Israel’s deadly campaign in Gaza is not a righteous response to the Hamas atrocity of Oct. 7

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 26, 2023

On the morning of Oct. 7, militants organized by Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist organization, attacked multiple military and civilian targets in Southern Israel. Ultimately, around 1,200 Israelis were killed. Attackers deliberately and sometimes brutally killed unarmed civilians, including children and partygoers at a music festival. There are numerous reports of women being sexually assaulted. In addition, Hamas militants took about 240 hostages. The prisoners include both Israeli citizens, some of whom hold dual citizenship, as well as guest workers.

The attack was an atrocity, plain and simple. Not since the Holocaust had so many Jews been killed in a single day. The experiences of victims and survivors are terrifying to contemplate.

Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip within hours of the Hamas attack. A ground invasion began toward the end of October. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have declared their intent to destroy Hamas, although many high Israeli officials seem eager to rain death and humiliation upon the entire population of Gaza.

In music, escape: Palestinian schoolgirl singers seek acclaim in ‘Sad Songs of Happiness’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
April 12, 2015

Constanze Knoche’s 2014 documentary, Sad Songs of Happiness, chronicles the journey of a handful of Palestinian girls and their singing instructor as they participate in a European music competition.

The story here is told simply and clearly. A few interviews with the three most prominent girls, Rita, Hiba and Tamar, are sprinkled throughout, but mostly we see the youngsters working with their teacher, attending school, talking with their families and, over the last third or so, taking part in the contest.

The American right embraces Netanyahu ardently as Netanyahu embraces U.S. conservatives’ slash-and-burn tactics

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 20, 2015

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, prides himself on taking a hard-nosed approach to security issues. He’s been warning for more than 20 years that Iran was just a few years away from building a functional nuclear bomb. He’s a longtime proponent of building settlements in the West Bank, an initiative that diminishes the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside the Jewish nation of Israel — the so-called two-state solution.

But Netanyahu’s Likud Party was struggling in the polls leading up to Tuesday’s elections, in part because many Israelis are focused on economic issues, not national security. So Netanyahu doubled down on his core issues.

Palestinians and Israelis must stop glorifying their own side and stop demonizing their enemies

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Aug. 4, 2014

Israeli novelist Amos Oz recently gave an interview to Dennis Stule of the German national news service Deutsche Welle. The dialogue caught the eye of multiple pundits, not least because the writer began the exchange in a novel way — by posing two questions to the news service’s audience.

Said Oz:

Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?

Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?

On dead children in Gaza Strip and the villain(s) in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.word press.com
Aug. 2, 2014

A major goal of Israel’s Gaza offensive, which showed indications Saturday of winding down, has been to destroy tunnels leading into Israelis territory — structures that I gather mainly have a military purpose. In fact, just days ago, one tunnel was used for an assault in which five Israeli soldiers (and one Hamas fighter) were killed.

Jeremy Bender and Armin Rosen of Business Insider published a post on Tuesday at Business Insider that excerpts some video that the assailants took during that attack. But what truly caught my eye about their article was the sentence at the start of the second paragraph, which casually mentioned that dozens of children died in the process of building the tunnels.

The stupid war: Israel’s apparent war crimes in its Gaza offensive must be investigated and punished

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 31, 2014

I wrote earlier this week about why the existence of Israel was and remains worthy of support. The subject is topical, alas, because of the Jewish nation’s ongoing war against Gaza, which began on July 7 and has involved a combination of aerial and naval bombardment and ground offensives.

The fighting has taken an appalling toll. As of Wednesday, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 1,263 Palestinians had been killed. Some 852 people, or more than two-thirds of the deaths, were civilians, including an astounding 249 children. The U.N. identified 181 of the victims as “members of armed groups.” Another 230 individuals had yet to be categorized; many of them are believed to have been civilians.

Israeli casualties, by contrast, have been light. Fifty-three soldiers have been killed along with two Israeli civilians and a Thai worker.

But the consequences of this war go beyond just killing. Earlier this week, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that 6,233 Gazans had been wounded; nearly 2,000 of the injured are children.

The property damage inflicted by Israelis upon Gaza has also been staggering. More than 800 homes have been totally destroyed or severely damaged. At least 68 families have suffered three or more deaths in one incident. That accounts for 360 deaths, the U.N. reports: 147 children, 73 women and 140 men.

The organization says that nearly 9,400 families — more than 28,000 people — must make major repairs or entirely rebuild their homes. Another 27,000 families, or 162,000 people, live in homes that sustained minor or moderate damage.

Some 245,000 Palestinians have registered in public shelters, many of which are schools; up to 200,000 more may have sought refuge in private residences.

A bloody birthright: Why I support Israel’s right to exist

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 29, 2014

The reasons why I support Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland are rooted in the mortal perils that Jews have faced over the millennia. However, the heart of the matter is and will always be the bloody history of the 20th century.

No serious discussion of the subject can overlook the impetus for Israel’s establishment in 1948. That was only a few years after the end of World War II, which went hand in hand with the widespread realization that Adolf Hitler had conducted a massive, horrifying campaign to exterminate Jews and other so-called undesirables.

The Nazi Germany genocide — Raphael Lemkin coined that word in 1944 to describe what we today call the Holocaust — racked up a staggering death toll. The numbers vary from account to account, but according to one tally published by The Telegraph, between five million and six million Jews were killed.

Jews were hardly the Nazis’ only victims; four million Soviet, Polish and Yugoslav civilians died in the German camps, along with three million Soviet prisoners of war, 70,000 individuals with mental and physical disabilities, more than 200,000 Roma and an “unknown number of political prisoners, resistance fighters, homosexuals and deportees.”

Entire Jewish neighborhoods were wiped off the map; Nazis and locals appropriated their property. (There are a few brief but poignant nods to this in The Monuments Men, and this morbid history forms the dark heart of the brilliant Polish movie Ida — although Germans were only indirectly responsible for the killings and theft in the latter film.)

Poland’s Jewish community was hardest-hit, dropping from more than three million in 1933 to about 45,000 in 1950, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Here, as elsewhere in Europe, most of the reduction was caused by the Nazi slaughter, although some was due to postwar migration.)

The devastation elsewhere in Europe was comparable: Germany’s Jewish population fell from 565,000 to 37,000 over the same time period; Czechoslovakia’s, from 357,000 to 17,000; Austria’s, from 250,000 to 18,000; Greece’s, from 100,000 to 7,000. And this is only part of the grim census of genocide.

One Wondrous Sentence: Peace between Israelis and Palestinians

This one wondrous sentence shows in detail how a self-described impenitent Zionist, impenitent dove and hawkish dove who has “irritated some of my comrades … with my unglowing view of the Palestinians and their inability to recognize the historical grandeur of compromise” views the long-standing and possibly intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

I am still quite certain that the establishment of the state of Palestine is a condition for the survival of the state of Israel, as a Jewish state and a democratic state, and that for Israel not to be a Jewish state would be a Jewish catastrophe, and for it not to be a democratic state would be a human catastrophe; and that the only solution there has ever been to this conflict is the solution that was proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, that is, the partition of one land into two states; and that the Jewish settlement of the West Bank was a colossal mistake, and the occupation (and the indifference to it) corrodes the decency of the occupiers; and that the Jewish state is a secular entity; and that anti-Semitism, which will never disappear, does not explain the entirety of the history of the Jews or their state, or exempt Israel from accountability for its actions.

Source: Leon Wieseltier, “Losing Hope on Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” The New Republic, Dec. 20, 2012.