Has Israel Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?
The days following Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, Israel had much of world opinion on its side, though many critics of Israel remained (whether anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, or simply pro-Palestinian) to the point of even justifying Hamas’ gruesome and sadistic attack on Israeli civilians.
Israel had a chance to resist a knee-jerk violent reaction, whether vindictive or purely defensive, letting Hamas’ shocking inhumanity impress world opinion while delegitimizing and discrediting Hamas as an organization. That would have allowed Israel to take the moral high road and finally start a serious public examination of the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, revealing that the roots are in the religious discrimination commanded and incited by the holy books of monotheism. Indeed, that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not really about land, rather it is essentially a religious conflict rooted in the Old Testament and the Koran. That would have finally illuminated the only path towards resolving the century-old conflict (which actually started in biblical times, from the days of Samson and Delilah, and then of David and Goliath), the path leading both sides to understand the primitive absurdity of their conflict.
Instead, the Israeli government chose the path of vastly disproportionate retribution (couched in a national defense rationalization), destroying countless civilian homes in Gaza and causing thousands of civilian deaths and severe injuries, instead of surgically counterattacking Hamas (admittedly a very difficult task) and thereby winning widespread global approval and admiration. The result of that immature and vindictive choice by the Israeli government is much global opinion turning against Israel and embracing Hamas’ violent extremism, while distracting the world from objectively analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to find a sustainable, logical, fair solution, agreeable to both sides.
Once the conflict’s roots are clearly exposed as being nothing more than primitive religious discrimination on both sides, which should be seen as anachronistic in the 21st Century and in violation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that realization will lead Israelis and Palestinians to understand they can live peacefully side by side in sincere friendship and share enormous prosperity together. In the same land, whether or not divided into two contiguous nations. They will both finally see the absurdity of believing that their god has a favorite people and a favorite religion, that their god indulges in religious discrimination. How could they, after careful objective reflection, choose to reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which all member nations of the United Nations have undersigned and pledged to uphold) in favor of self-serving religious discriminations of antiquity?
© Edward Sonnino 2023
November 3, 2023
