ALPERN AT LARGE-Whether some feel it is too strong or too weak a political statement, President Obama probably articulated what most Americans feel when he stated that he does NOT have sympathy for Hamas but DOES have sympathy for those Palestinian civilians struggling to survive in the Gaza Strip.
After all, who but the most heartless among us could not have empathy for the miserable plight of those Gaza residents who've lost their homes, their family members and their lives? Inasmuch as anti-Semitism towards Jews is intolerable, the term "anti-Semitism" includes anti-Arab sentiments because both Arabs and Jews are Semites, and they are all people.
Anti-Palestinian anti-Semitism is no more tolerable than anti-Jewish anti-Semitism.
That said, the entire Arab and Muslim world (the latter of which lies far beyond Arab lands) are facing the challenges of balancing democracy, religion and tolerance towards others. East Asian Muslim nations have, for the most part, chosen tolerance while Arab lands are struggling with tolerance towards Christians and Jews.
Why Arab Christians' plight is being ignored perhaps rests on much of society's lack of tolerance to Christians, but intolerance and violence towards any religious group or tribe is unforgivable in this modern day and age.
Which is also why the suggestion that Israel (formed as a majority Jewish land because Jews have always been persecuted and killed when they are in the minority, with very rare exception, throughout history) is a genocidal and pro-apartheid state is at best historical ignorance, and at worst Jew-hatred.
The late Golda Meir is now appropriately quoted for her FULL statement that not only (and I'm paraphrasing) do too many Palestinians hate the Jews more than they love their own children, but that while Jews can forgive the Palestinians for killing our own children, they/we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.
After all, this is the same historical group that has Sesame Street-like shows promoting suicide bombing and jihad to children, and which promotes street talk that Jews include Christian blood in our matzo (I'm Jewish, and the very suggestion is horrid beyond words).
After all, this is the same historical group that fled their homes to allow the mass slaying of the Jews in 1948, but to their dismay lost their homes when these Jews actually survived and took over both Palestinian and Israeli lands.
After all, this is the same historical group that has been thrown out of much of the Arab world (such as Lebanon and Jordan) because the element amongst them that appears to have a "culture of death" and advocates suicide bombing extended to other Arab neighbors.
Yet while the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip made the terrible decision to elect the hardened, pro-violence, and exuberantly anti-Israel Hamas into power (they only had the notoriously corrupt Fatah as an alternative), most Palestinians actually are quite educated and would do well to be welcomed into the greater world of economics and business.
The comparison can therefore be made to 1930's Germany, when a miserably poor and abandoned Germany chose the National Socialist Party out of anger and desperation ... but, as with Hamas, democracy ENDED there.
Hamas, like the Nazis and Yasser Arafat before them, pilfered the billions of UN, Western and foreign funds for economic development and chose war and death, both to foreign neighbors and to their own people.
If people want to ignore that Yasser Arafat and Hamas have spent billions on foreign aid towards missiles, personal wealth and (most lately) tunnels to kill Israeli civilians, that's either ignorance or Jew-hatred in one way, shape or form. The Palestinians are BOTH victims and (as a group) must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
So when former President Jimmy Carter claims that Israel must recognize the legitimacy of Hamas (which has sworn the destruction of Israel, and possibly all Judaism in that region), it's frightening to both Democratic and Republican Jews in our nation.
Ditto to statements and actions in Britain and Europe suggesting that Hamas and the Israelis are both politically and morally equivalent.
To suggest that the Jews would do the same thing had they been forced to endure what the Palestinians have endured is to absolute IGNORE the example of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during the brief Nazi German Empire.
The word "ghetto" is (for those who don't know this) originally NOT a black or brown word but a Jewish term for where European nations and city/states shoved their Jewish population. The Warsaw Ghetto in Poland is where the Jews were confined prior to their removal to their deaths in the concentration camps.
Rather than using their children as human shields, they smuggled their children out in any way they could, then repelled the Nazis with military force in a true David versus Goliath experience.
And then, after holding out for a few days, they were outgunned and annihilated. But they NEVER used their children as human shields, and Jews today never would.
Never.
EVER!
Ditto for the majority of Arab and Muslim nations who (particularly with Egypt) have turned their collective backs to Hamas. The knowledge that all the foreign aid was going to Iranian-built missiles and training, as well as a massive tunnel effort that would have led to mass killings and chaos among Israeli citizens later this year, is too much for any modern nation, Western or Muslim or otherwise, to tolerate.
So the destruction and killing among the Palestinians in Gaza is also just too horrible to tolerate...but the blame goes to Hamas, not Israel.
(A valid comparison: if the US were to invade Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960's, would the civilian deaths there have been the fault of the US, or of the USSR and Fidel Castro?)
The tunnels were reason enough to invade Gaza, and for the most part the Israelis are pulling out now that that mission has been accomplished. Had Israel wanted to carpetbomb the Gazans like the Allies did to Dresden during WWII, we would have seen civilian deaths by the tens of thousands---but that was NEVER part of the Israeli plan, which was meant to be surgical (even at the cost of Israeli military lives).
Gaza now has a chance, just as Egypt now has a chance, to promote democracy (or at least some form of it) without either Hamas or its Egyptian cousin, the Muslim Brotherhood (which was responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat). The hardliners among them will have to be put down, removed from power, and hopefully forced to renounce the Hamas Party in order to remain in future power.
The acceptance of peace with Israel and towards other Palestinian parties by Hamas is probably too much to realistically hope for, but at least that would allow Hamas to survive in the future--to rearm them and to allow this to happen again and again and again is to ensure the deaths of Israeli and Palestinian civilians (particularly the latter) in the future as well.
Hamas and Gaza and Egypt and the Palestinian Authority have a golden chance to prevent this horrific violence from ever recurring. As with the Nuremberg trials after WWII, both Nazi and Hamas leaders that used children as human shields, and lodged weapons in schools, hospitals and mosques must go to trial and account for their sins.
And if the UN ever wants to have any credibility among Jews and their Christian allies, they must demand the culture of death is NEVER AGAIN allowed, and for UN support to STOP if the Palestinian practice of handing out candies and sweets every time a Palestinian suicide bomber kills Israeli civilians continues, and to STOP Palestinian propaganda that encourage children to become suicide bombers instead of educated professionals and businessmen.
And if President Obama really wants to end this recurrent and habitual standoff in Gaza (and, by extension, to the West Bank), he will have to openly DEMAND that Iran stop arming the hardline Palestinians who have a much higher death toll of their fellow Palestinian civilian citizens that Israel ever has.
Let us hope and pray that peace among all reasonable peoples can survive and thrive in the Middle East. But let's pursue not only a "Never Again" with respect to another Holocaust of the Jews, but also a "Never Again" with respect to the rearming of a Palestinian segment that NO ONE can tolerate or live with any more than with the prior Nazi German hardliners of a past generation.
We should all pursue peace...but that means putting down those who refuse to ever join in pursuing that peace.
(Ken Alpern is a Westside Village Zone Director and Board member of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Co-Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected] . He also does regular commentary on the Mark Isler Radio Show on AM 870, and co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 64
Pub: Aug 8, 2014