Two countries have a large Jewish community: Israel and the United States both around 6 million people. But out of a population of more than million, the 6 million Jews in the United States are but a small minority. The state of Israel was founded after the Second World War, in In the Middle East, in a place where Jews had lived for thousands of years with their Arab neighbours. Because of their history and religion, Jews had felt a strong connection with this region for generations.
Many European Jews who had survived the Holocaust, went to live in Israel after the war. Many Jews from Arab Muslim countries also fled or migrated to Israel. The United Nations supported the division of what was then still called Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab part.
And they supported the creation of the new state of Israel. Among the Arab population, however, there was a lot of resistance. This assumption is based in part on the belief that Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East.
But Jews have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years. Israel was created in An estimated , to , Palestinians fled or were expelled in the subsequent Arab-Israeli war.
In later years, about , Jews left Arab countries. About two-thirds of them settled in Israel, and the other third elsewhere. Many of these Jews had been forcibly expelled. Many Jews settled in Israel from Europe. It is important to remember the context of European pogroms and Nazi genocide that obliged many of them to flee. It merely provides some context as to why so many Jews have settled in Israel. Thus the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel is legitimate, as long as it does not simultaneously question the right of Israel to exist as a state.
Many Jewish people both within and outside Israel who are concerned about Palestinian rights support this movement. Similarly, although it is not strictly accurate to call Israel an apartheid state, it is within the realm of acceptable political rhetoric. Legally speaking, apartheid can only occur within a state. The two pacts which sealed Palestine's future were both concluded by Britain. First we signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with France, pledging to divvy up Ottoman spoils in the Levant.
A year later, in , the Balfour Declaration promised a national home for the Jewish people. Under international law the declaration was null and void since Palestine did not belong to Britain - under the pact of the League of Nations it belonged to Turkey. This then is the potted history of the iniquities surrounding its own birth that Israel must acknowledge in order for peace to have a chance. After years of war, peace comes from forgiving, not forgetting; people never forget but they have an extraordinary capacity to forgive.
Just look at South Africa, which showed the world that a cathartic truth must precede reconciliation. Far from being a force for liberation and safety after decades of suffering, the idea that Israel is some kind of religious birthright has only imprisoned Jews in a never-ending cycle of conflict. The "promise" breeds an arrogance which institutionalises the inferiority of other peoples and generates atrocities against them with alarming regularity.
It allows soldiers to defy their consciences and blast unarmed schoolchildren. It gives rise to legislation seeking to prevent the acquisition of territory by non-Jews. Indeed, Israel publicly admits that it does not hold the land for the benefit of its citizens but holds it, in trust, on behalf of the Jews of the world for all time.
This is something that happens in practice, but that obviously Palestinians in the occupied territories — including Jerusalem — do not see as fair, especially as they are constantly forcibly evicted off their ancestral homeland by Israel to make way for foreign Jewish settlers, and because Palestinians in their diaspora are denied the same right to come and live. Sixth, it means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in lived in historical Palestine ie what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza and at that time made up , of its , inhabitants; and who were driven off their land through war, violent eviction or fear.
He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer. Moreover, Muslims wanting to take a similar, religiously exclusive narrative, could point out that while Jerusalem is mentioned times in the Bible, it is not mentioned once in the Torah as such — a fact that any Biblical Concordance will easily confirm. It has to do with the very Covenant of God in the Bible with Ancient Israelites of the promise of a homeland for Jews.
God says to Abraham in the Bible:. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.
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