An oversimplification in the Middle East?

By Letter to the Editor on March 17, 2018.

Negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians — at least this or another of bloodily feuding Palestinian factions — would be once more underway, but for the decision by the somewhat “erratic” leader of our neighbours down south, to name ancient Jerusalem again the capital of Israel. Many, many years ago it had been the spiritual and political capital of Israel/Judea.

The same many, many years ago the Israelites never quite managed to totally subdue the Philistines. Palestinians, or so it has been said, are the “modern” descendants of that ancient fierce tribe. That animosity, that hatred between those two peoples, apparently has been around for thousands of years and boils over into murderous disputes and armed clashes way, way too often. That doesn’t seem to have changed. Scary, wouldn’t you say? All these thousands of years they have been at each others’ throats; and it goes on today!

Why is it still happening today? What has managed to keep those flames of hatred so very, very hot? The reasons are many and complex, certainly beyond us mere mortal amateur historians to unscramble. Yet one cannot help but make certain comparisons — perhaps simplistic — to the situation in the central/eastern areas of Europe, at the end of the Second World War, when millions of — mostly Swabian — Germans invited by Czar Peter the Great and later Czarina Catherine the Great in the early to middle seventeen hundreds to settle in — and modernize — Russian agriculture and artisanship; were driven out by the victors at great loss of life to women, children and old men; driven into a totally destroyed — yes, justifiably so — and demoralized, hungering and greatly down-sized and divided Germany. These people were not Nazis, just Russian settlers of German descent. Were they resentful? Do fish swim? Did they long for the “right to return” to homelands of many hundreds of years? Do Monarch butterflies long for the south? Were there rumblings of “We’ll return some day.” Of course there were.

Instead, keeping and living their cultures, enriching their new democratic Germany, they went to work to assimilate and help rebuild a land they had never seen; aided, of course, by the Marshall and other plans and a realization that things had, as they always eventually will, changed irreversibly.

Compare to that the fate of the Palestinians who fled those areas of Palestine assigned by the U.N. in 1948 to the ancient co-dwellers of the land; the long harassed and persecuted Jewish people. Rather than the neighbouring oil rich Arab lands making an effort to welcome the refugees, resettle them, give them a new homeland, they launched a futile attack on the new Israel, lost the rest of most of Palestine, herded the refugees into refugee camps, into poverty and misery and left them there, all these years. There the hatred of anything Jewish festered and grew, heated and encouraged by extremist mullahs at extremist jihadist institutions and camps, erupting regularly into acts of murderous violence against their Jewish neighbors and against each other.

What did the neighboring rich Arab states have in mind when they left their fellow Muslims to seethe with hatred in those squalid refugee camps. What indeed did they have mind?

Ted Kohlmetz

Medicine Hat

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