Oh Israel!<\/p>\n
I was writing an essay the other day about the United States moving its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.\u00a0 Throughout my life, I have considered myself a strong supporter of Israel, who believed that the foundation of a Jewish homeland was right and historically based.\u00a0Israel was founded on the moral \u201chigh ground\u201d of the Holocaust; a repayment from the nations of the world for the atrocities of the Nazis.<\/p>\n
But now, I question my own views on Israel.<\/p>\n
When Israel was founded in 1948, the surrounding Arab nations ordered the Palestinians (the Muslim people living in the area that would eventually become Israel) to refuse to cooperate with the Jewish government.\u00a0 When the Israelis asked them to cooperate or leave, the Arab nations around Israel encouraged the Palestinian diaspora, built temporary refugee camps on the border, and assured the Palestinians that they would soon defeat Israel and move them back to their homes.<\/p>\n
Wars were fought in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973; all with the Arab goal of destroying Israel.\u00a0 Caught in the middle of these wars, often literally, were the exiled people of Palestine, used as pawns (by both sides) in the geopolitical game.\u00a0 In 1967, Israel captured much of the land where the refugee camps, then almost twenty years old, were located, and by holding that land (Gaza and the West Bank of the Jordan) internalized the Palestinian problem.<\/p>\n
It has been seventy years since the Palestinians were placed in refugee camps.\u00a0 Three generations have grown up, with little hope for a life outside.\u00a0Terrorism has found a breeding ground.\u00a0And while terrorist acts are abhorrent, terrorism itself grows from a reality that has no hope for change.\u00a0 To change terrorism, change the environment that produces it.\u00a0 Without making those changes, right or wrong, terrorism will thrive.<\/p>\n
And so it has been in the Palestinian areas.<\/p>\n
So Israel is faced with an intractable situation.\u00a0 Within its control are huge numbers of Palestinians, raised in the West Bank or stuffed into the Gaza strip.\u00a0 Israel has blocked their ability to gain employment outside of the controlled areas, citing legitimate security concerns.\u00a0 They have built a \u201cwall\u201d to separate Israeli from Palestinian.\u00a0 And Israel has responded to terrorism with tough and sometimes inhumane actions.\u00a0 Each of those actions becomes fuel for more terrorism, and the cycle goes unbroken.<\/p>\n
I always believed that Israel, with encouragement from its greatest ally the United States, would act in a moral way to try to resolve the Palestinian question.\u00a0 The actions of the current Israeli government now lead me to question that belief.<\/p>\n
There were shootings at the Gaza border last week:\u00a0 over sixty Palestinians were killed, thousands wounded.\u00a0 Women and children were among the casualties.\u00a0 There is no question that the young were placed in the front of the line, intentionally made targets by the leaders of Hamas, the terrorist organization that also governs Palestinian Gaza.\u00a0 They are terrorists, I don\u2019t expect them to act in a \u201cmoral\u201d manner; clearly the videos of the dead and wounded helped their cause.\u00a0Their placement of children at the front of the line isn\u2019t that different from the actions of the US Civil Rights movement in the 1960\u2019s \u2013 the difference is that the Civil Rights movement was coming from a moral position of non-violence, unlike Hamas.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>But I do question why the Israeli government chose this response, when there were less lethal and just as effective alternate options.\u00a0 By firing their guns and creating a whole new set of martyrs, the Israelis chose their own form of \u201cterrorism\u201d to answer the Hamas challenge.\u00a0They gave up morality, and allowed Jewish soldiers to kill children; and gave Hamas what they needed to convince the next generation.\u00a0 The United States not only acceded to these actions, but participated in a \u201ccelebration\u201d a mere sixty miles away in Jerusalem.\u00a0 The vision:\u00a0 as Palestinian children died in the sand, the President\u2019s daughter and son-in-law, the Secretary of the Treasury, and other notable Americans smiled and applauded.\u00a0 We lost the moral high ground as well.<\/p>\n