ISRAEL-HAMAS CONFLICT

I’ve Just (Non-Ethnically) Cleansed My “Compassionate” Anti-Israel Friends

Being pro-Palestine is not the issue here

A woman who ‘befriended’ me on Facebook some years ago just updated her cover photo with a graphic that shows the historical division of land between Israel and Palestine.

This woman is considered a wise elder and, some time back, was brought to the UK to be part of a circle of prayer and teachings from indigenous female elders from around the world. That gathering happened to take place right here in Devon, and many people whom I know took part in it. Hence me being on her radar and us ending up as friends on Facebook.

She’s not someone I know well and have not taken a great deal of notice of her. But notice enough.

Notice enough to have seen her cover photo update appear in my feed today. And for someone considered so ‘wise’, it took me by surprise.

I’m not showing it here but let’s just say that it showed four separate images; what constituted Palestine pre-1947, in 1947 when the partition plan was formed, and then two images from the 75 years since then. But there was no caption to accompany it.

Perhaps, due to the lack of caption, I shouldn’t have read into it at all. But I did.

What I read was “What did Israel expect?” and perhaps a little deeper — “Israel deserved what they got.”

I also saw all the emoji reactions from our mutual friends — hearts and that cringeful cuddly one, which depicts “support”. Again, I read probably more into it than I should have but it cuts a little too close to home and so I wrote a response and hit the cleanse button.

If you were to ask me if I was pro-Palestine or pro-Israel, I would probably, definitely say that I am pro-both and support neither.

I sympathise with every single civilian who is caught in any zone of conflict. And honestly, my heart has been with Ukrainians for most of the last eighteen months.

But what just happened cuts a little too close to the bone for me to simply accept others as sympathisers, or not.

You see, I am half-Israeli. And although I haven’t lived in the country, other than for a few months during my gap year between school and university, I have a lot of family there, and have kept some kind of contact with them over the years.

For anyone living in a cave, there was a festival in the desert that was one of the first points of Hamas’ attacks on the morning of October 7th. It was an horrific scene of bloodshed, innocent lives being taken, and innocent festival-goers being taken hostage.

My cousin’s daughter was at that festival. She left with her friends in their car as soon as they heard the first rockets being fired. Despite being sent in every which direction as cars were being attacked by Hamas militants, she and her friends escaped and made it to a secret military base, where they sheltered.

Her brother was also supposed to go but changed his mind beforehand and sold his ticket. Many of his friends who he was going to be attending with were among the dead. He is one of the military reservists now defending the country.

My cousin’s children are innocent civilians. There is no justifiable reason they should be held accountable for bloodshed that has happened on those lands in years gone by.

No one “deserved” to lose their lives in an horrific attack, nor to be taken hostage.

Whatever anyone’s idea of karma and rebirth may be, ancestral karmic influences or whatever justification some people may be pulling out of the sky, killing innocent people because they took birth in a particular land, in the name of one religion’s god, is never and will never be justified, whatever the circumstances.

I would expect the wise women of the world at the very least to understand that.

There’s seems to be a belief that the Jews only began life in what we now call The State of Israel after World War II had ended and the British — who were the colonisers of the land at the time — negotiated the partition agreement in order to give Jews somewhere safe to call home.

My Israeli family has been there for many generations now. Way, way before either of the world wars.

Having learnt a little of the history, I know that they contended with a great deal of racist attacks going back a very long way. Both Jews and Palestinians have, historically, been the perpetrators in ongoing disputes. In fact, the Jews and the Palestinians have shared that land — sometimes peacefully but mostly not — for way longer than most people hanging out expressing their wise opinions on Facebook realise.

So to look at the situation in terms of a few isolated graphics and no commentary feels insulting to me, to my family, and to the many Israeli civilians there in the country right now.

In addition, as ever, we need to look at how the information we see is being portrayed and by whom.

I happened to be directed to a very interesting clip of a video taken at the UN in which one man, born and brought up as a member of Hamas, undoes all of the claims of violation and mass genocide by Israel. As he explains, the Palestinian Authority, who was self-appointed and claims to represent Palestine, is in fact, in violation of the human rights of the Palestinian people.

He goes onto claim that they capture and torture their own people who speak against them as well as their political rivals. He says,

The suffering of the Palestinian people is the outcome of your selfish political interest. You are the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people. If Israel did not exist, you would have no one to blame. Take responsibility for the outcome of your own actions.

You fan the flames of conflict to maintain your abusive power. Finally, you use this platform to mislead the international community, to mislead the Palestinian society that Israel is responsible for the problem you create. — Source

So I will leave you with this…

Who knows the truth? Not me, and probably not you.

But I know that innocent people have been murdered. Some have been captured and taken hostage. Young people, old people, mothers, small children — there has been no discrimination and no rules.

I don’t know why anyone would want to justify this. But most especially why a so-called wise woman would want to.

Nothing in the world justifies the killing of innocent people going about their lives. Not on either or any side of any re-jigged borders.