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A History of the Never Ending War



Authored and Researched By Levi Zakye
@LZakye

Edited and Formatted By Cheryl E

Introduction:

On Oct 7th, 2023, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group Hamas, a US designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO), launched surprise attacks against Israel from the Gaza Strip firing over 7,000 rockets within 7 hours and breaching the Gaza-Israel border into Israeli territory.

More than 1200 Israelis and foreign nationals including 35 U.S Citizens in Israel were massacred. Hundreds were taken hostage, numerous women subjected to rape, numerous homes burnt and Israelis incinerated alive in their homes with the perpetrators recording these atrocities on camera.

There has been a global obsession with Israel and the Palestine question for more than seven decades. The October 7th attack was a symptom of this puzzle that dates back so many centuries, if not millennia. To attempt to understand this puzzle, we first need to look at the history of Israel - the most controversial piece of land in history.

A Bit of History:

Jews have had an unbroken presence in the land of Israel for over 3000yrs. In 70 AD Roman General Titus under Emperor Vespasian besieged and captured Jerusalem and destroyed the City and second Jewish Temple to crush the Jewish rebellion. In 135 AD Roman Emperor Hadrian again crushed Jewish revolts and exiled many Jews out of the Judean Province and city of Jerusalem. Emperor Hadrian also renamed the whole region ‘Palestina’ (a latin word) in place of the original name - Eretz Israel - to erase the memory of Jews in the land. The Roman Empire was succeeded by the Byzantine Empire in 313 AD.

Arab Invaders from the Hijaz invaded the Byzantine Empire and conquered it between 636 – 640 AD after the death of their prophet Mohammed. Jews lived under Arab rule here as dhimmis (lower class citizens) subject to jizya tax or subject to forced conversion. Jews not expelled into the diaspora continued to live through the different conquests like the Crusaders, the Mamluks, and the Ottoman Empire (1516- 1918).

By the mid-1800’s, Jews in the diaspora were beginning to flee different persecutions and pogroms in Europe and returning into Palestine under the Ottoman Empire, particularly more by 1881 with Jews fleeing pogroms from Czarist Russia.

Birth of the Zionist Movement:

The Zionist Movement began to grow in Europe to find a solution to the Jewish problem and end their homelessness and the persecutions and massacres and expulsions in Europe. The First Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland, on August 29th 1897 led by Theodor Herzl gathering hundreds of Jews from around the world.

As the Zionist movement grew, the Arab Nationalist movement in the Ottoman Empire was also growing.
In 1903 at the 6th Zionist Congress, the British colonial secretary proposed Uganda for the Jews fleeing these persecutions in Europe as the homeland which was rejected as the Jews’ aspiration was to form their state again in their ancient homeland in the region now called Palestine.

By the end of WW1 and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were faced with the question of how to solve aspirations of the Zionist movement and the Arab Nationalist movement in the former Ottoman ruled region.open.substack.com/pub/cherylwrot… 2/

As the Ottoman Empire neared its final fall on 31st Oct 1917, the British War Cabinet under new Prime Minister David Lloyd and Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour met to put the final wording on what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration.

This was followed by the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the San Remo Conference 1920 all with Arab leaders and Zionist leaders represented with the Agreement that the British Mandate for Palestine was to be for the re-constitution of the Jewish National home, and the French Mandate was to be for Syria and Lebanon and with the other British Mandates for Mesopotamia (later renamed Iraq).

However Colonial Secretary Winston Churchhill following the Cairo Peace conference of 1921 was under pressure from the Hashemite Emir Faisal and brother Abdallah and further partitioned Palestine creating another exclusively Arab state (Jordan) in 77% of Mandatory Palestine. And this was adopted by the council of the League of Nations in 1922.

The Council of the League of Nations met between July 19th – 24th 1922 and approved the British and French Mandates over these territories of the fallen Ottoman Empire.
Britain under the mandate committed to encourage further diaspora Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine and to support the Jews till they were ready for self-determination and settlement over the land.

Thus the San Remo Conference and the Council of the League of Nations of 1922 with the power of disposition had therefore passed legal title to the Jews over Mandatory Palestine, and for the Arabs over what would become Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq (Mesopotamia).
However with more economic success by the Jews in the land came further Arab migrations into the land from surrounding Arab states seeking jobs in the now flourishing Jewish agricultural economy.

The Arabs soon abandoned the agreements of the mandates and appointed the radical Amin Al Husseni as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as appeasement for Arabs in 1921 to restore calm after Arab uprisings and the Jewish massacres of 1920. A pattern had been set that would haunt the rest of British rule over Palestine. The Hebron massacres of Jews followed in 1929.

When Britain Turned Its Back on the Jews:

By the mid 1930’s Palestine had become almost ungovernable. By this time Hitler was in power in Germany and the persecution of Jews in Germany had began.
In order to appease the Mufti and his followers in case they sided with the Nazis (which they ended up doing anyway), the British Government began to introduce measures to severely reduce Jewish immigration into Palestine. The end result was the infamous Mcdonald White Paper of 1939 that would have disastrous consequences at a time when the Jews were fleeing from the Nazis in Europe, and virtually no country would take them. The White paper restricted the number of Jews that would be allowed to settle in Palestine to a total of just 75,000 over the next 5years. This was a monumental betrayal by Britain of its sacred trust of the mandate without the support or approval of the council of the League of Nations and of the Permanent Mandate Commission which was overseeing the operations in Palestine. Britain also purported to prohibit the transfer of further land to any Jewish Institutions contrary to article 6 of the Mandate which was illegal.

The 1939 white Paper literally wheeled hundreds of thousands of Jews that would have escaped to Palestine into the concentration camps and gas chambers.

Thousands of holocaust survivors also drowned as they tried to reach their ancestral home in Palestine in every way possible, mostly in small unseaworthy vessels. Many others also drowned while trying to run the British naval blockade of their promised homeland, blocked by the very nation that had been mandated to re-create the National home for the Jewish people and encourage their immigration.

Dear Shadi,

I wanted to respond to your thread which I have read several times to ensure I fully understand not only what you are putting forward, but also your rationale behind how you reached your views.

I noticed a trend in almost all the points you raised, which though your argument can be read as logical, well thought out, and well structured, each point either lacks critical context or uses one or another logical fallacy to reach its conclusion. In the below response, I won’t use the same bullet points mainly because the details I will cover will touch each one of the points both you and @petersavodnik touched on.

On the basis of Israel’s moral duty to protect itself from another Oct 7, I personally felt you oversimplified the argument and removed entire chunks of context. It’s a similar argument I’ve heard from dozens of analysts, journalists and academics, but fails to view this war in the context it should be.

Firstly, this isn’t a war that can be compared to any other. Too many people try to pigeonhole it into a comparison with the war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or even Syria. But everything about this war is vastly different from any other. This war carries with it a long history, and this history dates back earlier than 2006 when Hamas took control of Gaza. In fact it dates back a little over a century. With regard to that history, I will add this to the second post in my response so that it can be an appendix for any reader to come back to.

I agree with your point that Hamas used the atrocities of Oct 7 to provoke Israel into a response. I agree with your description of Hamas and the fact that they don’t really care much about their own people. They are very much ultra nationalists with a strong and violent ideology when it comes to Israel. But this ideology isn’t unique to Hamas. It didn’t begin with Hamas. This is the very same ideology first conceived, and acted out, by Mohammed Amin al Husseini back in 1921/2. It is the same ideology that was part of the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood back in 1928, and it is the same ideology with the same violent execution that al Husseini and his militias attacked and massacred unarmed and innocent men, women and children since the first pogrom and attack on Jews in the land in 1920 and the dozens after it up until 1948.

Like this war, back then, al Husseini used any retaliation from the Jews (of which the first occurred only in 1937 by Irgun after 15 years of pogroms against the Jews) to incite all the other neighboring Arab states to rise up against Israel.

In each of the other comparative wars people choose, neither Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria were fully surrounded by states that wanted its extermination. Neither of the Iraq wars were Iraq against all its surrounding neighbors. Syria wasn’t a war against all its surrounding neighbors. And neither was Afghanistan.

Hamas attacked Israel. But immediately began to incite and demand the other Arab states to join them in their war. In fact by Hamas’s own admission, they attacked Israel because they fully believed all the other states would join in and finally wipe Israel out. So your argument that Israel claiming it was fighting an existential war against an existential threat is the same as Hamas’s claim is false. Hamas at no point were fighting an existential threat to their entire people.

Unlike the other wars, Gaza isn’t one strip. It’s two strips laid one on top of the other. Hamas had built an entire network of heavily fortified tunnels that spanned almost the entire strip. The tunnels, by their own open admission, was purely for Hamas’s use to attack Israel and to hide just their fighters from the Israeli aerial attacks. They deliberately set it up to use their entire civilian population as shields. Now not only were their population used as shields, but they were also deliberately used for propaganda. Hamas’s intention was to draw israel to attack Gaza knowing their people would be killed. For Hamas, the more could be killed, the better. Why? Because they know that the international community has no understanding of how the mindset is in the Middle East. The world sees deaths of civilians and the activists lose their minds. Basically, our western mindset and morality is our weakness against a group that lacks both. And Hamas were banking on this western morality to pressure Israel. And fighting Hamas under western rules of war is like fighting against a samurai holding two swords while having no weapon, no armor, and being unable to do more than punch lightly. Western rules of war and our morality sees a punch against this heavily armed and heavily armored samurai that draws blood as excessive and disproportionate force.

While you continued in your argument about Hamas, you omitted the fact that they had also fired thousands of rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities and towns. But not only on Oct 7 or the two months after, but also for the past 18 years. So again, comparing this war to other wars is one of many strawman arguments you made. There is no other sovereign country on Earth that has had to endure even 6 months of constant and persistent barrages of rockets fired into their civilian cities, nevertheless 18 years of it. Imagine if Taiwan who some “experts” compare to Gaza had been firing thousands of rockets at Beijing and other Chinese cities for 18 years? Or if Puerto Rico or Hawaii decided to fire tens of thousands of rockets at mainland America? How about Sardinia firing rockets at mainland Italy. Or Tasmania firing rockets at Sydney and Melbourne? The comparisons can go on and on. But it’s important in the context. Because if it were any of those firing the rockets, the world wouldn’t try stop those larger countries from completely wiping out the islands. The only country in the world where the rules and expectations are different is always only Israel. Add to that the fact that the United Nations as an organization has been so one sided in its handling of this since 1949, Israel has been forced to fight the samurai with their hands tied behind their backs too.

Next, you attempted to compare casualty numbers. This for me is where you lost the argument entirely. Your entire analogy was a strawman argument, but not even a minor one. It was a huge error. You compared the wars in Syria and Iraq to Gaza by using the population size of Iraq. In keeping this response respectful, I have to admit my first thought was What the actual Fuck??? How can you compare population size when Iraq is over 1200 times the size of Gaza? Gaza is 360 square kilometers. Iraq is over 430,000 square kilometers. Syria is 185,000 square kilometers, making it 500+ times larger. Yet the population of Syria is just 11 times larger and Iraq is 23 times larger.

A far more accurate and credible comparison or analogy is this… if you take one grenade in your hand, and place 5000 salmon in an Olympic sized swimming pool, how many fish would you kill with that grenade? Give or take and depending how many fish are in any given part of the pool but assuming evenly spread out, you’d kill maybe 100? 200? Now place 5000 salmon into a bathtub and throw the grenade, and you’d likely kill almost all of them. And the reason this analogy, in my opinion, works perfectly is because in that bathtub the fish would have to be stacked on top of one another meaning the fish closer to the top would likely shield those at the bottom to some extent. That’s what Hamas is doing by hiding in their tunnels. Israel has to go after Hamas and destroy their infrastructure, but their infrastructure is underground… it’s underneath the civilian population. How can Israel defeat Hamas or even weaken it without destroying the tunnels?

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This will be a first raw 🧵 to unravel the Hamas accusations of IDF troops firing at and killing civilians during a recent aid mission in to Northern Gaza. I’ve never put together a thread like this so hopefully it will work.

On the 29th of February, Al Jazeera (aka HTN or Hamas Television Network) reported on what they and the Hamas Ministry called a massacre that took place in Northern Gaza as a convoy of aid trucks went in from Egypt.

With many previous convoys being hit by Hamas where aid was forcefully looted and stolen by armed terrorists (anyone can feel free to add to this thread with the many videos showing Hamas attacking aid trucks), it was claimed by Gazans that gunfire was indeed heard as the aid convoy entered the North. What was not confirmed was who was behind the gunfire.

Two days ago I analyzed a video and showed evidence clearly seen in the video that Hamas terrorists armed with AK47s were firing at civilians and stealing the aid by looting the trucks and beating civilians who tried to take food aid.

The IDF have given a few statements about the incident, stating that their troops did NOT open fire on the aid convoy. They stated that at a later point further north, a group of civilians approached the IDF and the troops fired warning shots in the air.

The BBC reported in their BBC Verified article that they based their findings mostly off the Al Jazeera footage and testimony report (surprise surprise). So basically they may as well have just taken a statement directly from Hamas. In fact, all the mainstream media that covered this story (and there weren’t that many, published their articles based on the Al Jazeera story.

As you will see in the article by the BBC here, they use the Al Jazeera story and reference it frequently. The BBC clearly states that their verification is also based on witness testimony, so the following parts of this thread will look at these in more depth.



I will add the full Al Jazeera video report, which I will breakdown in this thread, at the end of the thread so everybody can reference each point. This Al Jazeera report, as I will show, makes up the single predominant source for all other MSM worldwide covering this incident.bbc.com/news/world-mid… 2/

Like the BBC, most other MSM sites used the Al Jazeera report as their sole or main source for their own reporting. CNN, CBS, SKY, and even Reuters make reference to the same video and stating that they themselves could not verify it.

1/ Steps toward a ceasefire:

1. Release all hostages alive.
2. Hamas leaders and terrorists surrender. Leaders to be executed.
3. All of UN and NGOs leave Gaza immediately and never return.
4. No Palestinian will work in Israel for min 20 years until they prove to want peace. 5. Israel, Palestinians, Arab world representatives, US and Europe sign binding agreement that if a single terror attack happens again on Israeli soil, Israel has full unabated and uninhibited powers and rights to defend with complete impunity however they deem fit…

As nightfall comes upon our land,
our cries of grief still bitterly reign.

The world is screaming and shouting for a ceasefire,
How can they just not feel our pain? They continue to call for our extinction, to kill every person in our land,

We’ve no choice but to fight, yet the world refuse to understand.

@pplato334 @Ahmad4ISRL @GadSaad we can go on a history lesson all night if you wish. The actual name “Israel” also appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 1200BC, when the then Jewish nation of Solomon split in two. And it was Herodotus , in 500bc, not Aristotle. @pplato334 @Ahmad4ISRL @GadSaad We can also go on the basis that the land was not only inhabited by Jews. Of course there were other people and tribes back then, many of which were nomadic. The Philistines were also closer related to ancient Greeks and were not at all Arab.