Part 3: Why Israel and Palestine Have Failed

As I explained in Part 1, there is no easy solution to this many-thousand'd-year-old dilemma. Surely, the folly and tragedy of inhumane history, especially, the last two hundred years of failed diplomacy, war, and genocidal hatred must caution us against quick or even slow solutions to very complex situations.

How does one even begin to deal with Israeli settlers or Palestinian HAMAS—both who claim the Ultimate Reality of the Universe is exclusively on their own side, that their opposing Gods call them to kill their enemies?

How does one get two diametrically opposed killing nationalities to reconcile?

What would we do if our enemies played soccer with the decapitated head of our son, as did Palestinians with an Israeli soldier’s head in 2004 in Gaza?”!

What would we do if we were caring doctors, but while we helped the women of our enemies, they dropped large shells on our house and killed 4 of our daughters as did an Israeli tank in 2008 (I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza’s Doctor on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish)?

To be utterly honest, even given my ethical commitments, I don’t think I could handle such horrible actions by avowed enemies. How could I seek to care for the family of the Muslim “martyr” and “hero” who snuck into our 13-year-old daughter’s bedroom and knifed her to death?!!!

Only a minority of human leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin seem capable of having such a deep centering in benevolence and nonviolence that they can show caring to killers. MLK did for KKK members and other Southern racists, even though they supported bombings which killed 4 young girls, even though they fired-bombed King’s house, endangering his own family.

At present, I find it difficult to deal with several people who lied about me. I’ve sought to forgive them, but these individuals’ actions deeply harmed myself and my family, and had very bad results for years.

I admit, though I am writing this article in hope it will be one tiny blossom for peace in the Middle East, I, myself, wouldn’t know how to handle what Israelis and Palestinians go through daily—the oppression, the lying, the stealing, the cruel actions, the killing, and worst of all, the justifications for the killings...

Also, keep in mind, very ironically, that many Palestinians and Israelis are actually closer to each other than they are to their own ethnic/national governments. Did anyone see the video of Palestinian Fatah members who had their kneecaps/legs shot off by their “brothers” of HAMAS when the latter attacked them in Gaza?

The wounded Fatah members got medical attention, strangely enough, in an Israeli hospital!

And don’t forget the tragic story of the Palestinian gynecologist who helped treat Israeli women for infertility but lost 3 of his daughters, killed by Israeli soldiers!

Or what about the Israelis who agree to meet in equality with Palestinians in reconciliation groups such as the grieving parents organization, Parents Circle—Families Forum, and Musalaha, who share more in common with their “enemies” than with the Israeli government of Netanyahu?

What about the Palestinian Elias Chacour (the author of Blood Brothers and We Belong to the Land) who has founded schools for hundreds of children and teens? The schools include Muslims, Druze, Christians, and Jews all working together!

Or consider the extreme commitment to ethics, sharing, and peace of Combatants for Peace, former warriors on both the Israeli side versus the Palestinian side, who now are working together for peace and justice.

The solution of the unending crisis has been tried by at least 8 methods in the past.

What about #6 Diplomacy? We have seen over the last 50 years, political diplomacy, even at its best, is usually little more than a smoke screen for furthering one’s own national agenda. While the Israelis claim to be seeking reconciliation with Palestinians, they continue to confiscate land from Palestinians, siphon off far more than their share of water, water needed much more by the Palestinian Arabs, abuse and demean the latter, etc.

Netanyahu's goverment even destroyed a school built by Scandinavians for Palestinian children and bulldozed a orchard planted by a Palestinian family who owned their land in 1904, long before most Jewish people came from Europe and the U.S.

And while Palestinians claim they want peace with Israel, they actually continue to stock arms, and tell their own people, teach their children in their schools, that they plan for the eventual extinction of Israel. Their diplomacy is only a mask of their real intentions.

As for #7 Legal Claim, surely anyone who has dealt at all with the convoluted legal system in the United States, knows this method is by far the worst of the eight efforts at peacemaking, for trying to solve the tragedy of the Middle East.

Legality seldom if ever has to do with what is ethically good, loving, and kind.

If you think #3 Present Possession is the key, are you prepared to give up your car to the thief who stole it last week because he is now driving it?

If Chumash Indians take over your house, force you and your family off your property, claiming their ancestors lived on your land, are you prepared to accept their present possession?

Present possession for the most part is only the poisonous frosting on the cake of #4 Military Might.

The latter--Military Might is, of course, the most popular and the most successful of land decisions. If in doubt ask the Indians why they don’t control California? Or the Mexican Government?

Or why the Saudis, one of the most oppressive governments in the world, is still in power after nearly a hundred years. It’s called survival of the fittest, governments being the meanest, cruelest…

But I presume if you have come to this site, which has the longwinded name, Infinite Ocean of Light and Love, you are not among the multi-millions of humans who believe in revenge and survival of the fittest, that you don’t espouse stomping out your enemies and so do not want to hear a defense of that method. There are endless pro-military, pro-war websites and books for those who do.

Does anyone think #5 Best Use is ethically sound?

Strangely enough, many Israelis claim they get all of the land because they are better builders, farmers, scientists, etc. than Palestinians. But no doubt you know what infamous political group in the twentieth century actually espoused this doctrine before the Israelis.

It’s very strange that Jewish people would dare touch this view let alone strongly support it.

Now we come to the three best methods, but they, too, are fraught with severe problems...

TO BE CONTINUED--



In the Light of Peace, Justice, and SHARING,

Daniel Wilcox

ATTACKED! What Are You Going to Do?

How Are We Going to Respond to Attacks?

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- A Muslim Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Nasser Tarayra, was killed by a security guard on Thursday morning in an Israeli settlement in the southern occupied West Bank after carrying out a "martyr" attack--
repeatedly stabbing a 13-year-old Jewish girl, Hallel Yafa Ariel, in her own bedroom.
Shortly later, Hallel died from the murderous attack.
from http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=772054

Two months earlier, Muhammad's cousin, Yousef, was shot while committing a vehicular attack against Israeli soldiers.
Muhammad wrote on his Facebook page,
"Yousef is not the first martyr nor the last / and before he is my cousin he is a son of Palestine / God willing I will walk in the martyr’s footsteps / God have mercy on him and take him to heaven.”

After Muhammad's murder of the 13-year-old girl, his mother stated that she is "proud" of her son, and that her son is a "hero."
“My son died as a martyr defending Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque..."

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, he [my son] has joined the martyrs before him, and he is not better than them. Allah willing, all of them will follow this path, all the youth of Palestine.
Allah be praised.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/mother-of-kiryat-arba-terrorist-my-son-is-a-hero/

A sister of the killer said, “My brother is now a martyr. May God judge the Jews, and may my brother be content with his portion in paradise.”
--

What Are You Going to Do?

How Are You Going to Respond?

Other True Real Life Events,
(from minor to serious to horrific):

#1 Property Damage/Vandalism: Your New Chevy Van Is Keyed on the Whole Left Side

#2 Verbal Threat:

#3 Assault and Battery: A 200-pound Girl Knocks a 100-pound Girl to the Floor and Beats on Her

#4 Bodily Harm: You Get a Very Bad Cut Across Your Forehead and Lose One of Your Eyes When 2 Thugs Attack and Rob You (This happened to the Brethren in Christ leader Donald Tippet. Read of how he responded at the bottom of this article.*)
http://www.bic-church.org/connect/publications/Shalom/previous/pdfs/Spring01.pdf

#5 Lethal Violence: U.S. Ally Attacks Others
(A Government or Group to Whom We’ve Given Intelligence and/or Monetary Assistance)

#6 Massive Wars: The Great War, The Seven Years War, etc.

#7 Invasions: The Mexican War, the Invasion of the Confederacy, Invasion of Vietnam by the U.S. and French, etc.

#8 First Strike War: U.S. Attack and Invasion of Iraq

#9 Individual Acts of Terrorism:
a. Palestinian Muslim Knife, Vehicle, and Shooting Attacks Against Many Jewish Civilians such as the murder of Hallel Yafa Ariel
b. Omar Mateen, Muslim American Security Guard, Shoots to Death 49 and Wounds 53 Same Sexual Individuals in the Pulse NightClub in Orlando, Florida

#10 Mass Slaughter/Terrorism in War:

#10A 9/11: Muslim Jihadists, originally supported by the U.S. Against the Russians Turn Against the U.S. and use planes to kill over 3,000 people

#10B U.S. Civil War: General Sherman's infamous March to the Sea, creating a 40-mile wide swath of destruction, vandalism, theft, and horror across Georgia, to terrorize the Confederacy into Surrendering;
the intentional abuse and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate prisoners of war by both sides


#10C Pearl Harbor: Japan's First Strike Attack on U.S. Naval Ships on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu--2,335 military personnel killed and 68 civilians

#10D Japan's War Slaughter of Chinese:
"Japan’s China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention."

"They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731."

"Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war,
a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing..."
http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html



#10E U.S. Counter War-Responses: Later Intentionally Firebombing 67 Japanese Cities Including Tokyo and Atomic Bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki--killing at least 500,000 civilians, most burned to death.

In the firebombing of Tokyo alone, 100,000 died, and 1,000,000 were injured.
In contrast, at the start of WWII, President Roosevelt had warned European nations, “under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities."

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey provided "a technical description of the firestorm and its effects on Tokyo:

"The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage."

“...probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.”


#10F



How do you think we ought to respond to attacks by others?

Here's the answer of only one man in response to a single attack:
*"Bishop Donald Tippet of New York City had a scar that ran across his forehead and he was
blind in one eye from two men who robbed and mugged him.

After his hospitalization, he decided to declare war on them. He went to the jail to visit them and told them God loved them and had a purpose for their lives, and he wasn’t going to leave
them alone until they discovered that purpose.

He visited them weekly, and finally led them both to Jesus Christ. He went to their parole hearings, and testified on behalf of the two men who had blinded him. Finally, he told them that when they got out of prison he would help them finish high school, and then he would help
them finish college if they chose to go.

One didn’t go to college, but the other did. He made outstanding grades, went to medical school, and became an opthamologist!

Donald Tippet won his war. He took back enemy territory. He would have added to the enemy’s victory if he had allowed vengeance and hatred to fester in his heart. Every time we join with Satan’s hatred, it enlarges his territory. Every time we add to his violence, it enlarges his territory.

We are called to take back enemy territory. This young man became a restorer of vision instead of a taker of vision.

He became a healer and friend; he was lost and now he is found...Donald Tippet declared war, and
assaulted those two men with love; he hurled forgiveness and grace at their hearts,
and he stabbed them with truth and compassion.

That’s how God fights wars. If you want to control somebody’s body, kill them, put them in shackles and in jail, but if you’re after somebody’s heart, the only weapons that work are the weapons of Jesus
Christ."
--Woody Dalton is senior pastor of the
Harrisburg (PA) Brethren in Christ Church.
Grantham BIC,March 4, 2001.
Shalom: A Journal for the Practice of Reconciliation,
Volume 21, Number 2; Spring 2001, page 5
http://www.bic-church.org/connect/publications/Shalom/previous/pdfs/Spring01.pdf
--


To be continued--


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Money for Murder--Please Write Your Congressperson!

Arabic on the poster in part reads, "Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah, celebrates its martyr hero Mohammed Nasser Mahmoud Tarayreh." (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

What did Mohammed do?

Mohammed broke into 13-year-old Hallel Ariel's bedroom and stabbed her to death in her bed.

What a hero!

Then he attacked another Jewish person, but was shot.

Rataj Tarayreh, a sister of Mohammed Nasser Tarayreh, is looking
at a poster with pictures of her "martyred" brother,

Yasser Arafat and President Mahmoud Abbas,
at the family house, in the West Bank village of Bani Na'im, near Hebron.

The family is now eligible for $350 a month from a Palestinian “Martyrs’ Fund"--a Palestine Authority method
of rewarding the families whose family members such as Mohammed Nasser Tarayreh murder innocent Jewish civilians!

Relatives of the murdered Hallel Ariel

Please write your U.S. congressperson to divest all the millions of dollars being given to the Palestine Authority, until this travesty, horror, and injustice is stopped.



In the Light which shines through this world's ocean of darkness,

Daniel Wilcox