extinguisher.
(He wasn’t nuts. Perfectly sane and rational! He just really, really hated Arabs.)
It’s not like Goldstein is forgotten, either. He’s still venerated by the Kahanists and the more extremist settlers. The IDF eventually had to bulldoze his gravesite, because it had become a pilgrimage side, and you can still buy icon-like pictures of him in certain shops in Jerusalem. He was, and still is, a pretty major figure.
So it’s kind of an odd oversight.
Doug M.
Terry, Eilat – Israel
I kind of agree with your forbidden thoughts. I’m not talking ethnic cleansing or genocide. That may mean moving Arabs out of some areas and Israelis out of others.
But at some point, Israel has to draw reasonable borders and make them stick. Nobody blinked when after WWII when Finns, Germans, Poles and others were moved around by the millions to make the current map of Europe.
After the next war maybe Israel will have learned from its mistakes.
“You defeat your own argument by pointing out that the biggest threat to Israel comes from far away missiles”
Gaza and Lebanon are far away? I just looked at a map to make sure, and yup, just as I had recalled, they’re right next door to Israel.
” rather than Arabs who live in houses next to Israelis. ”
Those Arabs are well — Arabs. Their allegiance and kinship is to those Islamists who will be firing rockets and possibly chemical weapons from Gaza and Lebanon. And no, Michael, so long as Jews are being killed, they do not care that the Lebanese missiles are coming from Shiites rather than Sunnis.
Really enjoyed Mr. Totten’s article, and it warms the cuckolds of my heart to hear an impassioned distaste for ethnic-cleansing. Hebron is a microcosm of the West Bank, and is just like the old Gaza settlements, sucking up treasure and manpower to protect the few from the many – an unsustainable and wasteful enterprise.
I have not advocated any war crime. I haven’t specifically advocated modifying the definition of “war crime” to exclude any act that is currently classified as such. However, some modification is necessary:
I’ve merely called for a single standard by which both Poland and Israel may be judged. If relocation of Arabs from territory Israel gained in defending herself from the Arab nations that attacked her is a war crime, then so was the relocation of Germans from territory Poland gained by the Allied defense of Germany’s attack against Poland. If the latter was not, the former cannot be. Either we should resettle Germans in Poland to rectify that “war crime”, or not scream “war crimes” when someone mentions treating Israel exactly like Poland.
You have done nothing to answer this double standard. Instead, you’ve whipped out the Ban Hammer. I’m sure you’ve thought this issue out thoroughly in your own mind, and are quite capable of justifying (to yoursellf) how you got there. I’ve read enough of your work to know you’re a great communicator. But on this subject, you seem not to even want to communicate your thinking. Is there a FAQ on Why Forced Relocation is Ethnic Cleansing is War Crime (Except When it Isn’t) you could link to, so that I could read that and not taint this thread with the discussion? Is there something you feel uncomfortable putting in the public, that you’d prefer to keep private? You have my email address.
Are you accusing me of making such remarks? The closest I can see to that is the reference to “pigs, apes, and dogs”. Do you dispute that such terminology is used throughout the Islamic world to describe Jews, indoctrinating children as soon as they are able to comprehend language? Are we not to discuss that such language and far worse is used to dehumanize Jews, to raise mobs of millions ready to die in the next jihad, just for a chance to take a few Untermenschen mit? Is your definition of “civilized” such that we cannot discuss this ugly fact without somehow being guilty of racism in the process? Certainly there must be a way to talk about these Bad Words in such a way that that is not itself racist. Do I have to say “p*gs, ap*s, and d*gs” to talk about racism without you thinking my remarks are racist?
Talking about talking is troublesome: NO ONE is to stone anyone, not even if they hear someone say “Jehovah!”.
…Or are you pre-emptively warning me not to do so based on some kind of “gut feeling” that I’m the sort of person likely to drop an N-bomb or something? Perhaps it’s my concern for the Ethnic Cleansing perpetrated against Germans that raises those warning flags. Maybe I sound a little too much like a Nazi apologist. Except that I’m an unapologetic Zionist, who thinks that Judenhaß is the distilled form of one of one of the ugliest and most self-destructive aspects of human nature.
The accusation of “racism” has become so watered down that it now basically means “I can’t argue with you on the facts, so shut up!”
“Shut up,” he explained.
If you aren’t willing to have a rational discussion of why some forced relocations are war crimes and others are not, then you are not going to “win” by stifling it here. The discussion will take place with those who aren’t afraid to talk about it. Unfortunately, that group includes actual racists. But hey, if I’m going to be called a “racist” anyway, maybe it’s not so horrible talking to them about this subject after all. What are people going to do, call me a racist again?
@OldSoldier
When Israel declared independence, the Arab governments did a mass expulsion of Jews. You might say they “ethnically cleansed” themselves of them. Strangely, I missed the UN resolutions condemning these “war crimes”.
Michael asks for a drive to center. I agree. Some music and humor concerning Hebron.
This video near gone now.
http://mashable.com/2010/07/06/israeli-soldiers-dance-to-kesha/
Cmon these young people doing ok.
The Monster: Right after they condemned the Soviets for kicking the Germans out of Prussia and before they hit China for invading Tibet…
As always, I greatly enjoyed reading your reporting here. It matches pretty closely my impressions from the times I’ve visited there as well. I’d be really interested to read your impressions from visiting the Arab side of Hebron and other PA areas as well, as someone else mentioned earlier. As an Israeli Jew it isn’t safe or legal for me to go to these areas, but it would be a rare opportunity to hear a report from someone who is both not naive about the Middle East, and doesn’t have an agenda or political axe to grind.
Michael,
Thanks for your brilliant reporting from that probably the most difficult of places to report from.
I agree with you on your take on Kahane. He is closer to Islamists in his worldview, than to any political party in Israel. Most of his rhetorics was pure subversion, while his main doctrine was – using democracy to gain power and then convert Israel into religious state. It’s all in his writings that are available on the interenet, open for anybody who wants to know to see. It’s no different from Khomeini, who was just “anti-shah dicident” when living in France, and the best friend of Iranian communists and pro-democracy forces in Iran, before (if ever) he became the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I suspect that Kahane was greatly inspired by Khomeini’s success. Kahane’s other similarity with the Islamists was that his means of getting support was by fueling hatered, of Arabs in his case. We can play in ‘spot the difference’ between Kahane and Hamas (remember when they were a “Muslim charity” before they become a political party participating in Palestinian democratic election supervised by Carter?), and not find more than a difference in religion.
Since, I don’t comment often, I also use this opportunity to pass a general observation on your blog. The comments here are a damning reflection on the sad state of the western media. To many commenters show that they don’t know what the straight reporting is, and look for hidden meanings or just plain put words/opinions in your mouth that aren’t present in your articles. Evidently people are too used getting opinion pieces instead of reporting. Even your putting a qualifier that you’ll follow this piece with reporting from the Arab side obviously does not get register in the heads of quite a few of the commenters above. People treat media as a source of their opinions rather than a source of information to built their opinions on. Sad indeed.
The inconvenient truth, as many and no doubt Michael, as well, are aware, is that for the so-called “Palestinians”, peace means a 1 state solution, for the neighbouring nations peace means a no state solution.
The irony is that Isreal is likely the so-called “Palestinians” best friend. It is the one nation state which genuinely entertains the notion of a Palestinian state.
If Isreal had lost the 1948 Independance War…there would be neither Isreal nor a Palestinian state……and a lot of 60 year old mass graves….
Thank you, Michael for an excellent article.
Has anyone seen this:
“The Zionists must acknowledge publicly, in front of the world, that the
Jews have no connection to the Palestinian Arab land, upon whose ruins arose
the colonialist settler Zionist plan that settles and expels, represented by
the Israeli apartheid state. That which occurred two thousand years ago
(i.e., the Jewish/Israeli presence in the land), assuming that it is true,
represents in the book of history nothing more than invention and
falsification and a coarse and crude form of colonialism.”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May 27, 2011]
And to poke the other eye:
TEHRAN (FNA)- A prominent Palestinian activist cautioned on Wednesday that
the Zionist regime of Israel is likely to attempt to destroy the Al Aqsa
Mosque through an artificial earthquake…
Partners for peace? Of course they are!
There will be no ethnic cleansing of the Arabs by the Israeli government. Mind you, I believe that if a Palestinian state is Judenrein, Israel should reciprocate and invite the Israeli-Arab-Palestinians to join their brethren in their new-found utopia.
Rather than force anyone to leave, those countries that are pouring billions into Gaza and the west bank and thus supporting a corrupt government (or is is two corrupt governments?) should use that money to persuade the Arabs to move elsewhere. One poll indicated that about 1/3 would accept the offer. In England, France and Germany they would feel right at home.
Those in the Jerusalem ares have by a majority already expressed a desire to live under Israeli sovereignty so the problem is not that difficult to solve.
But the will is definitely not there.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe there will be a solution or even a hint of one until the Arabs believe that economic advancement should trump theocracy.
They have created a mythology of Palestine and have spread it like a virus because as others have said, they regard the Jews as Crusaders and foreigners even though Jews (Christians and others) have contributed to the countries or Empires of the middle east for over a thousand years, in science, art and economics (despite what Hilary Clinton says!)
Only simpletons believe that the Jews are going to get up and leave everything behind to the mercy of the Arabs. And they have already shown in Gaza the contempt they have for that. They may never accept the Jews as part of the middle east and I think in their actions will relegate themselves to a pathetic footnote in history.
The two items which I’ll remember from Totten’s excellent revue here of this Hebron crux is that disdainful, near sneering, faintly smirking expression on the face of that Nazi sympathizer-the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Revealing photograph. Those close-set, cooly appraising eyes concluding that everything in view just below his long nose is not quite worthy. He doesn’t really have time for us.
The other fine point is Totten’s description of the visceral hatred daggering out from the eyes of the young Arab men along the road driven. I’ve never experienced that, although I came close one time in 1955 in Nagasaki at some bar or other when a lobster-red faced Japanese [indicating too much saki] kept glaring at me from across the room. He apparently was on the recieving end of that epochal blast a decade earlier. Tough luck. But, I didn’t start our enmity. Don’t glare at me. You lost, we won. I finished my beer and left.
That isn’t an option for the native Israeli’s there in Hebron which houses the Tombs of the Patriarchs of Israel. How sacred can a particular location be?
The Mitchener musical, “South Pacific” has a quiet song, “You’ve got to be carefully taught…”, the scene’s subject was [is] inter-racial marriage. But the unfortunate, deep seated truth is that that hatred so zealously maintained now in the mind-set of the Arabs does, indeed, need to be carefully taught….Arab generation to Arab generation. It then feeds upon itself.
There’s literally no end to this. Apparently, the only solution is those ugly concrete barriers. “Outreach” and “talks” are a waste of time. An indication of weakness. Talk to Dennis Ross.
I’ll wait here for Totten’s appraisal from the Arab side. Why can’t the intermingling at Haifa be the norm? It has to be in a faction’s interest to maintain and teach this visceral hate. How can they rationalize this?
Gamal Nasser and the Soviet Union, haters of Jews, in Cairo in 1964 invented the “Palestine Libration Organization,” accompanied the phony history and propaganda of calling Arabs – non-Jews – “Palestinians.” “Palestine” has been synonymous with “land of the Jews” or “the Holy Land” (since Jesus was a Jew). and “Palestinian” with “Jew” since the Roman Emperor Hadrian in 165 A.D., after defeating the last Jewish rebellion under Bar Kochba, changed the name of Judea to Palestina, to eradicate fotrver all memory of Judea and the Jews. He outlawed Judaism, and changed the name of Jerusalem to Aelia Capitolina.
Great Britain was awarded the Palestine Mandate after World War I to be the “homeland of the Jews.”
Don’t continue the propaganda of calling Arabs “Palestinians.” As for Hebron, Jews have lived there almost 4,000 years, since the days of Abraham. It was the Arabs who massacred the Jews in Hebron in 1929. Jews have every right to live in Hebron, and the Arabs who fulminate against them are the ones in the wrong,
Charlie,
The gestapo had plans well advanced to build concentration camps and gas chambers in the Galilee area and were just waiting for Rommel to kick the British out of Egypt and Palestine with the willing help of the Mufti. It didn’t quite work out that way.
As far as Haifa is concerned, the Jews literally begged the Arabs not to flee (all documented) but most did anyway. Those that remained at least admit to themselves whose fault it was to flee Palestine and over the decades have had it a lot better than the Arabs of the surrounding countries.
The commenters here have done a fine job of bringing up lots of the arguments.
I have to agree specifically with The Monster. He made a very good argument. “Ethnic cleansing” is a euphemism for genocide. That was its original intent. A kinder, gentler genocide.
Separating areas by ethnicity or religion or culture is a very reasonable thing to, if they are truly antithetical to one another. “Kids, go to your rooms!”
The problem is, who does the separation? If a civilized society like Israel does it, I do not believe for a second there will be a mass-slaughter. If savage barbarians like Arabs do it, I do not believe for a second that there WON’T be a mass-slaughter. “Kill all the Jews!” is not just a chant. It is a motto.
Mr. Totten is right to reject “ethnic cleansing” as a war crime, because he is rejecting the euphemism. He is unfairly charging that The Monster’s advocacy for relocation is another similar euphemism. I think it unfair, because one must consider the source, before one labels it as advocating genocide. OTOH, he has seen too much of the evil, so he may just be erring on the side of caution. I think they are two guys on the same side having a misunderstanding.
I contributed my $5. The pictures are worth thousands of words, and a few bucks to help with the next trip… even if the pics make me so sad.
I’d like to point out to Totten and others that during both the first and the second intifadas, the PLO and Hamas murdered hundreds of Arabs who supported Israeli rule. Our darling mainstream media rarely, if ever, pointed this out.
The only way to get some semblance of information is to read the Israeli press or Israeli blogs. Unfortunately, much of the Israeli press suffers from the same self-hating mental illness that our anti-American press suffers from.
Thank goodness for the internet.
57. yesjb
Please provide some peer reviewed evidence for your allegations
–if you do not then you will be seen as just another hasbara propagandist.
The Baathist are followers of Stalin, Saddam had whole temples and libraries built in Stalin’s honor.
It is time we had a true accounting of Stalin’s legacy as Robert Conquest of the The Hoover Institution has well documented
http://www.hoover.org/fellows/9765
Eric: Gaza and Lebanon are far away? I just looked at a map to make sure, and yup, just as I had recalled, they’re right next door to Israel.
So the Israelis need to “cleanse” Lebanon of Arabs, as well? Jordan and Egypt are also next door. Your logic dictates that Israel must expel the entire population of the Middle East to Siberia.
Monster,
I didn’t call you a racist or mean to imply that you were. It was a throwaway remark about my comments policy in general.
But forced ethnic cleansing is without question a war crime. Read the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Armed Conflict. It makes no difference that it used to happen on a regular basis, even in Europe.
And it will not be advocated here. Not only does it offend me, it damages my reputation and I will not permit you to do that, so you will cease and desist one way or another.
DDN: My impression is that Mr. Totten sides with (sympathizes with) the arabs over the Jews.
First time here, I take it.
Viktor,
I made no allegations. Were you referring to my comments about the Nazi desire to incinerate the Jews or Mayor Levy and associations as well as Commander Stockwell (British commander of the Haifa region) to persuade the Arabs of Haifa to stay? Those were not allegations. Those are all well documented events.
You really are a simpleton!
And then you change the subject to some irrelevant mental meanderings.
“–if you do not then you will be seen as just another hasbara propagandist.”
Perhaps by you which I would consider a compliment.
65. yesjb
Charlie,
The gestapo had plans well advanced to build concentration camps and gas chambers in the Galilee area and were just waiting for Rommel to kick the British out of Egypt and Palestine with the willing help of the Mufti. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Please provide evidence of that claim– you have provide no evidence of your claim.
The future of the the ME cannot be built upon lies about the past
–in fact the lies will destroy it if they are are allowed to persist
Please provide peer review evidence of your allegations
” The gestapo had plans well advanced to build concentration camps and gas chambers in the Galilee area “
Terry raises the key issue that underlies any genuine negotiation: reciprocity. Israeli Arabs have to deal with discrimination it’s true but they have full political and civil rights. On the other hand, it’s a capital crime in the Palestinian Authority to sell land to a Jew. And it’s fashionable on the left to call Israel an apartheid state. At that point, we’re on the other side of the looking glass in Bizarro world.
There’s a double standard, where everyone tacitly accepts the fact that any Palestinian state will perforce involve some “ethnic cleansing” of Jews, and that Jews will have no right to become citizens of any such Palestinian state. Many of the same people that accept that double standard further entertain the fantasy that the Palestinian Right of Return is actually worth considering.
Hebron is indeed a microcosm of the Mideast. The ultimate question is whether Arabs and Muslims can tolerate Jews living in their midst.
I despair that Muslims will never accept the double insult of dhimmis claiming title to something regarded as wakf, in Muslim domain.
Jews are the uppity niggers of the Mideast.
I’m sorry, but many of these comments, and the article that sparked them, are a waste of space. there is one basic problem in the Middle East, and that is the flat-out hatred that the Muslim Arabs have for the Jews. they are brought up from children to hate the Jews. not just to dislike them or disagree with them or even fight against them. Palestinian children are taught that Jews are lower than animals, inhuman, and they not only may be killed, Allah COMMANDS that you kill them.
as long as the Pals teach and preach hate, and as long as they’re supported by their disgraceful enablers in the West (I’m talking to YOU, Barack Obama), nothing is going to change.
Michael, I honestly did not know that “ethnic cleansing” could also refer to moving people out of a country (and not killing them, that is). if that’s really the case, then a lot of Jews were “ethnically cleansed” after Partition. but nobody seems to care about the property they lost in the newly Judenrein Arab lands.
There are a few Jews and a lot of Arabs. If Jews are not allowed to live there because they were once driven out, then that validates the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Ethnic cleansing is wrong no matter who is the focus. We didn’t throw the Arabs out when we came back in 1967 even though they thought we would.”
-Eve Harrow
“They don’t want us here,” he said. “They say they don’t want us here, and they believe that someday we’ll leave, if not because they drive us out then because our own people will force us out. Mahmoud Abbas says that no Jews will be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. Arabs live in Israel, but he insists that no Jews can live in Palestine.”
-David Wilder
“Kill the Jews wherever you find them.”
-Mohammad Amin al-Husayni
“Allah willing,” she said to the interviewer, “you will bury (Israel), and massacre the Jews with your own hands. Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron. We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them.”
-The Palestinian Arab Muslim Voice of Ninety Years
“I think this,” I said, meaning the permanently closed streets that had been emptied at gun point, “is very disturbing.”
-MJT
Everything in it’s own context…
BOILING
DOWN,
R
Victor . . .
I know that you reflexively dislike Jews, for whatever reason. Maybe your family was persecuted and/or murdered by Bolsheviks.
Anyway, I suggest you read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jewish People. This is a long and difficult book, so I suggest you start with the Ghetto period and end with the Czarist period. Johnson’s view of the founding of Israel is not really complete.
The reason why I recommend this book is that you’ll get more insight into the complexities of the Jewish world. You’ll also learn something about Jewish life under the Czars. Remember, knowledge is power.
Maybe you won’t be so concerned about Jews after you read this book. People of Jewish origin are just as varied as people of Christian origin, with a different history, however.
Best wishes.
Victor – Once again. Do your own research before you run your fingers. Google “Einsatzgruppe Egypt”
STFU,
R
The picture of the infant boy is captioned: “A young victim of the 1929 masscre in Hebron”. In truth, he was the sole survivor of his family, his father being Eliezer Don Slonim. His son live in Ariel and is an Egged bus driver on my route, 148, Jerusalem to Shiloh.
I first visited Hebron a week after the Six Days War and my next visit was in September 1970 after my wife and I made Aliyah. We guested in the old Military Compound and walked from there through the shuq to the Cave and did that several times during those early years.
If there is any principle of inter-communal relations I’ve learned is that the more Israel attempts to be concerned with human rights, considerations of health & wellfare and reduce stringent security measures, the Arabs will never value that as a compromise and willingness to maintain any level of coexistence but rather will seek to take advantage to the detriment of the Jews – even when it harms their own physical standing.
“[Kahane] thought a second Holocaust was inevitable in the United States.”
It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds, so don’t just dismiss it out of hand. It is important to note, however, that the impending Holocaust in the United States is a cultural/religious holocaust, rather than a violent and bloody one. Simply put, Judaism as a religion, of any stream, is going to be gone from the US within a few generations. How so? Divide Judaism into Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy (Conservative, Reform, etc.). We see that non-Orthodox Judaism is dying a demographic death, with birth rates well under 2.1 which doesn’t count the fact that most children belonging to non-Orthodox families assimilate into Christian America at large, not attending synagogue/temple or celebrating Jewish holidays, and later on, intermarrying. The Orthodox side is different: birth rates are well above 2.1. But seeing this as evidence of a resurgence in Orthodox Jewish life in the US is incomplete; when you look at daily Orthodox Jewish life, you see that maintaining an Orthodox Jewish life in the US is a very hard proposition for all but wealthy families. Glatt Kosher meat is double the price of normal meat in the US. Day school tuitions can be $15,000 or more per child – for not even 4 children, that’s already $60,000 out of pocket. Orthodox Judaism has declined to the point where the only Orthodox Jewish communities in the US are the old “major” ones – New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. Virtually all the other communities have died out. Chabad tries to resuscitate Jewish communities in the far reaches of the world, to little success. And most Orthodox Jewish children, who are raised with a love for Zionism, grow up seeing that various aspects of Jewish life in Israel are much cheaper or free (see: kosher food and religious educations), end up making aliyah in larger and larger droves every year.
Example numbers, which were gathered and formulated well after Kahane’s death: http://www.aish.com/jw/s/48899452.html But all of this was predicted more than THIRTY YEARS AGO in his book, “Why Be Jewish?”, which you can buy on Amazon.
Mr. Totten, if you bothered to study Kahane at all, you would see that Kahane did not advocate killing Arabs. Proof: minute 56 of Kahane’s speech at Brandeis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF3HqY29VSE Baruch Goldstein and his ilk are the result of a vacuum within Kach after Kahane’s assassination. Believe it or not, people like Baruch Goldstein happen when they don’t have a proper leader to keep them on the straight and narrow. Kahane was active in Israel for decades, and the only terrorism tied to his name occurred after his death. How can you blame Kahane for such actions?! When Kahane was a member of the Knesset, people were inspired by him. He had only one seat. You mention that Kach was banned from the Knesset, but this is only half the story. The truth is that, before Kach was banned, his addresses before the Knesset were boycotted by the other members of the Knesset, often leaving Kahane to speak before an empty chamber. So you would think that people wouldn’t pay attention to him – not true! Polls leading up to the 1988 elections had Kach pegged for at least 3-4 seats and, at one point, 12 seats – which would have made Kach the 3rd largest party in Israel at the time. Unlike every single prime minister Israel has had in the last 20 years, Kahane spoke straight and showed real resolve to do the simple task of defending Israeli sovereignty and not negotiating with terrorists. Shall we compare?
Shamir: Did not retaliate against Iraq for launching Scuds at Israel during the Gulf War.
Rabin: Oslo Accords. Enough said.
Peres: Served for less than 1 year.
Netanyahu (term 1): Hebron Protocol, Wye River Memorandum, etc.
Barak: Camp David Accords
Sharon: see handling of the entire 2nd Intifada
Olmert: Annapolis Conference, also bribery and corruption
Netanyahu (term 2): Discriminating against Jews by allowing Palestinians to build as they like but not Jews in Judea and Samaria
So let’s ask some questions about why Kach was banned. Kach was banned pursuant to a law that said that racist parties were not to be allowed in the Knesset. Yet there are Arab parties that call daily for the obliteration of the State of Israel or at least its Jewish character. Is this not racist, saying that Jews should no longer have a state of their own? I think Kach was banned for another reason – I think Kach was banned because the people in the Knesset decided that they had to get rid of Kahane before Kahane turned their worlds upside down. Well, the joke is on them – Kahaneist political philosophy is taken up, albeit in portions, by different politicians across different political parties in Israel today – I am thinking of both Lieberman and Moshe Feiglin here. But now Yisrael Beiteynu and Likud are too large for a dying Israeli Left to do anything about anymore.
““They don’t want us here,” he said. “They say they don’t want us here, and they believe that someday we’ll leave, if not because they drive us out then because our own people will force us out. Mahmoud Abbas says that no Jews will be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. Arabs live in Israel, but he insists that no Jews can live in Palestine.””
That pretty much sums it up.
@60 Nora,
Kahane’s ideology may be criticized but had nothing to do with islamist views !
From wikipedia :” In order to keep Arabs, who he stated would never accept Israel as a Jewish state, from becoming a numerical majority in Israel, he proposed a plan allowing Arabs to voluntarily leave Israel and receive compensation for their property, and forcibly removing Arabs who refused.”
“It is time we had a true accounting of Stalin’s”
The lying Turk with his blood lust for the genocide of Jews *and* Christians goes completely off-topic in a desperate attempt to change the subject. Can we ban him *now*, Michael?
There are photos of the Mufti meeting with Hitler shortly before the Wannsee Conference where the Holocaust was officially authorized. Victor is channeling the old Lenny Bruce joke about a husband caught cheating: “Deny everything. Even if they have pictures, deny it!”
“I know that you reflexively dislike Jews, for whatever reason. Maybe your family was persecuted and/or murdered by Bolsheviks”
No, he’s just getting paid by his Turkish masters to fuck up Michael’s blog. I do not understand why Michael didn’t ban him long ago.
“Anyway, I suggest you read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jewish People. … you’ll get more insight”
Don’t waste your time with Victor. He’s a greedy ignorant bigoted lying asshole and is too stupid to ever change.
Not only was the writing very expressive of the frightening and desolate area called Hebron but the photographs emphasized it and the map was informative. All in all, a superb journalistic travel documentary. Residing in a yishuv east of the Green Line, I am familiar with stories about living in the city and why it’s exceedingly important. For a non-secular Jew who therefore values his ancient heritage, Michael, Hebron is the source of our being. We reserve the right to visit. Now the tombs are kept clean and in repair. When Jordan occupied it, this wasn’t the case. I think you, perhaps, do not comprehend what Hebron means to those men who wear the knitted kippahs. One of my friends who resided in Hebron for ten years used to tell me stories about how many Jews were shot and injured, that it used to be a war zone, He, himself, suffers from PTSD as do so many Israeli Jews, especially those in the Westbank who experienced the effects of the intifada to an extreme extent.
Talk to any Sephardic Jew, Michael, and they will tell you the same thing: Arabs only understand force. This is something which westerners are unable to comprehend because they view the world from within their own cultural prism. Which brings up the subject of ethnic cleansing. The penetrating hatred which you (and other Readers) witnessed from Arabs towards Jews occurred due to the continued reinforcement of their early education in their schools, families and mosques. Their hatred is well crystallized, impenetrable and nearly impossible to alter. They will never, ever, accept us as independent sovereigns even on this tiny piece of the Mideast. As a result, we (Israeli Jews) have become increasingly confirmed in our unwelcome perspective that we cannot live together and that either Arabs or Jews will be forced to leave the land. In that case, it will not be us. This is not a question of morality but of survival. Rabbi Kahane, whom you critique and, perhaps, demonize, clearly understood this thirty years ago. In that case, he was at least an astute political analyst and perhaps a prophet. I suspect that your liberal outlook, sense of justice and job description as an independent journalist/writer prevents you from accepting, or even entertaining, such a view. Many of your Readers who agree with me did not come easily to such conclusions easily. Looking forward to the next document, the view from the Arab perspective.
“So the Israelis need to “cleanse” Lebanon of Arabs, as well?”
Michael, you know that when (not if) the next Lebanon war occurs, Israel will have to drive out everyone south of the Litani, possibly everyone south of Beirut to stop the Hezbollah threat, so my answer to that one is “partially, yes.”
” Jordan and Egypt are also next door. Your logic dictates that Israel must expel the entire population of the Middle East to Siberia.”
Michael, one of these days, you know (even if you do not want to admit it publicly) and I know that the Islamonazis will make a real attempt to destroy Israel, and Israel will be forced to nuke these countries. They will have preferred Siberian exile, but they will be vaporized instead.
@78. Render
Victor – Once again. Do your own research before you run your fingers. Google “Einsatzgruppe Egypt”
Or…..
Read “Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina”
And for those who do not read German. This book was translated in English in 2009.
Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in PalestineKlaus-Michael Mallmann, Martin Cüppers.
…nightmare…
But it must be viewed as a nightmare. And portrayed as a nightmare. It must absolutely.
A never-ending nightmare.
A horrendous nightmare.
Until the Palestinians and their friends (i.e., their true friends) can figure out a way to erase the Zionist Entity.
And not before.
File under: Get with the program.
“There have a right to live here, as well,” she said. “I think they can gain a lot more from living in peace with us than they can by waging war against us. I hope that one day they understand that because we’re not going anywhere.”
This is the root of the problem. Jews need to wake up and realize Muslims (regardless of where they are from) hate them with murderous hatred because their religion teaches them to do so.
It’s only the Jews constantly talking about and actively working toward peace. When do we hear the Muslim side of this conflict doing so? Never. And they never will. Jew-hatred is enshrined in the Koran and was practiced by their so-called prophet Mohammad.
It’s time for Israel to stop talking about peace. It’s not possible to have peace with people who are hell bound on annihilating you. It’s time to start protecting your own citizens. It’s time for fighting back.
Michael, it is what someone is willing to pay that will determine the outcome of the historical tide that sweeps by us all. Right now and for decades past Western Europe, the UN, and the United States are paying to cleanse the Jews from their homes to indefensible lines. The support of the “refugee camps” for sixty years all over the Middle East is testimony to whom these elements would like to see the Middle East revert. The dogged quality of the Jews is the only thing that keeps the world at bay. Your evenhandedness is welcome in a world filled with these forces that see the Jew qua Jew as a stranger no matter where he is. Unfortunately, like the plates in the earth, things move slowly but inexorably. Even “evenhandedness” seems like a finger in the dike at times like these. Thank you.
To the mythical “everyone” who “knows” that peace requires that Jerusalem be divided, one must ask: Where and when in history has *any* city served as the capital of two states, hostile or friendly?
How about Berlin from 1945 to 1989? While it wasn’t technically the capital of West Germany during this period, it had been the capital until 1945 and became the official capital again after reunification.
I’m not trying to say that Berlin was a warm and wonderful place during those years; it wasn’t. There was a constant tension between the two portions of the city. But East and West Berlin managed to co-exist for that time without any major fighting erupting, although it certainly got very close a few times.
Now before anyone objects that Berlin only stayed at peace because the situation was clearly a temporary one, you should remember that until the Wall actually came down in November 1989, very few Germans in the east or the west expected that the Wall would EVER come down again. As far as the Germans were concerned, the division of Germany – and Berlin – into East and West was permanent for the foreseeable future. It is only with hindsight that we can say that the collapse of East Germany was inevitable.
You know, Viktor, these references are not difficult to find even for someone like you with his head perpetually up his ass. But then it’s always easier to cast aspersions on others than find the truth for yourself. You and integrity are like oil and water.
But for others who are interested:
The desire of the Nazis to exterminate the Jews extended into Mandatory Palestine. And Hitler had a willing accomplice and friend in Hajj Amin.
In a letter from the Arab Office in Berlin to the Mufti the nazi direction is made clear:
“Germany and Italy recognize the illegality of the Jewish Home in Palestine. They accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to resolve the problems of Jewish elements…and by the same methods that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”
(From “The Struggle for Palestine” by J.C. Hurwitz, 1950, 1976)
The Nazi desires are also indicated in Jeffrey Herf’s book , Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World but more indirectly.
However, the research by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers in “Nazi Palestine: The Pal to Exterminate the Jews of Palestine” is pretty definitive.
As far as events in Haifa are concerned, Ephraim Karsh’s, “Palestine Betrayed” is very illuminating and excellently referenced. While the situation was indeed complex, the Arabs were asked repeated to stay but to no avail. I suggest his chapter “Fleeing Haifa particularly pages 137-139.
But one quote will suffice although there are many all documented in the records of Israeli, Arab, British and American source.
“With tears in his eyes, the elderly Levy (Mayor of Haifa) pleaded with the Arabs, most of whom were his personal acquaintances, to reconsider, saying that they were committing ‘a cruel crime against their own people’. Yaacov Saloman, a prominent Haifa lawyer and the Hagana’s chief liason officer in the city, followed suit, assuring the Arab delegates that he ‘had the instuctions of the commander of the zone…that if they stayed on they would enjoy equality and peace, and that we, the Jews, were interested in their staying on and the maintenance of harmonious relations.’ Even the stoical Stockwell (British commander) was shaken. ‘You have made a foolish decision. Think it over as you’ll regret it afterwards. You must accept the conditions of the Jews. They are fair enough. Don’t permit life to be destroyed senselessly. After all, it was you who began the fighting and the Jews have won.’
There is of course much more, but one can only spend so much time fending off someone like Viktor
As I type this right now, there have been 89 Comments on the intractable Arab/Israeli controversy. Aren’t these a microcosm of sixty-some years of very bloody back-and-forth, including the verbiage of all of those formally convened Conferences? yielding….exactly….what?
This very in-bred, cross-bred, “carefully taught”,cross-generational hatred cultivated by Islamist interpretation of some formal “revealed” teachings (I’m carefully avoiding that “M” word here,trying to be specific….) is not to be settled by customarily civilized means, because the Islamists make no pretense at acknowledging those thousands of years of Civilization before they became theologiocal “arrivistes”.
While refusing to confine their literally bloody teachings to the geography of their origin, and leave the rest of us alone; refusing to content themselves with being confined inside their own self-created bigotry, they have foisted their self created problems upon the rest of us by physical conquest….this has not been earned by missionary persuasion, but by murder.
All of this is, of course, universally recognized. Nothing new here, folks, move along…..mind those land mines just ahead…….they’re wired.
All of which I repeat here to emphasize the need for the acceptance of those ugly concrete barriers between Jews and Arabs….there simply will be no “negotiated” end of Islamist madness…..talk and discussion are a waste of time….hence, it’s past time to set Idealism aside.
The Israeli’s will remain always major Contributors to the World, and the Islamists will remain destroyers of the very Civilization which enabled the exploitation of this accident of natural petroleum based environment, ensuring their survival thus far. Initially explored and developed by Western technology. This is the insanity of militant Islam.
There’s nothing new we can try that hasn’t already ended in futility, over and over again.
Mr. Totten said:
DDN: My impression is that Mr. Totten sides with (sympathizes with) the arabs over the Jews.
First time here, I take it.
– My apologies if my impression was wrong. This whole subject is very devisive. I side with the Jews (and relate to), however, I do not desire evil for the arabs. Peace is the answer and forgiveness is the path. Even so, I do not believe that the arabs are genuine or desirous with regards to peace and forgiveness. I wish it were not so. Ignoring reality (as many desire to do) in order to reach a forced solution will result in disaster in the end.
Michael, great article, I know you have to be careful about your reputation re. ethnic cleansing but, ironically, in threatening to ban those who discuss it you are actually endorsing the same concept as a solution to dispute.
Where and when in history has *any* city served as the capital of two states, hostile or friendly?
Nicosia, 2011.
I know you have to be careful about your reputation re. ethnic cleansing but, ironically, in threatening to ban those who discuss it you are actually endorsing the same concept as a solution to dispute.
I see what you’re trying to say here, but no. I’m not shooting at people in order to drive them out of their homes.
All decent and readable comment sections on the Internet are moderated. If you want to see what an unmoderated place looks like, take a look at the comments on YouTube. That’s what happens to untended gardens.
92. Henry Reardon I’m not trying to say that Berlin was a warm and wonderful place during those years; it wasn’t. There was a constant tension between the two portions of the city. But East and West Berlin managed to co-exist for that time without any major fighting erupting, although it certainly got very close a few times.”
…
Tension? There was a gigantic wall topped with glass and barbed wire, Armed guard towers with machine guns, a mine field, cameras and who knows what else. Go read up on what you had to do to get through Checkpoint Charlie. They did not ‘coexist’ by any stretch of the imagination. It was an ongoing low level war with East Germans as prisoners of the state and anyone trying to cross shot on sight.
And Nicosia is hardly a great example Michael. It is the capitol of Cyprus. Northern Cyprus is not a country at all and so cannot have a capitol. It is an ethically cleansed Turkish occupied portion of Cyprus, nothing more.
Berlin? Nicosia? Are these the visions people are putting out for a ‘solution’ to Jerusalem?
Here’s an interesting link to Michael Yon’s website, where I’ve just come across his posting of a de-classified paper on our current subject:
……”Dispatches Top Secret Report: Jews in Palestine
Top Secret Report: Jews in Palestine”
My Copy and Paste techniques are a wee bit challenged,so if this doesn’t work as a link, manually type in this as a subject.
Berlin? Nicosia? Are these the visions people are putting out for a ‘solution’ to Jerusalem?
You forgot to mention the European politicians who in their wisdom may well have (according to some) needlessly exacerbated tensions in the Balkans, in the early 1990s, and who were—somehow(?)—unable to prevent the Balkan atrocities once things got out of hand.
File under: But we have the best intentions!(?)
Great article. Here is the original timeline from 1947.
http://wwwtwosetsofbooks.blogspot.com/2011/05/1947-vaad-leumi-to-un-timeline-of.html
Spindok, I didn’t say I want Jerusalem to look like Nicosia. You did read to the end of my article, right?
Charlie,
The contents of the report has been known for some time. Perhaps it was the Appendix that was declassified more recently.
In any case it did recommend the immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews into Palestine. The Arabs quickly rejected it. They didn’t want even one more Jew to enter.
It was also rejected by the British government who had hoped for a different report. It was one of the main factors leading the Brits to throw the problem at the UN and hence the formation of the UNSCOP (UNITED NATIONS special committee ON PALESTINE). Its report was also a bitter disappointment to Bevin and the British government.
For you Charlie…
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/top-secret-report-jews-in-palestine.htm
The report in question is from 1946, it was written by the joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and was commissioned by both the British Joint Intelligence Committee and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US portions were authored by the OSS (forerunner of the CIA), I have no clue who the UK contributing agency was, (possibly MI6 and/or GCHQ).
That report dramatically overstates the then current capabilities and equipment of the Haganah (manpower they had, equipment they did not) and seems to go out of its way to ignore the concentration and death camp survivors then seeking entrance into the Palestinian Mandate (very few of whom would have been “fit young military age men” for painfully obvious reasons). Otherwise it is fundamentally accurate in its appraisal and many of its forecasts.
The OSS would be disbanded the next year (1947) by Harry Trueman.
===
Rabbi Kahane was correct about a great many things, he was incorrect about almost as many things. Such is the lot of all great men in their time.
We do what we can, with what we have, when we must. We do not always get to choose where we make our…
LAST
STAND,
R
Coffee on me when you get here, if you have time!
Andy – Thank you (sorta), I’ve been waiting for a translated version for since 2006. Do you have a link for where the English version can be found?
THE
REAL,
R
Hi Render (107)
I saw it advertized on Amazon.com. It says that it’s in stock.
Commenters at the end of Michael Yon’s “as is” presentation of this report wondered why it was even posted….well, to those of us of a certain age, it confirms the futility, as I posted above, and I paste here again as an “afterword”, of us Americans bearing the main cost in youth and cash to “correct” this absolute cauldron of sulphur having it’s origins in European Colonialism…
…”Retiree — Charlie Griffith 2011-06-02 14:47
Added to this American Geezer’s 20/20 hindsight, it indicates the absolute futility of any proposed American “outreach”, “negotiations”, “talks”, etc., and confirms the Colonial origins of the present day impasse in the Middle East/Central Asian theatre.
With the basis of this long continuing standoff firmly rooted in Colonialism, it galls me that we Americans are expected to provide the bulk of the material means and youth to support anything other than open pipelines for oil.
The near total containment/isolation of Islam is the only rational approach now in 2011.”
end.
Please…could someone explain to me how you can be a “settler” in a land that is yours, legally, historically, and ethically? Am I then a “settler” in Mira Mesa, a bedroom community of San Diego. Can I be evicted at the whim of Indians or others who possibly camped here? The Poway Indians and others were all through this area.
Ruth
Michael – I like the moderation on your blog, as it makes it a more civil and agreeable place to exchange views and opinions. I think you do a good job reining people in when their comments get too extreme. But I hope you reconsider your use of the phrase “ethnic cleansing”.
Ethnic cleansing is a term of moral equivalence, and so imprecise that it can be used to mislead. It can mean Hitler’s massive genocide against the Jews in his own country and every country he conquered, Pol Pot’s genocide against his own people not for ethnic or religious reasons, but to eliminate all possible political opposition, the massacres of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebenica by the Serbs to remove them from a city they wanted to claim for their new state, or the peaceful deportation of a group of people from a land to a land where their countrymen already reside.
The Arab deportation of Jews from their lands after the creation of Israel, or any future deportation of Arabs from Jewish lands are not in the same category as massacres and genocides. You are too good a wordsmith to apply that phrase equally. I could use the word punishment to describe what happens to a woman accused of adultery in an American court as well as what happens to a woman in an Iranian court. In America she might be somewhat disadvantaged in divorce proceedings, in Iran she might well be sentenced to death by stoning. Both are “punishments”, but the word is too imprecise.
You may still want to nix any discussion of population transfers or deportations, as that policy might be too emotionally loaded, and the discussion might veer off into more offensive comments. But, I do not think it rises to the level of “war crimes”, regardless of what the UN or other international (busy)bodies might say. Still, your blog, your rules.
But, I’ll say this – the best way to achieve mideast peace is for Israel to keep taking land (and emptying it of it’s inhabitants), because that is the one thing that will cause their adversaries to sue for peace. They can always offer to return the land after a period of peace, but unless they show a willingness to conquer land, the other side will NEVER make peace. I’d bet that the Arabs will sue for peace before the Israelis reach Mecca, and if not, on to the oilfields. Who thinks the Arabs won’t come to terms under such a scenario?
Ruth – If one is Jewish one can be evicted from wherever one stands, at any time, on a whim, at least according to a large proportion of the rest of “humanity”.
The sole exception should be Israel, where heavily armed Jews have made a stand and refused to be pushed any further into oblivion.
===
Charlie – The US financial investment in Israel between 1968 and 1989 was returned many times over during the Cold War. The only US blood expended has been almost entirely volunteers, innocent, and sometimes not so innocent civilian victims. You are missing a huge swath of Israelis from your calculations, all of those who did not come from the “colonial powers” of Europe and the US but were instead forced to Israel from Muslim nations. They, like the Russian Jewish immigrants to Israel (all the way back to the 1880′s), are not and cannot ever be considered colonizers, for they were already refugee’s when they arrived.
If you were a European Jewish survivor in 1946, would you have stayed in Europe? If not, where would you have gone?
SOMEPLACE
TO FIGHT
FROM,
R
Dave: The Arab deportation of Jews from their lands after the creation of Israel, or any future deportation of Arabs from Jewish lands are not in the same category as massacres and genocides.
True, if they’d agree to be transferred, but you know they never will. They would go fighting and screaming. It absolutely would look like Bosnia, and Israel would truly become a pariah, hated by just about all, including me and all my pro-Israel friends.
But it’s never going to happen because it’s just a dark fantasy. One reason I support Israel is because Israel would never do this. Jewish morality absolutely forbids it. So it’s pointless–and offensive–to even have this discussion. Stop.
MJT: “All decent and readable comment sections on the Internet are moderated. If you want to see what an unmoderated place looks like, take a look at the comments on YouTube. That’s what happens to untended gardens.”
I totally agree with you. I’m not criticising your “ethnic cleansing” of your blog, I agree with it. By the same token you should be able to empathise with Israelis who wish to ban the trolls from their “garden”.
Michael: Doesn’t Jewish morality absolutely forbid helping other people commit a massacre like that at Sabra and Shatila? Doesn’t Jewish morality absolutely forbid shooting civilians like in Kafr Qasim? Doesn’t Jewish morality absolutely forbid expelling civilians en masse like in Lod and Ramla?
I care deeply about Israel, and Israel has done a lot to atone for these acts, both with public discussions on their culpability and practical measures like increasing their sensitivity training and training on the laws of war, but the fact is that they did them. They did help Phalangists massacre Palestinians and they did shoot unarmed Arabs returning home from their fields. They did force thousands to leave their homes and walk miles to be put under foreign control. All those things happened. And while Israeli Jews have done much to make up for them, and while these crimes pale in comparison to other crimes committed around the world, they’re still horrifying acts that the IDF really did participate in.
Anyone who thinks that Jews are some sort of superhuman beings capable of abstaining forever from acts perpetrated by every other group on the planet is not living on this Earth. In general, the Israelis have acted with much higher moral standards than most other armies, but to suggest that they would never expel Arabs from Israel is not realistic. Jews are human beings like everyone else: sometimes human beings lose it, and sometimes their collective temporary insanity has catastrophic results for other people. I don’t think the IDF would ever, in cold blood, systematically design a method of kicking out every Arab from Israel. I agree with you that that’s so unlikely that it’s able to be dismissed. But if Israel were losing a war, or the Arabs within Israel and the territories both started launching large numbers of attacks on Jews, I think that a sufficiently enraged Israeli Jewish populace might turn on them.
I don’t want Israel to expel the Arabs. That would be a war crime, a permanent stain on the Jewish people, and a great loss to Israel. But I don’t discard it as impossible. To do so is to pretend that Jews are not human beings. Improbable, yes. Impossible? No dark fantasy is impossible for humans.
You don’t have to have a discussion about this on your blog. That’s fine. I just wanted to make a point.
Bryan: I don’t want Israel to expel the Arabs. That would be a war crime, a permanent stain on the Jewish people, and a great loss to Israel. But I don’t discard it as impossible…No dark fantasy is impossible for humans.
Yes, fine, anything is possible. Some lunatics here think it’s a peachy idea, after all. But like you said, it is extraordinarily unlikely.
“Allah willing,” she said to the interviewer, “you will bury (Israel), and massacre the Jews with your own hands. Allah willing, you will massacre them like we massacred them in Hebron. We, the people of Hebron, massacred the Jews. My father massacred them.”
Whoa, Michael. Looks like someone just advocated ethnic cleansing on your blog! But don’t worry, she’s an Arab, and she advocates killing Jews, so your reputation is safe. I assume that by “reputation” you mean “ability to travel without being killed by Arab Muslims”. Your ability to travel without being killed by Israeli Jews is pretty much a given.
#112 Render…
…”Charlie – The US financial investment in Israel between 1968 and 1989 was returned many times over during the Cold War. The only US blood expended has been almost entirely volunteers, innocent, and sometimes not so innocent civilian victims….”
““““““`
I see now that my statement was too sweeping and open to too wide a swing of our compass; the U.S. investments in Israel were farthest from my mind….they never entered my mind. [I just sent my check for US$50 to AIPAC...really.]
What sets me off is our whole sticky Central Asian/Middle East involvement, now expected by NATO to be ‘morphing into the North African theatre. NATO is seeking ever more American involvement now that they’re experiencing what it’s like without majority American participation. NATO….under the American umbrella for how many years? That whole Central/West Asian area comprised of artificially created countries whose borders were hand drawn in the Colonial Offices of France, Britain, and Italy. The former Spanish, Portuguese and German Colonies in Africa don’t seem to be at issue…yet.
As I see it, our initial ground combat involvement in Iraq and Kuwait was in America’s interest and originally prompted/justified by the Islamists’ attacks against New York City, and the Pentagon Building in Virginia….close to home for me ….not to mention the intended (?) Capitol Building in the District – the assumed destination of the highjacked aircraft which the passengers forced to crash in that farm field in Pennsylvania, intertwined with Saddam’s intentions. Complicated?…yes, indeed. Much more omitted here.
But, we Americans had nothing to do with the creation of those countries with sometimes straight line borders slicing right through religious, and ethnic divisions long established by tradition. Now, we find our selves tied down, Gulliver-like, by unforseen complications in those same countries…..while the former Colonial powers, Britian’s major troop contributions the notable exception, stand by and lecture us at every turn while pointing a finger at our chest.
My anti-Colonial-attitude resentment is further compounded by America being the major financial supporter of the United Nations, which unfailingly stymies any American initiatives, our being the major contributor to the World Bank and the IMF, whose other members are so disdainful of so much which is American….while at the same time unhesitatingly accepting our bales of cash. Our veto power at the UN is our only lever….a dimimishing lever. The General Assembly seemingly votes down anything of American origin as a matter of course.
Who wants to be lectured by the recipients of their aid? Karzai pops up like a jack-in-the-box Need I mention Pakistan?…this is why I repeatedly advocate isolation and containment of Islam. Screw their hypocrisy.
In short, I wish I were as bluntly articulate as John Bolton. We need more John Bolton’s, and we need to be less concerned with “outreach” and “understanding”.
End.
NotSoFast: Whoa, Michael. Looks like someone just advocated ethnic cleansing on your blog!
Yeah, and she’s basically a Nazi. That was the whole point of my quoting her.
I assume that by “reputation” you mean “ability to travel without being killed by Arab Muslims”.
That’s not even in the same time zone as what I’m talking about.
Michael Totten wrote, “True, if they’d agree to be transferred, but you know they never will. They would go fighting and screaming. It absolutely would look like Bosnia, and Israel would truly become a pariah, hated by just about all, including me and all my pro-Israel friends. But it’s never going to happen because it’s just a dark fantasy.”
Michael, I believe that you misunderstand the process of population change. It is more than likely that the most reasonable Palestinian Arabs will leave “Palestine” because that is exactly what they are doing when they allowed to do so. Immigration is a fear that Palestinian leaders fight against desperately. Freedom allows movement and reasonable people leave conflict when they define its process as destructive to themselves. The more bellicose the Palestinians are over a given time period, the greater the immigration. Only true peace with all its benefits will get the Palestinian college graduates positions commensurate with their education. The brain drain among the Palestinians is palpable. Just follow the money!
Frankly, the West has directly caused the conflict between Israel and its neighbors by paying the “refugees” to stay. Stop paying and Muslim immigration will leave Israel victorious and alone on the field. Indeed, that is why huge sums of money are pumped into Palestine by Western “entities”- to prevent Palestinian collapse. That is the strength of parlor Antisemitism – the same impulse that allowed the genteel British to close the doors of Palestine to the fleeing masses of Jews during Hitler’s rampage.
@ Henry Reardon #92.
You shouldn’t compare the Berlin Wall with Jerusalem.
Walter Ulbricht built the Berlin Wall to prevent his citizens from leaving the GDR for a better life in the West and out of necessity. The economy of the GDR would have disintegrated within several years without the Iron Curtain. There wasn’t real hatred, like the one MJT described in Hebron. It was all about politics. The western borders of East Germany were heavily guarded, and yet the border was relatively peaceful. That won’t be the case with Jerusalem.
To partition a living city, is a brutal thing to do. In this case it will not bring peace. There’d be lots of Arabs trying to make it across the border. Some of them looking for a better life, but some would be looking for victims.
Don’t divide Jerusalem.
120. “Frankly, the West has directly caused the conflict between Israel and its neighbors by paying the “refugees” to stay”
The refugee issue and so called right of return is what really betrays Palestinian intentions.
If they were truly interested in a two state solution they would want those refugees into the Palestinian state. Economically it would be a boom. They could demand and would easily recieve all kinds of money to resettle them, build housing and integrate them into the economy.
Just as Israel did when they recieved the Sephardic and later the Russian immigrants which resulted in tremendous boost to the economy over time, they need those refugees.
Why do they want them to go to Israel? Because they are more interested in destroying Israel than they are in their own well being.
There is only one enduring pattern of behavior in the entire history of this conflict. The Palestinians consistently act against their own self interest driven by their pathologic hatred of the Jews.
Not Israel, they dont hate Israel, most of them would love to live there and they have no problem with Israeli arabs. The hatred started long before there was an Israel anyway.
Michael, you never answered Terry’s question (comment #8).
He asked how you can justify (he say ‘reconcile) your support for a two-state solution when Israel allows Arab citizens full rights yet the proposed state of ‘Palestine’, like just about every other Arab state, will prohibits Jew from living in, obtaining citizenship of, and probably even entering that state (as is the case now under PA rule)?
Your response that ‘Jews shouldn’t be driven from Palestine’ doesn’t mean anything. It is clear that a ‘Palestinian’ state will not allow Jews to live there.
Do you support a ‘two-state solution’ where Israel gives Arabs full rights and ‘Palestine’ expels all Jews?
Dear Michael,
I have visited Hebron twice, 1st in 2001 and more recently, in 2008 as the organizer of an interfaith delegation from Philadelphia that included Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy and lay leaders and partnered with Leah Green and her Compassionate Listening Project. We sat down with David Wilder, who I had previously interviewed after meeting a Hamas leader hours earlier in Bethlehem. I was born in South Jersey, but as it happened David went to a religious school in North Jersey where one of his teachers was the Mother of my Rabbi, Sandy Roth, Z’L, who accompanied us on our journey.
I believe you are largely correct that the level of anger and hatred simmering in Hebron on all sides is toxic. I don’t believe the same can be said for Jerusalem except where there is a direct conflict over property in East Jersalem.
Dr. Martin Luther King said: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
It seems to me that Palestinians and Israelis alike need to begin a conversation that may never make them into friends but will replace enough hostility with understanding to enable them to become respectful neighbors,
G-d willing.
Totten,
First of all thank you for your work here. It is excellent. I would like more reaction to one thing though. I was very disappointed in your responses to Monster. My take is that on a big 5 personality test, he would have a few clicks up on openness (abstraction) compared to you (neither good nor bad, just different disposition which may be causing you two to miss each other).
1967 is not so long after WW2. Your complete dismissal of his rational point is baseless and unjustified. Our history is important. Even the collectivist nature of ancient Germanic cultures (and the concepts of weltanschauung and disgust for zivilcourage) held great consequence as Germany was devolving into national socialism, a thousand years later. The policies and cultural implements of the past mean a lot today. And forced relocation throughout history, by socialists amongst others matters.
We simply cannot arbitrarily consider relocation in some cases and not others, if we believe in sovereignty. We need repeatable standards which apply to all men, and does not treat certain men with special statuses.
The sovereignty of one nation is even less sacred than the sovereignty of a man’s home. Think of your home as the “most consequential” instance of sovereignty.
I think that those Israelis living in Hebron are heroes, standing for sovereignty and freedom.
Much of the experience you describe I have been exposed to within the US, as someone who has lived in and moved about two ghettos, being subject to black-on-white racism, sometimes resulting in threats of gang beatings for having white skin, other times being shot at.
The feeling you described regarding body language was exactly the feeling I have experienced here in the US while moving amongst such racist black populations. In fact, while my Asian ex-girlfriend never had her personal security directly threatened from such racism like myself and family members, she was exposed to the communities for less than 2 months and commented on the hostile body language you describe.
I am not nearly so heroic as to ideologically remain in such neighborhoods for sentimental reasons. I chose to apply myself elsewhere, where better opportunity to exploit my gifts existed.
Think of black populations in the south during reconstruction. Every bit as heroic as the Israelis living in Hebron. Of course, many had the option to move north, to friendlier territory, but many stayed for principle.
Why? Sovereignty is important. A man’s home is the pinnacle of sovereignty. If you would look into history and acknowledge forced relocation to be a dirigiste and unacceptable action, why do you even consider this as feasible in this conflict?
Like a freed slave during reconstruction who would not go north out of principle, these people are heroic to me, and I respect them.
But I also acknowledge the mentality which impels them to do so. Both Arab and Jewish populations are considering heritage, ideals, and other intangible factors to assert their own personal, tiny block of sovereignty. Compare this to a man like myself who says “the inner city of my family’s origin is home…but…I can do better things elsewhere and take my culture with me”
To me it is tragic that government intervention is continuously messing up the conflict and continually making it worse. When you consider such intangible motivations to sustain discomfort for principle – a government can only make it worse with active measures and direct action.
Instead of imposing forced relocation, rule of law should be upheld where security is at stake, the people involved should be encouraged to help each other, integrate, and rely less on a government arbitrator, and more on their hearts and outreach.
Conflicts based on such intangibles are never solved by state action – they are solved by cultural healing that can only be done by 1000 miniature acts of reconciliation and kindness amongst neighbors.
Unfortunately it seems that both parties in this case do not comprehend the concepts of reconciliation, mercy, and instead insist on their pound of flesh, their “rights”, their entitlements, and appeal to authority in order to maintain such “justice”.
I fully contend that until reconciliation and mercy is understood and practiced equally by Israelis and Palestinians, they will continue their hamster wheel endeavors with the Jacobinist and dirigiste instruments that only perpetuate and exacerbate the conflict.
If you want lessons for resolution, consider the hard work of reconstruction in the south amongst other debacles. Even in more recent times, consider LBJ’s Great Society. If you wish to make things worse, go ahead, place constraints on personal actions and independent culture while you incentivize codependency on a cold and distanced bureaucracy.
In my opinion, the actions of the state should be narrow and powerful: enforce laws, protect life. Clearly, they are not even succeeding at that in Hebron with the conditions you describe.
Abstracting now, the Hamas-sympathizers’ answer is to tell the freed slaves to exit the south and allow the KKK to reign, prosper, and grow? This is not a solution, this is capitulation of the worst kind. It dishonors sovereignty, it dishonors freedom, it dishonors integration, and it dishonors the heroism displayed by the Israelis brave enough to live in Hebron.
Forced (or coerced) relocation was not right during reconstruction. It was not right under Stalin. It was not right under Mao Zedong. It was not right under Napoleon. It is not right now. And worse than being not right, its actual long term consequences are known, negative, and destructive.
Please explain how forced relocation today, is any more acceptable (using the values codified in the US Constitution) than it was when socialists, or Andrew Jackson, or Germans were the perpetrators. If you cannot do this with juxtaposition of details to the current proposal for Israel and Palestine, then I will consider the newfound righteousness of forced relocation to be arbitrary, indefensible, and illegitimate.
Thank you,
Rigynold
Michael,
As to your reputation, perhaps I misunderstood. Feel free to clarify or not, as suits your purposes.
As to your scruples, this; in 1941, the Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. In response to this and other Japanese activities, the US Air Force destroyed all the major cities of Japan. This project included the first use of atomic bombs against human beings. In the judgement of America’s leaders, this was the only method available for convincing their leaders to cease to make war against us. Whether that judgement was accurate, particularly as regards atomic weapons, is still a subject of debate (I recommend Richard Frank’s extremely good book, Downfall).
Unlike the inhabitants of Gaza, the Japanese people had not elected their government. Nonetheless, they were massacred by the tens of thousands to force that governemnt to change its policies. While some may challenge the morality of that method, I do not. The Japanese people were the engine driving the Imperial War machine, and they were the sole hostage that might move Japan’s war lords. Wars are not ended by negotiation but by force.
Since the day of its creation, the State of Israel has been subjected to war. This war continues because, although the Arabs are very fond of war, they are not very good at it, while the Israelis, who are very good at it, are not fond of it, and are unwilling to employ the sorts of measures that would bring it to an end. What this means is that the Arabs are free to attack the Israelis when they find it convenient, and to sell them natural gas when they find that convenient.
The Israelis have repeatedly bested the Arabs in combat, conquering large territories, only to return the conquered territory in trade for “peace”. But the peace of the Arabs is nothing but the preparation for war. The so-called Palestinians are an enslaved population, maintained on Israel’s borders to justify that constant war, and to provide soldiers to fight it. They are sustained by the idiocy, and likely the malice, of the United Nations. As other commenters have made clear above, much larger populations were displaced and absorbed in the awful wars of the last century. The “Palestinians” are where they are because it suits the leaders of the Arab states (and now the Iranians) to have them there. And it will continue to suit them until such time as one side or the other terminates the arrangement by force.
So, to be clear – there is a war on. Civilians get killed in wars. Civilians have been killed in wars while I was typing this. BFD. That’s what war is like. And the Arabs, over and over and over, have chosen war. On their heads be it.
“But forced ethnic cleansing is without question a war crime.”
Not always, Michael. In the defeat and collapse of the three empires of WWI new nation-states were formed on the basis of separation-of-populations. Doing so was not a war crime by any measure. Conflict then ended in those areas. The areas not subject to the separation-of-population process remained flashpoints for later conflicts: the Saarland, Danzig, Iraq, and Palestine.
Stalin completed the European process after WWII, when the German population was kicked out of Eastern Europe. The harshness of that move, unaccompanied by economic or food aid, threatened these Germans with mass starvation and permanent refugee status and arguably was a war crime.
Rigynold: Please explain how forced relocation today, is any more acceptable (using the values codified in the US Constitution) than it was when socialists, or Andrew Jackson, or Germans were the perpetrators.
Are you talking to me? I thought I made it clear as could be that I am against forced relocation.
Happy and Proud: Your response that ‘Jews shouldn’t be driven from Palestine’ doesn’t mean anything. It is clear that a ‘Palestinian’ state will not allow Jews to live there.
That’s not my fault, and I am not in charge of this conflict.
Maybe Israelis should insist on the right of Jews to live as citizens of Palestine. Because if they don’t, it is clearly not going to happen.
FYI:
The view of international law on population transfer underwent considerable evolution during the 20th century. Prior to World War II, a number of major population transfers were the result of bilateral treaties and had the support of international bodies such as the League of Nations. Even the expulsion of Germans from central and eastern Europe after World War II was apparently sanctioned in article 13 of the Potsdam communiqué, although research has shown that both the British and the American delegations at Potsdam strongly objected to the size of the population transfer that had already taken place and was accelerating in the summer of 1945. The principal drafter of this provision, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, explained that this article was not intended to approve the expulsions but to find a way to transfer the competence to the Control Council in Berlin so as to regulate the flow.[2] The tide started to turn when the Charter of the Nuremberg Trials of German Nazi leaders declared forced deportation of civilian populations to be both a war crime and a crime against humanity,[3] and this opinion was progressively adopted and extended through the remainder of the century.
Michael, I’m not trying to be obnoxious by asking the question; I truly am interested in what you think b/c you are an intelligent and thinking person. I realize of course that you’re not in charge of the conflict (actually, there probably would be no conflict if you were “in charge” of things).
But we all live in the real world, not the world that “should” be; so I am trying to understand the thoughts of an intelligent and thinking person (you) who is trying to see things in a fair, yet realistic, manner. I’m not trying to trap you or trick you, or blame you for anything, or make you look foolish.
At present, a ‘two-state solution’ means an Israel which provides full rights for Arab citizens and a ‘Palestine’ which prohibits Jews from becoming citizens and living there. There is no reason to believe that the Hamas-Fatah coalition will change their minds on this at any time in the forseeable future- they’ve said over and over again that they won’t. Given that, do you approve of a ‘two-state solution’ as currently envisioned (ie. Arabs with full civil liberties in Israel and a Jew-free ‘Palestine’.?
Happy and Proud: At present, a ‘two-state solution’ means an Israel which provides full rights for Arab citizens and a ‘Palestine’ which prohibits Jews from becoming citizens and living there. There is no reason to believe that the Hamas-Fatah coalition will change their minds on this at any time in the forseeable future
Hamas and Fatah don’t even support Jewish sovereignty over Tel Aviv, but that doesn’t prevent me from doing so.
On point of principle I think Jews should be able to live as citizens in a sovereign Palestinian state for precisely the same reason Arabs live in a sovereign Israeli state, and I think the Israeli government ought to say so. In the real world, however, it will likely never happen, and someone would probably kill them even if the Palestinian government seriously tried to protect them, so what I think it irrelevent.
Sorry – part of the comment was left out. I’m not trying to put you on the spot by asking the question, even though it’s rather blunt. The most common thing people tell me when discussing the Arab/Israel conflict is that they don’t know know enough to have an informed opinion on many issues. Because you have a lot more knowledge about this area than the average person, I’m interested in your thinking on this. And I’m not trying to force you to answer – I fully realize that you may not have thought about it before or just aren’t sure. I’m just interested to know the opinion (if any) of someone who knows a lot more about the conflict than most people yet isn’t emotionally invested in it (as you seem to be doing your best to be as neutral as possible).
Thanks!
Michael, you state “Maybe Israelis should insist on the right of Jews to live as citizens of Palestine. Because if they don’t, it is clearly not going to happen.”
I think you’d agree that it goes without saying: Jews should have every right to live with equal rights in the ‘palestinian’ state, so instead of limiting this opinion to the comments, why don’t you strongly advocate for such?
To NOT support this is to support the ethnically clean fixated nazi movement of Husseini. How is this remotely rational??
Why don’t you be the rare voice that says: “I’m 100% opposed to the palestinian state because it’s clear that Jews will not have civil rights in this state.”
Incidentally, the legal foundation for Israel go back to the 1920s. Jews do have every right to live in all of palestine, which was given to the Jews in exchange for financial support to the allies in WWI.
You guys have got to be kidding. What Jew would want to live (for whatever brief period that might be possible) in a Palestinian State? What non-Jew would want to live in a Palestinian State? Would you? Be sure to bring garbage bags for the wife and kiddies.
The issue confronting us is not one of zoning regulations. The issue is that Israel is a viable, modern, democratic country, while the various Arabic satrapies surrounding it are police state hellholes on the brink of economic disaster, using their populations insane hatred of the Jews to distract them from the abject failure of their political, social and economic arrangements.
Look, you can’t make peace with people who want war. You have to make them want peace first. And the way you do that is with war. When has Israel ever had peace with her neighbors? In the immediate aftermath of killing large numbers of them, that’s when. The idea that this problem has a peaceful solution is one of those delusions that people allow themselves to swallow because it enables them to think well of themselves. And, of course, because they don’t expect to be present when the nukes fall on Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem.
#86, you’re bang on about Sephardic Jews. That’s because they know the arab mind. Westerners try to psycho-analyze the situation. Middle eastern Jews see the muslims for what they are and react accordingly. If arabs say they want to kill you – that’s what they want to do! What’s so difficult to understand about those words?
Notsofast,
If this ‘palestinian’ state is governed by qusling leadership, disciples of hajj amin al husseini (and we know that this is the case) then indeed no one should support this state even one iota.
There is no ‘moderate’ or ‘middle’ position here. Rational and objective thinkers are 100% opposed to this.
It’s time that we re-visit the founding documents (Mandate, San Remo Accords) and that palestinian Arabs stop being indoctrinated into naziism.
Why does the US government, via copious funding, and extreme silence and complicity, support the indoctrination of palestinian Arab children into genocidal Jewhate? THIS is what is preventing peace.
@Michael Totten,
But it’s never going to happen because it’s just a dark fantasy. One reason I support Israel is because Israel would never do this. Jewish morality absolutely forbids it. So it’s pointless–and offensive–to even have this discussion. Stop.
Voluntary Arab transfer to palestinian kingdom of Jordan is the key.
All of us know it and all the wasted EU and USA money might be useful for that purpose !
Trumpeldor: Voluntary Arab transfer to palestinian kingdom of Jordan is the key.
That’s no more a plausible solution than than voluntary Jewish transfer to Brooklyn.
Michael:
Please, look at the religions. The Jews were never called to dominate anyone other than to remove the nonbelievers from their patch of land — an Israel with defined borders.
In the same manner, Christians reading their directive were to seek out the “lost sheep of Israel” — no more. In that they oft chose death or forced conversions was their sin of the past.
However, Islam is not such:
Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward,-”
Quran (9:20) – “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.”
There’s no such call for the “People of the Book” to do as Muslim must. Don’t criticize Jews for following their Creator, or laud the “bad” Muslims who are not following theirs.
Islam is a world domination religion. The words of Mohammed Akram, U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader pertaining to “settlement”:
The general strategic goal of the Brotherhood in America which was approved by the Shura [Leadership] Council and the Organizational Conference for 1987 is “enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base; aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts; presents Islam as a civilization alternative; and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is.” … The priority that is approved by the Shura Council for the work of the Brotherhood in its current and former session is “Settlement.”
In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the life of its society, [with] firmly established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carrying out this grand mission as a “Civilization-Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and—on top of them—the Muslim Brotherhood in this country….”
With all the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in the world, Israel should not be forced to protect a handful of “bad” Muslims while they are being attacked by the likes of the PLO, the Brotherhood and Hamas, let alone the murder of “infidels” seeking only the sanctuary of their tiny borders.
Trumpeldor: Voluntary Arab transfer to palestinian kingdom of Jordan is the key.
And with money,it is quite plausible !
Suffice to think about the billions of dollars wasted by eu and USA ,which go to the same bank accounts.
As an old woman, old enough to have seen hatred expressed by white only water fountains; white only side of the ferry between Norfolk & Portsmouth, never mind white only toilets…what do you think impressed me so very deeply as an American tourist in the early ’80s to the Middle East holy sites in Jordan, Eygpt,Israel, ect..?? The deep & abiding hatred of the Arab for the Jew…Hatred such as I had never seen equaled or have ever forgotten…
I love the Jewish people and will defend and support them( as God commands) until I die.
Those who support Israel will be blessed. I Stand for Isreal.