When Things Fall Apart
Scrutinizing two myths that stand in the way of peace
Over the past few days, the stamp of once-reputable political and academic institutions — old and new — have endorsed statements that unequivocally blame the mass murder of Israeli civilians — not on the terrorist perpetrators who proudly shared videos of them murdering innocent elderly, children, women and men on social media — but on Israel itself. I do not wish to go into detail how dangerous their logic is, and how they thereby are justifying the mass murder of American civilians by those who have historically be oppressed under their delusional ‘decolonizer’ moral compass of good and evil.
Instead, I wish to challenge (and prove false) the two fundamental premises that underpin much of the Anti-Israel coalition’s hatred.
Jews are settlers and colonizers of Palestine
Israel is solely responsible for Palestinian suffering, specifically their low quality of life
I wish to do so because I don’t see anyone else doing so, yet it seems so pivotal to the issues at hand.
If we can prove that Jews, all Jews, are not settlers or colonizers of the land of Palestine, and that Israel, while deserving its fair share of blame, is not the sole source of Palestinian suffering, can we get closer to recognizing each other’s common humanity and right to co-exist in a land so holy to so many?
Let’s begin with the Settler-Colonizer argument. It states that Jews are settlers and colonizers of Israel/Palestine, have no claim to the land, and thus deserve to be removed from the land by any means necessary. This is what “from the river to the sea” means.
Here are a number of counterfactuals that prove this to be false.
~2.2 million Jews were living in Judaea (the Roman name for Israel/Palestine) in 70 A.D prior to the vast majority being forcefully expelled. Nonetheless, many stayed.
The ancient Synagogue of Gaza was built in 508, a hundred years before the birth of Islam.
When the Rashidun Caliphate came from the Arabian Peninsula and conquered and settled the Levant and land of Israel, 400,000 Jews were already living there.
It is estimated that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Jews had lived, loved, and died in Israel during the ~2,000 period before the first Arab Muslim stepped foot in the region.
Unlike Islam and Christianity, it is not part of the Jewish religion to evangelize and convert non-Jews. Up until the past fifty-ish years, Jew did not marry non-Jews (mainly because non-Jews didn’t want to marry Jews). For the past 4,000 years, Jews have largely occupied the lowest station in every society that they have lived in, so no non-Jew in their right mind wanted to be a Jew. Thus, regardless of where the various Diasporas flung Jews to around the globe, Jewish bloodlines and family trees can discretely be traced back to Israel. That’s why the 2010 research study “The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people” published in the Science Journal Nature “trace[d] the origins of most Jewish Diaspora communities to the Levant”, and why gene tests show that two fifths of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from four women.
None of this is said to diminish the right of Muslims (or Christians) to live in the land of Israel/Palestine. They should! And they do! 1.7 million Muslims live in Israel (roughly 20% of the population), the vast majority Arab. Rather, it is to establish the historical and scientific provenance supporting the Jewish peoples claim to the land of Israel.
If Muslims do not want to live in a Jewish state, Jews recognize that. The position of Israel and the vast majority of the Jewish world has always been that there should be a Jewish and Islamic State (i.e. Two-State Solution). This was the foundation of the 1947 UN Partition Plan of Palestine which was accepted by Jews but rejected by the Arabs. To this day, the position of the Palestinian Leadership Organization, and unfortunately roughly 50% of Palestinian people and the vast majority of the Islamic world, is that there should only be an Islamic state.
Prior the founding of the state of Israel, because of the various expulsion events from foreign occupiers, an estimated 850,000 Jews were living in Arab countries (a significant portion of their global population). They had been for hundreds of years. When Israel announced it’s independence, 820,000 of them uprooted their lives, left their homes, businesses and possessions and immigrated to Israel.
Which begs the question: why?
Surely there was the pull factor of returning to the land of Israel and the dream of living in a Jewish state. But history and anecdata proves that it was largely due to fleeing persecution.
Jews (and Christians), in many Arab lands, lived as “Dhimmi” (meaning “people of the covenant” or “protected people”). According to Sharia Law, the Islamic State protects a Dhimmi’s life, property and freedom of religion in exchange for loyalty and a special jizya tax.
Compared to the expulsions, inquisitions, pogroms and atrocities committed against Jews in European Christendom, Jewish life as persecuted, non-equal citizens in Islamic States under Sharia Law was a lesser evil.
Yet, it was clearly an oppressive existence. Here a few things Jews couldn’t do:
Be in public office or the armed service
Bear arms
Ride horses or camels
Pray or mourn in loud voices
Give evidence in court against a Muslim, so they had little legal recourse when harmed by a Muslim
They also had to show public deference toward Muslims, such always yielding to them in the center of the road.
These Jewish populations also faced a number of violent atrocities. Often, these occurred when Jews were seen to as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society and approached anything near an equal station. These include:
On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants.
Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in an offensive manner. The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.
Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.
Furthermore, decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293-4, 1301-2), Iraq (854-859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran's prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).
Like they have been everywhere but Israel, Jews were oppressed subjects that faced consistent persecution.
Things got worse in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Jews in most of North Africa (including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco) were forced to live in ghettos. In Morocco, which contained the largest Jewish community in the Islamic Diaspora, Jews were made to walk barefoot or wear shoes of straw when outside the ghetto,
The frequency of anti-Jewish violence increased, and many Jews were executed on charges of apostasy. Ritual murder accusations against the Jews became commonplace in the Ottoman Empire.
In Yemen, once a Jewish Kingdom in the fifth century CE, Jews remained subject to dhimmi status throughout the Islamic period and endured persecution in the 19th century. Once 50,000-60,000 strong, some moved to Palestine from 1874 onwards, drawn by economic opportunity rather than interest in Zionism.
In 1947, strikes organized in Aden against the UN's decision to partition Palestine turned into bloody riots that led to the deaths of 82 Jewish people. Shops were looted, homes and schools burnt. This is thought to have been the main trigger behind the airlift of Yemeni Jews to Israel, beginning in 1949, though many of those who left were also motivated by socio-economic reasons and the desire for a better life. Following the departure of the majority of the community in the late 1940s, Jews were forbidden to leave from 1962 until 1992, when 250 migrated to Israel.
So, Jews, in every nation in the world were robbed of their dignity, their potential, their right to equality, and often, their lives.
By the twentieth century, the status of the dhimmi in Muslim lands had not significantly improved. H.E.W. Young, British Vice Consul in Mosul, wrote in 1909:
“The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.”
Perhaps H.E.W. Young, because of his ethnocentric perspective, is biased and exaggerates the conditions of Jews and Christians. Indeed, Jews and Christians were not slaves, and enjoyed liberties that Muslims and Jews didn’t receive in Europe.
But Arab perspectives also confirm such persecution.
The Syrian delegate and future Prime Minister and father of modern Syrian politics, Faris el-Khoury, concurrently warned:
“Unless the Palestine problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting and safeguarding the Jews in the Arab world.”
More than a thousand Jews were killed in anti-Jewish rioting during the 1940s in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.
So while not only is the Settler-Colonizer argument false and Jews have an indigenous and rightful claim to the Land of Israel — alongside Christians and Muslims — but the events of the 1940s, such as the Holocaust in Europe and mass murder and persecution of Jews in Arab nations, made it apparent that there was an urgent and existential need to create a Jewish State in their ancestral homeland.
The second argument states that Israel is solely to blame for the suffering of Palestinians. During non-violent times, two significant sources of Palestinian suffering are the lack of electricity and the lack of plumbing infrastructure.
It is often reported that Israel perpetually and purposefully robs Palestinians of electricity as a form of persecution.
Accusations blaming Israel for Gaza’s energy crisis have compounded for years prior to the events of the past week. According to the Oslo Accords, which Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed in 1993, Israel is responsible for supplying Gaza with 120MW of daily electricity.
Yet, in 2017, the Palestinian Authority, in a move to loosen the Hamas’ hold on the Gaza Strip, told Israel that it will no longer pay for the electricity Israel supplies to Gaza. At the same time, they increased the taxes they imposed on Hamas for the collection of diesel.
As Reuters reported then:
With the generating plant off-line and Egyptian supplies via power lines notoriously spotty, Israeli electricity has been vital, keeping power on for Gazans, although for only four to six hours a day.
Additional, amid Gaza’s sole power plant shutdown in 2017, the UN issued the following press release:
On 17 April, Gaza’s sole power plant (GPP) was forced to shut down completely after exhausting its fuel reserves and being unable to replenish them due to a shortage of funds. Prior to this, the GPP was operating at only approximately half of its capacity, producing nearly 30 per cent of the electricity supplied to the Gaza Strip. On 20 April, electricity supply from Egypt, which accounts for 15 per cent of Gaza’s supply, also came to a halt due to technical malfunctioning that is yet to be repaired. Gaza is currently supplied only with electricity purchased from Israel (some 55 per cent of the previous supply), resulting in electricity blackouts of 20 hours per day, up from 12 hours previously, further undermining the delivery of basic services.
Since 2017, the Palestinian Authority has not paid for such electricity, incurring a massive debt. The PA’s debt owed to state-run Israel Electric Corp (IEC) (ISECO.UL) for electricity usage had reached 2 billion shekels ($528 million!). As is common practice between credit agreements and financial covenant breaches, Israel responded by deducting money it collects on behalf of the PA to help pay down its growing debt. The deduction amount would depend on how much electricity the PA buys each month and could reach 20 million or 30 million shekels.
Yet, the Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh lambasted the move as "a financial war that isn’t isolated from the ongoing political war against our people and that aims to undermine our people’s hope in gaining their rights and establish their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital."
While inflammatory, such accusation cannot hold up with any honest person. It’s not ‘financial war’ or a form of oppression, it is reality that every single individual and nation deals with — you have to pay for your utilities!
As the chart below shows, Israel has by and large held their end of the bargain and have continued to provide electricity to Gaza for six years with no payment. Gaza’s other neighboring country, Egypt, for which it shares a militarized, fenced-in border with, has not provided Palestinians with electricity since 2017. To that end, Egypt, as of Wednesday morning has kept the Rafah border crossing shut to Gazans.
Gaza’s sole power plant rarely operates above 50% capacity and has been severely under-funded. Reserve fuel is almost never purchased. Diesel for the power plant is usually trucked in from Egypt or Israel. During times of violence when Israel shuts down their Gazan border, the power plant can quickly run out of reserve fuel leading to a rapid energy crisis. This is often described as unequivocal persecution by Israel.
Yet, Hamas has not invested a single dollar to improve their sole power plant. Their Arab allies have not given them aid, citing instability in the region. The same goes for their plumbing infrastructure, which has been criminally underfunded and under supported. Terribly, Hamas recently shared a highly-produced propaganda video of militants digging up water pipes in Gaza to turn into rockets.
Israel does not control the Palestinian government or how they choose to spend the billions of dollars of yearly tax income and financial aid that they receive from overseas.
So where does the money go?
As Ali Baraka, a Senior Hamas Official, reveals in in the following video, instead of investing in their electrical power plant and other necessary infrastructure, they invest in factories with the sole aim of destroying Israel.
The official proudly states:
“We have local factories for everything. We have factories for mortars and their shells. We have factories for manufacturing B-7 and b-10 guns and their shells. We have factories for manufacturing Kalashikov rifles and their bullets.”
Indeed, in 2016, it was speculated that Hamas spent $100M a year on their military infrastructure, $40M of which was spent on their network of tunnels.
Yet, as the UN had previously stated in 2017, “Gaza’s sole power plant (GPP) was forced to shut down completely after exhausting its fuel reserves and being unable to replenish them due to a shortage of funds.” Clearly, as Ali Baraka reveals, Hamas does not have a shortage of funds. Rather, they explicitly decide to spend money on their weapons for terrorism instead of electricity and access to clean water for their people.
This is not to absolve Israel of blame. Israel’s blockade stymies trade and is a chokehold on the Gazan economy. There have been examples of food rotting as trucks wait hours to get through the highly securitized Gazan border, and fuel not being able to pass through for prolonged periods of time. I’m sure there are plenty other elements that further exacerbate Palestinian suffering. I empathize with the the Palestinian suffering. It is real and it is painful and it needs to end.
But unfortunately, many of these are legitimate policy responses to a Hamas-controlled Gaza that conducts terrorists attacks and calls for the destruction of your nation — especially when it’s your neighbor. South Korea has a highly securitized military border with North Korea, part of which is because North Korea seeks South Korea’s destruction and fails to recognize their legitimacy as a state. The North Korean people live in horrendous poverty and suffer from consistent famine. Do we charge South Korea with oppressing North Korea into an open air prison? The same justification applies to the USA’s blockade of Iran, a regime which frequently calls for the destruction of both Israel and the USA. Is a blockade of such an adversarial regime not legitimate?
Indeed, as mentioned, many call Gaza an ‘open air prison’, but that also is false (although blindly accepted as true by so many). In September 2023, The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) issued about 18,500 work permits to Palestinians in Gaza. That’s granting 222,000 Palestinians access to work in Israel each year, which is roughly 20% of Gaza’s workforce.
Terribly, 50% of Gazans are unemployed.
But, why?
For one, Hamas engages in consistent terrorist campaigns that unfortunately result in retaliation by Israel. Hamas strategically chooses to fire rockets and place military assets in locations such as mosques, hospitals, schools and residential complexes. Israel has three choices in how to respond to these terrorist attacks: (1) do nothing, (2) send in ground troops, and (3) locate and bomb Hamas targets to prevent future attacks. Diplomacy is off the table for Hamas. Often, Israel chooses the third option because (a) it must respond and protect its people through deterrence and (b) a ground incursion would be significantly more violent and destructive. Yet, the results are almost always tragic. Innocent people die. Homes and businesses are destroyed. The psychological and economic toll of that cannot be understated.
Furthermore, Israel’s blockade and militarized border throttles the Gazan economy. But these are unfortunate yet legitimate policies that Israel must conduct for its safety in response to Hamas’ persistent bombardment of terror attacks and unequivocal rejection of any attempt to further regional stability through peace negotiations (it has rejected the past two). Yet, as evident by the vast amount of work permits, to say Israel’s sole intention is to impoverish Palestinians and rob them of their dignity is logically inconsistent. Jobs provide income. Jobs provide dignity. A rational person would conclude that Israel seeks to help those who are willing to receive it.
Secondly, as we have discussed, the Palestinian Authority does not invest in the infrastructure needed to improve quality of life or GDP growth domestically.
Lastly, the radical top-down political indoctrination of the Palestinian youth, as demonstrated in the above Senior Hamas Official’s interview, propagandizes Martyrdom over life, causing many young men to choose to become militants over entering the secular workforce and investing in a long, peaceful life. As the Senior Official states:
“Jews love life. The thing that any Palestinian desires the most in life is to be martyred for the sake of Allah.”
In response to the terrorist attack that has killed 1,200+ civilians, Israel has stopped supplying Gaza with electricity. Israel, unfortunately for the innocent Palestinians, are in their right (both legally, and I believe, morally) to sanction an adversary that threatens their safety and sovereignty, takes hostages, and has invaded, raped, mutilated and butchered innocent civilians. Such actions are non-combative policy decisions that have been employed by government’s across the world to resolve hostile situations.
For example, the United States, and rest of the Western World, banned the Russian banking system from SWIFT as part of a series of severe sanctions aimed at economically isolating Russia and crippling the Russian financial system in order to pressure the Putin regime to end its military operations in Ukraine. Moreover, since 1995, the United States and its allies have prohibited trade and investment with Iran, a foreign policy posture that began following the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the Iranian Hostage Crisis that saw the detainment of 50 US Americans.
We now know that over 200 individuals have been seized from their homes and taken as hostage in Gaza. Tens of these are thought to be American Citizens, making this the most consequential hostage crisis since that with Iran in 1979.
The point is, it is logically inconsistent to believe that these foreign policies against Russia and Iran are morally sound yet view Israel’s as an evil form of persecution. One can only speculate why such a double standard exists.
To wrap, Israel is responsible for their fair share of Palestinian suffering. War is brutal. Especially within the population density of Gaza, it is impossible to prevent innocent suffering, and even worse, causalities of war. But Israel is not solely responsible for suffering of the Palestinian people.
It is not fair for me to attempt to judge Palestinian’s suffering. But I, and the vast majority of Jews and Israelis, recognize and empathize with it. We know it’s real and it’s intensely painful. We want it to end.
But if Hamas and the 50% of Palestinians who support them do not see our pain, recognize our right to exist, how is it suppose to be solved? And why don’t things change?
A tragic and cynical conclusion would surmise that Hamas, and their backers like Iran, have no interesting in ending Palestinian suffering. What they want is to ensure that, as the official put it, sacrificing young Palestinian lives for Martyrdom outweighs any desire for young Palestinians to love life.
How do you make that happen? One, you do everything possible to brainwash your people into hating an enemy so much so that they are willing shed their humanity, taint their souls and decapitate babies in the name of some noble calling. And two, you funnel all your resources to such a military industrial complex, explicitly at the cost of quality of life so that it is hard to love life, all the while blaming your enemy for such a condition. It is a self-perpetuating flywheel of hatred, depravity, propaganda and suffering — the victims of which being the Palestinian and Israeli people.
“The thing that any Palestinian desires the most in life is to be martyred for the sake if Allah.”
I will not endorse this conclusion, because I think it is too terrible and consequential to do so without more evidence and study. But one must question the arguments that so much of this conflict is built upon and recognize the falsehoods that underpin it.
The question then becomes, are people willing to listen? Is there hope for peace and light from this coalition beyond that blind rage, or is it just another use of fancy rhetoric to cloak the irrational hatred of Jews like so many cycles of the “justifiable” murder of Jews before it?
Great piece Sam! Very enlightening.
Great piece. I found the second section especially enlightening. Thanks for writing this.