Ok, let’s see, if we can look a little down memory lane, and find some examples to learn from in our current situation.
What is Israel in a historical context?
Israel lies in the very birthcradle of civilization. Babylon or modern day Iraq is close, Lebanon or really Phoenicia is just besides, there is Egypt (still called Egypt) Hellas, Persia, Assyria and a few more countries that have essentially made modern day civilisation, that is rule of law, religion, commerce, and nation states.
In other words, it is a place of proud traditions, and rightfully so.
Israel is in the middle of it all. To the north there were the powerful Assyrian kingdoms that later became Persia, in the south there is Egypt and the Arab countries.
So whenever a pharaoh wanted to honor his ancestors by “smiting the enemies”, he went to in and around Israel to conquer it, smite a whole lot of enemies (that is running their chariots into them, and kill them in many other ways), and when the Assyrians had a powerful king, the smite went the other way. In other words, there was a whole lot of smiting going on in the ancient time.
The reason why Moses (an Egyptian prince) could realistically take Israel was because no one really had any control of the territory. That is the historical fact. Getting over Sinai and make the first monotheistic state is a testament to the sheer power of Moses, so it is not to say that Moses was not extremely powerful, its just that Israel was and is the borderland between the north and south.
Its a bit like Poland in Europe, always run over be either the Central European states or Russia. It is an essentially a borderstate, and carries all the characteristics of a border state.
Now, after all the warring in the ancient times, Israel was run over by Assyria, in one of the constant warring back and forth, and has not been made until now three thousand years after. But a lot of things have happened in the meantime.
First Alexander the Great conquered most of the Mediterranean and the states ended up being divided by his generals.
After that the Romans came, and conquered it all. We have a lot of lore coming from that time, not least the Christianity, that was the pushback of the Jews onto Rome.
It later became an integral part of Rome, and still is to this day.
Then the area was held by the East romans for a lot of time, until the time of Muslim conquest in the 600 hundreds. The Muslim conquest held a lot of different factions, so you can’t say Islam, there were the Muslims of the Arab countries, they are still with us to this day. There were the mongols, the Ottomans and the Persians.
As an interim, we had the crusaders, who went to Israel to take it, and did hold on to it for a few hundred years. It was a push back on the Muslim conquest from the northern Christian kingdoms, and it brought a lot of suffering to the Middle East, not least, because it had a lot of viking christians, and they are brutal.
The crusades were also brilliant and heroic, so it is not a simple picture. The point is, that Israel was AGAIN a piece in the politicking of the time.
So Europe had a long time of progress and uptick, that kind of culminated in the First World War, that was truly brutal. From there on, Europe has been in decline, there are signs, that things are turning, so there will be a turnaround.
The thing is, the current Israel is a realization of Western colonial power.
I know that it sounds awful in this day and age, but that is the truth. The US the same and Australia. They are all the result of British colonialism.
So since the colonialism has had a pushback, in the most brutal of ways, in especially Rhodesia/Zimbabwe where we saw cleansing of whites, the scales of kind of been rebalanced.
The colonizers have suffered a lot. So the claim of Hamas is, in this light, not the same as thirty years ago.
Anyway, the whole point of the discourse is, that Israel has ALWAYS been a part of a larger conflict. How long did we hold on to the territory in the first place 200 – 300 years?
That is not long compared to the other nations around is. Egypt is at least 5000 thousand years old.
So my point is, if you live in a borderland (as Denmark is doing) you need to be VERY good at diplomacy to survive. Denmark has survived for 5000 years, at least, due to our strength of arms and ability within diplomacy.
I mean, do you seriously believe that the small area that Israel is, will survive by itself?
We have to play the game, and right now, we are just chopping up all the political capital we have painfully gained over the lifetime of Israel on the hunt of Hamas.
It is all wrong, you do not win over a foe by going against it alone, you do it by making the right alliances, so that the ALLIANCE fights the enemy you have.
That is how you win wars, just to take diplomacy totally out of the equation makes no sense.
G-d bless the will to think clearly in this conflict.