Israel-Hamas War Causes Turmoil in the USA

Ever since Hamas–the governing party of the Gaza Strip–attacked Israel on October 7, killed 1,200 Israeli Jews, and took about 240 hostages, Israel has continued to retaliate with a war that is flattening Gaza resulting in reportedly 16,000 Gaza Palestinians killed. Turmoil has been building in the US about this whole situation, especially since the US is Israel’s #1 ally who supplies it with much of its weaponry and ammunitions freely as foreign aid.

The war has brought to the forefront the underlying cause of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is that there has never been the creation of a Palestinian state, which I believe is the only way it will ever be solved. Yet, as I have been saying for over forty years now, and wrote a book about it published in 1990, the traditional two-state solution–a Palestinian state in the separated territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip–will not solve the problem because it is the wrong geographical solution, being merely based merely on demographics. I maintain that it can only be solved with the creation of a Palestinian state according to historical precedence as claimed in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, issued on May 15, 1948, which resulted in war and Jews getting their own state. Ever since, Palestinians have been left wanting.

In recent days, the presidents of three leading universities in the US–Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania–have been accused of promoting antisemitism as support for free speech because large masses of its students have been demonstrating on campus on behalf of Palestinians by chanting “from the river to the sea.” This saying is commonly understood to mean that the State of Israel should be demolished so that Jews are either expelled from all land between the Jordan River-Dead Sea to the Mediterranean Sea or that all Jews there be exterminated, meaning genocide.

This week, Congress held a hearing in which it questioned all three of these university presidents. They held to their previous conviction without denouncing their students’ seeming call for genocide of Jews. Because of this, Congress is going to investigate these schools with the aim of taking punitive measures against them. Many hefty financial donors of these schools are calling for Congress to take such actions.

The UN has been responding as well. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, of Portugal, has been accusing Israel of committing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. On October 24, he denounced Hamas’ attack on Israel. Yet he explained the anger of such Islamic, Palestinian organizations against Israel has not occurred “in a vacuum” but that it is due to Palestinians having been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” by Israel. He is quite right about that. So, Gurreres has been calling for the UN Security Council to demand that Israel halt its assault on Gaza with a permanent cease-fire. The Council voted on it this week, with thirteen of its fifteen members voting yes; the UK withholding its vote; and the US voting no. All members must vote yes for any measure to pass.

Israel’s fiesty, right-wing ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, accused Guerres antisemitism and called for his resignation. On the contrary, IMO it is the State of Israel, especially under its leadership of President Netanyahu, that has been contributing to a definite rise in antisemitism in this century worldwide. This is because he and others in his administrations have been against the creation of aa Palestinian state and have taken measures against that happening.

On the other hand, I sympathize somewhat with these leaders of Israel because I think they have some legitimate arguments against the traditional two-state solution. The main thing to me is that there desperately needs to be a revival of peace process, which has not existed since 2014, and the US should be firm in advocating for a two-state solution. But again, they need to discuss alternatives to the traditional one.