At least the Bin Laden farce - going viral on TikTok - highlights an essential feature of the current focus on Israel: this is and has always been about Islam. The young generation discovering the terrorist diatribe and thinking, "hey, he's got a point you know", are demonstrating not just how antisemitism has now become acceptable, but that, at bottom, it all derives from a radical Muslim agenda to destroy Israel and defeat the West.
Why, after all these years, after the great "ethnic displacements" of the mid 20th century, is the Palestine question the one that still lingers? The Greece-Turkey exchange - it was said you couldn't see the water in the harbour at Smyrna, now Izmir, for the bodies fleeing the Turkish army in 1922....The huge and hugely violent India-Pakistan Hindu-Muslim population movements....The millions of Germans driven out of Eastern Europe in the most brutal circumstances after the Second World War. The list goes on.
The Germans driven out of Silesia, say - they were taken in by Germany. Of course they were. There are no camps now on the borders of Poland, run by the UN, where hundreds of thousands of Germans, calling themselves Silesians, demand that they return to Silesia, and educate their children into hating the Poles who've usurped their land. "Silesia will be free, from Ostrava to Katowice". No it doesn't have that ring to it. [Nor, as PG Wodehouse noted in one of his ill-judged communications after being captured by the Nazis, does it have that much appeal: “If this is Upper Silesia, what on earth must Lower Silesia be like?”]
The analogy isn't perfect, of course. None are. Each "ethnic displacement" has its own history. At least for Israel you can say that it's the ancestral home of the Jews who were there centuries before the Arabs, that the United Nations authorised its creation as a state, and that, contrary to popular belief, over half of its population are Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors lived, for centuries, in Muslim lands before they were driven out. Also, the population of Israel is 20% Arab, which is some 20% more than the remaining population of Jews in Eygpt, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Yemen...
So why didn't the Arabs, at a time when Arab Nationalism was all the rage, take in those Arabs displaced and driven out of Israel? It's 75 years ago now. UNRWA is the only UN agency now dedicated to just the one group of refugees. It was founded in 1949 to look after all the refugees displaced by the 1948 conflict. The Israeli government took over responsibility for the displaced Jews in 1952, but the Arab governments have never taken over responsibility for the displaced Arabs.
Why not? Surely we can see now. The Palestinians have never wanted a state of their own if it meant living alongside a Jewish state. They claim all of the land as Muslim land. They're taught that the Jewish Temple is a myth, that it's all part of a plan to destroy the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam. The Jewish claim that the Temple Mount is the holiest site for Jews, site of Solomon's Temple, then the Second Temple - both destroyed - is dismissed out of hand. The Oct 7th Hamas pogrom was called the Al-Aqsa Flood. Almost everything in Hamas-run Gaza is the Al-Aqsa this or the Al-Aqsa that.
In other words, yes, it's all about Islam. Any land so closely connected to Muslim history can never be allowed to be taken by non-Muslims - and especially not by Jews. Hamas is an Islamist group. They glorify in the killing of Jews. They want to keep killing Jews until Israel is destroyed, and then to see Islam take over the whole world. They keep saying it, again and again. Their leaders, worth billions and living in luxury in Qatar or wherever, rejoice in the killing of the wretched Gaza civilians - martyrs to Allah in the great cause.
What might be a clarifying moment has, tragically, been taken by the hard left - as perceptive as ever - to be a case of "settler colonialism": of white people taking over the territory of brown people. Which also, handily, allow them to indulge their inner antisemitism while still feeling good about themselves.
So here we are...
Excellent analysis and comment.
Yes, all those other displacements, especially Jews being forced out of other parts of the Middle East, and the religious element regarding Palestine. Why doesn’t the UK government do something to “educate”, “inform” people????!!!!
[Some Palestinian Arabs (not many, I guess!) could be descended from the original inhabitants of Canaan in the late Bronze Age just as some of the Jews! They are one people!]
Posted by: Alan | November 18, 2023 at 05:51 PM