I see too much confusion for any of this to end well. Avoidable confusion, that is. To avoid confusion, just like some math problems, is best to start from first principles and the salient facts.
Why even apparently good articles like
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/opinion/israel-gaza-antisemitism.html fail to provide needed clarity?
The article doesn’t even define ‘Zionism’ to make things clear. For me, Zionism refers to a somewhat radical and sometimes violent political movement in the early 20th century that supported the belief of European Jews that they had a right to Palestine as a new homeland. They went ahead, took it and didn’t ask nicely, exactly as Ben Gurion had promised they would.
The conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism is intentional. One said that you can’t be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, citing that equally you could not be against the civil rights movement and condemn racism at the same time. It’s an inappropriate example. There are no human rights being trampled if Zionists don’t get all of Palestine.
All kind of irrelevancies make it to the front page. “Israel has the right to exist.” It is a simplistic statement that leaves out what needs to be said, that Israel’s existence must to be implemented a different way. One that is not to the serious detriment of millions of their neighbors. This is a territorial dispute, not a philosophical one. it’s not subjective.
The moral high ground cannot possible depend on who commits the most or least shocking atrocities, unless we forget that war is hell. We shouldn’t if we have to assign blame justly.
Atrocities are not the root problem, the root problem is the war, and to assign blame we need to know who provoked it. No fog of war obscures the answer. The casus belli is clearly the Zionist land-grabbing that’s been going on for the last 120 years. He who starts is to blame, for one. As I said before: ‘We see the existence of "beginning wrongful violence" as an offense in Athenian law. See Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates and Demosthenes.’
Are Palestinian blameless and corruption free? That’s is the wrong question in this conversation. On the land-robbing question, they are certainly blameless. Did they commit barbarous acts. YES. Because it’s a bloody war, not a fashion show. And no matter the fashion in which they fail to resist conquest, they didn’t ask for any of this, and they will ALWAYS have a good reason for their terrorism, as good, I dare say, as John Adams, Tom Jefferson, et al, had.
Conquest has been sort of legal in human affairs because conquerors said so, and they also wrote the history. No wonder that after the worse couple of wars ever, in the last century, with only Pyrrhic victories to be had, the survivors gathered and decided at long last that conquest is a bad thing, and that 50 million dead by bullet, explosive or worse, was a clue not to be missed. So, after those wars the United Nations made conquest illegal, and a violation of international law.
So, whoever, pushes people out of their homes at bayonet point, AFTER 1945, is an international criminal. BEFORE, they get a pass. If Jordan or Syria or any other Arab country that was an UN state member at the time, pushed Jews out of their land at bayonet point, let them be punished. Goose-gander, punish Zionists equally for similar violations.
This would not apply to Palestinians, however, as far as the law, since they are not a country that is a full UN member. It is an important difference that puts Palestinians on high ground, legally and morally.
Finally, to resolve any pending ambiguity, if you take the land under Israel control today, and subtract the land that was granted in 1948, you will see a large remainder. That is the land Israel conquered illegally as UN member.
Can you do the same for the Palestinians, or other Arabs for that matter. Are they holding any land illegally? I don’t think so. This indicates also were guilt should be placed.
Finally, what do you say to a Palestinian who complaints about the war. Do you say. “You should get out of the Promise Land”? I hope not, but there is no better answer either.
What do you say to an Israeli who complains about the war? That’s an easy one. You say the same we said to Japan, if you give Pearl Harbors, you get Hiroshimas.
The ‘Pearl Harbor’ Zionists gave Palestinians is called the the Nakba (the catastrophe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
Naturally, poor Palestinians have much less than a Hiroshima to offer in reply, but they do what they can, and I applaud their courage, knowing the likely consequences.
Hamas are terrorists. They fit the original definition, before 9/11 completely charged the word with all kinds of nastiness, forgetting that the French Resistance and the Founding Fathers were terrorists too. So sorry that political complexities cannot be carried by a single word. A terrorist can be a good guy, after all, if they fight the Reich, King George, or land-robbing Zion.
Terrorists who fight to bring back medieval religious practices, like ISIS, are not the good guys clearly, by a vast difference, and yet we use the same word. More confusion…
So, since 1948, who is that clings to the land obtained by acts of conquest? It’s Zion again.
Israel IS a democracy, but more like that of Athens than the European and American democracies of today. They have elections and that’s it. They also have Arab citizens that are officially discriminated. If this is a reason to think supporting Israel come what may, and the high price we are paying for it financially and reputationally is a good investment… it’s a rather poor one.