Johnnie's blog

 As we see war erupting yet again in the Middle East, amid much polarisation of views, it is helpful for us to lay aside our prejudices and try to grasp the complexity of all that has gone before.  I have visited Israel twice and Jordan twice, and have studied the current affairs of the region over the last 30 years.

The history starts many centuries ago.  The peoples inhabiting the land were tribal Bedouins, Arabs, Samaritans, Canaanites, Philistines and nomads alongside Abraham, the father of the Jewish and Islamic people, living there approximately 5,000 years ago.  The Jewish race saw it as their homeland from that time. Islam did not exist for many centuries after.  Moon-God worship certainly did, but it was not until after 600AD that Islam arose – a fact worth remembering.  More of this later.

Returning to Abrahamic times, there was plenty of conflict between the various factions, but the Jewish people were dominant until the Roman Empire took power around 30 BC.  The Romans dominated Israel.  Many hoped Jesus would be their liberator, misunderstanding his spiritual mission.  Historians tell us that Jerusalem was crowded to capacity when a siege by the Romans began around AD 70.  It was the time of the Passover and more than half a million extra visitors were in Jerusalem. But over a period of months each successive wall of the city was destroyed.  Those who tried to flee were caught and crucified until we are told there were no more trees left to make wood for the crosses.

Eventually the city was taken. The temple was set ablaze and those who were left were either slaughtered or taken into captivity and dispersed as slaves around the Roman Empire.  Estimates put the number of Jews who died in the siege as high as 1 million.  

Over the years that followed thousands more Jewish people perished.  The Romans banished all but a few of the poorest Jews from the country and they changed the name to ‘Palestine’ (the land of the Philistines), this title not having been used before.  By the third century AD when Constantine became Roman Emperor, he declared Christianity as a good religion and took on the faith himself, but the Jews were still being persecuted. His Christian faith was doubted and seen as being more political than spiritual. At this stage Israel was largely emptied of Jewish people who had fled to other countries or who had been killed.  Few understand that the actions of the Roman Empire played a massive part in the development of the current situation, in that they started the antisemitic purge which has been repeated many times since.  These purges have probably shaped the Jewish race into increasing intolerance of attack.

As the centuries passed a new religion began to arise from the lineage of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his servant girl, in the name of Mohammed. Before he died in 632 AD Mohammed had succeeded in capturing Mecca in modern day Saudi Arabia, and beginning the religion known as Islam. His claims had ongoing implications for Christendom and world Jewry right down to the present day. Again, few realise the relative newcomer on the world religious scene that Islam represented. However, it’s perspective and prejudice were based on centuries of anti-Jewish culture.

The crusades became an excuse for appalling acts of savagery by so called Christians against both the Jewish and Muslim populations, perhaps provoked by Islam reaching Spain. In 1096 as Christendom was allegedly being upheld, an estimated 10,000 Jews were slaughtered in Germany by Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. Once there, they massacred most of the Muslims and Jews, some of the Jews being locked into their synagogues and then burnt to death. By this time, it is estimated that Jerusalem’s population had fallen to its lowest level of around 3,000 people. Throughout Europe including in England, Jews were expelled.  In many lands, pogroms were carried out with the whole Jewish community killed or burned alive. In the aftermath of the black death, Jews were blamed for the plague, and in Switzerland Jews were burned alive by the shores of Lake Geneva.

Under the Spanish Inquisition Jews suffered some of the worst persecution before Spain banished the remaining Jews from their shores.  On the day that Columbus set out on his voyage of discovery that was to lead him to America a great exodus of Jews was in the process of boarding ships. They were taken to new lands to escape European persecution.

Possibly the worst excesses took place in Russia. In 1881 the Orthodox Church issued a proclamation that said one third of the Jews in the country should be forcibly converted to the Russian church, one third should be expelled from the country and one third should be exterminated. Somewhere between 500,000 to a million Jews were killed.

In Germany, as the 20th century progressed, Jewish property was seized, Jews were forbidden to own businesses or to practice a profession. Month by month the pressure increased. The second world war in Germany saw approximately 6 million Jews together with gypsies, Poles and other groups exterminated in the concentration camps by the Nazis. By the time Germany surrendered in 1945 the Jewish population across Europe had been decimated. The world’s people began to see for themselves the full extent of the demonic campaign waged by Hitler against Israel.

Jews had been slowly returning to Israel in increasing numbers during the last part of the 19th century.  The Balfour declaration of 1917 was a public statement issued by the British government announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small Jewish population. 

The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community. It did not of itself cause a great influx of migrants but did encourage those already there to provide the prospect of a safe haven.

It is worth noting that the land of Israel has never been an Arab kingdom from the time of King David.  There was a succession of empires, the last of which was the Turkish Ottoman Empire.  General Allenby was a senior British Army officer and Imperial Governor. He fought in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire in the conquest of Palestine.  As a result, the British succeeded in capturing Beersheba, Jaffa and Jerusalem from the Turks during October to December 1917 without a shot being fired. The stage was set for the birth of the modern state of Israel in their original land.

In 1921 Churchill sanctioned the creation of Transjordan to accommodate the Palestinian people, and so the current Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was formed at a stroke.  This massive east bank territory reduced the land available to the Jews.  This is not a subject raised by the Arabs in any modern-day discussion. Throughout the 20s and early 30s immigration increased with more than 150,000 Jews returning to the land between the two world wars.

On the 29th of November 1947 much to the amazement of many seasoned political commentators, a vote acknowledging the right to create the state of Israel was taken at the United Nations. It needed a majority to get  an acceptance. On one of the very few recorded occasions both Russia and America voted in agreement of the resolution. 

So on December 6, 1947 Britain announced their British mandate would end on May 15, 1948. Within hours of the declaration of the state of Israel, five nations, namely Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia launched an attack on the fledgling country, determined to eliminate it before it had a chance to establish itself. Israel lost most of the city of Jerusalem before a ceasefire was agreed on June 11, 1948.

Some researchers argue that the two-state solution has already been implemented because Jordan, which makes up 78% of the former Mandatory Palestine, was originally created as a state for the Arabs, and over 6 million Palestinians actually live there right now.

Meanwhile Jordan had seized the West Bank annexing it in 1950, and declaring it to be part of Jordan.  The response of the Arab league was to threaten to expel them but the war weary Western powers had no desire to intervene again and so Jordan maintained control. Egypt meanwhile played much the same game, hanging onto the Gaza Strip that it had seized in 1948 as legitimate spoils of war. As the fighting developed over the next 20 years it erupted into the 1967 war. Many Arabs and many Jews were displaced from their territories during that war. The Arab nations were unwilling to recognise Palestine as a state, and Jordan would not accommodate Palestinian people. Equally Egypt was unwilling to recognise the Palestinian people.  It seemed that they were too troublesome, in that they wanted the destruction of the Jewish state, and would not live in peace. They were not alone as Syria, Iran and Egypt still spoke of their aim as the elimination of Israel.

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of pre-emptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities.  Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt’s military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. Jordan, which had entered into a defence pact with Egypt just a week before the war began, did not take on an all-out offensive role against Israel. However, the Jordanians did launch attacks against Israeli forces to slow Israel’s advance.  On the fifth day, Syria joined the war by shelling Israeli positions in the north. Egypt and Jordan agreed to a ceasefire on 8 June, and Syria on 9 June, and it was signed with Israel on 11 June. 

As this six-day war ended, it was hoped that it would bring an end to hostilities but it did not. Between 1949 and 1967, the present-day Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egyptian forces from, firstly, the Kingdom of Egypt and, secondly, from 1958 onwards, the United Arab Republic (UAR). The Egyptian occupation of Gaza began with the inception of the territory in 1948 following the First Arab–Israeli War, and ended after Egypt’s defeat to Israel in the Third Arab–Israeli War of 1967, after which the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip commenced.  This ended in 2005 with elections being held in Gaza. It is noteworthy that Israel does not occupy the Gaza Strip, nor the West bank and protestations of ‘Free Palestine’ have no basis in history.

By 1973 war erupted again.  It began on 6 October 1973, when the Arab coalition jointly launched a surprise attack against Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur.  Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, one day in the year when even the most secular Jews were not working.

The surrounding Arabs attacked Israel. Much of the defence systems along the Suez Canal were breached or bypassed by the Egyptian army. Syria and Egypt attacked simultaneously with 1 million troops between them. Suddenly the Egyptian army found itself out manoeuvred, encircled and isolated and open to the mercy of Israeli forces.  Jordan, in bloody fighting, expelled the Palestinians from the West Bank.  Civil war broke out in Lebanon as thousands of Palestinian fighters sought a new home.  Neither Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt was willing to accommodate them.  This is a noteworthy event regarding the standing that the Palestinian fighters held among their Muslim allies.

Many Christians today say nothing is wrong with Palestinian ideology, yet this disregards decades of bellicose attitudes. Islamic teachings fundamentally oppose Judaism and Muslims despise Jews.  This spills over into anti-Christian rhetoric due to the claims of Jesus ‘The king of the Jews’. It was reported that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 the attackers were saying “today we kill the Jews; tomorrow the Christians “.

The Oslo Accords were a pair of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).  The Oslo I Accord, was signed in Washington, D.C. in 1993 and the Oslo II Accord, was signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995. They marked the start of the Oslo process, a peace process aimed at achieving a peace treaty based on Resolution 242 and Resolution 338 of the United Nations Security Council, and at fulfilling the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.

Many Palestinians and Israelis, as well as the Arab League, have stated that they would accept a two-state solution based on 1949 Armistice Agreements, more commonly referred to as the “1967 borders”. In a 2002 poll 72% of both West Bank Palestinians and Israelis supported a peace settlement based on the 1967 borders so long as each group could be reassured that the other side would be cooperative in making the necessary concessions for such a settlement. A 2013 Gallup poll found 70% of Palestinians in the West Bank under Fatah, and 52% of Israelis supported “an independent Palestinian state together with the state of Israel”.  Only 48% of Gazans agreed, with the majority wanting Israel to be eliminated, influenced by Hamas.  Indeed, the chant “from the river to the sea” is not about joining up the two parts of Palestine, but totally about the elimination of Israel. When English sympathisers repeat the chant, they need to explain what they wish to become of the ancient race of the Jews, and their homeland. And they need to understand that Fatah and Hamas are two very different faces of Palestine.

To date Israel has not stopped provocative building in the West bank, an aggressive and totally unacceptable situation.  And Palestine in Gaza has five times refused to enter into a two-state solution.  As such, both have hindered a way forward.  Meanwhile the world is blind to the fact that many Muslims live in Israel, at peace with their Jewish neighbours, with mosques freely allowed to function, and many Muslims working within Kibbutz communities.

Right now, in December 2023, Hamas are believed in quite outrageous statements.  How many of their thousands killed are their terrorists? It is estimated that 30,000 Hamas fighters exist. So it could be very many.  As I write this is estimated to be 5,000.  Don’t forget that 300,000 Russians have now died in Ukraine, which gives a scale by which to measure. And how many babies would be in incubators in a population of 2.6 million? Massively less than they claim. And yet the world is naïve to this deception. The IDF is clearly attacking the tunnel network, and the Hamas leaders who live within it.

The ignorance of a large number of figures in British political life who speak of Israel and Palestine is startling. From Humza Yousaf to Jess Phillips, their lack of historical insight and balance can hardly be exaggerated. As it happens, a ceasefire of a kind existed in Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally, and very painfully, in 2005 – removing every Jew from the strip. They handed over the land and got rockets, often daily, in return.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have street protests that pre-dated the Israeli invasion, a fact that puzzles many Jewish people.  They ask what has become of the UK?  The answer is that while we welcomed into our society people from very different cultures, this was something we could have coped with had we not also deconstructed our host culture at the same time – with the end result that there isn’t much of a national identity for either arrivals or the young to assimilate into.  Add to that the virtue-signalling culture we now see before us and maybe we can explain the protests.

Of course it is important to make a distinction between Hamas as a government and as an armed force. According to the people interviewed in Gaza and to polls, support for Hamas as a political force was low even before the war.  Hamas came to power in 2006 in elections in which it won 44 per cent of the vote to rule on a four-year mandate. At the time of the elections, half of the people alive today in Gaza had not been born.  A year later, Hamas drove out the opposition party, Fatah, and took complete power in the Gaza Strip. During the battle for control, Hamas militants threw a rival Fatah fighter from the rooftop of a 15-storey building. Later that day, a Hamas fighter was thrown from another building. 

Since then, Hamas has run Gaza with brutal authoritarianism, imprisoning and torturing its critics. “They are an autocratic government who only care about themselves, they never cared about us as people. They denied us basic needs when they were doing well financially,” said Omar, a father of two living in Gaza, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. “What happened on October 7 was so useless, I didn’t celebrate it for a second. What should I celebrate — children being killed? This is against Islam, this is against my morals.” 

Prior to October 7, while Gaza was a conservative Islamic society, its inhabitants were not living under the kind of restrictions imposed by Isis in Iraq and Syria, or by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Girls went to school and women could attend university. The strip’s small Christian community was permitted to practise their religion. There were no bars: alcohol was strictly banned except for Christians. And, like in most of the region, gay people were not open about their sexuality. Homosexuality was illegal under a 1936 law inherited from the British Mandate in Palestine, but in practice the law was not enforced.

However, the Hamas government was regarded by the Gazan public as corrupt, greedy and ineffective, unable even to get the rubbish collected and the electricity working, but demanding taxes nonetheless. Leaders of the political division, such as the grey-bearded Ismail Haniyeh, were seen as out of touch, living in safety in Beirut and Doha while their people endured 16 years of suffering.  This suffering is also enforced by the Egyptian government who view the constant hatred, rocket barrage and massive tunnel construction of Hamas to be counter-productive.  Despite the fear of repression by Hamas, thousands of mainly young people marched in Gaza this summer to demand better living conditions, including jobs, electricity and water. 

A widely cited poll published in September by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed Haniyeh would win in a presidential election in Gaza — albeit one with a low turnout — if he stood against Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, who controls the West Bank and is also seen as corrupt and  weak.

Nearly half of people surveyed in Gaza and the West Bank said that neither Fatah nor Hamas deserved to lead or represent Palestinians. Only 10 per cent of people in Gaza said they had a positive view of their living conditions; 72 per cent said there was corruption in Hamas-run institutions.

Here in the UK we don’t see street marches against the unjustified Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Are people not incensed over Russian brutality, rape and murder?  It seems not enough to protest.  Why might that be?  The simple, but probably true answer is because one is brutal, worldly and cruel.  And the other evokes hatred, massive prejudice, and maybe spiritual aversion.  People find it hard to determine why they respond in a certain way.  In the present Israeli – Palestine conflict, centuries of misunderstanding, hatred, and anti-Israeli sentiment is embedded in so many people. Yet does not the Jewish race deserve a safe haven after all that has happened to it? If your answer is yes, where should that be?  They have lived there for millennia.  If your answer is no, then you need to determine where these 6.5million people should go. And why. Herein lies the problem: many say no, but cannot bring themselves to explain the next steps. Because national annihilation is not politically smart, as Jeremy Corbyn found. But sitting on the fence is no better.

Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, recently told Times Radio we should “not forget there was a truce between Israel and Hamas, and it lasted right up until October the 7th 2023 when Hamas broke it”.  This was as news of a ceasefire extension to allow more hostage releases was overshadowed by the alleged deaths of the youngest children remaining in captivity.  Let us pray for a just solution for all involved.