Israel/Hamas War Superthread

[Dill]

(04-16-2024, 08:58 PM)Belsnickel Wrote:  What I find laughable is the assertion that a majority of Muslim nations issues (people btw, not the government) with Israel isn't that they are Jews

I disagree with the bold. There is a long history of Jews and Muslims living as neighbors without issue. They fought together against Christian invaders during the Crusades. What changed? Western meddling in the region that displaced many and drew borders without true consideration of the people of the region. This doesn't mean there isn't just some straight up Jew-hating in the mix, but I think that your viewpoint on this is a gross oversimplification.

All three religions of the book have had difficulty with tolerance, given the command to have no other gods before them. 

It's only in circumstances where they have had to share power that tolerance became a Biblical/Quranic teaching. Jews were the "terrorists" of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century CE, massacring thousands of "idolaters" in Alexandria, Cyprus and other places. Christians killed more Jews in 1944 alone than all Muslims combined since the 7th century. And it is Christian intolerance that set European Zionism in motion.  

"Western meddling" is a bit of an understatement, given the direct colonization and control by Western powers of much of the region, which continues less directly with US support of authoritarian regimes there, and its active work in creating "peace" for Israel by buying off such regimes with US aid, to the detriment of democracy and development in the region. 

It's only absent knowledge of this history of colonization and exploitation, the Palestinian displacement, and effects of accelerated modernization, that some mysterious "core rot" of Islam can be read into myriad, diverse conflicts in the Muslim/Arab world as a primary cause. 

In structure, this ideology forms a belief system rather like religion, incorporating bits and pieces of some events while excluding others, and knitting them together into a worldview which explains/"predicts" everything after the fact, while remaining impervious to empirical correction. "Hate," always an effect to be explained in materialist accounts of professional historians, suddenly becomes an a (non) explanatory "cause" and primary driver of Muslim politics. Rather like claiming some common Native American hatred of Christianity was the root cause of the Pequot, Sioux and Apache wars. 

That they were driven from their homes and live under military domination just can't be the REAL reason Palestinians hate Israelis.

(04-16-2024, 08:58 PM)Belsnickel Wrote:  This doesn't mean there isn't just some straight up Jew-hating in the mix, but I think that your viewpoint on this is a gross oversimplification.

The "Jew-hating" I've encountered in Jordan, Egypt and Qatar has always passed through condemnation of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. That's the real issue for them.  Sometimes it seems the mirror image of Islamaphobic paranoia, with "Jews" controlling US foreign policy and the UN; but that is ONLY an issue because of the way Israel fits into their own regional politics as a dominant Western military power bullying and displacing Arabs. Just the continuation of violent colonization. 

This isn't to say religion plays no role in the response of Mulsim countries to Israel's founding; Islam creates a bond of identity, so Muslims in far away Morroco and Afghanistan can still empathize closely with Palestinians, just as Jews in the US empathize with Israelis. And it becomes a rallying cry when the US settles troops and bases in Muslim countries while protecting Israel.

But had the Nakba not occurred, they'd waste no more of their time "hating Jews" than most Americans do.