Michael Shine
Michael Shine: Israel My PERSONAL VIEW
A PERSONAL VIEW AND SOME OF MY FEELINGS
I was born in the UK after the Second World War and now I live in a country at war. My attitude and feelings are understandably perhaps somewhat different to my friends and acquaintances who live thousands of miles away in the Western world. The majority of them have never experienced warfare in their home country. If they are a similar age to me (i.e. not of their parent’s generation) they have never personally experienced having close friends and family affected by the atrocities committed against them by a terrorist neighbouring country. They have never experienced running for a bomb shelter when the sirens go off warning of yet another rocket attack on its way towards them. So I can, to a certain extent, understand their thinking of the current war against terrorism as being of an event thousands of miles away, and although many have sympathy, and many know that the world’s anti-Semitism is growing at a horrendous rate they just do not understand.
Many have conveniently forgotten that Hamas started this war against Israel with the most barbaric attacks of torture and murder and that a large amount of the Islamic world have given them support and continues to march all over the world in further support of them. The vast majority of so-called ‘Palestinians’ also have supported them as many recent polls have shown. Too right that I am angry.
They see the stories posted every day in the biased anti-Israel Western media and they are influenced by it. They see Israel chasing after the Hamas terrorists and all they are told is about the poor ‘innocent Gazan civilians’ – you know the ones, that spit upon and stoned on the naked bodies of Israeli women after they had been raped, tortured and murdered, they that celebrated the ‘victory’ of Hamas by celebrating in the streets by handing out sweets and cakes, – and they begin to think that Israel is not being proportional in their response. They were not alive when the Allies in World War Two, in order to shorten the war, bombed German civilian cities and in one night killed 25,000 German Nazi-supporting civilians. They were not yet born when the USA used the atomic bomb on Japan in order to shorten the war. They were children, or not much older during the Vietnam War when thousands of civilians died. So they don’t know what being involved in a war is. They think that they do, but those that have never experienced being in a war, just don’t know. In wars, many innocent people die. Children die. It is tragic, but that is what war is.
Let me give you some insight. It is not pleasant to be in a war. It is horrific. Israeli innocent civilians are scared for their families too. A quarter of a million Israeli innocent civilians have been displaced within their own country. Have had to leave their homes near Gaza and near the Northern border with Lebanon and Syria Refugees in their own home. Lost their homes, many have lost their jobs, many are without the wherewithal to feed their families. And the world, in its bias and bigotry is demanding that Israel does not continue in its efforts to eliminate the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas and stop one of Iran’s other supporters, Hezbollah, from protecting its citizens, but also, to protect the naïve and ignorant western world which is also under attack (but does not even realize it yet).
(Listen, if you get the chance to Douglas Murray.
https://www.tiktok.com/@the_eden_report/video/7301034077681945863
See what Hamas is all about – it isn’t just about land.
Here in Israel we heard, and were disgusted by the Presidents of Ivy League Universities not acknowledging and condemning anti-Semitism in their Universities, But, I have amongst my foreign friends, those who had not even heard about it. Disgraceful non-reporting media, or just non-awareness?
The ignorance around the world on what is happening in the Middle East is amazing.
This is from The Jerusalem Post from an article in the Wall Street Post
“In a recent survey of 250 college students across the US, some 86% supported the Palestinian chant “From the river to the sea,” — but only slightly more than half of them (47%) were able to name the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as the boundaries that the slogan is talking about.
Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates rivers, the Dead Sea—and even the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was or what the Oslo Accords were”.
Is there any wonder that many in Israel are annoyed and frustrated about the world’s opinions?
After October 7th many of my friends and acquaintances across the globe expressed their concern for the welfare of me and my family, some even condemned the Hamas atrocities but not as many as I would have expected. Many more than I expected were prepared to believe the Western media in its lies and twisting of the facts on the ground before they believed what we in Israel were telling them.(For example the explosion at the Shifa hospital in Gaza where all immediately blamed Israel but had to backtrack when the evidence was so overwhelming that it was a failed Islamic Jihad rocket –
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20096/blood-libel-israel-gaza-hospital?fbclid=IwAR2Q8yeOhewIzxNhBPXKU9PaIWEowmONsxd9uSH8mPkVKyIQraan8khKmCA
Of course, we all know that lies get around the world before the truth has a chance to get its trousers on (Churchill). I hear less from them now.
So, I am angry and frustrated, and I shout a lot at overseas friends and acquaintances who just don’t get it. But then again, why should they? They are not experiencing it so why should they understand?
