Rockets raining down on civilian areas – Silence
Hatred presented as an ideal value – Silence
Murder taught to children as virtue – Silence
Calls for Genocide – Silence
Murderous terrorism against civilians – Silence
Glorifying those acts of terrorism – Silence
Celebrating terrorism – Silence
Encouraging terrorism through financial incentive – Silence
Diverting billions to build terrorist infrastructure – Silence
Open hypocrisy in the U.N. – Silence
Obvious bias in the media – Silence
Open anti-Semitism on university campuses – Silence
Financing of terror activities – Silence
Using civilians as human shields – Silence
People fighting for their survival – Outrage
1000 Verses - a project of Judaism Resources 
The contrast is so stark, and the balance is way off in a lot of institutions and circles.
It’s not literal silence, for example, “According to the Framework for Cooperation signed by the U.S. State Department and UNRWA on July 14 [2021], continued U.S. financing will require UNRWA to implement various reforms, including combating incitement and antisemitism in its educational curriculum, requiring the neutrality of its staff, and ensuring UNRWA facilities are not used by terrorist organizations and its staff are not affiliated with them.”
But to read the whole article, it’s evident how much ‘comparative silence’ there is towards this kind of propaganda that’s being taught. Far beyond disputed land, it’s the hatred and lack of peace in the curriculum.
Annelise
This was just a bit of talk – no action. The hate is still being taught by UNRWA
Whether to keep connections and try to transform via pressure that way, or just cut ties completely, seems to keep coming up in US relationships with hostile groups.
The balance on Palestinian concerns needs to change very much in academia… do you think that’s where it’s mostly being driven?
I have forgotten the number of years, no decades, we have been reading the same story of the need to stop teaching hate to children over there. The end of the article said “This is not a complicated idea.” It really isn’t but you have to want to change, like any bad addiction, and they are addicted to hate, you have to want to. Unfortunately, food isn’t the only thing being provided to these people. How can change happen when the majority of the people there, hate Israel?
I just heard the idea that no matter what the textbooks say, UNRWA teachers will teach whatever the values of their society are, and so there’s no purpose in funding them before these social values of destroying Israel are changed.
Funding them gives legitimacy and a sense that the world agrees with their teachers, when students see the letters UN at their schools.
I think that makes sense. Although there’s also the fact that sometimes careful diplomacy is more effective than hostile division. In the case of actually funding and being part of the label, I can see how that leaves limited room for saying there is no tolerance for teachers being free to teach hatred and aggression there.
Spot on!
Hamas has been exploiting their own people for decades, taking aid money meant to help the economy to purchase weapons and appropriating cement meant for civilian infrastructure to build their underground tunnels.
They need to distract the people from the true source of their problem so they can continue exploiting to their hearts’ content.
Jew hatred always works.
Netanyahu WALL Street Journal, I think this morning.
Unfortunately all those who hate Israel still live there. Rabbi Manis Freidman suggested you want to win a war sufficiently so the enemy does not want to fight for at least 30 to 40 years. This did not happen.
“Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized,” Netanyahu wrote in the editorial. “These are the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.”
“Among other things, this will require establishing a temporary security zone on the perimeter of Gaza and an inspection mechanism on the border between Gaza and Egypt that meets Israel’s security needs and prevents smuggling of weapons into the territory,” Netanyahu wrote.
“Schools must teach children to cherish life rather than death, and imams must cease to preach for the murder of Jews,” he said of proposed deradicalization in Gaza. “Palestinian civil society needs to be transformed so that its people support fighting terrorism rather than funding it. That will likely require courageous and moral leadership.”
I’m not sure how he envisions deradicalisation happening while people are constantly fleeing from one shelter to another, and going through an intense crisis of death, injury, services collapse.
Regardless of whether or not a less collectively destructive route could have been be taken in pursuing Hamas, I hope he doesn’t mean that deradicalisation of the population is a prerequisite for shifting to a new phase where people can begin to recover. Because it’s a process that can’t be resumed during this absolute level of intensity of the conflict (whether it be justified from a security standpoint, or not), and will actually take much longer because of what people are going through.
Does Netanyahu understand that a people being crushed into submission can’t at the same time be a people thinking logically and receptively about peace?
Btw I do agree with him about deradicalisation. I just hope that he understands that Israel’s handling of civilians inevitably (even if unfairly) plays a part in the way to that.
Netanyahu is referring to long-term processes and goals, as deradicalization is a long-term process.
I do not think you have fully grasped the extent and depth of indoctrination of Jew hatred in the Muslim world. Here are some videos by Muslims who explain their upbringing.
If you’re right it’s a long term goal, that makes sense. It’s just hard to see that being brought up in the same breath as the more immediate battle goals, because the same battles are going to set back the deradicalisation process immeasurably.
If part of the strategy is to go beyond defence alone and make this war so bad as to be a deterrent for decades, then that would be counterproductive, as the magnitude of it will stir radical antisemitism. And if in parts counterproductive, then in those parts unjustifiable.
Israel doesn’t bear much of the blame for the aggression and radicalisation, but having the power to unleash this level of destruction, there is shared responsibility to push towards the trajectory of peace. If Netanyahu believes he can use (specifically) deterrent force in a heavy and prolonged way (as there’s some reason to suspect), over and above the force needed to control Hamas, and then still expect the radicalisation to change in that context, then that is what’s hard to hear.
The scales need to drastically rebalance in terms of blame for the ongoing conflict. Only that can’t distract from the fact that accountability is still two-sided, and when someone is holding most of the weapons then scrutiny can’t be distracted from.
If it’s all purely and minimally defensive, then this is irrelevant. But later isn’t the time to work out which questions should be held up. I think that sifting between the justifiable and the potentially unjustifiable elements of the war actually only gives credibility to how real the defensive aspect is.
Also it’s not just in politics that I find it hard to trust leaders who talk all about deterrence and behaviouralist punishment, and never about things like the neurobiology of trust and safety in helping people to be receptive and prosocially cooperative. Whether in schools or criminal justice systems, I also feel that a huge part of the picture is missing when people talk about prize/punishment-based behaviour modification as the main focus. State-based terrorism is clearly much bigger, and people in Gaza aren’t free under Hamas to push for a better way, but there’s still a wider population involved. Both in terms of their human needs and their collective ‘turning towards’ or ‘turning away’.
I would trust the Israeli government more if they didn’t talk about generations of deterrence, since this is probably counterproductive on a social level. If they acknowledged openly that the need to protect civilians is not only humanitarian, but also very influential on the future of Palestinian culture.
The thing that I find so difficult is that the IDF’s principles and strategies for harm minimisation can be applied around a broader military decision, but the nature of the operation, and how many casualties can be likely expected, is much more defining in terms of the outcome. And a government looking for decades of deterrence, vs a government looking to disarm Hamas for now, would potentially make very different broad decisions as to the nature and extent of the battles. Applying IDF values around those decisions is important, but the valued within the decisions are even more influential on the magnitude of suffering that happens, potentially including some degrees of unnecessary and unjustifiable impact.
Similar (on a different level) to the way compassionate prison staff and laws around treatment of prisoners can make a real difference, but can’t really impact whether the system as a whole is focused in a punitive or rehabilitative way.
I would also trust them more if they didn’t act as if the ball for peace is 100% in the Palestinian court. By not acknowledging the historical displacement or the way the settlements may be the final straw for the possibility of two states, they make it one-sided in a way that doesn’t show real openness to a political solution even in future. Even though Israel shouldn’t be shouldering all or most of the blame, it’s still hard to trust the basis of rhetoric that has no nuance. And it’s elements of the population that does, to an extent, give the government the parameters to distract from the (lesser, but significant) Israeli responsibilities in the peace process.
You raised a bunch of complex issues which I would love to address, Annelise. I will try to get to as much as I can early next week.
Thanks, Dina
I’m fairly certain that the deradicalization will come after hamas is destroyed, certainly not in the war zones. Destroy hamas, shut down their military first. There is no other way this early in the war. I sure hope hamas helps their people get out of the war zones, a concerned government would do that. I really do not expect them to since they have shown they care less about their own people than they care about murdering the Israeli people. Anyway, one thing at a time. At this point, surrendering would be such a wise thing to do. Israel has their tunnels, they are never getting them back, and this will only end one way. hamas is responsible for every single one of their citizens deaths and they must be stopped from ever doing this to their people, and Israels citizens, again. Or all these people died for nothing.
I agree with him that it can only happen under new leadership.
But we’re getting two narratives. One is that the IDF only does what it has to, to reach terrorists while avoiding innocent people. The other is the talk about deterrence, such as Netanyahu saying, “Time will tell if the balance of deterrence [in Gaza] has changed or not. I think it has.”
If he really believes that Palestinian society can become peaceful, and that this is the ultimate way forward, he doesn’t seem to have addressed the question about how any use of excessive force for deterrence further affects the ability for people to turn to peace.
I think he is saying that because he doesn’t believe the force is excessive, but necessary. Israel does not want to fight; Hamas does. Hamas can end this in a second. Israel can’t.
Sometimes, it really is that simple.
I guess what’s necessary can also be deterrent. The danger is when the two are blurred. They just seem to talk a lot about deterrence via severity, whether or not that’s just rhetoric.
In any case, I agree that the main issue overall is the incitement to violent resistance. Even if the situation were less complex, still many peoples who simply have been colonised and oppressed have rejected long-term violence as a pathway.
I do not accept the narrative that the Palestinians are colonized and oppressed by Israel (the settler colonial narrative in which white Europeans colonize and oppress people of color in their imperialistic expansionist drive). I would like to explain further but I am traveling this week. I hope I will have time to untangle this next week because it’s very complicated!
I don’t accept it either, at least it’s much more complex than that.
What I meant was that if so many people from other lands, who truly have been oppressed in simple cases of colonisation, have chosen to move forward through non-violent resistance, that says a lot about how brutal violence can’t be brushed away as a valid response to what is claimed as colonisation.
I do question the decisions made by the British Mandate and the UN, and there were incidents that contributed to Arab Palestinians fleeing. But the fact that those places really were the hometowns of many Arabs under the Ottoman landlords stands alongside the well-known Jewish connection to the land. And as fair as the right of return should be, it’s made impossible by the threatened destruction of Israel. So I agree that there’s no straightforward comparison at all to colonisation, even if there were elements of it via British involvement.
Okay, I see what you’re saying.
I just want to add to this that the claim that Hamas is responding to Israeli oppression is odd in light of the fact that people rarely respond this way to oppression. I’m thinking of the Armenians, Uighurs, Yemenis, Syrians, the concentration camp that is North Korea, etc. I can’t find an equivalent modern example, and the only historical example off the top of my head is the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, which, as bad as it was, is not even in the ballpark of the Hamas savagery that was unleashed on October 7.
This proves a point I made earlier, that Hamas distracts its people from the real oppression they suffer under Hamas by directing their hatred toward the Jews.
Indeed.
History will record the stance and voice of each participant in this utterly shameful episode. Israel will live.
I’m not sure this comment will show up in the right place–I’m responding to your comment to Larry explaining that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same.
Zionism is the belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism opposes this belief. Therefore, anti-Zionists do not believe the State of Israel has the right to continued existence. The only country in the world that they believe does not have this right is the only Jewish state in the world. I do not believe for one second that this is a coincidence.
Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israeli government policies. It is not support for a two-state solution.
I don’t understand how anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism, and I would be interested to understand your perspective on this.
Jews who are anti-Zionist claim legitimacy for their view because they are Jews. This is intellectually dishonest. You can be Jewish and hold antisemitic beliefs. It is something that has been painfully clear to Jews throughout history. How often have we been betrayed by our own brethren? The very first blood libel was propagated by a Jewish convert to Christianity, for one example among many.
To me, it seems obvious that anti-Zionism is the peculiar strain of left-wing antisemitism and is used as a respectable cover for antisemitism on the left. That’s why you will see defenses of anti-Zionism only by left-leaning authors. (I am politically independent, so I have no axe to grind against the left; in fact I lean left in many of my political views–just definitely not on Israel, lol.)
Wow, I didn’t know she ever replied to me.
I accidentally replied to this on the other thread.