{"id":10478,"date":"2023-10-09T09:42:22","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T09:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=10478"},"modified":"2024-03-22T18:35:57","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T18:35:57","slug":"israel-two-sides-of-a-war-and-i-know-which-side-i-stand-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/israel-two-sides-of-a-war-and-i-know-which-side-i-stand-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel &#8211; Two sides of a war and I know which side I stand on"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Humans worldwide are faced with terrible news from the Middle East about an area so soaked in complex history that communities divide their views, justify actions or abstain for fear of siding with one side or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Amongst others, New York Mayor Eric Adams recently spoke&#8230; (watch the video)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oUM1M7MQVLE?si=yUhJE9FELyJY5T1R\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote has-text-align-left\"><blockquote><p>I read this article by &#8220;Gareth Cliff&#8221; (I don&#8217;t know who this is),<em> but his view makes sense.<\/em><\/p><cite>I am not a Jew and I\u2019m not a citizen of Israel. I haven\u2019t even visited Israel. I don\u2019t trace my religion back to a holy site in Jerusalem and I don\u2019t have a problem with Arabs or Muslims or Christians. I\u2019ve read about Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon; the Umayyads, the Abbasids and the Ottomans; I know about the British, the Balfour declaration, Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. I know a bit about the Six-Day War and the Intifada. I might not have any personal stake in the Holy Land, but humanity certainly does \u2013 and I\u2019m a human being.<br>The women, men, children, elderly people and soldiers who were kidnapped, tortured, raped, humiliated and murdered on Saturday by Hamas in sovereign Israel were human beings too.<br>Those who did it to them are not.<br>Imagine what kind of rational and ethical gymnastics you have to do to justify the cold-blooded murder of teenagers at a music festival; or watching a child, perhaps 5 years old, being prodded with a stick and made to cry for his mother in Hebrew while children of a similar age laugh and mock him? We don\u2019t know that child\u2019s fate and for all we know what followed may have been much worse. It\u2019s depraved. To even enter a conversation about these disgraceful facts with a rehearsed retort about territory or Gaza being an \u201copen-air prison\u201d reeks of moral bankruptcy.<br>If you wail and scream about your land, dignity, rights, oppression and poverty but are willing to murder, rape, kidnap, torture or humiliate children; then I don\u2019t have to listen to your reasons. When the video footage, photographs and stories of Saturday\u2019s carnage come not from \u201cIsraeli propaganda\u201d but from the Hamas terrorists themselves, then how am I to read anything else into it but that you want credit for these atrocities? You want me to know you did it. You want me to know you are proud of it. You want me to see you for who you are. Well, I do.<br>So, if you swarmed the Israeli Embassy in London, waving Palestinian flags and calling for genocide; if you went down to Times Square to celebrate a victory for decolonisation against \u201capartheid Israel\u201d; if you sang along to \u201cgas the Jews\u201d chants at the Sydney Opera House or hung a \u201cone settler, one bullet\u201d Palestinian flag over Grayston bridge in Johannesburg then you\u2019re telling me who you are. Well, I see you \u2013 and you\u2019re my enemy.<br>I\u2019m one of those people who believe civilisation is a real thing, and I\u2019ve resisted the poison of moral relativists in the humanities departments of universities across the west who think that being nuanced about the idea of civilisation versus barbarism is a signal of intellectual prowess or critical self-reflection. Upon even a cursory investigation of these people or their positions, you will find every sign of pedestrian intelligence and self-absorbed navel-gazing, combined with a fetishisation of victimhood and always concomitant humourlessness. They too, are my enemies.<br>It is always interesting to note that only western liberal democracies tolerate and give succour to the most heinous arguments and positions in public protests. You couldn\u2019t picket on the side of quite laudable things like education for girls in Taliban Afghanistan, gay rights in Syria, or against the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. The Ayatollahs of Iran wouldn\u2019t allow women to protest the hijab there under threats of violence. But London, New York, Sydney and even Johannesburg will embrace marches where people actively call for genocide. This is not how allies behave.<br>Perhaps when the dust has settled we can examine the insidious links between Anglo-American leftism and antisemitism, between Europe never reckoning with what happened in the holocaust and their growing Muslim populations, and between ignorant regimes like mine in South Africa and their determination to stand alongside the worst human rights abusers in the Middle East.<br>For now, it\u2019s no big mystery that this has nothing to do with the existence of the State of Israel and everything to do with Jew-hatred \u2013 that great, festering wound in the side of humanity from which all prejudice flows. It has been there for thousands of years and every time we think it has healed, some monstrous collective claws it open again.<br>Hamas aren\u2019t hiding the ball. Their leader, Ismail Haniyeh (safely skulking in Qatar) made this clear. He celebrated dead Jews, not territory won, nor Gazan lives saved. I\u2019m afraid there are only two sides in a war \u2013 your allies and your enemies. On September 11th 2001, I knew whose side I was on. I feel the same today.<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m not religious, but I believe in peace, dialogue, compromise and, above all, the right to defend your family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I do pray that every last Jew and moral-standing person in the world is allowed to live in peace, free from jealousy, greed, anti-semitism, racism, and bullying, and free from those who cannot talk and articulate their views and to compromise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Am Yisrael Chai<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humans worldwide are faced with terrible news from the Middle East about an area so soaked in complex history that communities divide their views, justify actions or abstain for fear of siding with one side or another. Amongst others, New York Mayor Eric Adams recently spoke&#8230; (watch the video) I read this article by &#8220;Gareth&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10477,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":629,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[629,247],"tags":[630],"class_list":["post-10478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","category-world-affairs","tag-israel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/img_0022-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7ZU0a-2J0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10478"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14445,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10478\/revisions\/14445"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiftyfourandcounting.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}