I have recently been criticized in a private email by a pro-Israel / pro-Jewish advocate - who I respect - for lacking nuance in my criticisms of the Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East.This gentleman is a writer who has published a book on pro-Israel advocacy, but I honestly have no idea what he is talking about.
I guess that I do not value nuance over simple truths.
Here is a simple truth:
The Jews of the Middle East lived as second and third-class non-citizens under Arab and Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century CE until the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.Now, this is not a very nuanced view, but it has the virtue of historical accuracy and I tend to think that matters.
2 + 2 = 4 is not particularly nuanced, either, but it does not make it less true.
Here is another simple and entirely unuanced truth:
The Jews of the Middle East have been under constant attack by the great Arab and Muslim majority in the region for fourteen hundred years for irrational racist and religious reasons.That is, the source of the conflict is millenia old Arab and Muslim racist hatred toward Jews.
It is nothing else.
Europeans tend to think that the Jews of Israel are terrible people in need of sanctions for their alleged mistreatment of the indigenous, innocent, conquerors of Jewish land.
This is very odd considering the ongoing malice and rape and murder of European Christians on their own land by the emigre Arabs and Muslims that they invited into their countries for humanitarian reasons.
That is also a truth lacking in nuance.
Here is another entirely unuanced truth:
The Arabs have turned down every single offer of yet another Arab state in the Middle East since the League of Nations Peel Commission of 1937.There is not much nuance in the word "no."
After the war of 1967 there was not a whole lot of nuance to the statement of the Arab heads of state in Khartoum, Sudan, that there would be no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel.
The famous 3 Nos.
It does not get much less nuanced than that.
Diaspora Jews who care about the well-being of the Jewish people - particularly the Jews in the Middle East who are under constant attack by their hostile Arab neighbors - need to recognize that, as Ted Belman says, there is no diplomatic solution precisely for the reason that the Arabs do not want two states for two peoples.
What they want are the Jews dead or gone.
And that is not very nuanced, either.
People say that the conflict is complex.
It isn't.
It is grounded entirely in religious and ethnic hatred on the part of the Arabs and Muslims toward the Jews for centuries.
The fact of the matter is that Arabs in the Middle East teach their children that Jews are the issue of orangutans and swine.
And there is nothing the least bit nuanced about that either.
