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DEMOCRACY MUST PREVAIL FOR ALL HUMANITY TO WITNESS

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

T

here had to be another way moving forward with Gaza.

The anger was justified – but the outcome by all accounts amounts to an attempt at genocide. And for that reason, Israelis must vote out of power the Likud Party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israelites should take the task on as another holy mission on behalf of the rest of the world, no doubt doing world leaders a favour who are unwilling to oppose Bibi in public but who also may secretly be wishing to distance themselves from him after he demolished the Gaza Strip.

The October 7 terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas, of Gaza, and the citizens of Gaza killed 1,195 innocent Israelis, including 364 attending the Nova Music festival, during the Simchat Torah holiday.

251 hostages were taken by Hamas into the Gaza Strip. Those hostages and their families and Jews around the world were psychologically tortured by the delayed return of their family members.

The Palestinians are absolutely guilty of mounting a border war involving 3,800 elite fighters from the Nukhba forces and 2,200 civilians on October 7, 2023. To distract Israeli security forces from the 119 border points that were penetrated, Hamas launched 4,300 rockets into Israel.

Hamas aka Islamic Resistance Movement have been the governing body in the Palestinian territory of Gaza since 2007. Hamas replaced the PLO aka Palestinian Liberation Organization. Hamas and the PLO may only be quasi democratic governing entities because of the authoritarian nature of their rule in Gaza and the West Bank.

And Palestinians must be held accountable for the joint acts of aggression by their governing officials.

While the Gaza War that was begun by Hamas and the Palestinians has been unsettling, the region has been molded by a series of conflicts since the founding of Israel in 1948.

The political backstory is anchored in the historical connection to the land that is a nexus of political, religious, military and economic forces.

The slaves used by the Egyptian pharos to build the pyramids exited to Canaan, crossing the Red Sea near Mount Sinai where the Hebrew Prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God about 1400 BC.

The area is also the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and contains the founding stations of Christianity.

For Islam, the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have walked from Mecca to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem before ascending to heaven.

The complexity of merging religious and cultural influences on the Holy sites in Jerusalem cannot be overstated.

With that backdrop, the Roman, Ottoman (Turks) and British Empires exchanged control of the region from time to time, with the Crusades often involved in swapping out occupiers of the Holy City.

The world foresaw the never ending conflict in the region, to the point of deciding to create  a Jewish nation state out of the homeland from about the mid-18^th century to 1920.

The Arab population was in the majority at the time Isreal was made the homeland for inhabiting Jews and Jewish refugees from all over the world. The migration of Jews to Israel had begun prior to the German Nazi Holocaust, but the Jewish population in the area swelled following World War II.

The Arabs and the Jews almost immediately began to fight for possession of the land, despite international intervention in 1948.

The conflict has smouldered to the point that the current situation may be intolerable with the memory of the loss of land and the historical conflicts being passed down from one generation to another generation. The politicians will just not let the grief pass, resulting in the need for all sides to be heavily armed, and to rearm continuously.

Israel has many foes, with bordering states being complicit in the frequent terrorist cells striking into Israel with rockets and suicide bombings, eventually requiring a blockade of Gaza and a tightening of border security to prevent, as much as possible, future attacks.

The Palestinians have enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza, which are in relative proximity to Jerusalem. Israeli settlers live among the Palestinians inside the West Bank.

So, what is to be done within that context in which the days of conflict must now outweigh the days of peace. The answer is that not much more can be done because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has overseen the destruction of 80 per cent of Gaza along the Gaza Strip’s 42 km border with the Mediterranean Sea on one side and Israel on the other side.

This retaliation is not even justified in an all out war, although the flattening of the opposing civilization has frequently been the response, including by the Allied Forces over Germany, the dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan, the Americans in Vietnam, and attempts to stop the rebellion in Yemen.

While everyone would be happy to be able to say that the world has moved to a heavenly place beyond conflict, the ugly reality is that humanity can switch very quickly from joy to anger, particularly with the knowledge of having modern arms at the disposal of national interests.

The mistake Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made is in lashing out in anger without forethought or reason other than the cold calculated killing of 74,000 Palestinians, including children, and injuring 175,098 more, among a population of about 2 million.

No shelter, no food and no water equals a humanitarian crisis regardless of the politics and the religion in the region.  The Palestinians could not be driven from the land before, because the sole of the people is connected to the land just as much as the Israelites are to ancient Canaan.

Everyone may be hostile now, if they were not before the Gaza reprisals, but before that not all Palestinians are guilty of hatred. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed the weakest side of his human character by launching disproportionate counter measures that seem now to have likely been a hidden desire for many years.

The brutal October 7 terrorist attack and the destruction of Gaza is a blight not just on the Middle East but the entire world order and modern civilizations – a horrible reminder of humanity’s dual nature.

The good must be encouraged in every way possible. And the evil must be deterred in every step forward.

The burden of all that violence will be significant for the Jewish people, for many years to come. And the empathy of the world for the plight of Israel has been substantially diminished, forever.

The World offers support for peace, and just the opposite for war and violence. Nation states often proceed regardless, much to the dismay of the many innocent participants in modern civilization.

There is so much splendour and so much goodness in the world, but almost like clockwork, the dark shadows return to do truly evil things to people.

The October 7 attack by Palestinians from Gaza on 21 border communities in Israel warranted punishment. The scale of destruction in Gaza, and the pain and suffering dispensed, must however be condemned. And the world relies on democracy in Israel for the proper adjustments toward peaceful coexistence moving forward.

Climate change advocate and human rights activist Greta Thunberg has called the Israeli response to the Oct 7 terrorist attack a genocide.

Certainly, the cruelty exhibited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must be rebuked in a democratic forum.

The world will then be able to step back and condemn the October 7 terrorist attack and the disproportionate destruction of Gaza as an abhorrent example of the darkest side of human nature that surfaces far too often all around the globe.

The Palestinians and the Israelites ought to be ashamed.

Democracy must prevail in this situation to restore the dignity of all the innocence that still exists despite everything that has occurred.