The leaders of Israel are playing the long game. They appear to think that they can exterminate the people whose lands they wish to steal, betting that in a few generations everyone will forget or get over it and their children's children will have a safe Jewish homeland.
They might be right. This tactic worked well for the Europeans who purloined the Americas from the native populations.
There is a difference today, however, and there is a question we need to ask ourselves. The difference now is that anyone with a computer can pull up news and images of the carnage and cruelty. And the victims are literate people, with cell phones, many sympathetic friends outside the gulag, and Twitter feeds. The question we must ask is, are we humans finally emerging out of the juvenile stage of consciousness in which might makes right?
If a big kid (or a more ambitious, angry, determined, self-righteous, and better-armed kid) can pin a smaller kid, is he entitled to the smaller kid's lunch money? Can or will the people of the world who are witnessing the oppression, slaughter and theft in Palestine do anything about the injustice and suffering?
The Jewish people were horribly oppressed for millennia. It culminated in the unspeakable Nazi attempt to wipe them out, while the world did nothing, so a self-protective reaction is perfectly understandable. Doing to the Palestinians what was done to the Jews by the Nazis, however, is a foolish choice.
Anti-Semitism in the modern, more educated world was going out of fashion the way sexism and racism are slowly but surely going out of style, perhaps even faster. An extremist faction of Jews exterminating a group of innocent people in order to steal their land seems like a great way to rejuvenate a powerful hatred of Jews everywhere, which I find exceedingly sad. Many Jewish intellectuals condemned the plan to take over Palestine and their worst fears about the consequences have materialized; anti-Semitism has been resurrected and extended. If the world does not take action to stop it, the Palestinian expulsion and genocide will succeed and the Jews will have finally earned the demonization that was laid upon them falsely for so long. If all plays out on the current trajectory, it may be as great a tragedy for the soul and legacy of the Jewish people as it is for the Palestinians.
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