Today is March 20, 2024. I should state that so that Reader could put my writing in context. The first thing I want to say is I am a man with no political position and therefore I have no political power. It also means that only information I have about world events came only from newspapers. I don’t have any information that is private. Everybody in the world can know what I know if they care to read newspapers or do research on the Internet.
I want to inform Reader that I know what antisemitism means. It is unthinking, unreasoning hatred of Jews. Since I want to be a thoughtful man, that kind of thing is something I hope I will never be guilty of. I would never do easy reasoning like “He is a Jew. Therefore, he is bad.”. On the other hand, Jews do not have the right to use antisemitism as a weapon to justify themselves oppressing other people.
Since founding of Israel in 1948, very often they acted like big bullies. When I was a child growing up in Burma in 1960’s, after 1967 Six-Days War (after Arab countries lost a lot of land to Israel), in a news journal, I saw the photograph of young Palestinians learning to fire a rifle in order to fight for independent Palestine. Because I was always a compassionate person, I felt heartbroken for them.
I know Reader knows that, that kind of sentiment was not uncommon. One question people ask may be why Israel was very harsh with their enemies when Israel was so much stronger militarily. Since we couldn’t explain that it was just easier to hate Israel.
Now I want to write about my attitude towards conspiracy theories and that was they don’t worry me because I have my refugee and that refuge is God. But in Arab-Israeli conflict, there are a lot of things I just do not understand.
I was attending University at Albany, SUNY from 1993 to 1995. In one semester, I took an Anthropology class and it was taught by a Jewish professor. I had had quite a number of Jewish friends before then but I didn’t talk too much about Arab-Israel conflict with them because I didn’t want to be rude. But what surprised me about Prof. Zimmerman was he seemed to have very friendly attitude towards Muslims. I was happy that now I knew at least one Jew who didn’t hate Muslims. But I was also a little surprised by that incidence.
There were a few other anomalies like that in my life experience and I will describe them. In year 2000, I had a job as a software engineer in an Israeli software company located in Long Island, NY. Yes, there were plenty of Jews there, no worries. But there were also a lot of Muslims there and that surprised me a little. Manager of software engineering was a Turkish Muslim. There were also a number of men and women who were Arab Muslims. Furthermore, one amazing thing was I sensed no tension at all among Jews and Muslims; actually zero.
There was still yet another incidence of that nature. I attended Queens College in Flushing, Queens in Spring of 2002 and I took a few graduate classes in Computer Science. There, I met a number of both Jews (some were Orthodox) and Muslims and I could not miss that they were best friends. But by then I was not surprised by things like that anymore.
Now I can recall a few things Prof. Zimmerman taught me to understand what I was seeing. Yes, there were a lot of reasons why they would like each other. First, they both don’t eat pork. They have similar religious dietary laws: Kosher and Halal. Also, most controversially, they both don’t believe that there can be incarnation of God in human form.
I can only say that when there were facts like that about Jews and Muslims, I cannot make sense of Arab-Israeli conflict. I would like to ask both Jews and Muslims to give me an explanation. Now I just don’t understand.
One thing I don’t have a lot of knowledge about was history. But I will now work with what I do know. I suppose one of the causes that founded Jewish Homeland, Israel was Holocaust. Jews moved to Palestine and some time later, Palestine was partitioned into Arab and Jewish entities.
One question I can ask was why Palestine was chosen for Jewish Homeland. Afterall, Palestinians didn’t have anything to do with Holocaust, it was Germany who committed that. Logic would suggest that it was Germany which should be partitioned into German part and Jewish part.
But I was being too theoretical. A lot of Germans hate Jews so badly (yes, the cause was only antisemitism and nothing else) that partitioned Germany will become hell for both Germans and Jews. It just wouldn’t work.
Then, I suppose World Leaders made the right decision to create Jewish Homeland in Palestine. But supposedly things didn’t work out with that approach either, at least according to newspapers we read. What is really going on there, only God knows.
Now I want to regroup myself and proceed according to what newspapers said. We can summarize here what we know. There was 6-Days War in 1967 and Israel gained a lot of Arabs’ land. Israeli occupation was extremely harsh and selfish. When Palestinians attacked Jews because of their extremely brutal rule, they responded in ineffably harsh ways. Not only that, very aggressive Israeli settlers would often just seize Arabs’ land. For example, after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Israeli settlers seized land in West Bank which was not even in Gaza.
When the current Gaza War broke out on October 7, at first I wasn’t sure what to say. Yes, Israeli rule may be very oppressive but Hamas did start the war. Then I saw that Hamas attacked Israel because Palestinians were making no progress under very oppressive Israeli rule and they started the war to tell the World about their plight under Israeli occupation. I now think that interpretation of Gaza War is correct.
All I want to say is this. If there is no justice, there will be no peace. Here is what I think should happen. Israel must retreat back to pre-1967 borders. I know Israeli Government claims that those borders were indefensible. But there is an easy solution for that. Five permanent member countries of UN Security Council should raise a peace keeping force and guard the border. I don’t see any problems with that solution. Yes, it costs money but spending that money is very appropriate.