Problems in the pro-Palestinian portrayals
There is a currently, at least in the posts I run across, a heavily skewed bias in favor of the Palestinian people in the current conflict. Most of the posts I have read speak heavily about the suffering of the Palestinians and ignore the reasons for the situation.
A relevant analogy
An analogy I might offer up would be: Someone tells us about another group of people who were being held like animals in cages. All their freedoms have been taken away and they aren’t even allowed to move about as they wanted.
Oh my god, we might think, who are these people and how can we help?
The person says, Oh, they’re prisoners- the people in prison right now, and the government has stripped them of the majority of their rights!!!
Well, that’s a one-sided story if ever there was one. Prisoners are in prison for a reason- they committed crimes and were found guilty and locked up for the protection of society at large. If all you tell is the loss of freedom, which is a direct consequence of their actions, and not the crimes committed
The Palestinian narrative: Israel is mean
The story I keep hearing from too many pro-Palestinian posts is that Israel is brutally oppressing them. But the narrative lacks any understanding of how the situation got there in the first place. What many of them seem to believe is that for a long time there were a group of “Palestinian Arabs” who lived in this land peacefully until a bunch of mean Zionist Jews showed up, stole the Palestinian land, established an apartheid state there and then shunted the poor oppressed Palestinian people into a corner, shut them off and keep them there, all for no reason whatsoever.
The need for wider context, not just isolated facts
I imagine many of the posters believe this to be more or less true. It’s not.
This isn’t to say that the Palestinian people aren’t oppressed and suffering, or that their lives aren’t miserable. But the narrative that is being pushed out there on so many of these posts is as misleading as the prisoner example above. Unfortunately, it does no one any good to push lies. We need truth if we’re going to understand the situation correctly. Many of the things said are true, in and of themselves. But so were the facts in the prisoner story. The ‘fact’ is facts are manipulated when told out of context. They can truthfully report certain facts…. and yet by leaving out other pertinent facts, arrive at an overall narrative that is not the truth.
No one is served by learning only half the truth. If we’re going to have any hope at truly understanding a situation, we need to get the context. But there are people with vested interests in leaving out broader context. They want their end goal met and they’ll tell whatever story needed to achieve it. They can even give us genuinely truthful accounts. But they aren’t telling the whole truth.
History
Israelis have been in Palestine since probably 1400 BC. I maybe off, even by a few centuries… but for a long time. And they were never fully gone from the land.
Israel was united as a kingdom, until around 950 BC. The kingdom split into Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. Israel was deported by the Assyrians around the 700s BC, Judah was deported by the Babylonians in the 500s BC. When the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian, the Jews were allowed to return and rebuild the temple in the early 500s BC. The Greeks then conquered Israel, and then the Romans took over. There was a Jewish revolt (well, there were several…) and the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, then later the province of Judea was renamed by the Romans to Palestine as an insult to the Jews.
The Byzantine empire ruled the province until the Muslims conquered in the 600s AD. All this time there were Jews still living in the land, alongside Christians… and now Muslims.
The Christians swapped control with the Muslims during the Crusades (1100-1300 +/-) and then the Arabs had control over Palestine until the Ottoman empire conquered it around the 1500s. The Ottomans held the land until Britain took it in 1917.
During the 1800s, there was a Jewish Zionist movement to bring Jews back to Palestine. But there had always been Jews living there alongside Muslims and Christians. The land was sold to Jews by absentee Ottoman owners, who possessed, but often did not live on the land. The land was maintained by Arab tenant farmers, many of whom had lived there for generations. When the Jews bought the land, they had no intention of being absentee owners. They wanted the land to live on, cultivate, and eventually, hopefully, turn into a resurrected state of Israel. The original Zionist Jews did not ‘steal’ the land, they bought it legally, often at exorbitant prices charged by the Ottoman or Arab absentee owners.
Oc course, it’s understandable that the tenant farmer families who lived on the land would feel aggrieved at this, after all they were forced off land that they had lived on for generations. But the land was sold out from under them. It wasn’t stolen.
Around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, there was a massive immigration of Jews into Israel as part of the Zionist movement. Though it was legal immigration, it did cause problems with the Arab residents. Even if the displacement from ancestral lands was legal, it was still bitter for those families to accept and they reserved their resentment for the Jews, not the landowners who sold them out.
There were incidents of violence between Arabs and Jews during the first half of the 20th century.
Britian had promised a two-state division of Palestine- one Arab and one Israeli, but they balked on it. When Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1947, and Israel declared a small state within Palestine according to the previously agreed upon borders in 1948. The surrounding Arab states attacked Israel. But they lost the war. Unfortunately, the Arab leaders had promised many of the Arabs that they would push Israel into the sea, and if the Arabs living in Israeli territory wanted to avoid the conflict, they would be better served by vacating the area temporarily. Then when the Arabs had finished the job, they could come back and the land would be rid of Jews. So many Arabs packed up and left. But the Arab armies lost and they never got their homes back.
This isn’t to say that all left. There was bad blood and violence on both sides, as there tends to be with wars. But much of what is narrating now as Jewish theft of Arab land is a lie. Some land has been illegally occupied, that is true. But the general idea that it was all Arab land and was stolen by the Jews is false.
The Arabs attacked again in 67, and in 73, each time losing the conflict and losing ground.
Restrictions are a response to attacks
Had they simply accepted the presence of the Israeli state, they wouldn’t be in the condition they are now. But they would not accept Israel in any form. Israel, on the other hand, after each intifada or outbreak of violence, has had to consistently take stronger and stronger measures to protect their own citizens. As Palestinian militants have grown increasingly sophisticated in their attempts to get around Jewish defenses and inflict damage on Israel, Israeli defenses have gotten more restrictive in response. This is the part that the pro-Palestinian arguments won’t mention. The Israeli restrictions are driven not by some innate desire to oppress, but as a response to and a consequence of Palestinian attacks.
Israel isn’t an outsider to Palestinian land
The Palestinian narrative has been that Israel is an outside interloper that stole native Palestinian’s land, pushed them into a corner and brutally oppresses them. It’s a straightforward instance of brutal oppression and theft instigated by Jews against Arabs. But history shows that it’s not true. The land belonged to Israel from 3500 years ago. Even if we were to accept that modern Jews came back and took over, that is the exact same thing the Arab’s did with the Muslim invasions back in the 600s. Certainly if invasion and conquest is wrong, then the Arabs have no business being there. It was Jewish long before the Arabs. But since history is a never-ending series of conquests, I don’t think it’s worth trying to decide land rights based on who was there before who. I’m just saying that IF one side wants to make that argument, then they need to be aware of their own role as outside conqueror too, and not be hypocritical in denouncing the latest version.
Israel was there long before the Palestinians. There was never a ‘Palestinian state’. The land has been governed by outside powers since the Babylonians deported the Judeans back in 586 BC. Since that time, Jews have always been in the land, even we acknowledge they were a minority of around 10% before the Zionist movement started.
Israel has ignored international law in allowing settlements into the west bank, so they aren’t blameless in this. But each time they have tried to negotiate with the Palestinians, there was nothing to negotiate. Palestinian leadership has time and time again chosen armed resistance over mutual acceptance.
Apartheid State
I don’t know if many of the pro-Palestinian posters know this, but Israel has Arab citizens. They have a political party in Israel, and they can vote and hold office. Israel is not actually an apartheid state. It’s not like Gaza is a part of Israel, but excluded from participation; Gaza is a separate state. Gaza on the other hand IS an apartheid state. There is no place for Jews in Gaza.
Obstinance
There is a lot more that can be said about the history of the region, but hopefully this will be enough to demonstrate that while the plight of Gazans is dire right now, the narrative being pushed by them is not wholly accurate. I really don’t know what can be done. I have no answers for this. It would, as a first step, require an attitude adjustment by the Palestinian leadership, which comes down to a rethinking by the voters themselves. For all the ink spilt on the need of a two state solution, that was the original proposal in 1948, and it was never accepted by the Arab population. Until they are willing to accept the existence of Israel on the ancient land of Israel, there is no way forward.
I believe there are elements in Israel that don’t want that. They’d prefer an excuse to take the entirety of the land as their own.
Summary
I do believe the Palestinians are being oppressed right now. But what the pro-Palestinian posts are not acknowledging is WHY it’s happening. Just like the prisoner example at the top, it does no good to simply denounce oppression without asking why. Recourse to “colonialism” is useless here. The Arab/Palestinian population are being oppressed because of specific decisions and miscalculations that they themselves made.
And if someone wants to reply that there is NEVER an excuse for oppression, then I can only respond that such an assertion is utterly absurd. Even the excuse the pro-Palestinian side gives for fighting back would be null under that assertion. If Palestinians are justified in armed resistance and atrocities, then Jews are justified in those things as well. After all it was Arab attacks and Jewish defense that got us into the situation.
I really wish there was some way the two sides would make peace. But I don’t see it happening.