Questions, questions..

Many Muslims are getting increasingly hot under the collar about what's going on in Gaza, this would be understandable if their primary concern was the civilian population in Gaza and how they might reach a peace deal with Israel, i.e. by stopping Hamas inflicting terror attacks on Israel. However, many of these people seem to place other situational factors above this basic concern. You hear many Muslim commentators refuse to condemn Hamas or the attacks and claim that their "anger" is for "the murder of their fellow Muslims" while asserting that Israel is either committing genocide and/or are "invaders / colonisers / occupiers" (take your pick) and/or even that Israel (and by implication Israelis) should be erased completely, "from the river to the sea" as the popular slogan goes. 

I have some serious questions about these claims.

Firstly, while the deaths of any civilians in war is clearly awful, I'd like to understand why I don't see demonstrations or protests about the 350,000+ Muslim civilians killed by Bashar al-Assad and his thugs. I'd also like to understand why I don't see protests and Muslim uproar about the 220,000+ Yemeni Muslims killed by the Islamist Houthis (another extremist group, like Hamas) And yet hundreds of thousands of people march in cities around the world for the Palestinians, what's the difference? There is of course one clear and distinct difference, the Palestinians are fighting Jews and the poor buggers getting bombed back to the stone-age in Aleppo are not, this fact perhaps opens the kimono a fraction and reveals something else going on?

Then there is the claim of genocide, this seems like a logical fallacy to me, clearly Israel has the firepower to obliterate Gaza, and all it's inhabitants but has not, and, critically, wouldn't be doing what they're doing now if Hamas hadn't killed 1500 people in Israel 4 weeks ago. If the boot were on the other foot and Hamas had jet fighters, ships, missiles and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed and trained troops then I think it would be a safe bet that there would be no more Israel. It's the latter that has the "genocidal" intent, simply by definition.

What about "occupation / apartheid / colonisation" etc. Well this is perhaps the more complex of the claims and the one where I think the opposition to Israel has most traction. There is no doubt that Israel has committed wrongs (and continues to do so) against Arabs since 1948, there is too much evidence of prejudice, forced removals, destruction of property and illegal settlement etc. to claim that the Israeli hands are clean. However, the position (as seen in many youngsters in the West) that all Palestinians were forcefully herded out of a country that they once owned is hopelessly simplistic, for example the territory of Israel remains 20% Arab by population even today. A proper reading of history shows that the situation is far more nuanced and complicated than that, there are faults and atrocities on both sides and, of course this is easier to say than do, Israel exists now, just like America and Ukraine exist now, so people should look forward not back although, it's difficult to see how this is going to get resolved without significant and prolonged bloodshed on both sides, including many civilians. 

I watched a debate at the Cambridge Union the other day between a prominent supporter of Israel and many pro-Palestinian students. It was mostly civil but one Muslim student got slightly animated over her claim that the Israelis were "immoral" actors because their response to the terror attacks is not "proportionate", i.e. far more Palestinian people are being killed than Israelis. The speaker made a good point in response, he said that according to this logic it would mean that the Allies in WWII were acting "immorally" in destroying the Nazi regime because far more Germans were killed than Brits, she paused for a second and said "but the Allies weren't bombing civilians", quick as a flash he retorted with, "well you should ask the civilian Women and Children of Dresden, ah no, you can't, they're all dead". On that point the conversation finished but it made me think about the issues at play here and the historical context of it all, when you're faced with an existential threat, as the UK was in 1939/40 and Israel has been many times in the last half century then you see things differently.