The Life Argotic

Disclaimer: I am not a foreign policy expert nor am I a military analyst. My views on this extremely complex topic are solely based on my views as a human rights advocate.

I understand why critiquing Israel is often seen under a lens of antisemitism. Humanity has a devastatingly long history murder, genocide, and oppression against Jews. I’m not going to provide an exhaustive history of antisemitism in the world, but suffice to say that it goes way, way back. Jews were expelled from almost every European country at some point in time between the years 200 and today. In England, Edward I expelled the entire Jewish population in 1290 after years of persecution both legal and extrajudicial. In France, the Antisemitic League of France was founded by Edouard Drumont in 1889 whereby they published numerous antisemitic pamphlets and texts and were responsible for riots.

While I am sure everyone is familiar with the holocaust and the abhorrent deeds committed during that time, I feel that a reminder is necessary that it wasn’t just Germany who were pursuing a total removal of Jews from their territories. In fact, one of the earliest proposals of the Nazi party was to ship all of the Jewish population to the island of Madagascar. At that time, America also refused Jewish refugees from Germany. In at least one instance, turned a ship of 900 refugees around where one third of them would be murdered during the holocaust.

That brings us to today. Antisemitism has been on the increase for some time now. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the FBI has reported a 37% increase in antisemitic hate crimes since last year. This increase is not relegated to the United States either. In 2020, there was a marked increase in antisemitic incidences globally. One of the foundational goals of the terror organization Hamas is the complete destruction of Israel and all Jewish people living there. This has culminated in the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians and military targets.

So yes, antisemitism is both historic and contemporary which makes any critique of Israel and/or Jewish state policy complex. What is more, this complexity is heightened with the history of how Israel became a country in the first place. I’m not even going to try to tackle that here, but VOX has an excellent timeline you can find here.

However, that complexity does not immunize Israel from accusations of colonialism, displacement, murder, and even ethnic cleansing. Israel’s response to the October 7th terrorist attacks are completely disproportional and very much so targeting civilians.

Words vs. Actions:

As stated above, Hamas’ goals are pretty strait forward when it comes to the state of Israel and its people. This is an example having a written policy of hate whereby goals of genocide are explicitly stated.

Yet, Israel has on several occasions showed that it doesn’t need to write hate into its own laws in order to get the job done. Between evicting entire populations of people from their homes to further develop the land, to war crimes of specifically targeting civilians during conflicts, Israeli policy right now is easily comparable to early American policy towards Native American Indians. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the situations are the same. That would be an unjust and severe oversimplification. What I am pointing out here are the policy and reaction similarities.

In fact, there are many parallels between America’s policies toward the indigenous populations and Israel’s policies and actions toward Palestinians. Just like Israel, we too created borders through treaties that we said settlers could not cross. Just like Israel, we did nothing to stop settlers from crossing those lines. Just like Israel, we also defended settlers who were squatting when they were attacked by other sovereign forces for violating their rights. Another important parallel to point out here is the complete lockdown of Gaza. For several years now, Gaza has functioned much like a reservation system where entry and exit are controlled and so are rations of food, water, and even internet. In the current conflict, Israel has displaced millions of people and vowed to raze sections of Gaza, people’s homes, in retaliation. What is more, Israel refuses to allow aid through to the nearly 6 million people who live in the Gaza strip.

Civilian targeting and displacement have been prominent features of Israel’s war policy for the last few decades. In fact, the UN even reported in 2009 that Israeli troops had specifically targeted several UN aid facilities along with deliberately targeting civilians, both of which are war crimes. Over the past 2 decades, hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been killed each year through Israeli airstrikes, artillery, and rocket fire according to the UN. And lets not forget the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was murdered by an Israeli sniper in 2022.

So when I see Hamas and Palestine striking out at Israel, I see the Dakota War of 1862 where over 300 captives were taken and a similar number of civilian casualties reported on the settler side. I see the parallels between our own historical and contemporary policies of land grabbing and people murdering. Yes, it is different. But in many ways it is the same.

Conclusions

My reasoning for wanting to get this out there was the sheer number of people who are defending Israel by specifically naming Hamas’ policy goal of genocide as justification for inhumane actions. My point here is that while this is an extremally complex situation that was created more than a hundred years ago by the then League of Nations, it’s not a scenario of heroic, righteous peoples vs a destructive, evil terror organization. It is also not a story of a justified group of rebels who are just in it for the freedom from the imperial powers of colonialism. It is a conflict that needs to be met with just as much complexity as the events that started it. We need to force Israel into a ceasefire. We have to bring Hamas to justice. We must get aid to the Palestinian people. We should work to free Palestine from Israel. A two state option clearly doesn’t work and probably never will. Finally, Israel must be held accountable for their crimes.