Why I Don’t Want To Be Made To Support Israel

I realize, my dear readers, that many have picked a side in this fight, which really isn’t theirs, but which they have made theirs to the extent it often seems this fight is more important to them than events at home. They have declared “My mother, drunk or sober”, and see everything through that loving lens, dismissing any criticism out of hand as false, suspicious, or malicious. This is human nature.

I do not wish to talk you out of whatever side you have picked. I want to tell you why I do not want to be made, as I am forced by our rulers, to pick a side. As it is, my side is not represented. If it were up to me—and it isn’t, and never will be, so there is no point becoming anxious or angry—Jerusalem would be Christian because Our Lord sacrificed himself there. But if you want to argue that all groups, and not just one, should and must have their own ethno-states, then I’m right there with you.

As it stands, the position I take—again, this will never matter to our rulers, so calm yourself if you must—is that of not having anything to do with that certain area of the world. The bad blood, as we shall see, goes back too far. It is not my responsibility to step in. I do not want to pay for any meddling, yet pay and meddle I must, because our rulers have decided I must.

I am also, unlike some, not keen on World War III. We see, for instance, Russia, the ancient enemy of some, but not me, has moved the frigate Marshal Shaposhni into the Mediterranean. Pleasure cruise? Sampson Option anyone?

My hope in this post is to cut through some of the propaganda, and so quiet tempers, and perhaps, in some meager way, reduce the chance of global war.

It’s true: the propaganda on this subject is, like it is everywhere else, thick. Though those of us on Team Reality see its presence on almost every other subject; some of us, because of sympathies with the goals of it, do or will not see it here. Yet ask yourselves: when does the media not propagandize? Why would this subject be different for them?

The grossest mistake you can make is supposing all violence started last year, for no reason at all except some kind of innate and inborn hatred on one side, and that the retribution which followed was fully justified in all its brutality (which itself is dismissed or denied entirely). But, dear reader, the vicious fight between parties has been going on since before 1947. Both sides having their hand in (a media-favorite word) atrocities.

Let’s continue our review of a small fraction of the history of the conflict to see the truth of this. The first part is here (blog, Substack). From a man who was there and who was a witness and participant in events from World War II up through the long past it: Lieutenant-General Sir John Baggot Glubb, a.k.a. Glubb Pasha (see the link for details on Glubb, if you don’t remember).

He summarizes the violent foundation of the Jewish ethno-state in A Soldier With The Arabs (1957). He reminds us that “In 1946 and 1947, no voice was raised in America in support of Arabs [p 57].” Due to massive changes in immigration that has changed. It turns out there is no magic dirt in America. As recent events have, as Team Reality predicted, well demonstrated.

Here is the Glubb’s summary:

In so far as Israel was concerned, to save the persecuted Jews of Europe was doubtless a noble task. But the proposition which I venture to submit is that the Jew should not have been settled in Palestine by the use of military force, and against the will of the people already living in that country. That was indeed the heart of the matter. To give help to persecuted Jews, both moral and material, would have been a generous policy. Britain and America could have mediated between them and the Arabs, but the fatal error was to use violence—and to leave a tradition of violence, which Jews and Arabs alike only too readily absorbed. Neither side considers any solution to their present deadlock, except violence….

Selfish violence [by Jews in settling their new homeland] sooner or later brings retribution, though it may be long coming. [p 225]

In The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival Glubb recalls that “In 1948, about a million Palestinians were driven from their homes by force.” By force. In the demand for living room. On that violent forced removal, Glubb reminds us in his The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography:

Whole villages were bulldozed down and then ploughed over [by the nascent Israelis], so that the refugees would have no homes to which to return. After the armistice, some of these refugees attempted to return to their homes at night to see if they could retrieve any of their possessions. All such persons caught by Israeli patrols were shot dead on the spot, without arrest or trial.

As a result, the infiltrators began to carry weapons and a little sub-guerrilla war developed, which need never have happened…

The second principle on which their action was based was that of ten-fold reprisals. If one Jew were killed by a refugee infiltrator, ten Arabs must be killed in revenge. For this purpose, a platoon of Israeli soldiers would be sent across the line to kill ten Arabs in a border village.

These events are never, of course, recounted in modern propaganda. But so are these next events forgotten (all from A Soldier With The Arabs). Of course, it might be said Glubb was merely angry and had a grudge because Jewish terrorists, who, à la the King David Hotel, in 1947 planted a bomb at his house which nearly killed his wife. By coincidence, Glubb was away at the time, and his wife had just turned away from the window outside of which was the bomb.

Here is some of the history:

As May 1948 and the end of the [British] mandate drew nearer, fighting and confusion in Palestine increased. Battles took place in the very streets of Jerusalem. The Jews began slowly and methodically to conquer and occupy Arab quarters of the city.
[p 71]

Outside the area which was to be awarded Jews, in a place called Nevi Yaacov or Nebi Yqoub, Jews had set up a “colony” and built a “concrete blockhouse” on the road leading to the colony.

From the end of 1947 until May 15th 1948, this blockhouse was continually manned by armed Jewish “soldiers”. When British control began to relax, these men, whenever the spirit moved them, would enter the blockhouse, shut the door and man the loopholes. They would then first at a few yards’ range at any Arab vehicle attempting to pass. Many Arab buses and taxis suffered casualties in this manner, often to women and children…

…A little Arab Legion bedouin corporal called Auda Dhuweihi, rather a friend of mine, was standing in the road. On his left, an Arab taxi was overturned in the ditch, the Jews having shot the driver as the car drove past. Pinned underneath the overturned taxi were an Arab woman and child. A few yards away, the Jews had come out of their blockhouse and were smoking and laughing.

Then this event in 1948, which you might recognize sounds very modern, in which “the Irgun and the Stern Gang were invited by the Hagana to capture the village of Deir Yaseen.

[W]hen the [Jewish] terrorists entered the village, they found in it only old men, women and children. These were massacred apparently without explanation, and without regard to age or sex. Two hundred and fifty dead bodies were thrown down the village well. The Irgun and term at first openly claimed the credit for this massacre. The Jewish Agency officially expressed its horror. [p 81]

Glubb goes on to say that the “Jewish Agency regularly registered its horror at the terrorists’ outrages, but it never took action against them for terrorist activities against non-Jews.”

In 1947, a senior British officer was asking a Jewish official about the partition plan about to go into effect. The British officer asked whether the Jew would have trouble “in view of the fact that the Arab inhabitants would be equal in number to the Jews.”

“Oh, no!” replied the Jewish officer. “That will be fixed. A few calculated massacres will soon get rid of that!”…

So much might be idle boasting or dismissed as mere gossip, but:

Later on, when the problem of the Arab refugees became a tragedy which drew the attention of the world [now forgotten], Jewish apologists claimed that the Arabs had voluntarily become refugees, and that they had not been driven out. [p 81]

What is fascinating to me, and perhaps to you, too, is that after recounting these events (of which I only gave a small sample into 1948, with many more similar events on both sides to come), he said this, much in the spirit of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose:

Two or three years later, I was discussing these events with a prominent English Jew. He expressed incredulity. “You cannot be right,” he said. “No Jew would do such things. You have been deceived by anti-Semitic propaganda.” [p 82]

This brings our mini-history to the official founding of the Jewish ethno-state. Which is where we’ll leave off (for now), except to note that at that beginning the Jews “were already in occupation of considerable areas allotted to the Arabs and had begun (as will be seen later) to conquer Arab Jerusalem.”

There were and are, some of you will be now screaming, misdeeds from the other side, too. Why not highlight those as well? What for? Most of us know of these already because of propaganda.

It must be clear by now, I hope, that the hatred felt by both sides against the other goes back a long way, has become permanent and generational, and that playing Innocent Victim is absurd. However politically efficacious.

My point is not to take sides. I don’t care if you do. My argument is that I do not want to be forced to pick a side. I want nothing to do with it. These are not my people. I do not want to be forced to have anything to do with it, nor to have my money pay for any of it. And I do not want global war to begin over a fight that is not mine.

Incidentally, not everybody in Israel is pro-war. Here’s Haaretz: “Resisting the ‘Ecstasy of War’: Gaza Through the Eyes of Religious, Left-wing Israeli Soldiers”.

For religious left-wingers, the moral complexity surrounding their military orders created a unique battle within them during their time as reservists in Gaza – especially when witnessing ‘disgraceful acts’ that contradict Jewish values

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