Have Hamas learnt a lesson?

I find it a bit confusing when posters ignore well over 100 years of aggression and conflict created by the Arabs against the Jews / Israelis, and complain about latter day wrongs of the Israelis.
None of which would have taken place if one of two things had happened.
1. If the Arabs had accepted the Two State Solution back in 1948.
2. If the Arab world had defeated the Israelis in any of their wars of elimination of Israel. Where they would have taken a land grab of all of the land under Israeli Jurisdiction. 

Yes I agree with you about the impossibility of eliminating the source of fighters bred on hatred of Israel even before the present Israeli attack on Hamas, which must add to the hatred of Israel.
I started a thread not so long ago in which I posted the unlikelihood of Israel getting anything out of attacking Hamas. And the unlikelihood of eliminating Hamas, and even if such was possible there would be plenty of Jew haters and Israeli haters waiting to take their place.
This is why I continually call for the responsibility of the causes of the conflict to be placed where they belong, not just automatically pointing the finger at Israel. It just seems to me that many people cannot escape from the ages old problem of 'blaming the Jews' regardless of the cause of the problem.

I agree with your Last Paragraph.

It took no time at all for the Palestinian Arabs to deny an area of Israeli Jurisdiction in Palestine to be given to the PALESTINIAN Jews. Followed by wars in attempt to eliminate Israel. And those naughty Israelis had the audacity to fight back. Whatever next? 

The wrongs committed by the Arabs in no way give a free pass to any committed by the Israelis. Peace can only ever come about by both sides not committing wrongs against each other, and not by the wrongs of either side being excused by the behaviour of the other. And the more recent the wrongs by either side, the more relevant today.

I know there is truth in what you say as regards some on the left. This is fundamentally due to them seeing the Palestinian Arabs as the oppressed much more than the oppressors, victims mainly. And the left tend to champion the cause of oppressed victims, especially if the oppressors are our own allies. I am not saying this is right but it is the way many think. And they are more likely therefore to be understanding of the anger that feeds Arab terrorism, which is dangerously close to excusing it in some cases, and on the extremes can shade into active support for groups like Hamas who can be seen as freedom fighters. So yes, large elements on the left are taking sides against Israel and have been doing so ever since it became an occupying power in 1967. And to some considerable extent in doing so they are deluding themselves. Because it is not quite as simple as one side an oppressor = bad, the other side the oppressed = good. Some on the left like to see international issues in black and white, but this one in particular does not fit such pigeon holing because there has been good and bad on both sides

Many on the left are not fully aware of or do not much acknowledge the history of Israel pre-1967, when sympathy and support for it was widespread on both left and right. In British mandate times, the Arabs several times rioted against the Jews and killed a number of them. And when the British left, the Arabs tried to destroy Israel at birth. At that time the Israelis and Jews were largely defending themselves against aggression and fighting for survival. The Jews themselves however were not all innocent victims. There were extremists amongst them from the start who were responsible for terrorist outrages aimed as us, the British, most notoriously the blowing up of the King David Hotel. And once we were gone and fighting between Jews and Arabs flared up in earnest, these same elements perpetrated the atrocity at Deir Yassin.

However, we need to look at this from both sides. Until the rise of Zionism the Jewish population in Palestine was a rather small percentage of the population , most of whom were Arab Muslims or Christians. The Jewish minority had been comparatively small for centuries. But what began to happen was growing numbers of Jews started coming to the area, buying up ever more land. To understand how the indigenous Arab population thought about this we need only consider the furore in this country with the arrival of culturally and religiously different boat people. The incoming Jews were seen as culturally different migrants unwilling to assimilate into the existing culture and swamping large areas with new settlements. And unlike us, the Arabs had no ability to vote for anyone promising to stop the boats, so no democratic outlet for their anger. They saw it as cultural foreigners taking their country from them and wanted it back, which is what fuelled their attempt to destroy Israel at birth and drive all the Jews out. We would probably react the same way if millions of culturally different people were flooding in and building their own towns all over the place and wanting to set up their own state here.

But from the Jewish point of view  they had just endured the holocaust and felt the need to have a homeland of their own and where else but Palestine? They saw that the Arabs controlled the whole of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsular and the whole of the Middle East south of Turkey and West of Iran. For the Jews to have a tiny part of this area, especially after all they had suffered, did not seem at all unreasonable to them.

It is possible to understand the Arab perspective logically. It is equally possible to understand the Jewish perspective logically. What it is not possible to do very easily is to understand both perspectives and believe both must be right simultaneously. There will be no peace without an understanding by both sides of each others' perspectives.

Because too many find it too difficult to understand the perspectives of both sides simultaneously, they tend to pick a side and back it. The left tends to fall in behind the Palestinians, seeing them as an occupied and oppressed people, and are most unwilling to give any credit to the Israeli perspective, and far too willing to attempt to justify the likes of Hamas, and reluctant in the extreme to see wrong on the Palestinian side.

The right on the other hand tends to back Israel as an ally and victim of terrorism, and are most reluctant to see wrong on the Israeli side, and have a total failure to understand the Arab perspective at all in many cases.

And this is the fundamental problem with this issue when it gets debated. Most people pick a side, and see nothing but victimhood and justified responses to it from the side they back, are highly reluctant to acknowledge any wrong on the side they back, and if they do acknowledge any it is cursory and quickly justified or at least explained as supposedly an understandable response. And they see nothing but malice and evil from the other side. It is always one side is all bad and the other side is all good. One side forever a victim hitting back, the other side always an aggressor.

But it seems to me that the key to understanding the conflict is to be able to recognise and understand the perspectives of both sides, as the essential prerequisite to recognising legitimate grievances on both sides, and recognising the wrongs on both sides and seeking solutions. Going back through history pointing fingers at who started it serves little purpose today other than as an aid to understanding perspectives. But any solution must address facts on the ground today. And the most fundamental of these is that most Israelis were born there and have no other home. Likewise most Palestinian Arabs. Each has to accept each other's presence as neighbours and respect each other's rights. Without this as the foundation, no peace will ever be possible unless it results from one side wiping the other out.

There is of course the inevitability that some day some Arab religious nutters will get hold of or manage to develop nukes. Israel already has them. And I don't doubt for a moment that the kind of people willing to launch missiles indiscriminately into Israel would without any hesitation gleefully lob in a couple of nukes if they could. And Israel under such circumstances - what is left of it because it is a small country - would most definitely launch a nuclear retaliation. And then we are into Armageddon territory.

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3. Yes the Jewish population was small, but the linage of the existing Jewish population were there before the Arab invasions and the introduction of Islam. The imposition of the Dhimmi in the 8th century made the Jews second class citizens in their own country. This and the occasional Arab pogrom against Jewish settlements played a part in Jewish migrations as Jews sought freedom and equality.

The Quran claims that Palestine was given to the Jews. Even so why wouldn't the Jews think that freedom and equality with the Arabs in Palestine was anything but right?

At the end of the WWI Palestine was a sparsely populated, economically weak, sickly, malaria ridden area. Which is probably why it stayed sparsely populated. At the end of the British Mandate Palestine was a very different place thanks to the efforts of the British, helped by the Jews. This saw ten of thousands of Arabs migrate into Palestine with no problems.

When tens of thousands of Jews moved in, there was conflict, because the Arabs didn't like it. Well the Arabs didn't own it, but that didn't stop them from acting as if they did.



Back later.

Your post may be correct, though IMO many of those referred to as the 'far left' are just people who wear their heart on their sleeve. They have fallen for the 'the Arab good and the Israelis bad' false propaganda. What they don't understand is that in falling for this lie they give the Arabs a free ticket to attack the Israelis which feeds into the more misguided Muslims turning to terrorism. 

I just don't see communists as carrying any weight in the UK, and as far as I'm aware Democratic Socialists want a modified version of capitalism, not its elimination.



Your version of hearts on sleeve referred to the belief about Hamas, my version goes much further right into the hearts of much of the Arab world. i.e. "Arab good and the Israeli bad."