For decades to come, we will wonder how this could happen.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over 19,500 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli attack. Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters / NTB
- Jens Jacob Lund
Bjørnafjorden
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DebattThis is a debate post. The entry was written by an external contributor, and quality assured by BT’s debate department. Opinions and analyzes are the writer’s own.
Lately In the past decades, Western leaders have made several decisions which in retrospect have been unfortunate, sometimes disastrous. The massacres in Rwanda and in Srebenica were carried out without anyone intervening, Iraq was invaded on the basis of false intelligence,
The “war on terror” left a devastated Afghanistan, and Norway also participated in the bombing of Libya, a country left in total disintegration, with dramatic consequences for the entire region.
Common to all these wrongdoings is the total lack of apology and admission of guilt from the people and states responsible for these terrible events. It can testify that Western heads of state are not very good at learning from their mistakes and showing humility afterwards.
Jens Jacob Lund would describe himself as a “friend of Jews”, but is also a friend of the Palestinian people. Photo: Private
When we now every day our Christmas-decorated living rooms receive horrific images of bombings and massacres of whole people, by 1.5 million people which are pressed together in the very south of the Gaza Strip, while the houses are bombed, and over 7,000 innocent children have been killedthen most people react with despair and rage.
Still, most of the West’s leaders are reticent and waiting. The reason for this paralysis of action is rooted, in my opinion, in two factors: the fear of being labeled as anti-Jewish and in domestic political conditions in the United States.
Recently described one registers here in BT as “friend of Israel, and proud of it”. I think that’s perfectly fine. The undersigned, like almost everyone who knows the history of the Jews, would describe himself as a “friend of the Jews”, and I have a great understanding that the state of Israel was established.
But I am also a friend of the Palestinian people, and have always wondered that one could expel 700,000 Arabs to create this state. But this is how it was common for colonial powers to act at the time, they paid little attention to local residents in colonized countries.
Now, 70 years later, the world should be different, and an Arab life should be worth as much as an Israeli one. Yet, for over 20 years, the Western democracies have allowed Israel to treat the Palestinians as second-class people, continuously violated international law, humiliated the Palestinians and allowed 700,000 Jews from other countries to settle on occupied Palestinian landthus destroying the possibilities of forming a Palestinian state.
Domestic political conditions in the US explain why the West does not intervene and stop Israeli attacks on Gaza, the submitter believes. In the picture are US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (left) and Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Photo: Saul Loeb / AP / NTB
Such conduct creates hatred, and it is inconceivable that Israeli governments, with the West at their backs, have been able to get ahead, given the Jews’ own history of oppression. Israel is a democracy, and thus the people there have a greater responsibility for extreme right-wing forces being in power than the people in dictatorships have. This last government bears a great deal of responsibility for Hamas’s bloody attacks.
The US has nearly 100 million evangelical Christians, and to these Israel is holy. Jerusalem must be inhabited by the people of Israel, that is a prerequisite for Jesus’ return. The use of expressions such as “God’s chosen people”, both in Israel and in the USA, is supposed to justify everything Israel does.
The world would be a better place if the Bible, Torah and Koran were not misused to promote extreme attitudes. Unfortunately, these extreme Christians in the USA, who mostly support Donald Trump, have also managed to gag moderate Americans, and have made it possible for Israel to bomb Gaza, with new American weapons, and have killed over 19,500 people so far.
The Western world largely follows the United States, and no one knows what the Palestinian people will do when they can finally return to their bombed-out homes, and the West Bank will soon be populated by settlers. What we do know is that the massacre will be yet another disgrace on Western democracies, which for decades to come will wonder how this could happen.
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Published: 29 December 2023 09:43
2023-12-29 08:43:30
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