Biased or Factual? Both?

A summary addressing some of the feedback from the past two weeks

As my newsletters get more distribution and more subscribers there is more feedback, and most of it comes by way of direct message or e-mail. Most are positive generally and there are helpful ones that point me to things I missed or items I should be adding to a story. But there are also those that argue that I am biased, not fully educated on the subject and that there is little consideration for what Palestinians think or have experienced. One came through LinkedIn yesterday and it was a good primer to address that concern, so let me do it in three ways.

Firstly, Israel and the ongoing conflict is an issue near and dear to my heart and they have been for over fifty years. In 1973 as a kid I started to collect newspaper clippings and created a scrapbook with every piece of news on Israel that I could find. A sort of Google News by search terms before the fact. In hindsight a pointless task you say, and to that the answer is: yes it was, totally, and it did not last very long. But it did educate me in a time where we grew up witnessing the massacre at the Munich Olympics and the drama at Entebbe. But also seeing Arafat making a name for himself by entering the UN with a speech. There were Israelis at our dinner table in those days and later in life I toured not just Israel, but also the Palestinian areas with wife and kids and yes, we know people on both sides of the conflict intimately.

Secondly, this newsletter was conceived to give context to the big issues of our times (Ukraine, US Elections, China, the impact of tech on politics etc.) and add news that was otherwise not fully covered in mainstream outlets like for instance the Dutch farmers. I try to stitch news and analysis together with what I know and have learned over the years. When you see what is written and promoted in the face of the horrors of October 7th it is impossible to stand aside and not only express moral outrage, but also try and find clarity in the global re-arrangement that is now taking place. What is really happening and where do we go from here?

In order to do so you have to go back to the start of this recent fire and focus in on: (1) the attack on Israel that was so barbaric that we have to go back as far as Nazi Germany and its killing fields to try and make sense of it; (2) the inevitable media and information war that followed. I cannot put it any better than Unherd journalist David Patrikarakos who attended the IDF briefing this week that compiled all the footage taken by Hamas fighters on their killing spree in one viewing. This is what his summary was:

What happened on October 7 had nothing to do with resistance. It had nothing to do with occupation or a one- or two-state solution. It was about something far more ancient and atavistic—the desire to kill Jews wherever they are and whoever they are. And against that, there can be no retreat.

And that is point three. Hamas does not want a solution; it does not seek peace and in all likelihood would end up building a terror state much like or even worse than today’s Iran given the chance. Their information cannot be trusted, the way they treat their own people falls short of any standard of decent and humane governance. It is the abyss where humanity dies. That is what we witnessed. Call me biased, I call it a return to the age old conflict between good and evil. To choose an imperfect state that tries and betters the life of its citizens over the one that destroys everything it sees in its way. The moral choice.

But let’s park that for a moment and revisit the two-state option. Because yes, as a precursor of all the events that does play a role. Why did we never see a lasting peace arrangement, a settlement? You will read the arguments about the conflict being ‘complicated’ but in reality it is not and there are a few key things that have not happened:

1. The 1947 UN resolution to divide the land was never implemented. Why? The Arab world rejected it, violently.

2. Israel never returned to its 1967 borders. Why? The Palestinian leadership bombed away everything that was accomplished during the many negotiations and peace accords that took shape over the last two decades of the 20th century.

Let me get to my final argument here. The core reason is that there is a huge imbalance between Israel and its opponents in the Arab and Muslim world. On the one hand we have an open and democratic state, Israel, that has shown extreme leniency over the years in coming to an arrangement that will secure peace. Sure, pressure from the US in this regard helped to get that deal across the line. But it was never reciprocated. The Arab world is not democratic, closed and remains fundamentalist in many of its positions. And its wealth has made it far more insular from international pressure. Peace between the two factions is not equal, it is asymmetrical.

Democracies and autocracies operate differently and therein lies a deep separation between the two sides, one that has been unbridgeable to date. The Arab world has first tried to destroy Israel and when it failed outsourced and financed a continuation of the conflict it started to one of its own - the Palestinians - as a proxy to wage war. And: practically all Arab and Muslim nations nation refuse to have Palestinian refugees enter their country and that should give you an indication of the love and support the Ummah really has for the Palestinians.

In all its efforts to secure peace the answer from the Palestinian side has been terror with mounting casualties over the years, here is an accounting of it. There have simply been too many attacks and too many victims. The ones that stand out in their cruelty were attacks where families and in particular children were targeted. One of these was the Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem in 2001.

So in a certain way we are in Israel’s third survival fight. The first wave of attacks came from sovereign Arab nations and lasted from 1948 to 1979 (the year Egypt made peace with Israel), the second one from Palestinian terror groups (from 1980 to around 2007, the year Hamas sized power in Gaza). We are now in phase three with Iran funded terror groups that will go as far as they possibly can to destroy the Jewish state and all its inhabitants. This includes Lebanon-based and Iran-funded Hezbollah. We are actually in the middle of the third phase where the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran grouping is at its peak of power, or at least very close to that. All that is lacking is a nuclear armed Iran to make the crisis complete.

Has Israel become heavy handed in its response? Maybe. The counter question is: what would be a proportionate reply if you are up against a well co-ordinated collaboration that seeks to annihilate you and your family? No negotiation, no peace, not an inkling of humanity, just death. What would your options be? Israel is using its secret weapon, and asked what it was former prime minister Golda Meir revealed it to then junior senator Joe Biden in 1973:

“She said, ‘Senator, don’t look so worried… We Israelis have a secret weapon.’ And I thought she only had said this to me, no one else in the whole world… And I thought she was going to tell me about a new secret weapon.”

So what is Israel’s secret weapon, Biden asked eagerly.

“We have nowhere else to go,” replied Golda.

And that’s where we are again today. In October 2023, some seventy-six years after a UN mandated creation of two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one. And we are further away from it than ever.

Photo: my favourite fruit juice stand on Dizengoff and Ben-Gurion Streets in downtown Tel Aviv. A few weeks after visiting there this February a terror attack took place right on the same place where this photo was taken. Three innocent Israelis were injured, one of whom died later.