SAMPLE CHAPTER

Why do you hate Israel?

Game Boy wrote:

What Must Go is the 55-Years of Israeli Occupation, Colonization, and Racisms. If the Jews were given a homeland in Palestine as a reparation for the Holocaust; then the European must pay for it, NOT the Palestinian. The Palestinian People are under No Obligation to cooperate with their Occupiers. The Palestinian People have the Legal, Historical, and Moral right to engage in resistance and Self-Defence against their occupiers by ALL means possible.

[Game Boy is under a number of misconceptions. Israel has not occupied anything. Israel exists on land allocated to it by UN Resolution 181. Additionally, it exists on land taken from the illegal Jodanian occupier in war. The concept of ‘occupation’ is an interesting one. I do not claim to be an expert in international law, but one thing I do know. For Israel to be ‘occupying’ land, that land has to have been someone’s sovereign territory. That makes not only legal sense but it is surely common sense. The myth Israel faces is that the west bank was Palestine, and that therefore it was sovereign territory and that therefore it is under occupation. The slightest familiarity with hsitory would acquant Game Boy with an understanding that not only has the west bank never been anyone’s sovereign territory but neither has anywhere that Israel exists, unless you choose to go back to biblical times, which I don’t. Prior to Israel, the land was under a League of Nations mandate, and prior to that it was part of the Ottoman Empire. At no time has there ever been a state of Palestine, and so Israel cannot be ‘occupying’ anything, let alone Palestinian land, because there is not and there never has been such a thing as Palestinian land. And in case anyone is tempted to say it’s land allocated to the Palestinian Arabs by the United Nations in 1947, let us remember that the Arabs rejected that Resolution. Now let’s look at his belief that the Jews were given a homeland in Palestine as reparation for the Holocaust. This is of course historical nonsense. The Balfour Declaration was dated 1917.]

Why do you hate Israel?

Tomato Legends wrote:

As a Palestinian myself, you got most of the information right. I believe, however, that you should mention the many acts of violence that Israel has done to the Palestinians. You’ve never explicitly mentioned the many, many deaths caused by Israel’s bombings of Gaza, the apartheid system in place and the ethnic cleansing and the killing and imprisoning of children.

[I cover most of the silliness in this elsewhere, so I shall focus on Israel’s bombings of Gaza. Let’s keep in mind the question Tomato Legends is answering, why do you hate Israel. The function of Hamas attacks on Israel is to make Israel retaliate with overwhelming military force, which it obligingly does every time. If I could bang heads together to make the Israeli government do one single thing it would be to not fall for this. They know exactly what Hamas is doing, and every time they oblige. I just do not understand the thinking. The primary strategy for the IDF should be, never attack Gaza. Do whatever you have to do to defend Israelis, but do not give Hamas what it wants, which is to goad the IDF into killing Palestinians, especially, if Hamas gets lucky, Palestinian children. To understand how Hamas could do this one must stop thinking like a westerner, coming from a culture that reveres life and protects children above all. Hamas is a death-fixated cult that sacrifices children just as easily as the Aztecs did. The result is what Tomato Legends is saying, repeated not just throughout the disputed territories but throughout the world. What this person, and everyone else, should be doing is hating Hamas, not Israel. I have said it before and here it comes again. If Hamas wants to make peace, it will find Israel eager to listen. If Hamas wants to protect Gazans it will not attack Israel. Hamas does not want to protect Gazans because it considers them expendable cannon fodder in its obsessive war against Israel. So, if Israel wants to neutralise the Hamas threat it is going to have to understand that when Hamas launches missiles at Israel it is not the missiles Hamas is firing, it is propaganda.]

Why do you hate Israel?

J Mickhael wrote:

May Allah protect Palestine from the daily aggression and tyrany of the isreili occupation who systematically target and kill Palestinian children? ? Full support and everlasting love to Palestine?

[Here is what I picture the systematic targeting and killing of children would look like. At regular intervals, whether that would be daily, weekly or monthly, soldiers would enter a school, load a given number of children onto a lorry and take them to a killing site, where they would be killed either by a bullet in the back of the head or some other effective method. Given that in any given week or month, let alone day as J Mickhael suggests, no Palestinian children are killed, and those who are killed are killed because they attack Israeli soldiers, as opposed, say, to being picked at random for killing, this does not appear systematic. And I should not need to say it but I shall, if a parent allows their child to attack a soldier with a stone or even a knife, in a civilised country the parent would face criminal charges.]