"Shalom, Motherfucker."

Recently a Jewish blogger in Israel wrote a piece with the above mentioned title after he defriended a professional acquaintance who had been routinely posting anti-semitic messages. It's a brutally honest account of his life in Israel and he makes a pretty good case that most people are ignorant fools who can't see what is actually going on. An excerpt:

"...I will not apologise for surviving.

For surviving missiles intended to kill me. The fact they didn’t kill me doesn’t mean they weren’t sent with the intention to murder. We have a defence system, shelters, evacuation procedures and governments who take care of us – I will not apologise for living and surviving thanks to being prepared because we have a culture that celebrates our lives and cherishes them instead of sending 10-year old children to be fighters and bombers. I will not apologise for having a business, a home, a family and friends here who want normal lives and to live in peace with our neighbors. I will not apologise for existing and I want nothing more than to co-exist quietly with neighbors who accept me here.

But this is not what Hamas wants.

Let me be very clear. Hamas is trying to kill ME. My family. My baby son. All of us here. That is their purpose. Get it through your heads – that is what is happening. And it’s VERY personal. For all of us here.

Our Israeli civilians – people like me – are being targeted to die. Palestinian innocents on the other side are dying because my army is trying to protect us from thugs operating in those areas who are launching rockets at my populated cities. If Palestinian innocents are dying it’s because of jihadists and terrorists (other names for thugs), but NOT because of the State of Israel that is trying to protect its citizens as any sovereign country would do."


FOCUS: How do you feel about the crisis in Israel? What do you think the ultimate outcome will be?

Alt Focus: Antisemitism in general. If you are Jewish, what has your experience been.

For myself, I think that most people who are protesting have no real clue what has been going on or have any idea about the history of the area. Selena Gomez posting her uninformed self-righteous tweets just goes to prove this fact. For instance there has never been an Arab state in the region where Israel resides.

As to antisemitism in general, I never understood it. It's not even logical. If ever there was a race of people who should be held up as an example of how to achieve success, it's the Jews.

 

It's best not to take sides in this if you're not directly involved. Both sides are the good guys AND the bad guys. Hamas is an organized murder squad masquerading as a de-facto governing body and their one and only hope in life is to drive every Jew in the world into the sea. They get support from their public in the same way John Gotti did: by throwing a block party once a year and suddenly everyone thinks that they're Robin Hood. They have fired THOUSANDS of rockets and mortar rounds blindly into Israel, killing whoever they can without provocation.

On the other hand you have Israel, who have forced Palestinians into a disgusting pig-pen called Gaza where people are not allowed out and forced to live in the biggest shithole on earth sans infrastructure. The modern Gaza is more of a concentration camp than a community, and one of the most per capita populated places on Earth.

Palestinians and Jews will not get along. They can't. The very core of their beliefs and what's important to them are literally stacked on top of each other, and by that I'm talking about Salomon's temple mount in the world's most holy city, Jerusalem. You see Islam's third holiest site, The Al-Aqsa mosque which sits directly on top of the site of Solomon's temple, which as you probably know the mount's Western Wall is (now) the holiest site in Judaism which once kept the Holy of Holies, the Tabernacle and the Ark Of The Covenant. Each side hates each other for this and consider the other the trespasser, and they will never EVER back down. Just up the street is the Dome Of The Rock which is holy to all of Monotheism and shared equally by them.

This is a 1000 year war the will probably go on for another thousand years because these are two personalities that are designed to bounce off each other. I say the smart thing would be for Israel to pull back to its original 1967 borders as the ultimate olive branch but I doubt that will happen and who knows if that will make things worse or better.

 

There was a great comment on this on reddit the other day...
Upfront - I haven't had time to read it, and all the links entirely, but it may be interesting reading to some of you guys.

 

It's been said that anti-Semitism is unique from other forms of prejudice because it sometimes takes the form of a mental illness. And I think that has some merit to it. Anti-Semitism has been around for about as long as the Jews and there's always some consistent features, like conspiratorial thinking (i.e. the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Think of everyday examples in which people are racist against, say, black people. We know people with stereotypically black sounding names on a resume are less likely to get hired, or security guards will follow black people through stores on suspicion of shoplifting. Extremist anti-Semitic Christians are often, curiously, huge supporters of the state of Israel (something about bringing on the apocalypse). There are some racists who might advocate sending all black people to Africa, but wouldn't exactly want their government to maintain close political and economic ties once all the blacks had been deported.

Which is exactly the point that anti-Semitism isn't logical. It is a prejudice that is in name against a religion but that targets individuals based on ancestry, without regard to their actual beliefs.

 

That's exactly what it is.
Neither will stop until the other side capitulates/disappears/surrenders. There's no end to this without that.

 

I know very very little about this conflict other than what I have picked up from news. I can share this anecdote however:

I had a girlfriend who is British and classified herself as Arab. We lived in Kansas City MO. At the time I was taking classes in Krav Maga which is an Israeli martial art and was obsessed. Sometimes I wore shirts over to her house that had the logo and name on the front. Her father was due to visit from the UK and wanted to meet me. She begged me not to wear any Krav Maga gear and especially not to mention it or anything favorable about Jews, Israel or anything related. In the end she was so nervous about any possible reaction that she declined to let me meet him and we broke up shortly afterward.

Shit is in the blood and no joke.

 

I can attest to this type of behavior. And have been given some seriously bad looks from Arabic people when I would sometimes wear my IDF shirt.(my cousin who was in it sent it to me) My upbringing was never anything but complete acceptance of other cultures. Its hard to keep such rose colored glasses on as you get older though and see all these suicide bombings on the news and hear utter vilification of Jewish people from all over the world.

 

Fair point.

It shouldn't take the disappearance of an entire people to bring some kind of peace/resolution to the situation.

 

I don't think it's true that neither side wants peace. As the famous quote goes "If Palestine were to lay down their guns tomorrow, there would be no war. If Israel were to lay down theirs, there would be no Israel - Benjamin Netanyahu"

Israel, from the moment of inception, has been threatened with annihilation and know that if they relax their vigilance or deterrence then they cease to exist. Internally or externally, they are the one place on *Earth* where being Jewish does not subject you to sanctions ranging from anti-semitic jokes all the way to violence and death. They have to maintain their sovereignty or face the possibility of the destruction of Jews as a people. So they won't ever stop defending themselves against incursion or terrorism and sometimes go over the line to do it. However, when people stop trying to destroy them, they are quite happy to stop fighting. They won't relax their vigilance, they won't stop their training, but they'll stop fighting. Israel doesn't want to wipe out the rest of the region or the populations around them, the same cannot be said in reverse however, and thus the violence continues.

Hamas' charter is a call to war against Jews, Israel isn't going to let them succeed.

 

Any time I can predict, with 100% accuracy, whether a facebook post is going to be pro-israeli or pro-palestinian based on the last name of the person posting, I'm pretty sure everyone's full of shit.

 

The conflict is a clusterfuck that is caused by a combination of multiple things:

1. Israel and Islam are completely incompatible. They simply cannot exist in the same region; they are mutually exclusive. You will not have peace while they are together.

2. Most of the incompatibility is due to the Muslim world, which happens to be located right where Israel is. The quote about "If Israel were to lay down its guns, there would be no Israel" is pretty apt. Take a look at the atrocities committed during the Yom Kippur war, and you'll see what Syria and Egypt had planned for the rest of Israel.

3. Israel is powerful enough at this point to dictate its own terms. It's fought three separate conflicts of Israel vs Islam, and it's won decisively each time. It cannot be scared into just capitulating; it's here to stay.

4. In the name of achieving peace, Israel has butchered Palestinians without regard for the division between militant and civilian. In many cases, its rhetoric has approached its enemies' mindset - "There's no difference, as they all want us to die anyway. Fuck 'em." It has created a massive ghetto filled with people who are now frothing with justified hatred toward their captors.

5. The world is far less concerned with actually finding a solution than they are concerned with pushing their own ideology. Whether that's pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, they're more interested in scoring moral points for themselves than they are with actually working something out.

If I ran the zoo, here's what I'd do: Deport all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the course of several years. They would go into a single region that borders a Muslim country. A DMZ would be created between them and Israel, similar to the divide between North and South Korea but on a smaller scale. Money would be allocated to spur development of infrastructure and education over the course of the next twenty years. Israel would foot the lion's share of the bill to accomplish this, as the creation of their country required this to happen eventually. The remainder would be contributed by Muslim countries and the UN. If necessary, Israelis would be displaced in a similar manner to make room for the new Palestinian state.

Segregation is the only way to reach a lasting peace without killing millions of people. The ghetto's current position basically guarantees oppression because there is no way for Israel to loosen its stranglehold without opening itself up to being attacked. Since they can't remain there, they have to be moved. I can't see any other way. Unfortunately, no one would ever support that solution, so we'll just remain with nonfunctioning ceasefires and bloodshed every few years.

 

I think finding a political group, religiously affiliated or otherwise in the middle east that has held military power long enough to pull a trigger and not committed despicable acts is like finding a choir boy in a catholic boys school who doesn't know what cock tastes like. Which is to say if you think you've found one, just give it a minute.

I've been to the holocaust museum in Sydney, watching Jewish families - kids not old enough to be in school running around through the life size photo printed 3d layouts of their grandparent's neighbors being slaughtered by Nazis and listened to them teach virulent hatred to kids who I honestly wouldn't think are old enough to know the difference between being a meanie and being a murderer. I can't imagine how those kids grow up with any kind of perspective other than "strike first, kill the anti Semite before it happens again."

My muslim friends are ultra non conservative. 3 are very openly gay, one is trans, and they all drink booze like a guilty Anglican at a family gathering, and most of them really like bacon and are generally pretty modern people. Muslim in the sense that my roommate, a swinger who's active in the kink scene and hasn't been inside of a church in years is apparently Roman Catholic. I'm honest enough to admit that my jewish friends are also much more more Jew-ish than all the way Jew, and my christian friends are generally pretty fucking lax about the premarital sex thing. There are awesome, modern, casual muslims out there - much like there are supremely dickish religious fuckwits in almost all the major religions. Hell, I know a couple who are very observant Buddhists, and utterly awful people.

Watching the practical realities of shit play out in Israel? I have a hard time looking at any group with explosives and thinking they have clean hands. I can't really differentiate on any practical level Israeli collateral damage from terrorism civilian targeting.

Recreating Israel where they did created a fucked situation. I have zero clue how you get a good situation out of it. But fuck me it's hard to pick a regime to feel sorry for. But I sometimes I like to imagine a world where religion was reserved for adults. Where you have a right to cancer sticks, fire arms, and the belief in an invisible man in the sky who watches while you poop, but not until you're 18 and not while driving. Where teaching a minor about religion was fined, and socially perceived like selling a kid cigarettes and tequila. Where underaged Christians were ticketed like underaged drinkers. I wonder if religion would still exist in two or three generations if children were raised free from it.

Although I suspect then we'd just see racism and classism spike instead. People love to hate each other.

 

It not that teaching religion should be banned, but they are teaching kids racism/hatred.

 

Unfortunately some of the tenets of Abrahamic religions are xenophobic at best, condoning genocide at worst. Couple certain interpretations with the centuries old blood feud and here we are. Reza Aslan's No God But God was a wonderful read on just how confusing Islam can be. Also remember these guys were so fractious and quarrelsome with each other they allowed a modest, but strong and at times equally fractious, European force to occupy their lands during the crusades, and in World War I almost let the Turks sweep through the Arabian Peninsula instead of banding together. However, the one thing these groups all have in common now is an absolute loathing for Jewish people.

What nobody is really asking concerning Hamas is *why* they came to power. Hamas is a state sanctioned terror group, as well as a governing body. Why were they able to gain any traction in the first place? Same reason extremists in this region have done so in the past: a necessary response to violence perpetrated by another group. You treat a certain population like sub-human garbage, with violence, with hate, of course they are eventually going to respond in kind. It's been escalating for decades. The Gaza Strip should never have been allowed to "flourish" by any international body, it is the same pre-genocide tactics the Nazis started. I sympathize with Palestine, but they are not helping their cause in the slightest.

Omegaham's idea is actually pretty damn good. None of the parties involved would go for it. They'd rather continue a blood feud and blow each other the hell up. What will probably happen is some kind of gradual assimilation over the next 100 years.