Hello Hossein, thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspective. I'm wondering if you might be open to discussion on a few thoughts I had in response to your writing:
1. I completely agree with you that America's policing of the world almost exclusively gives rise to more hatred, anger and pain--this was true in the time of the Vietnam War and it's true with regards to Afghanistan. That being said, you talk a lot about revenge-- you even say "lest Israelis forget, Palestinians have fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, aunts, uncles cousins and friends. There are close to 450 million Arabs and nearly 2 billion Muslims in the world. Might just a few of them hate what Israel does day in day out to Palestinians?" I suspect we won't agree on the situation itself, which is absolutely fine, but I want to say first that I stand with my Palestinian siblings who are in pain and who are feeling the constant weight of statelessness and abuse at the hands of Israel through many indisputable human rights violations. It's heartbreaking. That being said, I also stand in solidarity with my Israeli siblings who are fighting for recognition and the right to exist in the Jewish homeland. It doesn't mean the land isn't also sacred or home to Palestinian people (and Christians), but the history of this place for the Jewish people cannot be ignored or overlooked; after all, it was the 7th century Arab conquest that forced many of us violently out of our homelands, relegated those of us who stayed to "dhimmi" status (which really is a form of apartheid), and caused the foundations for much of the tensions we see today between Israelis and Palestinians. Jews too have been stateless since being forced into diaspora, and there is literally countless archaeological evidence that ties us to thousands of years in that land. It most certainly DOES NOT justify the treatment of Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, nor does it mean that Palestinians shouldn't have their own state (they absolutely should). But it does mean that Jewish people also have a right to be there.
What I'm struck with when I hear you talk about what you essentially refer to as the justifiable vengeance for Arab people against Israeli Jews, is the double-standard in terms of who is entitled to traumatic acting out of vengeance and who is supposed to be "the most empathetic of people." Why is it that you can justify why a Palestinian person would choose to blow up a pizza shop filled with children in Israel, but you can't comprehend why after half the Jewish population was wiped out in the lifetime of many Israelis -- entire families, villages, friends, and everything they had lost-- that you think they should behave with pure "empathy" but Palestinians and Arabs are entitled to anger and vengeance. This is completely fair and antithetical to human nature. Trauma makes everyone behave crazy--Arabs, Muslims and Jews alike. Jews and Palestinians can both understand and appreciate the despair of statelessness, of wandering, of persecution. And yet, the constant cycles of violence across both groups propel even more hatred and violence.
I see echoes of this in what you're saying so, assuming that any part of you is either inclined toward pacifism or at least aspires to peace, why can't you recognize across all groups of people, how moving forward necessitates eventually putting aside the desire and will for vengeance and coming together? I'm certainly not naive enough to think realistically that a group of people who have been killing each other's children for thousands of years are going to hold hands and sing together, but writing things like you've written serve only to justify and perpetuate this toxic cycle of anger and violence. You say "hubris is dangerous" but you don't see the hubris in selectively condemning Israel for exacting revenge while encouraging it only when it serves people you perceive to be like you.
2. You say "The U.S. maintains silence on Israel's nuclear warheads, while it tells the world that the region must be kept nuclear free," and that this "garners hate and revenge for Israel as well as for the U.S. in much of the world." To be fair, it's hypocritical and ridiculous for the United States to be dictating whether or not any country should possess nuclear weapons when it also possesses them and constantly leverages the power of its military to preside over the rest of the world and interfere in regional politics. However, Pakistan and India also have nuclear weapons; there is much reason to believe that Iran is interested in pursuing them; Saudi Arabia may not have nuclear weapons, but the sheer magnitude of their money, resources and military power puts them squarely in a position of dominance should a nuclear war break out.
Also worth noting is that at this point, nuclear war in general would likely mean complete annihilation for most human life on this earth. The irony of being angry about Israel having nukes that it could possibly use on its neighbors is that this is about as likely and productive as imagining North Korea would actually fire nukes at South Korea. If Israel threatened any of its neighbors with nuclear bombs, the Israeli people would also suffer--if not immediately then slowly but gruesomely through radioactive poisoning.
My personal belief is that no country should have nuclear weapons, including US and Israel. But are you really angry that Israel has nuclear weapons (as opposed to Pakistan or India or the literal thousands more bombs possessed by Russia and China, which also use countries around the world as proxies to advance their precarious political and economic agendas), or are you just looking for any possible reason to reinforce your hatred of Israel and your resentment of the fact that there is some looming threat -- nuclear bombs -- that makes the possibility of its total, instantaneous demise impossible or at least improbable?
3. You are justifiably angry about the colonial role America has played in disrupting and damaging much of this world. Again, I think that's spot on and fair. However, I think it's absurd to equate Israel with American colonialism, and frankly irrational to suggest that "America's blind support for Israel... buys it millions of enemies around the world." You seem to have a tendency to blame all of the world's problems and America's colonialism even on Israel; let us recall for a moment that two typical outcomes of colonialism are language and religion. English, Spanish and Arabic are among the most spoken languages in the world, with Christianity and Islam accounting for the vast majority of human religion on this earth to the tune of multiple billions of people. There is one country, with just over 6 million Jews (out of around 14 million Jews worldwide, less than 0.2% of the world's population) who speak Hebrew. Judaism is a reclusive and non-proselytizing religion. Israel as a government has undoubtedly espoused extremely right-wing, violent and exclusionary policies that ought to be condemned and accounted for. However, not every *single* country in the Middle East can blame America or Israel for their governments that engender some of the most violently fundamentalist Islamist regimes; neither America nor Israel caused the root differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and neither America nor Israel forced Syria to kill and oppress thousands of Palestinians. No one forced Egypt to refuse to cede land to Palestinians that they once claimed as their own in the Sinai Peninsula. Choosing to blame Israel for literally everything at a certain point is a scapegoat, and one that is either intentionally or subconsciously antisemitic. Jews are not to blame for the world's problems, even if many people think that it is so.
4. You can call Israel an apartheid state all you want, and as I mentioned before, there are undoubtedly atrocities that Israel is committing in its "territories" that it incontrovertibly should NOT "own." This land should be sovereign Palestinian land. However, 1/4 of Israel's CITIZENS are Muslim Arabs, and they have representation in Parliament, full and equal voting rights, can marry whomever they choose, and enjoy otherwise completely equal rights to their Jewish siblings--except for that they don't need to participate in the mandatory military conscription if they choose not to... You know what else would count as apartheid that I didn't hear you concerned about? The millions of Mizrahim (Arab Jews) who were violently murdered and expelled from places like Iran, Morocco, Yemen and Afghanistan over the last few hundred years. The Dhimmi status of Jews in the age of Arab empires--all the way through the Ottoman Empire until the British conquered-- is well documented. Jews in Israel don't seem to be doing a whole lot better in the context of Gaza and West Bank, but to be fair, if you look at the history of wars between its inception and the Yom Kippur War, there have been many attempts from coalitions of Arab States to annihilate Israel, and a constant refusal from Hamas to either recognize or stop terrorizing Israeli people.
You can deny it if you'd like, but the Jewish homeland and places such as the Western Wall mean to Jews what Mecca means to many Muslims, except for us there are not "many" holy sites throughout the region. Israel is our holy land. It shouldn't be *exclusively* ours and it absolutely must not justify harm or oppression towards others, but we have a right to be there. There was nowhere for European Jews to go during the Holocaust because we were robbed of our homeland-- robbed by Arab conquerors. And many of the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews who spread throughout the rest of the Middle East didn't incur much better treatment than the Jews who temporarily resided in Europe. Our DNA literally links us together, to this land. In fact, we are most closely tied in DNA to Palestinian people! Go figure!
The cycles of violence are futile, but if you are going to get upset by the fact that the British Empire "allowed" Israel to exist, you might as well be equally upset by literally every other country border that was carved up by the Balfour Declaration that created Israel, the Ottoman Empire itself which reflected imperialist violence in a not dissimilar way to that of the British Empire, and for that matter get upset by ALL borders and the lack of camaraderie throughout the Arab world for each other's brethren (again: see Syria, Lebanon and Egypt's history corresponding to Palestinian people), except as it relates to an antisemitic loathing of Israel and Jews.
I completely agree with you about America's role on the global stage; it's reprehensible and shameful. But you are taking enormous leaps and bounds to justify your hatred of Israel and talk yourself into believing that it doesn't rest on some fundamental antisemitism.
If you are still reading this, I appreciate you. I appreciate any meaningful dialogue we can have and I honor your experience and your perspective; we're all trying to understand justice and resilience in our own ways in this twisted world.
