By Husam Dughman
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” So goes a well-known saying. This was probably how many Israelis have been feeling since the horrendous terrorist attacks by Hamas on the 7th of October 2023. Israel had previously been taken by surprise on the 6th of October 1973 when a coalition of forces led by Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, thereby starting the Yom Kippur War. Who would have thought that Israelis would be caught napping again 50 years later, almost to the day?
Not surprisingly, Israel reacted promptly and decisively by attacking Gaza where Hamas was based, something which has been going on to this day. In the prosecution of its war with Hamas, Israel has seen most of the world’s initial sympathy towards it evaporate, to be replaced by much zeal and vocal support for the Palestinians. The reasons behind this volte-face on the war are not entirely clear, but one suspects that a number of factors converged to bring about widespread hostility to Israel. One of those is the age-old antisemitism. Countries with Muslim and Christian backgrounds had been exposed to religiously inspired feelings of hatred towards Jews for thousands of years. This has made many people there easily prone to antisemitism, whether at the conscious or even subconscious level. It is astounding that the world has not been anywhere near as vocal in its opposition to and outrage at far greater numbers of casualties than Gaza’s, in places such as Syria, Yemen, Sudan (hundreds of thousands of deaths in each one of those), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (six million deaths since 1996). Even the persecuted Muslim Uyghurs and the persecuted Muslim Rohingya have not been at the receiving end of a tiny fraction of the sympathy and support accorded to the Palestinians. Is that enthusiastic support an expression of strong love for the Palestinians in particular? Not likely. One has to bear in mind that the Palestinians have not been that popular in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), especially where they had resided in big numbers. In 1970-1971, they clashed with the Jordanians because they were seen as posing a major threat to the stability of the kingdom. Following what became known as Black September, Palestinian fighters were finally expelled to Lebanon. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, they clashed with the Lebanese who complained that the Palestinians had built their own state within the Lebanese state, something which partly accounted for the 1982 killing of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese militias in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. In 1990-1991, Kuwaitis reacted strongly to widespread Palestinian support for Saddam’s invasion of their country, and they subsequently expelled most of the Palestinians residing in Kuwait. Palestinians also faced a lot of antagonism in countries like Libya, Syria, and Iraq. The main reason for this seems to be the fact that Palestinians by and large sided with Qaddafi, Assad, and Saddam Hussein, leaders who were intensely loathed by their own populations because of the extensive crimes they had committed against them. One, therefore, has the feeling that the many people who stand with the Palestinians in the current conflict do so much more because Israel is involved in this war, rather than because of their love for the Palestinians, especially because a good number of people had begun to show their support for the Palestinians and their hostility to the Israelis even before Israel initiated its military retaliation against Hamas.
A second reason may have to do with the left in Western countries. Many of those leftists have regularly been apologists for dictators and tyrants, be they in MENA, Latin America, or elsewhere. They appear to have joined hands with wokers, particularly from Gen Z and, to a certain extent, millennials, in an attempt to oppose Israel. A recent survey conducted by Harvard CAPS/ Harris Poll shows that 80% of Americans support Israel, while 20% support Hamas, with much of the Hamas support coming from Gen Z and, somewhat, from millennials. In addition to the above-mentioned groups of people, a considerable amount of opposition to Israel tends to come from people who have a knee-jerk reaction to what they perceive as imperialism or colonialism. Those include black Americans, Latin Americans, and the Irish. A third reason may be the large-scale campaign of misinformation spread far and wide by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their ilk in favour of Hamas, their Muslim Brotherhood brethren. Countries such as Turkey and Qatar, as well as organizations such as CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), in addition to the Qatar-funded Aljazeera, all fit into this category. The combination of the above-mentioned factors, among others, serves to explain the astonishing naïveté with which highly agitated people with overwhelmed critical skills and superficial understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict readily believe slanderous allegations against Israel for which one is unable to detect any solid foundation.
Various claims have been made about Israelis being colonizers; that they forcibly took Palestinian lands; that they represent a colonial project; that they are people who went to Palestine from Europe and to Europe they should return; that the only reason why the UN voted for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was because the members who did so were mostly colonizers themselves; that since then, the Israelis have been occupying, oppressing, and dispossessing the Palestinians; that Israel is an apartheid state; that it is now causing mass starvation in Gaza; and that it is committing a genocide and an ethnic cleansing in Gaza and has been doing so to Palestinians for the last 76 years. Some of those accusations have been cited by the United Nations, especially by the ICC (International Criminal Court) prosecutor when he recently said he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif (aka Abu Khaled). Even more recently, the ICJ (International Court of Justice) ordered Israel to halt its campaign in Rafah, the last refuge of the remaining three or four Hamas battalions.
Unlike European colonizers of North, Central, and South America, as well as those of Australia and New Zealand, Jews actually have thousands of years of history in the land we now call Israel/ the Palestinian territories. The Jewish holy scripture is full of references to the Land of Israel and to Jerusalem. That land apparently went through a long series of foreign control, including that of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. There was a period of about 100 years- 140 BC to 37 BC- when the Jews of the land were governed by the Jewish Hasmonean Dynasty. Following the crushing of the Second Jewish Revolt against Roman rule in Judaea in the 2nd century AD, the Romans changed the name of Judaea to Syria Palaestina. The name was derived from the word “Philistia” which ancient Greek writers had used to describe the region in today’s Israel/ Palestinian territories that was inhabited by the Philistines, a people who had immigrated to the region from southern Europe. When the Arabs took the land from the Byzantines, they called it “falasteen”. Interestingly, those who denigrate modern-day Israel for being a product of what they regard as a colonial project seem to be unaware that the area covering all of the Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority countries outside of the Arabian Peninsula is around 400 times bigger than the area of Israel, which makes it the product of a 7th century AD colonial project that is 400 times bigger than that of which Israel has been accused. From the 7th century AD to the 20th century AD, the area in question was mostly ruled by various Muslim caliphates and dynasties, ending with the Ottomans.
In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious allies- mainly Britain and France- took over the lands previously ruled by the defeated Ottomans, with a French mandate over Syria and a British mandate over Palestine. That effectively separated the lands now occupied by Syria and Lebanon from those that are now occupied by Jordan and Israel/ Palestinian territories. The British then gave about three quarters of that land under their mandate to King Abdullah, and that was used to form Transjordan, later called the Kingdom of Jordan. The remaining one quarter of the land became the subject of a two-state proposal by the UN in 1947. Palestinian Jews accepted it, but Palestinian Arabs rejected it. Israel declared its independence in 1948. Most of those who soon recognized Israel’s independence- whether de facto, de jure, or both- were not in fact mainly colonizers, as some of Israel’s detractors have alleged; instead, they were countries from Scandinavia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, in addition to countries like Iran and Ireland. Furthermore, Israelis are not all Europeans like some denigrators of Israel have asserted; instead, only about 45% of them are of European origin- who even further back in history were of the Jewish diaspora- while 55% originally hail from the land we now call Israel/ Palestinian territories, as well as from other countries in MENA such as Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Following Israel’s declaration of independence, the Palestinian Arabs and seven countries from the region sent armed forces to attack Israel. They lost. That failure became known in Arabic as An-Nakba (The Catastrophe), a word coined for that purpose by the Syrian pan-Arabist Zureiq to refer to the demoralizing failure of the above-mentioned forces to defeat Israel and preclude the Jewish right to self-determination. From 1948 to 1967, the Palestinians had the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, although they were governed by Egypt and Jordan respectively. Astoundingly, they never attempted to form a state of their own in those areas. Despite being urged to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by people like Bourguiba, who was the president of Tunisia at that time, the Palestinians adamantly refused to do so, preferring instead to insist on the need for the formation of one future Palestinian state, without the existence of Israel. That is the exact meaning of the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Another chant in Arabic translates as, “From the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab.”) Not only will Israel never accept its own destruction, but Israelis will never accept a binational state for demographic reasons, among others. Currently, there are eight million Israeli Jews living in Israel and half a million living in the West Bank. There are two million Arabs (Israeli citizens and permanent residents) living within the state of Israel, three million in the West Bank, two million in Gaza, and around six million of the diaspora. In this envisaged binational state, there would be eight and a half million Jews and thirteen million Arabs/ Palestinians. That would make the Jews only 40% of the population. Given the higher birth rate among the Palestinians, the Jews in that state would become an increasingly smaller minority, something to which they will never consent for obvious reasons. Several major attempts have been made over the last decades with regard to the two-state solution, but they have all failed. Nowadays, the two-state solution seems to be more far-fetched than ever before, in spite of Western countries trying to tout it as the best solution. The Israelis will not likely accept it partly because it would be seen as a reward for the October the 7th massacre, and partly because of its potentially dangerous implications: Who would govern this new Palestinian state? Hamas appears to be still popular amongst Palestinians, certainly far more popular than the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. What if democratic elections were held in that state and people voted Hamas into power? What if Hamas staged a successful coup d'état, regardless of the votes? What if the government of that newly independent, sovereign Palestinian state elected to form a military alliance with Iran? What if it decided to give military facilities to Iran on its soil, next to Israel? What if the Palestinians agreeing to the two-state solution were not really sincere in their recognition of Israel’s right to exist? What of the political culture of the Palestinian civilians themselves? After all, a recent opinion poll (March 2024) conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 71% of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip approve of October the 7th atrocities. It also found that about two thirds of Palestinians blame Israel for their suffering, most of the rest blame the US, but only 9% of them blame Hamas. The poll states that almost all Palestinians think that Israel is committing crimes against humanity, but that almost all Palestinians believe that Hamas is not committing any such crimes. It also states that Palestinians’ satisfaction with the role played by Hamas and Yahya Sinwar in the current war remains high. Not only that, but 59% of Palestinians polled say that if it was up to them, they would like to see Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip. That does not augur well for a peaceful future with the Jewish state, and it is a major reason why the Israelis are not particularly keen on a two-state solution at the present time. That is also why they are determined that one of their three objectives in this war- apart from the crushing of Hamas and the returning of the hostages- is ensuring that the Gaza Strip never poses a threat to Israel again, part of which will have to involve the deradicalization of the Gazan population, à la Germans and Japanese following the end of World War II.
Israel has for long been seeking permanent peace with MENA countries, but to no avail. Many of those MENA countries are nations and people intent on supporting- or even committing- genocidal attacks on Israel. Yet, it is Israel that is accused of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Most people who use such words do not seem to know what they really mean. Let’s take the accusation of ethnic cleansing: In 1948, there were 150,000 Arabs living in the state of Israel. Today, there are 2 million of them. That is an increase of over 1,300%. In 1967, the population of the West Bank was 600,000. Today, it is 3 million. That is an increase of 500%. In 1967, the population of the Gaza Strip was 400,000. Today, it is 2 million. Again, an increase of 500%. Those figures do not in any way indicate any ethnic cleansing at work by Israel. If people really want to know about an actual ethnic cleansing, they can compare the number of Jews who lived in MENA one hundred years ago with that of Jews who live there now. That is the real ethnic cleansing. Now, let’s take the accusation of genocide: In the 1930s and 1940s, there was no war between the Germans and the Jews. Yet, the Nazi leadership had it as its policy to do away with the Jews, people who were just innocent, unarmed civilians. It set about executing its plan in the most morally reprehensible manner imaginable. Six million of the nine and a half million Jews of Europe were systematically murdered in the most horrific way possible. That was a genocide. Nothing of the sort has happened to the Palestinians by any stretch of the imagination. Israel does not have it as its policy to exterminate the Palestinians. Moreover, the numbers mentioned above show a huge increase, rather than a massive decrease, in the size of the various Palestinian populations. It, therefore, stands to reason that there has not been any genocide there at all. A high number of people point to the current civilian deaths in Gaza as “proof” of genocide. However, they err: Apart from the fact that there is no evidence showing that Israel is intent on the extermination of the Palestinians there, Israel’s conduct in the war points in the opposite direction. It is true that in wars involving urban areas and aerial bombardment people die, no matter how precise the weaponry or how determined the armed forces are to avoid civilian casualties. It is also true that sometimes faulty intelligence can lead to tragic incidents. It is true, too, that in all wars, there are some fighters who are just bad apples and who may commit crimes against humanity. No war has ever been free of those. However, the way Israel has generally conducted its Gaza war appears to show a high degree of restraint in avoiding civilian casualties. On numerous occasions, Palestinians have been warned well in advance to get out of harm’s way. Over a million Gazans have accordingly relocated to safer areas and saved their own lives. Contrast this with Hamas’s policy of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Hamas did not even bother to build air raid or bomb shelters for the Gazan population at large, while many Hamas militants and their families live safely in the tunnels underground.
The first time I ever heard of how Israel was keen on moving people out of harm’s way happened when I was engaged in a conversation with a Palestinian woman who was living in Libya at the time, and who had lived in Lebanon at the time of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. She told me that Israelis were humane in that war. I asked her for clarification. She said that anytime they wanted to attack, they would drop flyers for people to move out of harm’s way before they launched their attacks. She said neither the Syrian, nor the Lebanese, nor the Palestinian armed forces themselves did that. This is impressive, considering Israel’s loss of the element of surprise which such forewarnings must entail. Even some individuals versed in warfare, especially urban warfare, seem to concur that Israel has been more careful in avoiding civilian casualties than any other army in modern history: John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, is one of those. Former US Army general David Petraeus is reportedly another. As a matter of fact, such allegations can be verified on the basis of actual statistics: The estimates for civilian deaths in the current Israel-Gaza war have varied. According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the total death toll for Gazans is about 30,000, with 14,000 deaths being of members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and 16,000 being of civilians. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has cited comparable figures. The Hamas-run Ministry of Health, however, has given a figure of around 36,000 Palestinian deaths, but no distinction is made between civilian and combatant deaths in that estimate. The UN has recently drastically reduced the number of deaths of Gazan women and children by almost a half, in correction of previously released Hamas figures. If we assume, not unreasonably in my opinion, that Hamas’s estimate of the number of its dead fighters is about 8,000 out of the 36,000 total deaths cited, we can try to work out an average between the Israeli and the Hamas estimates as follows: The average number of all people killed- combatants and civilians- is 33,000; the average number of dead combatants is 11,000; and the average number of civilians killed is 22,000. Let’s take the number of deaths of German civilians in World War II: There have been different estimates of those, ranging from 500,000 to 2 million. If we take the average, somewhere around 1.2 million, we find that the average number of dead German civilians per year in that war was 200,000. If we compare that to any eight-month period (on average)- which is how long the Israel/Hamas war has been going on so far- the figure is 133,000 dead civilians. The above-mentioned estimate of 22,000 dead civilians in the Gazan war is actually under 17% of the corresponding German estimate. As a matter of fact, even if we took Hamas’s (probably inflated) figures, and even if we assumed for the sake of argument that the 36,000 dead individuals cited by Hamas were all civilians, that would only be 27% of the number of German civilians killed in any eight-month period (on average). Furthermore, while estimates for German civilian deaths resulting specifically from Allied strategic bombing vary, the average is around 425,000 deaths over a period of six years (1939-1945). That is over 47,000 civilian deaths for any eight-month period (on average). The aforementioned estimate of 22,000 civilian deaths in Gaza is, therefore, under one half of that of German civilians over the same period of time. Considering the fact that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields, the above-mentioned figures highlight how carefully Israel has conducted this war compared to some other wars involving other nations.
The accusations levelled at Israel of using starvation as a war policy and that it is an apartheid state suffer from as much lack of insight as other accusations mentioned above. First of all, if one wants to find out if Israel is an apartheid state or not, one has to compare apples with apples, not apples with oranges. South Africa was an apartheid state because the state’s laws unashamedly segregated whites and blacks living within the South African state and denied any voting rights to blacks. No such thing has happened to Israeli Arabs living within the state of Israel, for they enjoy full equality with Israeli Jews in the eyes of the law and they have voting rights, just like Israeli Jews do. In fact, they now have ten individuals from their community as members of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). Nevertheless, it is to be acknowledged that in spite of their full rights according to the law, there is a certain degree of discrimination against them by some Israeli Jews. This means that the reality falls short of the ideal guaranteed to them by the laws of Israel. In my estimation, far from being like the blacks of South Africa during the days of apartheid, the current situation of Israeli Arabs appears to be akin to that of black Americans in the US of today. There, too, blacks are equal to whites in the eyes of the law, but the reality falls short of that. Still, just like the rights enjoyed by black Americans, with all of the shortcomings in their day-to-day life, are nevertheless better than those enjoyed by people living in sub-Saharan Africa, the rights enjoyed by Israeli Arabs- in spite of any shortcomings in their daily lives- are still way better than those enjoyed by people in Arabic-speaking countries, probably with the exception of Tunisia. As for the accusation of mass starvation in Gaza, that seems to be highly exaggerated: There has been no real evidence of such starvation. One remembers the footage of mass starvation in Ethiopia in 1984 and in Somalia in 2011. No such footage has been seen in the case of Gazans. People shown in the footage from the Gaza Strip appear to be well-fed. One remembers a while ago, some footage showed a dying Gazan child with his distraught father at his bedside, and reporters were talking about mass starvation. However, his father looked well-fed. Why would he feed himself and let his child die of starvation? Some other sick children were shown to the press, but there was no evidence that their suffering was caused by mass starvation, rather than by disease. One suspects that Hamas cynically used those poor children and their families for propaganda purposes. I remember once hearing a Hamas member saying that the way Hamas individuals and officials talked to audiences in MENA was very different from the way they talked to those in the West. With the MENA audiences, Hamas members talked about what they saw as their heroism in fighting their “Zionist” enemy. However, with Western audiences, they almost always talked about “women and children” because they considered Western people to be “softies”.
Israel is currently at the forefront of fighting genocidal Islamism in MENA, led by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, namely Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Shi’ite militias of Iraq and Syria. Those, in addition to the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas and the governments of Turkey and Qatar are part), the Salafis, and the jihadis pose the greatest threat not only to Israel, but also to the West, and even more so to the minority of freedom-loving, liberal, and enlightened people of MENA. In an early 1930s correspondence on the actual reasons behind wars, two German-speaking, Jewish scholars- Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein- try to understand why supposedly civilised human beings would engage in the violent, destructive acts of war. Freud explains that while idealism may be a conscious motive for waging war and inflicting violence, a destructive impulse is in fact at work at the subconscious level. He calls for the strengthening of our intellect so that it can control our instincts. Most interestingly, Freud urges the formation of a class of independent thinkers since, he argues, both the nature of the rule of politicians and the religious ban on liberties tend to be opposed to such independence of thought. Is it any wonder, then, that the dearth of independent thinkers in today’s world has given way to the nonsense of misguided politicians, the delirium of genocidal religious entities, and the abysmal foolishness of the masses?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Husam Dughman is a Libyan Canadian political scientist, religious thinker, linguist, and an expert on immigrants and refugees. He received his formal education in Libya and the UK. Mr. Dughman later worked as a university professor of political science in Libya. Due to confrontations with the Qaddafi regime, he resigned from his university position and subsequently worked in legal translation. Mr. Dughman has been working with new immigrant and refugee services in both Canada and the US since 2006.
Husam Dughman has published a book entitled Tête-à-tête with Muhammad. He has also written numerous articles on politics and religion. He has just completed the full manuscript of a book which he hopes to have published in the near future. The new book is an in-depth examination of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and the non-religious school of thought.
