From John Ray's shorter notes




February 26, 2024

The biggest enemy of Gazans is HAMAS

Hamas launched a big terrorist strike into Israel in the full knowledge that Israel always  hits back proportionally at attacks on it.  It was a deliberate provocation motivated by their undoubted hatred of Israel.

Most Muslims are antisemitic.  Their prophet tells them to be.  But HAMAS are Islamic extremists.  So they start out with religious hatred and add to it envy over Israel's notable success in most ways.  Its success is an offence against the proper place of Jews according to Muslim teachings

Helmut Schoeck has written eloquently about how dire in general it is to be envied  and there is no doubt that Israel suffers in just the way that he predicts

https://www.amazon.com/ENVY-Theory-Behaviour-Helmut-Schoeck/dp/0865970645

And the Leftist "protesters" who claim to be speaking for Palestinians ignore the fact that Gazans are a small minority of Palestinians. Large numbers of Palestinians live in Jordan, the West Bank and Israel itslf. And they live peacefully with Israel.  

It is HAMAS that the Left would be demonstrating against if they has any real concern for the people of Gaza.  Without HAMAS, peace already reigns between Israel and Palestinians.

It should be noted that there is no clear agreement about who is a Palestinian.  The name  Palestine as a geographical term  goes back to Herodotus but has never denoted a place with any clear boundaries.  In ancient times generally, however, terms similar to it do seem to have mostly denoted the central or Southern part of the Levantine coast.  So the term Palestine would seem to refer pretty well to what we now know as Eretz Israel.  In that case some Jewish Israelis are Palestinians.  

By courtesy, however, the term is usually reserved for Arabs with some ancestral attachment to the area.  The vagueness of the term does however make it difficult to say precisely how many Palestinians there are in any particular place.  If we include members of the Palestinian diaspora, Gazans are a really tiny fraction of the total Palestinian population

JR 

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