A year ago, a friend asked me if I would join him in Christchurch for the weekly Palestinian support protests. I declined. I pointed out that asking me to do so made it implicit that I was obliged to take a moral stand on the more than 35 conflicts going on across the world today, and to rank them in terms of importance. I also argued that those protesting the Palestinian cause, were unfamiliar with the history of Palestine, up to and including the partition of Palestine to give the Jewish people a homeland. Since then, much debate has taken place, and while we remain friends, our views on the current conflict are not reconciled.
As many as 90,000-plus people — estimates of the crowd vary widely –recently protested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge despite an appeal by NSW Police to the NSW Supreme Court. What I viewed of the protest on television were the usual Palestinian flags, but more worrying, giant pictures of the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini. Iran, a financial and ideological backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, has been and remains committed to the destruction of Israel.
Today, it was heard, both on radio and in the print media that people were comparing the Gazan conflict with the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. While the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza has become a travesty beyond words following the October 7 attacks in Israel, the comparison is quite perverse. It is insidious to argue that the deaths caused by the Nazis, which surpassed 55 million people, is in anyway comparative to the war casualties in the Gaza and the West Bank.
The history of conflict in the region, and beyond the borders of Israel and the occupied territories goes back millennia and, as in all conflicts, there is the context of historical antecedents which are often ignored, not understood, or simply not known. Take the Roman occupation, for example, or Napoleon’s failed attempt at the occupation of Palestine, or the Ottomans and Egypt’s attempt to establish a kind of satellite state in Palestine.
The region, has been hostile to the Jewish people since the Jews were expelled under Roman occupation, especially so since Islam’s conquest of the region. In 1917, the Ottomans expelled the entire population of Jews from Tel Aviv and Jaffa (not unlike Idi Amin’s madness in expelling all Asians from Uganda).
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.ruthfullyyours.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
