How can Gazans stop the Israeli bombings?

By Madeline Brooks/ November 4, 2023/ . [American Thinker]

“I write about what could stop the bombing if they took responsibility for themselves, and I look at them through a family systems lens. They are like the very troubled child living off Daddy who wants to burn the house down. Let us not buy into their self pitying smokescreen.” MB

Seventy-five years ago, my husband’s family was part of Egypt’s flourishing Jewish community. After Israel’s establishment in 1948, their community was destroyed. Egyptian Jews fled anti-Jewish persecution or were expelled.

But, speaking to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi recently denied this well-documented history. Instead, he audaciously claimed:

“I grew up in a neighborhood side-by-side with the Jews of Egypt. They were never subject to any form of persecution whatsoever. They were never targeted in any way whatsoever…. Maybe they were targeted in Europe, in Spain, in other countries, but in our Arab and Islamic region, nothing like this ever happened.”

While astonishing that Sisi, the leader of a U.S. ally, would spread ahistorical propaganda — many on the extreme political left promote similar lies.

The reason is simple: Middle Eastern and North African Jews do not fit a neat narrative about Israel’s supposed evil as a symbol of Western colonialism. The culpability of Jews and the “eternal innocence” of those who brutally resist the West by murdering civilians does not allow for Jewish victimhood when the perpetrators are not white or European.

But the history of Jewish life under hundreds of years of Islamic rule paints a different picture.

Jews under Islamic regimes were dhimmi, or a “protected people of the book” permitted to live in Muslim societies. They were however subject to regulations, such as paying the jizyah tax levied on non-Muslims, exclusion from certain professions, restricted habitation in ghettos, and often forced to wear distinctive clothing meant to demonstrate submission to Muslims.

Even with this “protected” status, Jews were under threat as a minority. Fanatics who rejected tolerant Islam often perpetrated anti-Jewish violence, including the slaughter and expulsion of Jewish tribes in the 7th century, the Almohades’ persecution in the 12th century, 17th-century forced conversion of Jews in Isfahan and manifold other expulsions, massacres and forced conversions — all of which are often erased in historical retellings like Sisi’s.

Modern history of anti-Jewish violence by fundamentalist Islamists is also denied or ignored. Before Israel was established, more than 800,000 Jews lived across the Middle East and North Africa. After Israel’ s establishment, hundreds of thousands of Jews left, fled or were expelled from Islamic-majority countries, threatened by rising Arab anti-Jewish sentiment and violence.

This persecution — ironically — resulted in todays’ Israeli Jewish population whose majority is made up of “Brown” Mizrahi Jews, indisputably indigenous to the region even for those with a penchant for denying ancient Jewish ties to Israel. With a few exceptions, their families’ former countries have largely become Jew-free. Today, as a Jew, I cannot safely visit most of the countries that generations of my extended family once called home.

But why is anti-Jewish violence and antisemitism in both pre-modern and modern Middle East and North Africa denied or ignored?

The reason is simple. Erasing Middle Eastern Jewish history and historical oppression of Jews sets up a bedrock of falsehoods to support the justification for terror: The decolonization argument, the belief that Hamas’ terror serves as legitimate resistance to a colonizing power.

Proponents of this false theory argue that Zionism grew directly from Western colonialism. Jews who settled Israel are seen as white European colonizers who carry the West’s moral stains and re-victimize its Muslim innocents. The Holocaust, typically understood as a key event in the legitimization of Zionism, is construed as yet another crime of European colonialism that indirectly led to the persecution of Palestinians.

Seeing this conflict as merely a question of colonialism is based on historical lies and allows for grotesque moral conclusions.

First, any violence against Israelis is legitimized and becomes the fault of the colonizers — either Europeans or Jews themselves — but never fundamentalist Islamists who perpetrate them.

Second, Jews cease to be innocent civilians. Whether adults or babies, whether they support a two-state solution or not, whether Israelis or Jews living in countries outside of Israel, they are legitimate targets for “freedom fighters” engaged in a prolonged anti-colonial struggle.

This false narrative assumes that Israelis should be viewed strictly as colonizers and Palestinians strictly as their resisters. It assumes that fundamentalist Islamists bear no responsibility for their actions. It ignores anti-Jewish violence by Islamists around the world. It denies agency to the very people whom it claims to speak for — Palestinians. It assumes that if only Israel were to dismantle itself, Jews would live peacefully again in the Middle East.

The events of Oct. 7 — and their aftermath — show the utter folly of that idea.

And lastly, from mia talias

[https://www.instagram.com/miatalias/]

She says, “Time for a history lesson, every day is a school day.

Am Yisrael Chai!