Yet again, about the only public intellectual, aside from J McWhorter and T C Williams, who ever sees life in perspective, dialectic, with dignity. Thanks.
I have begged my college to use your services. Alas, they like the radical lefties with a more authoritarian view than Mussolini ever had....
I think the academic pro Palestinian absolutists are about as much as a threat to the United States as Trump. Two ends of the same ignorance, students who can't spell Gaza and a president who wants to own it.
Chloe is a gifted, soulful writer and she has once again spoken to the center. Will the center hold? I am with you Chloe; speak as you do and hold the space for hearing.
You put in a concise and clear form the central problem that too many continue refusing to see. And refusing to see it means pushing the horrors to pile on, it means hurling oneselves and others on a road that only leads to more hatred and bloodshed and destruction.
A problem is that Jews can live side by side or integrated peacefully with others (20%+ of the ISRAELI population is Muslim or Druze or Christian, holding full rights and representation) but Muslims cannot, when they are in charge. Name any Muslim majority democracy in which non-Muslims exist and have equal status. 950,000 Jews were expelled from middle eastern Muslim countries in the 20th century. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews cannot return to those places where they had many generations of relatives. But non-Jews can absolutely live in Israel peacefully. Maybe if the citizens of Gaza and West Bank stopped acting like terrorists, led by corrupt and genocidal Palestinian governments in blind rage towards Israeli Jews (vs Egypt or Jordan that also controlled these areas at times), they too could live in freedom to pursue their best lives.
But can you hold space for the reality of the human condition - might makes right.
Israel is using their might to hold their country. Its their country because the Jews for the first time in millennia currently have the power to hold their country.
The Palestinians hold to their faith. All the world eventually needs to be under one world Caliphate ruled by Allah (actually some supreme leader who claims to have insight into what Allah wants). I'm sorry but that "faith" is very incompatible with my views and the views of the West in general. A majority of Muslims view me as the worst infidel guilty of sexual perversion. I at a minimum I should be in-prisoned and better yet killed.
Can you hold space for someone like me that wants Muslims to stay in their space away from me. Ideally a space that has a huge fortified wall to keep them in.
In the end, it will always come down to might makes right. Right now the Muslim world in general only has the might of their countries and the oil on the land they occupy. Their culture doesn't seem to have given them the ability/motivation to create might beyond that. The Ottoman empire collapsed.
The Israelis have many millennia of oppression that drove them to work hard to establish the might to maintain the state of Israel. That state has largely western values - i.e. they won't imprison me or kill me for being gay. I can hold space for Israel as a lone bastion of Western values in a very Muslim region.
May be a little blunt, but I focus on reality, not idealism.
Might makes, and made right, for plenty of Arab states, empires, kingdoms, chiefdoms and sultanates. Make doesn't always make right. Might in this case is, as you likely agree, the right to retaliate to a feeble set of murderous radicals. Like a million people of all shades before them, everyday Palestinians pay the price.
The performative wokenuts/students/academics in the West who can only see one shade of color (ie. nonwhite), are doing more harm than they know by supporting Hamas. They are losing the remaining centrists, and many a liberal. They are inflaming the Right, and loathe their politics as I do, they are not a good group to inflame.
I hear allot about Israel shouldn't kill Palestinians when they target HAMAS. Exactly how is Israel supposed to know who is a Palestinian and who is HAMAS? When HAMAS did their terror, "everyday Palestinians" cheered when they returned with hostages. Some "everyday Palestinians" stole from Israeli houses that were ransacked.
If "everyday Palestinians" were wanting to avoid the war especially now they should out any HAMAS member they know. I don't see any of that happening. All I hear and see is attacks from Hospitals, dense neighborhoods, Mosques, etc.
Are "everyday Palestinians" helping the IDF find the tunnels the HAMAS militants are hiding in. Quite the opposite, they say their are no tunnels until Israel finds them.
Most of the HAMAS fighters are teenagers that have been brought up in schools to hate Israel and the Jews. Seems "everyday Palestinians" should have taught their "kids" that was not going to turn out well.
Please, help me understand. What exactly is an "everyday Palestinian" and how should the IDF identify them? Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm not sure my definition of everyday Palestinians is the central issue in this thread, this piece or the conflict.
However, if cornered I would say the presumably 80% of people there who just want to live, anywhere, even in Israel, in peace.
If you are in the US, I would ask you why you haven't stopped the Jan6 or BLM riots, the US invading Iraq and Afghanistan, meddling in the Middle East and Latin America for decades, assuming you are of sufficient vintage, and lets see, why you haven't stopped the US polluting the planet for consumerism for decades, myself included.
Point being? What are 'everyday' people supposed to do? They are poor, regular people.
To your tricky question, keeping in mind my sympathies are in line with yours as you can likely tell, it is hard indeed to root out the baddies, but I think we can all agree, um, wiping out this many people is not going to help get rid of Hamas or win hearts and minds globally (and lord knows Jewish people do need that). I am actually worried for Jews around the world if this keeps up, including my close relations.
I doubt most Palestinians fit your profile. It sounds a little like generalizations made about Jews for, well millenia.
On Arabs living in Israel, here's a piece from Wiki about Jerusalem.
"Under Israeli law, Arab residents of East Jerusalem and Druze residents of the Golan Heights (both Israeli-occupied territories) have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, are entitled to municipal services, and have municipal voting rights; this status is upheld due to Israel's effective annexation of the former through the Jerusalem Law of 1980 and of the latter through the Golan Heights Law of 1981.[22] Both groups have largely foregone applying for Israeli citizenship, with the Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the Syrians of the Golan Heights mostly holding residency status."
Arab Muslim's could certainly live in peace in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As for you creating strawmen that related back to the US, I'm thinking you are a pacifist. Why can't the world just live in peace? Most would like to live in peace, the question is who control's the peace.
Israel controls the peace in Israel and the West bank and soon GAZA. Palestinians can live in peace their if they adopt Israels rule of law and what the country is.
But isn't that the rub everywhere in the world. Who is the one that gets to define the laws that everyone has to live in peace on?
Might makes right. Its the human condition.
Palestinians have chosen their path. They basically supported HAMAS creating a military in GAZA. That would not have been a problem if the goal of HAMAS (and indirectly the "everyday Palestinian") wasn't to eliminate the state of Israel. They could have had peace. They chose the opposite. Blaming Israel for border and sea control to minimize the weapons being brought into GAZA and the attacks from GAZA into Israel isn't helping anyone - you, the world, or the Palestinians.
Acknowledging the reality that Muslims cannot really live in "peace" with any country that isn't a Caliphate with laws aligned with the Muslim faith is reality. The naivety of the west was believing that Muslims in the middle east wanted democracy. They did not. Based the "peace plan" on that reality.
Exactly. Supernatural land grants and indigeneity are beside the point. After millennia of slaughter, theft, and expulsion Jews have at last claimed a defensible place in the world and won't give it up.
As much as I like and respect Chloe Valdary, this piece rubs me the wrong way. The suffering of the Palestinians is heart wrenching, but their inability to gain political leadership that truly wants peace is the problem. Israel exists as a safe haven for Jews - Jews who have tried time and again to make peace with their Muslim neighbors, only to be rejected, attacked, and invaded repeatedly. Israelis will not stretch out their necks on the chopping block as so many throughout the world seem to want.
The failure to "hold space" exists almost entirely on one side, minus the few wingnuts that exist in every society. How many synagogues in all Middle Eastern countries? Exactly one, in Bahrain (not Gaza), and it just opened. How many mosques for the 20% of the Israeli population that is Muslim? Twenty-six at last count. One could make the case that there are no Jews in those Middle Eastern countries (except Bahrain) so no need for synagogues, and that would be true, because those countries refused to "hold space" and drove them out. How did those Muslim Arab-Israelis come to be there? Because they or their forefathers were not "driven out," but instead chose to remain and become Israeli citizens. The two-state solution has been thrown in the trash bin by one side from the very beginning, choosing rockets and terror instead. The propaganda out there makes the population density of Gaza out to be something of a dark and dystopian landscape, with people crawling over heaps of bodies and scrabbling for scraps of food. The population density of Tel Aviv? 7606/square km. Gaza? 5853/square km. That hellhole of humanity, Paris, that tourists seem to love? 20,000/square km. You say they are all "indigenous," but then you refer to one side as "Palestinian." All those who live in the area of the Mandate Palestine (Jordan, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank) are "Palestinians," whether direct descendants over thousands of years (some from both sides), or more recent immigrants, just as all those in north, south or central America are "Americans." Just ask a Canadian or those from a south or central American country. The terrorists will be killed or driven out, and then the Israelis, the Gazans and their children can live and grow in peace. https://www.timesofisrael.com/uae-opens-interfaith-center-that-houses-gulf-states-first-official-synagogue/
Where is there space held for the Israelis who have still not been freed? Where is there space held for the innocent human shields of Hamas to flee to, if there are any willing to escape their Hamas oppressors? Where can those human shields find temporary PHYSICAL space held for them, space and humane treatment? At least the mothers and children? What country or organization would host them humanely without setting Hamas terrorists who might still hide among them free? If there were even one innocent mother and some innocent children in Gaza - where is there physical safe space held for them but not for Hamas and their sympathizers? Only time, far too much time, will tell.
P.S. If there is even one innocent Mother wanting to surrender with young innocent children and receive humane safe treatment - how would she surrender when Israelis who escaped being held hostage have been killed trying to surrender?
I am surprised and please that Free Black Thought made space for your essay. I tried similar two months ago but it was rejected without explanation. I was told to take my essay to a more open or diverse site... I forget now the actual word used. But it was soul-crushing. Thanks for making the Love of HaShem the guiding factor.
Yet again, about the only public intellectual, aside from J McWhorter and T C Williams, who ever sees life in perspective, dialectic, with dignity. Thanks.
I have begged my college to use your services. Alas, they like the radical lefties with a more authoritarian view than Mussolini ever had....
Thank you! It is unsurprising but sad to hear about your college.
America is confronting it's own Mussolini. Have you seen the TIME interview on Trump?
I think Trump is pretty close to Mussolini.
I think the academic pro Palestinian absolutists are about as much as a threat to the United States as Trump. Two ends of the same ignorance, students who can't spell Gaza and a president who wants to own it.
Agree on absolution, including Israeli far right settler absolutists.
Both sides deserve a home.
Thank you. It is a good quest to sink deeper into an idea and not remain at the surface level where the options presented are so disparate.
Chloe is a gifted, soulful writer and she has once again spoken to the center. Will the center hold? I am with you Chloe; speak as you do and hold the space for hearing.
Thank you, truly.
You put in a concise and clear form the central problem that too many continue refusing to see. And refusing to see it means pushing the horrors to pile on, it means hurling oneselves and others on a road that only leads to more hatred and bloodshed and destruction.
The world needs more people like you.
A problem is that Jews can live side by side or integrated peacefully with others (20%+ of the ISRAELI population is Muslim or Druze or Christian, holding full rights and representation) but Muslims cannot, when they are in charge. Name any Muslim majority democracy in which non-Muslims exist and have equal status. 950,000 Jews were expelled from middle eastern Muslim countries in the 20th century. Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews cannot return to those places where they had many generations of relatives. But non-Jews can absolutely live in Israel peacefully. Maybe if the citizens of Gaza and West Bank stopped acting like terrorists, led by corrupt and genocidal Palestinian governments in blind rage towards Israeli Jews (vs Egypt or Jordan that also controlled these areas at times), they too could live in freedom to pursue their best lives.
Sure. I get that overly simplistic view.
But can you hold space for the reality of the human condition - might makes right.
Israel is using their might to hold their country. Its their country because the Jews for the first time in millennia currently have the power to hold their country.
The Palestinians hold to their faith. All the world eventually needs to be under one world Caliphate ruled by Allah (actually some supreme leader who claims to have insight into what Allah wants). I'm sorry but that "faith" is very incompatible with my views and the views of the West in general. A majority of Muslims view me as the worst infidel guilty of sexual perversion. I at a minimum I should be in-prisoned and better yet killed.
Can you hold space for someone like me that wants Muslims to stay in their space away from me. Ideally a space that has a huge fortified wall to keep them in.
In the end, it will always come down to might makes right. Right now the Muslim world in general only has the might of their countries and the oil on the land they occupy. Their culture doesn't seem to have given them the ability/motivation to create might beyond that. The Ottoman empire collapsed.
The Israelis have many millennia of oppression that drove them to work hard to establish the might to maintain the state of Israel. That state has largely western values - i.e. they won't imprison me or kill me for being gay. I can hold space for Israel as a lone bastion of Western values in a very Muslim region.
May be a little blunt, but I focus on reality, not idealism.
Might makes, and made right, for plenty of Arab states, empires, kingdoms, chiefdoms and sultanates. Make doesn't always make right. Might in this case is, as you likely agree, the right to retaliate to a feeble set of murderous radicals. Like a million people of all shades before them, everyday Palestinians pay the price.
The performative wokenuts/students/academics in the West who can only see one shade of color (ie. nonwhite), are doing more harm than they know by supporting Hamas. They are losing the remaining centrists, and many a liberal. They are inflaming the Right, and loathe their politics as I do, they are not a good group to inflame.
What is an "everyday Palestinian"????
I hear allot about Israel shouldn't kill Palestinians when they target HAMAS. Exactly how is Israel supposed to know who is a Palestinian and who is HAMAS? When HAMAS did their terror, "everyday Palestinians" cheered when they returned with hostages. Some "everyday Palestinians" stole from Israeli houses that were ransacked.
If "everyday Palestinians" were wanting to avoid the war especially now they should out any HAMAS member they know. I don't see any of that happening. All I hear and see is attacks from Hospitals, dense neighborhoods, Mosques, etc.
Are "everyday Palestinians" helping the IDF find the tunnels the HAMAS militants are hiding in. Quite the opposite, they say their are no tunnels until Israel finds them.
Most of the HAMAS fighters are teenagers that have been brought up in schools to hate Israel and the Jews. Seems "everyday Palestinians" should have taught their "kids" that was not going to turn out well.
Please, help me understand. What exactly is an "everyday Palestinian" and how should the IDF identify them? Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm not sure my definition of everyday Palestinians is the central issue in this thread, this piece or the conflict.
However, if cornered I would say the presumably 80% of people there who just want to live, anywhere, even in Israel, in peace.
If you are in the US, I would ask you why you haven't stopped the Jan6 or BLM riots, the US invading Iraq and Afghanistan, meddling in the Middle East and Latin America for decades, assuming you are of sufficient vintage, and lets see, why you haven't stopped the US polluting the planet for consumerism for decades, myself included.
Point being? What are 'everyday' people supposed to do? They are poor, regular people.
To your tricky question, keeping in mind my sympathies are in line with yours as you can likely tell, it is hard indeed to root out the baddies, but I think we can all agree, um, wiping out this many people is not going to help get rid of Hamas or win hearts and minds globally (and lord knows Jewish people do need that). I am actually worried for Jews around the world if this keeps up, including my close relations.
I doubt most Palestinians fit your profile. It sounds a little like generalizations made about Jews for, well millenia.
I seriously doubt your 80% number.
On Arabs living in Israel, here's a piece from Wiki about Jerusalem.
"Under Israeli law, Arab residents of East Jerusalem and Druze residents of the Golan Heights (both Israeli-occupied territories) have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship, are entitled to municipal services, and have municipal voting rights; this status is upheld due to Israel's effective annexation of the former through the Jerusalem Law of 1980 and of the latter through the Golan Heights Law of 1981.[22] Both groups have largely foregone applying for Israeli citizenship, with the Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the Syrians of the Golan Heights mostly holding residency status."
Arab Muslim's could certainly live in peace in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
As for you creating strawmen that related back to the US, I'm thinking you are a pacifist. Why can't the world just live in peace? Most would like to live in peace, the question is who control's the peace.
Israel controls the peace in Israel and the West bank and soon GAZA. Palestinians can live in peace their if they adopt Israels rule of law and what the country is.
But isn't that the rub everywhere in the world. Who is the one that gets to define the laws that everyone has to live in peace on?
Might makes right. Its the human condition.
Palestinians have chosen their path. They basically supported HAMAS creating a military in GAZA. That would not have been a problem if the goal of HAMAS (and indirectly the "everyday Palestinian") wasn't to eliminate the state of Israel. They could have had peace. They chose the opposite. Blaming Israel for border and sea control to minimize the weapons being brought into GAZA and the attacks from GAZA into Israel isn't helping anyone - you, the world, or the Palestinians.
Acknowledging the reality that Muslims cannot really live in "peace" with any country that isn't a Caliphate with laws aligned with the Muslim faith is reality. The naivety of the west was believing that Muslims in the middle east wanted democracy. They did not. Based the "peace plan" on that reality.
Exactly. Supernatural land grants and indigeneity are beside the point. After millennia of slaughter, theft, and expulsion Jews have at last claimed a defensible place in the world and won't give it up.
Thank you Chloe. You have balanced the many ways of seeing this conflict in ways that are complementary to my own percetions.
This was a beautiful read and what my soul has been longing for. Thank you...so much
As much as I like and respect Chloe Valdary, this piece rubs me the wrong way. The suffering of the Palestinians is heart wrenching, but their inability to gain political leadership that truly wants peace is the problem. Israel exists as a safe haven for Jews - Jews who have tried time and again to make peace with their Muslim neighbors, only to be rejected, attacked, and invaded repeatedly. Israelis will not stretch out their necks on the chopping block as so many throughout the world seem to want.
The failure to "hold space" exists almost entirely on one side, minus the few wingnuts that exist in every society. How many synagogues in all Middle Eastern countries? Exactly one, in Bahrain (not Gaza), and it just opened. How many mosques for the 20% of the Israeli population that is Muslim? Twenty-six at last count. One could make the case that there are no Jews in those Middle Eastern countries (except Bahrain) so no need for synagogues, and that would be true, because those countries refused to "hold space" and drove them out. How did those Muslim Arab-Israelis come to be there? Because they or their forefathers were not "driven out," but instead chose to remain and become Israeli citizens. The two-state solution has been thrown in the trash bin by one side from the very beginning, choosing rockets and terror instead. The propaganda out there makes the population density of Gaza out to be something of a dark and dystopian landscape, with people crawling over heaps of bodies and scrabbling for scraps of food. The population density of Tel Aviv? 7606/square km. Gaza? 5853/square km. That hellhole of humanity, Paris, that tourists seem to love? 20,000/square km. You say they are all "indigenous," but then you refer to one side as "Palestinian." All those who live in the area of the Mandate Palestine (Jordan, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank) are "Palestinians," whether direct descendants over thousands of years (some from both sides), or more recent immigrants, just as all those in north, south or central America are "Americans." Just ask a Canadian or those from a south or central American country. The terrorists will be killed or driven out, and then the Israelis, the Gazans and their children can live and grow in peace. https://www.timesofisrael.com/uae-opens-interfaith-center-that-houses-gulf-states-first-official-synagogue/
Where is there space held for the Israelis who have still not been freed? Where is there space held for the innocent human shields of Hamas to flee to, if there are any willing to escape their Hamas oppressors? Where can those human shields find temporary PHYSICAL space held for them, space and humane treatment? At least the mothers and children? What country or organization would host them humanely without setting Hamas terrorists who might still hide among them free? If there were even one innocent mother and some innocent children in Gaza - where is there physical safe space held for them but not for Hamas and their sympathizers? Only time, far too much time, will tell.
P.S. If there is even one innocent Mother wanting to surrender with young innocent children and receive humane safe treatment - how would she surrender when Israelis who escaped being held hostage have been killed trying to surrender?
Whom would Jesus bomb?
I am surprised and please that Free Black Thought made space for your essay. I tried similar two months ago but it was rejected without explanation. I was told to take my essay to a more open or diverse site... I forget now the actual word used. But it was soul-crushing. Thanks for making the Love of HaShem the guiding factor.
Beautifully put. I love that you know his name: HaShem. Are you familiar with Elias Chacour?