Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.
Let me teach you too.
The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.
The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.
There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.
Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.
Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.
That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.
The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.
The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.
From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.
Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.
Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)
By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.
In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.
Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.
Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.
Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.
In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.
As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.
At least, that was the plan.
Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.
And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.
They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.
They were very wrong.
He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.
He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.
He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.
Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.
As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.
The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.
But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.
About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.
Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.
By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.
That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.
Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.
(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.
Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.
Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)
Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.
Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.
Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.
Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.
But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.
Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.
Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.
It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."
(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.
It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)
Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.
It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.
Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.
Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.
The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.
Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.
That is how this conflict came about.
A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.
And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."
As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.
Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.
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A Chabad synagogue in Pomona, New York, burned to the ground on April 17th, along with its three Torah scrolls.
Torah scrolls are hand-written, hand-made, and kept in elaborately decorated cases or wrappings.
Many of them have long histories; my synagogue has two, I think, that were smuggled out of villages being destroyed in pogroms or in Nazi attacks. One of them is the only remaining piece of that village on earth.
Sometimes, the Torah scroll doesn't even belong to the synagogue, but is on loan from a place like the Memorial Scrolls Trust:
There's an entire Jewish holiday just for taking them out and dancing with them: Simchat Torah, "The Joy of Torah."
In fact, that was the holiday on which Hamas's invasion took place.
So it's a particular tragedy when a Torah is destroyed.
Chabad itself has a page about what goes into making just one Torah scroll:
"An authentic Torah scroll is a mind-boggling masterpiece of labor and skill. Comprising between 62 and 84 sheets of parchment -- cured, tanned, scraped and prepared according to exacting Torah law specifications -- and containing exactly 304,805 letters, the resulting handwritten scroll takes many months to complete.
"An expert pious scribe carefully inks each letter with a feather quill, under the intricate calligraphic guidelines of Ktav Ashurit (Ashurite Script). The sheets of parchment are then sewn together with sinews to form one long scroll. While most Torah scrolls stand around two feet in height and weigh 20-25 pounds, some are huge and quite heavy, while others are doll-sized and lightweight."
I learned all of this on Tumblr.
Once upon time, in people's "punch Nazis" days, I would've been able to find some mention on Tumblr of this synagogue burning.
There is none, so I'm posting about it.
And I'm going to quote Daniel Weiner, Rabbi of Temple de Hirsch Sinai in Bellevue, Washington, when his own synagogue was vandalized last November:
"It’s horrific and heartbreaking.... [Taking out your feelings about] what's going on in the Middle East by defacing a sacred space of a synagogue -- that’s the very definition of antisemitism."
I'm also posting about the Kehillat Shaarei Torah Synagogue in Toronto, whose windows were broken on Friday, April 19th, by someone who also tried to break the front door down.
And the April 15 graffiti outside a Bangor, Maine synagogue that said, "Nazi Israel 30K murdered," next to a crossed-out Star of David. The same synagogue faced pro-Hamas flyers plastered around it in November.
I was going to include all the synagogues vandalized over the past six months. But there are way too many. Several every week. Lots are swastikas.
I'll go back to just doing attacks on and near synagogues.
Someone has to talk about the 1-year-old who was stabbed outside Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel (BZBI) synagogue, in Philadelphia, on April 13th.
The foiled terrorist attack on a Moscow synagogue on April 11th.
The man who, on April 9th, screamed at the rabbi at Moldova's Great Synagogue, "What are you doing here? How come no one has finished you off for everything you are doing to the Palestinians?" Just one week after people had vandalized a Holocaust memorial in nearby Soroka, and sprayed "Free Palestine" on it.
The Oldenburg, Germany synagogue that was firebombed on April 5th.
The Florida Las Olas Chabad Jewish Center, which on March 16 burned, but not to the ground. The Torah scrolls were safe, and no one was hurt, but the back of the building was severely damaged.
The planned-but-thwarted-on-March-7th ISIS massacre in a Moscow synagogue.
The stabbing of an Orthodox Jew in Switzerland on March 5th. (He was badly injured, but expected to survive.)
A man leaving a synagogue in Paris was beaten on March 3rd.
People set the courtyard of a synagogue in Sfax, Tunisia on fire on February 27th. Firefighters managed to put the fire out before it consumed the inside of the building.
The synagogue is no longer used; there are no Jews left in its area, and fewer than 1,000 Jews left in Tunisia overall.
(Thousands of Tunisian Jews were sent to work camps during the Holocaust. Antisemitism across the Middle East continued to increase rapidly for decades. By the 1970s, 90% of Tunisian Jews had fled to France or Israel.)
On February 18, an Orthodox Jew leaving Synagogue of Inverrary-Chabad in Lauderhill, Florida, was beaten by an attacker yelling racial slurs.
Someone deliberately chose International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, to smash all the windows in the front of Sgoolai Israel Synagogue in downtown Fredericton, New Brunswick.
On December 29, Turkey arrested 32 people linked to ISIS who were planning attacks on synagogues and churches.
On December 17, a man drove a U-Haul truck up onto the sidewalk between a barrier and the front door of the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington D.C., got out, and started yelling "Gas the Jews." He also sprayed a foul-smelling substance on two people leaving the synagogue.
December 17 also saw 400 synagogues across the United States receive bomb threats.
On December 11, a man attacked an elderly couple on their way into a synagogue in Los Angeles, screaming, "Give me your earrings, Jew!!" and beating one of them bloody with a belt. (Happily, he chased the guy down the street, and caught him when his pants fell down.)
On December 10, a 16-year-old was arrested in Vienna for planning an attack on a synagogue.
On December 8, on the first night of Hanukkah, 15 synagogues in New York State received bomb threats. And someone screamed, "Free Palestine," and fired shots outside of Temple Israel in Albany, NY. Which has a preschool that was in session.
Meanwhile, the five Jews left in Egypt were canceling public Hanukkah candle-lighting at their synagogue out of fear of reprisals. Particularly after two Israelis in Alexandria had been gunned down by terrorists on October 8. (While Israel was still fighting Hamas in Israel.)
On November 15, a terrorist group set the only synagogue in Armenia on fire.
Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) has a history of working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
(PFLP is part of Hamas's network of groups. Samidoun is their nonprofit arm - which is why Germany banned Samidoun last year, although it's still active in many other countries.
PFLP is also actively supported by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a diaspora nonprofit group, and Within Our Lifetime (WOL), an SJP spinoff in NYC.)
On November 11, halfway through Shabbat services, police asked Central Shul in Melbourne, Australia to evacuate "as a precaution" due to a "pro-Palestinian" protest that had chosen the neighboring park as its gathering place. Australia has seen some very outspoken antisemitism at protests, including the march shortly after October 7 that chanted "Gas the Jews."
Also on November 11, protesters targeted a synagogue along a march route. They sat in their cars, spraying green smoke and shouting at people leaving the synagogue. The march itself featured a record number of horrifying signs and chants.
On November 7th, Congregation Beth Tikvah in Montreal was firebombed, and the back door of the Jewish organization across the street (Federation CJA) was set on fire.
On November 4, protesters chanted "Bomb Israel," and burned an Israeli flag outside the only synagogue in Malmo, Sweden.
During October, there were 501 antisemitic acts under investigation in France in just three weeks, including groups gathering in front of synagogues shouting threats, and graffiti such as the words “killing Jews is a duty” sprayed outside a stadium.
On October 18, people firebombed a synagogue in Berlin after homes all over the neighborhood were graffitied with stars of David.
And also on October 18, hundreds of "pro-Palestine" rioters attacked the Or Zaruah Synagogue, in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa, while worshippers were inside.
Based on the video, they seem to have blocked the synagogue entrance completely, while screaming "Murderous Israel" and waving Palestinian flags. (Melilla is an autonomous zone belonging to Spain. It borders Morocco.)
On October 17, during pro-Palestinian protests, hundreds of rioters set fire to Al Hammah synagogue, an abandoned house of prayer in central Tunisia. They hammered down the building’s walls and raised a Palestinian flag on the building. Police did not intervene.
The Facebook page "Tunigate", which has around 88 thousand followers, published a video of the assault. So did "Radio Bousalem”, with 83 thousand users. The vast majority of comments on these videos welcome these acts. The building was severely damaged and almost completely razed to the ground.
On October 15, bomb threats were sent to many East Coast synagogues. Attleboro synagogue Congregation Agudas-Achim received one of the emails, which read, "The bombs will blow up in a few hours. A lot of people will die. You all deserve to die."
On October 8 -- again, while Hamas was still in Israel -- Madrid’s main synagogue was defaced with graffiti that read “Free Palestine” next to a crossed-out Star of David.
And on October 7, an assailant in Rockland, NY fired a BB gun at two women entering a synagogue. Later in the month, a banner at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in the area was vandalized with the words, “Fuckin kikes."
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