Friday, September 3, 2021

Goodwill gestures

 Jerusalem Post, Letters to the Editor, August 31, 2021

“Israel will make a series of goodwill gestures to the Palestinian Authority, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said Monday after a rare meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas the night before in Ramallah.”

Goodwill gestures? Historian Benny Morris in his lecture “Jihad and Antisemitism in the 1948 War” said, “On the basis of the research I did for book 1948, which came out in 2008, I pointed out that the war was also a religious war, certainly from the Arab side, a jihad, they were waging jihad against the Jewish Zionists who were seen as infidels and were fighting over what they regarded as sacred territory.”

Goodwill gestures is not exactly something that worked at all throughout history during the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem, Persia, Anatolia, the Balkans, North Africa, Sindt, India and Andalusia.

Is it not time that our political leadership started reading history? To quote Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s remark made regarding the US debacle in Afghanistan, but which is fully applicable to the Palestinians as well: “What makes you think they will act differently and how many times do you want that to happen before you wake up and realize that it is just not true? Take the world as it is not as you fantasize it to be.”

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC

Beersheba