NEWS
Gaza and Israel (updated)
07-10-2025Two years in the war that began with the Hamas attack against Israel on 7 October 2023, with the specific genocidal aim to destroy Israel and expel the Jewish people, it is time to reflect rather than just demonstrate against Israel and "recognise"the Palestinian right to its own state.
It is important to be reminded of two historc facts: that the Arab world has waged war against Israel ever since the State of Israel came into being i n May 1948. Gaza, a costal region under Egyptian military rule in 1948, was chosen as the temporary region for Arab inhabitants,instructed to leave Palestine west of the Jordan temporarily until the Arab armies had driven away the Jewish immigrants. That plan failed and the refugies were deliberately left there as a continuing threat to Israel.
Renewed efforts to destroy Israel moved from regular armies to terrorist movements like the PLO and Hamas (both created by the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt!)
Hamas attacked in October 2023 because it came to be sponsored by the Iranian Ayatolla's regime, whose primary purpose is the destruction of Israel, written in both Iran's and Hamas's' Constitutions.
The deep tragedy of the war today is, that Israel under prime minister Netanyahu - one of the immgrants from the former Sovietunion - has chosen for the old principle of war:"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" a concept of justice in the Torah intended to establish proportional penalties rather tha promoting unlimited retaliation. Against Hamas the concept amounts to complete destruction of Hamas's militarized Gaza" in its war of self-defence. What else could or should Israel have done? While -significantly - the Arab States remain silent, Europeans demonstrate against Israel and invent anti-Israeli policies, including the empty promise to recognise the non-existing Palestinian state!
Are we living through a revival of very old European Antisemitism? I am no admirer of US President Trump, but he is at least prepared to search for an end to the war - in the long American tradition of support to the State of Israel. We Europeans have all reason to be ashamed of our approach.
Back
- Cultural Diplomacy: Waging war by other means?
- The Illusions of Détente,
- Western Cooperation
- Sporen van de Twintigste Eeuw
- European Unification into the twenty first Century...
- De geest van Christus leeft in Europa
- Neither Justice nor Order
Western Cooperation
Footprints of the 20th Century - Third EditionDescription
For the study of international relations, knowledge of the history of Western Cooperation in the Twentieth Century is essential. The third volume reviews the broader history from America’s entry in the First World War in 1917 and the start of the American Era in international relations one hundred years ago, to the inauguration of President Trump in 2017.