by Larry Johnson at SONAR 21
Yesterday, I sent an email to a discussion group in which I participate that is comprised of many prominent Americans who are very pro-Zionist. My email contained the spreadsheet of the Israeli Foreign Ministry data on “Palestinian terror attacks since 2000.” My point in sending the spreadsheet was to show that there is a large discrepancy between the public narrative, which claims Israel is the victim of unrelenting terrorist attacks, and the actual facts. I received the following response from a very smart person, who embodies the mindset that is widespread in Israel. I believe it is important to listen to others, even those you strongly disagree with, and try to have a dialogue. I prefer talking over killing. Here is what this person wrote:
So since 2020, 3000 Israelis murdered by Palestinians. What about 1980-1999? Another 3000? And before 1980? The Arabs were murdering Jews in Israel when Israel was called Palestine. From the 1920s at least. So say 6000 out of a population of 8 million? That would be 225,000 Americans, proportionally. Would we stand for 200,000 Americans murdered by terrorists and just sit on our hands? What if native Americans did this in attempt to gain sovereignty over their native lands. Would we tolerate it? No, of course not.
Larry, it is one thing to try to be objective with just presenting numbers, but quite another to represent an agenda under the guise of “just presenting numbers.” You certainly know that the numbers of deaths claimed by the Palestinians are greatly enlarged by them for PR value, and that they include all of the Hamas terrorists killed in the fighting, at least 20,000 according to the Israelis. Further, you know that (a) Hamas uses civilians as shields in order to increase the civilian death count for exactly the agenda you are describing (which violates the Geneva war convention and is a war crime), and (b) Israel has the world’s lowest civilian-to-combatant death ratio of any army, the US included, and this in inner city fighting which is notoriously difficult. Omitting these facts and just pretending that the numbers speak for themselves is an agenda, and to give you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps not the one you really want to espouse.
What is really occurring here is that Jews have fully resettled their indigenous homeland at a time after Arabs had colonized it and claimed according to Islamic theology that colonized land becomes Dar al-Islam. We Jews are asserting our natural right to live in our indigenous homeland, and that includes the so-called West Bank, which is where the very name Jews comes from. Over the last 150 years, we in fact purchased back essentially all of our indigenous land. That the remaining Arabs won’t voluntarily go back to their indigenous Arabia has led to multiple wars. Because Israel is a democratic country, if the Arabs would live peaceably as citizens of Israel, they could stay and enjoy all civil rights of Israeli citizenship. Many have. But Islam is restive for sovereignty over everyone else, and this is the central fact that has prevented a peaceful resolution. It is basically the same as Spain–Islam still considers Spain Dar al-Islam because it once occupied Spain. We Jews are the rightful indigenous owners of Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, including Yehuda and Shomron (the West Bank) and Gaza, but are willing to deal with practical issues to make this peaceful. The Arabs, who assert Islamic colonization rights, are not, and the land is not theirs, and Israelis have fought numerous defensive wars to keep the ownership of our indigenous lands.
Here is my response:
1. If you want to make the proportionality argument, then apply it uniformly to the Palestinians as well as the Israelis. The current killing of Palestinians by aerial bombardment, over the last year, exceeds anything done by Israel in the last 70 years. The estimate for the number of Palestinian deaths is not from Palestinian sources. It is from The Lancet, a British Medical Journal that you know quite well (here is the link — https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext). According to The Lancet:
By June 19, 2024, 37 396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.1 The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services,2 the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry,3 which found claims of data fabrication implausible.4
Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure.5 The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35 091 deaths were unidentified.1
The fact remains that Palestinians are being killed at a disproportionate rate and that Israeli tactics include the bombing of hospitals, schools, mosques and churches.
As far as your question, “What would we do if terrorists killed 250,000 Americans?,” we already know…
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