When I started this Substack, I never thought that I would ever have to mention the Middle East. But then the Hamas attack on Israel happened on October 7 and here we are.
Like I wrote in a previous post, one of the reasons why I have an aversion to the Israel-Palestine topic is because of the activists on both sides that I encountered during my days as a student at the University of Maryland at College Park. I have another reason that's a bit more personal.
I mentioned briefly in my first-ever Substack post that one of my street creds on Eastern Europe came from the fact that I was once married to a man who is the grandson of the Hungarian-born diabetes researcher Michael Somogyi. His mother was Somogyi's daughter. When my mother-in-law and father-in-law were married, they were involved in both the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements primarily through volunteering with the Congress of Racial Equality.
As for religion, they were members of a Quaker congregation for a few years until that congregation went through a nasty split over the Vietnam War with half of the congregation wanting to bomb that nation back to the Stone Age. (I know that the Quakers have a reputation for being pacifists but President Richard Nixon, who authorized the bombing of Cambodia, was raised as a Quaker.) Otherwise they were completely non-religious.
In the later years of their marriage my father-in-law, who worked as an engineer in a now-defunct high tech company, met a new coworker who had just started working in his department. She was a thirtysomething woman who had never married and she had a PhD in chemistry. She shared my father-in-law's interests in the hard sciences.
Basically my father-in-law and that coworker had a relationship that was more than just two colleagues working for the same company. At one point that coworker apparently told my father-in-law that she is a devout Orthodox Jew and she will always be one. If he wanted to remain in that relationship, he would have to convert. Once he left my mother-in-law he began lessons with the rabbi on all aspects of Judaism including learning Hebrew. He converted to Orthodox Judaism and he married that coworker just two weeks after his divorce was final.
To say that his relatives and longtime friends were shocked by all this is an understatement.
His second wife was a staunch Zionist. In fact, when she was in her 20's she had moved to Israel for a few years where she was instantly granted citizenship under its Law of Return. But then she was notified that she had to obey the Israeli law where men and women of a certain age were required to serve with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for a few years. She moved back to the United States shortly after she got that notification.
She remained very pro-Israel and I still have memories of when my ex-husband and I used to visit her and my father-in-law in New York City when she would literally spend time talking about how great Israel is, how much of a paradise that country is, and other stuff. To her Israel could do no wrong. And she wanted the Palestinians to just leave.
She and my father-in-law visited Israel several times during their marriage. They seemed to really enjoy each visit, especially when they would see former members of their congregation who had moved there. He began to say the same political things about that country as she did. He also looked down on the Palestinians, which was ironic given his past volunteer civil rights work with CORE.
They strongly disapproved of the Oslo Peace Accord that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed together, which was ironic on my father-in-law's part given his previous work in the anti-Vietnam War movement. I didn't dare ask either of them what they thought about Rabin's assassination by a right-wing Jew soon after that landmark peace plan was signed.
Basically they believed that Israel is for Jews only and you shouldn't show any concerns about Palestinians because they are terrorists who don't like Jews. It was such a draining experience hearing them talk like that that I ended up developing a distaste for discussing anything to do with the Middle East around them.
I last saw them in person in early 2011 when my husband and I visited them at their condo in New York City. When my husband abruptly walked out on me with zero warning (he pretended that he still loved me until three days after Christmas Day 2011) I emailed them with other members of his family telling them where they could reach him (via his work phone number and cell phone) since he wasn't living at home anymore. I sent one more email a month later telling them that I learned from friends that he had left me for a friend of ours. That was the last time I contacted my ex-husband's father and stepmother. (In case you're wondering, the woman my husband left me for isn't Jewish.)
Neither of them had ever joined any social media platforms so I never caught up on what they were up to after my marriage ended. I got word from one of my ex-husband's relatives that I'm still Facebook friends with that my father-in-law died in 2017. I don't know whatever became of his second wife. None of my ex-husband's relatives that I'm still Facebook friends with ever mention her. (She has had a few personality clashes in the past with some members of his family for reasons that had nothing to do with Israel or Judaism.) Since she was 15 years younger than my father-in-law, I guess she's still alive but I don't know for sure.
When Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, I was glad that I had lost contact with my ex-husband's stepmother because I can only imagine how she would've reacted. I can also imagine her reaction when Israel warned Palestinians in the northern part of the Gaza Strip to move to the southern end if they want to avoid being bombed.
I was also reminded of her and the people on both sides of the issue that I encountered in college when I read the outpouring on social media. I saw posts saying that they side with Israel. I saw posts saying that they side with Palestine. It's like you had to choose which side to support and if you choose a side, expect to get a lot of hostile responses from supporters of the other side.
The thing is that, compared to Russia vs. Ukraine, it's harder to pick a side here. The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas, which was originally elected in 2006 but they did away with all elections afterwards. Hamas cares more about destroying Israel than actually governing the Gaza Strip. They are more focused on their hatred of Israel than trying to serve the basic needs of the residents that they are governing.
On the other side there is Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not only a hard right winger but he has a long history of corruption. Shortly before what happened on October 7 there was a massive march in Israel against Netanyahu forming a new government that would be the most right-wing government that Israel has ever known.
And then there is the Kremlin connection. Hamas is aligned with Iran. Iran is aligned with Russia. I found this video on the United 24 YouTube channel that spells out how entwined Russia is with this conflict.
I know that United 24 is the official channel of the Ukrainian government so they are definitely not totally impartial but I found other independent sources that also implies the Kremlin connection. There are allegations that the Kremlin had financed Hamas through cryptocurrency that was funnelled through Garantex, a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
On top of that, October 7 happens to be Vladimir Putin’s birthday. I wouldn’t be surprised if he considered the Hamas terrorist attacks to be a lovely birthday present for him.
Russia has a good reason why it approved of what Hamas did–because it would take the bulk of the attention away from the war in Ukraine so Russia could be free to conquer that country without so much media scrutiny.
And now we have this new crisis with Israel and Hamas. So how did we get here? If you look at the holy book that's known in Judaism as the Torah and in Christianity as the Old Testament of the Bible, you'll see frequent mentions of wars for territorial conquest in what is now Israel and Pakestine. At one point the region was part of the Roman Empire then it became part of the Ottoman Empire.
Moving up to the early part of the 20th century the source of this current conflict has its genesis during World War I and, yes, it was the result of colonialism. This video provides a very clear and concise explanation as to how everything stemmed from World War I and it only lasts five minutes.
The late political blogger Steve Gilliard did a long multipart series on the history of colonialism. While I found the posts he wrote about the British in the Middle East during World War I, he focused more on Egypt and Iraq with hardly a mention of the land that was then-known as British Palestine. The entire series is still worth reading since it’s about European colonialism in general that legacy has haunted many countries around the world to this very day. You can see the entire list of links to that series at the beginning of this previous post.
Russia has long supported the Palestinian cause ever since the Cold War. Part of the reason is because of antisemitism (there's a history of pogroms against the Jews and the Communist crackdowns on religion, especially towards Judaism). Another reason is because the United States has long supported Israel since that country's creation in 1948 and the USSR wanted to stick it to the US by supporting the Palestinians. Whenever Israel fought a war with one or more of its Arab neighbors, the US would side with Israel while the USSR sided with whoever is Israel's adversaries. That resulted in a proxy war which would be fought without the US and USSR directly going to battle with each other since both sides have nuclear weapons. The Israelis and Arabs would die in battle so the Americans and the Soviets wouldn't have to sacrifice their own soldiers.
Even now with this recent October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel plans to go into the Gaza Strip in order to get rid of Hamas once and for all, you see leftists automatically siding with the Palestinians without any regards to the victims of the October 7 attacks. Likewise there are certain pro-Israel people who are siding with Israel without having any concerns about the unarmed Palestinians who would be most likely to die.
On top of it there are far-right Christian Nationalists here in the US who are siding with Israel and who are happy for the terrorist attacks because they believe that it’ll kickstart the end times as foretold in the Book of Revelations when Jesus is going to return to Earth and all of these holier-than-thou Christian Nationalists will be raptured into heaven. They view any deaths of Israelis and Palestinians as “collateral damage.”
Basically a shitstorm is brewing in Israel and the Gaza Strip and Vladimir Putin is pleased with that.
And if I have to stand with anyone, I stand with both the unarmed Israeli civilians and the unarmed Palestinian civilians because they are literally caught in the middle of this latest hell to erupt in the Middle East. Some of them are already dead and others will be dead in the future. None of them deserve this at all.
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