Michael Shine. Well obviously it would be wrong of me to blame it on Jew hatred, wouldn’t it? It can’t be for that reason because although Israel is the nation-state home of the Jews, the world knows that its population is made up of Jews (the majority), Muslims, Christians, Bahai’s (an offshoot of Islam originally from Iran), Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists and others, and some of these minorities actually join the Israeli army, serve in the government, are high court judges, and generally have equal rights to everyone else. So it can’t be because Israel is Jewish – can it?
Michael Shine
It obviously can’t be because that the 60 year old Israel has flourished as the only free thinking, Liberal Democratic state in the middle-east. That Israel has turned an area once predominantly deserts and swamps into a nation of affluence, forward thinking, well educated people, dedicated to peace and education. Surely nobody could possibly hate it for that, or could it?
Maybe it is that there are some who think that, for whatever reason, Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. Maybe they think that the area that Israel now occupies was once a nation state of some other people and that Israel violently took it over? The question that we have to answer is, which Nation state did Israel take over?
As much better writers than I have explained in a myriad of different places, Israel now occupies a small piece of land that was once a very small part of the (Islamic Turkish) Ottoman Empire (from approx 1453 until its defeat in WW1 by international forces – approx 1918) and was then governed by British Mandate. Prior to the League of Nations and then the UN agreeing to a division of the land (between Jews and various Arabs from different countries that were already living there, some (of each) for many centuries) there had not been any recognized country, or state, actually controlling the area, that is unless one wants to go back to biblical times, when without controversy everybody knows it was Israel (name changed to Palestine by the invading and subsequent occupying forces of Rome!).
When Independence was then declared by Israel in 1948, it is undisputed historical fact, that it was attacked by all of the neighbouring Arab Muslim countries. The reason? The Arabs did not want a Jewish state in their midst – I mean, they were not protecting another Muslim country were they? There wasn’t one! There were Jews, as well as Arabs, living under Ottoman Rule together, some of the time quite amicably, for centuries, so what had changed? The surrounding Arab states just could not accept that the Jews would have a state, similar to their Muslim only countries, but which would be firstly Jewish. The UN had wanted to divide the small parcel of land between Jews and Arabs (the Arabs getting more of it) – the Jews accepted, and we all know what the Arabs did. Many Arabs (Christian and Muslim) remained in the part that became Israel, they prospered, they enjoyed equality under the law, their religious practices were respected, indeed, they prospered so well that they now enjoy a life far superior to many Arab Muslims in the rest of the Arab world. So much so, that when recently polled if they would rather move to neighbouring Arab countries, they emphatically declined. They still (in the main) don’t like Jews, but they are not going anywhere!
What about those who either ran away, or were coerced by the neighbouring Arab countries to get out of the way whilst Israel was destroyed, what happened to them (approx 600,000 originally)? They became the longest running history of refugees the world has ever known. They were settled in refugee camps governed by those countries that attacked Israel, in Gaza (governed by Egypt), in what was to become known as the West Bank (governed by Jordan). Were they, as with many refugee problems over the years, given assistance by those that governed them? Were they offered citizenship of the countries that now had control over them? Whilst their Arab brothers killed them, made their lives a misery, and expelled them from where they had tried to move (Jordan and Lebanon come to mind), Israel managed to assimilate more than 1 million Jewish refugees who had been tormented and killed and forced to flee the Arab countries where they had lived for millennia (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden). http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/talking/jew_refugees.html.
This brings us to the present time, nearly 70 years later. Maybe the liberal left-wingers in the world demonize Israel because the approx 600,000 Arab refugees, or more accurately, their descendants, who left the land that became Israel are now reckoned to be almost 6 million. The United Nations, which has been instrumental in resettling millions of refugees from around the globe, following various conflicts, had set up UNWRA, an organization that feeds on itself, maintaining these people as refugees and making no attempt to resettle them. Who funds UNWRA? Where do the funds go? (See the personal fortunes amassed by Hamas leaders, and before them the fortune that Arafat managed to accumulate). Who runs UNWRA in Gaza? Many of its workers are members of the Hamas terrorist organization, whose creed, as we all know, is the destruction of Israel. What chance do the poor descendants of the original refugees, have for ever being resettled, anywhere? Their leaders incite them to violence against Israel. Their leaders still chant “Death to the Jews”. The rulers of Gaza, Hamas, still have in their charter, no recognition of the Jewish state, indeed destruction of Israel and death to all the Jews in it. The same Hamas, by the way, that is now joined in Gaza by (its sister terrorist organization) ISIS , who go that little step further – death to all Jews, everywhere! And whilst they are at it, death to anyone who disagrees with their warped fundamentalist Islamic Jihad religious ideology.
They, the left-wing liberals, hate Israel because Israel has the courage to defend itself against terrorism. They would not want their respective governments to defend them would they? They would want to passively allow the terrorists to kill them and take over their countries wouldn’t they? So it is not because the world hates Jews – is it? Of course not – why would Israel think that?
Michael Shine
