Why supporting israel is wrong

The degree to which the conflict has seeped into Israel-Palestinian music is a sign of how deeply and pervasively it effects Israelis and Palestinians. The Arab Israeli experience, typically one of solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and a sense that Arab-Israelis are far from equal in the Jewish state, comes through in their music, which is highly political and deals with themes of disenfranchisement and dispossession in the great tradition of American hip-hop.

Christiane Amanpour interviewed DAM about their music last year. Now here is a sample of Israel's wonderful jazz scene, one of the best in the world, from the bassist and band leader Avishai Cohen. Cohen is best known in the US for his celebrated instrumental album Continuo, but let's instead listen to the song "El Hatzipor" from 's Aurora.

The poem translated here expresses the hopeful yearning among early European Zionists like Bialik to escape persecution in Europe and find salvation in the holy land; that it still resonates among Israelis over years later is a reminder of both the tremendous hopes invested in the dream of a Jewish state, and perhaps the sense that this dream is still not secure.

On the surface, this is just the latest round of fighting in 27 years of war between Israel and Hamas , a Palestinian militant group that formed in seeks Israel's destruction and is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization for its attacks targeting civilians — and which since has ruled Gaza. Israeli forces periodically attack Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, typically with air strikes but in and with ground invasions.

The latest round of fighting was sparked when members of Hamas in the West Bank murdered three Israeli youths who were studying there on June Though the Hamas members appear to have acted without approval from their leadership, which nonetheless praised the attack, Israel responded by arresting large numbers of Hamas personnel in the West Bank and with air strikes against the group in Gaza.

After some Israeli extremists murdered a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem and Israeli security forces cracked down on protests, compounding Palestinian outrage, Hamas and other Gaza groups launched dozens of rockets into Israel, which responded with many more air strikes. So far the fighting has killed one Israeli and Palestinians ; two UN agencies have separately estimated that plus percent of the fatalities are civilians. On Thursday, July 17, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza, which Israel says is to shut down tunnels that Hamas could use to cross into Israel.

That get backs to that essential truth about the conflict today: Palestinian civilians endure the brunt of it. While Israel targets militants and Hamas targets civilians, Israel's disproportionate military strength and its willingness to target militants based in dense urban communities means that Palestinians civilians are far more likely to be killed than any other group.

But t hose are just the surface reasons; there's a lot more going on here as well. Palestinian youth throw stones at an Israeli tank in The simple version is that violence has become the status quo and that trying for peace is risky, so leaders on both ends seem to believe that managing the violence is preferable, while the Israeli and Palestinian publics show less and less interest in pressuring their leaders to take risks for peace.

Hamas's commitment to terrorism and to Israel's destruction lock Gazans into a conflict with Israel that can never be won and that produces little more than Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel's blockade on Gaza, which strangles economic life there and punishes civilians, helps produce a climate that is hospitable to extremism, and allows Hamas to nurture a belief that even if Hamas may never win, at least refusing to put down their weapons is a form of liberation.

Many Palestinians in Gaza naturally compare Hamas to Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have emphasized peace and compromise and negotiations — only to have been rewarded with an Israeli military occupation that shows no sign of ending and ever-expanding settlements. This is not to endorse that logic, but it is not difficult to see why some Palestinians might conclude that violent "resistance" is preferable.

That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in recent years. In the early s, there was also a lot of fighting between Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank.

This was called the Second Intifada uprising , and followed a less-violent Palestinian uprising against the occupation in the late s. In the Second Intifada, which was the culmination of Palestinian frustration with the failure of the s peace process, Palestinian militants adopted suicide bombings of Israeli buses and other forms of terror. Israel responded with a severe military crack-down. The fighting killed approximately 3, Palestinians and 1, Israelis. It's not just Palestinians, though: many Israelis also increasingly distrust Palestinians and their leaders and see them as innately hostile to peace.

In the parlance of Israel-Palestine, the expression for this attitude is, "We don't have a partner for peace. This sense of apathy has been further enabled by Israel's increasingly successful security programs, such as the Iron Dome system that shoots down Gazan rockets, which insulates many Israelis from the conflict and makes it easier to ignore. Public support for a peace deal that would grant Palestine independence, once high among Israelis, has dropped.

Meanwhile, a fringe movement of right-wing Israeli extremists has become increasingly violent, particularly in the West Bank where many live as settlers, further pulling Israeli politics away from peace and thus allowing the conflict to drift.

The Dome of the Rock at left with gold dome is one of the holiest sites in Islam and sits atop the ancient Temple Mount ruins, the Western Wall of which at right is the holiest site in Jerusalem.

You can see how this would create logistical problems. There are three ways the conflict could end. Only one of them is both viable and peaceful — the two-state solution — but it is also extremely difficult, and the more time goes on the harder it gets.

One-state solution: The first is to erase the borders and put Israelis and Palestinians together into one equal, pluralistic state, called the "one-state solution.

After generations of feeling disenfranchised and persecuted by Israel, the Arab majority would almost certainly vote to dismantle everything that makes Israel a Jewish state. Israelis, after everything they've done to finally achieve a Jewish state after thousands of years of their own persecution, would never surrender that state and willingly become a minority among a population they see as hostile. Destruction of one side: The second way this could end is with one side outright vanquishing the other, in what would certainly be a catastrophic abuse of human rights.

This is the option preferred by extremists such as Hamas and far-right Israeli settlers. In the Palestinian extremist version, Israel is abolished and replaced with a single Palestinian state; Jews become a minority, most likely replacing today's conflict with an inverse conflict. In the Israeli extremist version, Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza entirely, either turning Palestinians into second-class citizens in the manner of apartheid South Africa or expelling them en masse.

Two-state solution: The third option is for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own independent states; that's called the "two-state solution" and it's advocated by most everyone as the only option that would create long-term peace.

But it requires working out lots of details so thorny and difficult that it's not clear if it will, or can, happen. Eventually, the conflict will have dragged on for so long that this solution will become impossible. A follow-on agreement in was the last major Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. The one-state solution is hard because there is no viable, realistic version that both sides would accept.

In theory, the two-state solution is great. But it poses some very difficult questions. Here are the four big ones and why they're so tough to solve. To be clear, these aren't abstract concepts but real, heavily debated issues that have sunk peace talks before:.

Jerusalem : Both sides claim Jerusalem as their capital; it's also a center of Jewish and Muslim and Christian holy sites that are literally located physically on top of one another, in the antiquity-era walled Old City that is not at all well shaped to be divided into two countries.

Making the division even tougher, Israeli communities have been building up more and more in and around the city. Conflating Israel with Judaism — and Israelis with Jews — is unfair and leads to tropes about dual national loyalties. But conflating Israel with Judaism — and Israelis with Jews — is unfair and leads to tropes about dual national loyalties. It also conflates a diverse religion with the politics and policies of a single country.

This tautology allows accusations of antisemitism to be weaponized, particularly against people who speak up about Palestinian rights — sometimes in ridiculous ways. Just look at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene , R-Ga.

Yes, the same Greene who once blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers and now compares mask mandates to Nazi gas chambers. The fact that Greene, despite her own record, felt comfortable weaponizing antisemitism as an alleged defense of Israel while spewing antisemitic remarks shows how cynical the discourse about this heinous form of racism has become.

The same dynamic plays out in foreign policy, as Netanyahu finds allies in antisemitic leaders in Poland and Hungry. Obviously, antisemitism exists in the Israeli-Palestinian discourse. These antisemitic attacks — physical or rhetorical — in a dark irony, help Israel justify its actions. A month after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, a Jewish guard was shot outside of a synagogue in Denmark.

In her view, "unless people live there and know the nuances, or really know the history and where we came from, you don't know how this situation developed". Describing herself as "absolutely pro-Israeli", Eliana says: "Everyone deserves a home and Jews have no place to call home except Israel.

She believes that Palestinians also have a legitimate right to live in the region, but a minority of Arabs are "volatile, radical and want to bomb us". She points to the many Arabs who live in Israel, who she says are culturally Muslim but live harmoniously alongside Jews. Most of her friends there are Arabs too, she adds. Recounting her travels through Gaza, she recalls the "heart-breaking" poverty of its residents and adds that they are the innocent victims of larger forces at play.

She says that, despite coverage that shows many more Palestinians have died than Israelis in the recent escalations, it is only because Israel has built up the military strength to defend itself from neighbours "like Syria and Iran that very much do not like us". On a trip to the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, for example, Eliana witnessed firsthand the might of Israel's Iron Dome during a missile attack. It is absurd to her that terms like apartheid are being used in social media posts to describe the situation.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict explained. Israel-Palestinians: Old grievances fuel new fighting. Mothers fear for children in Israel-Gaza conflict. Image source, Leila A. Leila's mother, an American, met her father, a student leader of the first Palestinian uprising, during an archaeological trip.

Ramallah was where Leila, right, celebrated her 5th birthday in , alongside her best friend in kindergarten. A major foreign policy headache for Biden. Image source, Adam C. Adam took this photo of his Hebrew class poring over social media for news as they huddled together in a bomb shelter last week.

Adam, second from right, says he can celebrate his Jewish identity more easily in Israel. Image source, Leen D. Leen's Palestinian grandparents, seen here on a US trip in , have no right of return to their home country and are citizens of Jordan. Image source, Eliana G. Eliana hiked up the mountains around Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in How Israel's Iron Dome missile shield works. Eliana visited an army bunker at the border of Israel, Jordan and Lebanon on her trip.

Related Topics. Published 16 June.