Post 11 - Judaism

Many Jewish people feel they have the right to the land of Israel because it is their ancient homeland, taken from my conquest and invasion from several different civilizations including the Babylonians, Assyrians and Romans. Israel is the site for the Jewish people’s important religious sites and temples and part of their cultural heritage. After the horrors of the Holocaust, the need for a Jewish state became much more important to the Jewish people. However, their biblical homeland had already been occupied by Palestinian-Arab farmers for centuries prior. Originally Palestinian and Jewish people were able to coexist fairly peacefully when the Jewish community began a large land grab problems began to arise. I do not agree with the resettlement of the Jewish people in Israel. I do not agree with a people reclaiming land that has not been theirs for centuries at the cost of the local people. I do not agree with removing Palestinians from their homes and land, and then blaming the Palestinian’s for not agreeing to a prior settlement. Can you imagine the outrage if Native American’s demanded their lands back after centuries of American control? No one would stand for it. Native American’s are given reservations, a small area of land considering their traditions, not whole countries. To add to the frustration of the settlement and creation of Israel, most of the Jewish people are not ethnically Arab/middle eastern. There are two types of Jewish people, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Most Jewish people in Israel are Ashkenazi, of European descent, and a minority Sephardi, of Arabic, Spanish or Portuguese descent. A different source I once read, I believe Wikipedia, said that the majority Ashkenazi Jews even discriminate against the Sephardi Jews. How a people can that only has biblical and ancient ties to a geographic region, not even ethnic ties, claim a land as theirs?

The Palestinian people feel they have a right to the land of Israel because they have lived on and worked the land for centuries. Palestine was not a complex civilization, but it was a land of self-sustaining villages and people. Palestinians idealize the life they were once able to live, but considering their current harsh reality, who can blame them?  Religious Jewish people have lived alongside the Palestinians for a long time without problem. The region of Israel was their home and suddenly with the Zionist movement they lost everything they once knew and became refugees in their own land? I understand that after the Holocaust the Jewish people wanted safety and their own home after centuries of Diaspora, but I cannot understand why they would force other people out.

I do not think Israel has lived up to its moral obligations to the Palestinian people. I think they have failed miserably in this regard. Not only do they take the lands and homes of Palestinians for Jewish resettlement, they forced the Palestinian people into small areas taking away their religious and civil rights. I once watched a documentary about the building of the wall between the Gaza strip and Israel, how the wall divides towns and villages were Jews and Palestinians once coexisted. I watched families torn apart, forced to carry travel paper and deal with soldiers on a daily basis. In this documentary, even a retirement home was cut off from the rest of the community by this wall! Even YouTube videos of attacks on the Gaza Strip are horrifying. Once I saw Israeli soldiers use white phosphorus, a blinding and burning substance, to quell a protest at a local school. I know that Palestinians also commit terrible acts of violence with Israel and that is not justified either. I don’t think any of the violence committed by either side is justified.

I don’t necessarily know what the solution for peace is. Both people want to be able to live in safety in their homeland, to live, work and raise their families. There is no wrong or shame in that desire. I would hope that the peoples would be able to set aside their claims and differences and work for the betterment of everyone. Instead of an Islamic Palestine or Jewish Israel why couldn’t there be a secular government meant to ensure the rights and safety of all; a government that was elected by all the people to promote prosperity and co-existence? Violence is solving nothing; aggressive encroachment still from Israel is not solving the problem. Only when both sides care more about the children and families than political and religious ideology can there be peace. This isn’t a very descriptive solution, but it’s the only place I know we need to start.