Hunter Stuart was a self-described Protestant liberal with the “pantheon of beliefs”:
You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
He was also pro-Palestinian, with the belief that Israel was the big bully:
Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom
Most troubling was that even when he became eyewitness to Palestinian bloodlust and brutality against Israel, he felt little sympathy for the Israeli victims. In fact, he felt hostility, and as leftists tend to do, he blamed Israel for being victimized by stabbings and suicide attacks.
Stuart finally snapped out of his trance, but that was only when it became personal. Until then, he believed Israeli citizens deserved everything they got, no matter how sickening; much like Europe and the West, where nothing it gets is sickening enough because they “deserve it.” The propagandist, victimhood narrative has stuck on like crazy glue, and it’s rooted in guilt, namely the past sins of colonialism. Stuart says of Western liberal that “they see it as a white, first world people beating on a poor, third world one.”
Eventually, Stuart came to realize that lying jihadists are governing the Palestinian territories, that the Arab states surrounding Israel have been seeking its obliteration since the Jewish state was born in 1948, and that maneuvers by Israel — deemed to be bullying, apartheid-driven and murderous — are actually defensive. Israel is the bullied, not the bully.
Similarly, those Muslim refugees who are victimizing Europeans en masse and plunging Europe into chaos are deemed by leftists to be innocent, poor, third world, needy victims of the “white people,” whenever Westerners make any effort to protect themselves.
“How a pro-Palestinian American reporter changed his views on Israel and the conflict”, by Hunter Stuart, Jerusalem Post, February 15, 2017:
IN THE summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a year-and-a-half stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.
Boy was he right.
Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom.
“I believe Israel should relinquish control of all of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank,” I wrote on July 11, 2015, from a park near my new apartment in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood. “The occupation is an act of colonialism that only creates suffering, frustration and despair for millions of Palestinians.”
Perhaps predictably, this view didn’t play well among the people I met during my first few weeks in Jerusalem, which, even by Israeli standards, is a conservative city. My wife and I had moved to the Jewish side of town, more or less by chance ‒ the first Airbnb host who accepted our request to rent a room happened to be in the Nachlaot neighborhood where even the hipsters are religious. As a result, almost everyone we interacted with was Jewish Israeli and very supportive of Israel. I didn’t announce my pro-Palestinian views to them ‒ I was too afraid. But they must have sensed my antipathy (I later learned this is a sixth sense Israelis have).
During my first few weeks in Jerusalem, I found myself constantly getting into arguments about the conflict with my roommates and in social settings. Unlike waspy New England, Israel does not afford the privilege of politely avoiding unpleasant political conversations. Outside of the Tel Aviv bubble, the conflict is omnipresent; it affects almost every aspect of life. Avoiding it simply isn’t an option.
During one such argument, one of my roommates ‒ an easygoing American-Jewish guy in his mid-30s ‒ seemed to be suggesting that all Palestinians were terrorists. I became annoyed and told him it was wrong to call all Palestinians terrorists, that only a small minority supported terrorist attacks. My roommate promptly pulled out his laptop, called up a 2013 Pew Research poll and showed me the screen. I saw that Pew’s researchers had done a survey of thousands of people across the Muslim world, asking them if they supported suicide bombings against civilians in order to “defend Islam from its enemies.” The survey found that 62 percent of Palestinians believed such terrorist acts against civilians were justified in these circumstances. And not only that, the Palestinian territories were the only place in the Muslim world where a majority of citizens supported terrorism; everywhere else it was a minority ‒ from Lebanon and Egypt to Pakistan and Malaysia.
I didn’t let my roommate win the argument early morning hours. But the statistic stuck with me.
Less than a month later, in October 2015, a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jewish-Israelis began. Nearly every day, an angry, young Muslim Palestinian was stabbing or trying to run over someone with his car. A lot of the violence was happening in Jerusalem, some of it just steps from where my wife and I had moved into an apartment of our own, and lived and worked and went grocery shopping.
At first, I’ll admit, I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for Israelis. Actually, I felt hostility. I felt that they were the cause of the violence. I wanted to shake them and say, “Stop occupying the West Bank, stop blockading Gaza, and Palestinians will stop killing you!” It seemed so obvious to me; how could they not realize that all this violence was a natural, if unpleasant, reaction to their government’s actions?
IT WASN’T until the violence became personal that I began to see the Israeli side with greater clarity. As the “Stabbing Intifada” (as it later became known) kicked into full gear, I traveled to the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan for a story I was writing.
As soon as I arrived, a Palestinian kid who was perhaps 13 years old pointed at me and shouted “Yehud!” which means “Jew” in Arabic. Immediately, a large group of his friends who’d been hanging out nearby were running toward me with a terrifying sparkle in their eyes. “Yehud! Yehud!” they shouted. I felt my heart start to pound. I shouted at them in Arabic “Ana mish yehud! Ana mish yehud!” (“I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”) over and over. I told them, also in Arabic, that I was an American journalist who “loved Palestine.” They calmed down after that, but the look in their eyes when they first saw me is something I’ll never forget. Later, at a house party in Amman, I met a Palestinian guy who’d grown up in Silwan. “If you were Jewish, they probably would have killed you,” he said.
I made it back from Silwan that day in one piece; others weren’t so lucky. In Jerusalem, and across Israel, the attacks against Jewish Israelis continued. My attitude began to shift, probably because the violence was, for the first time, affecting me directly.
I found myself worrying that my wife might be stabbed while she was on her way home from work. Every time my phone lit up with news of another attack, if I wasn’t in the same room with her, I immediately sent her a text to see if she was OK.
Then a friend of mine ‒ an older Jewish Israeli guy who’d hosted my wife and I for dinner at his apartment in the capital’s Talpiot neighborhood ‒ told us that his friend had been murdered by two Palestinians the month before on a city bus not far from his apartment. I knew the story well ‒ not just from the news, but because I’d interviewed the family of one of the Palestinian guys who’d carried out the attack. In the interview, his family told me how he was a promising young entrepreneur who was pushed over the edge by the daily humiliations wrought by the occupation. I ended up writing a very sympathetic story about the killer for a Jordanian news site called Al Bawaba News.
Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was fast learning) most news outlets wanted – that Israel was to blame for Palestinian violence. But when I learned that my friend’s friend was one of the victims, it changed my way of thinking. I felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers. The man who’d been murdered, Richard Lakin, was originally from New England, like me, and had taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem. He believed in making peace with the Palestinians and “never missed a peace rally,” according to his son.
By contrast, his killers ‒ who came from a middle-class neighborhood in East Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians ‒ had been paid 20,000 shekels to storm the bus that morning with their cowardly guns. More than a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around East Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs. (One of the attackers, Baha Aliyan, 22, was killed at the scene; the second, Bilal Ranem, 23, was captured alive.)
Being personally affected by the conflict caused me to question how forgiving I’d been of Palestinian violence previously. Liberals, human-rights groups and most of the media, though, continued to blame Israel for being attacked. Ban Ki-moon, for example, who at the time was the head of the United Nations, said in January 2016 ‒ as the streets of my neighborhood were stained with the blood of innocent Israeli civilians ‒ that it was “human nature to react to occupation.” In fact, there is no justification for killing someone, no matter what the political situation may or may not be, and Ban’s statement rankled me.
SIMILARLY, THE way that international NGOs, European leaders and others criticized Israel for its “shoot to kill” policy during this wave of terrorist attacks began to annoy me more and more.
In almost any nation, when the police confront a terrorist in the act of killing people, they shoot him dead and human-rights groups don’t make a peep. This happens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh; it happens in Germany and England and France and Spain, and it sure as hell happens in the US (see San Bernardino and the Orlando nightclub massacre, the Boston Marathon bombings and others). Did Amnesty International condemn Barack Obama or Abdel Fattah al-Sisi or Angela Merkel or François Hollande when their police forces killed a terrorist? Nope. But they made a point of condemning Israel.
What’s more, I started to notice that the media were unusually fixated on highlighting the moral shortcomings of Israel, even as other countries acted in infinitely more abominable ways. If Israel threatened to relocate a collection of Palestinian agricultural tents, as they did in the West Bank village of Sussiya in the summer of 2015, for example, the story made international headlines for weeks. The liberal outrage was endless. Yet, when Egypt’s president used bulldozers and dynamite to demolish an entire neighborhood in the Sinai Peninsula in the name of national security, people scarcely noticed.
Where do these double standards come from?
I’ve come to believe it’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeals to the appetites of progressive people in Europe, the US and elsewhere. They see it as a white, first world people beating on a poor, third world one. It’s easier for them to become outraged watching two radically different civilizations collide than it is watching Alawite Muslims kill Sunni Muslims in Syria, for example, because to a Western observer the difference between Alawite and Sunni is too subtle to fit into a compelling narrative that can be easily summarized on Facebook.
Unfortunately for Israel, videos on social media that show US-funded Jewish soldiers shooting tear gas at rioting Arab Muslims is Hollywood-level entertainment and fits perfectly with the liberal narrative that Muslims are oppressed and Jewish Israel is a bully.
I admire the liberal desire to support the underdog. They want to be on the right side of history, and their intentions are good. The problem is that their beliefs often don’t square with reality.
In reality, things are much, much more complex than a five-minute spot on the evening news or a two paragraph-long Facebook status will ever be able to portray. As a friend told me recently, “The reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so intractable is that both sides have a really, really good point.”
Unfortunately, not enough people see it that way. I recently bumped into an old friend from college who told me that a guy we’d both known when we were freshmen had been active in Palestinian protests for a time after graduating. The fact that a smart, well-educated kid from Vermont, who went to one of the best liberal arts schools in the US, traveled thousands of miles to throw bricks at Israeli soldiers is very, very telling.
THERE’S AN old saying that goes, “If you want to change someone’s mind, first make them your friend.” The friends I made in Israel forever changed my mind about the country and about the Jewish need for a homeland. But I also spent a lot of time traveling in the Palestinian territories getting to know Palestinians. I spent close to six weeks visiting Nablus and Ramallah and Hebron, and even the Gaza Strip. I met some incredible people in these places; I saw generosity and hospitality unlike anywhere else I’ve ever traveled to. I’ll be friends with some of them for the rest of my life. But almost without fail, their views of the conflict and of Israel and of Jewish people in general was extremely disappointing.
First of all, even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel ‒ not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution ‒ what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land.
To me, however morally complicated the creation of Israel may have been, however many innocent Palestinians were killed and displaced from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967, Israel is now a fact, accepted by almost every government in the world (including many in the Middle East). But the ongoing desire of Palestinians to wipe Israel off the map is unproductive and backward- looking and the West must be very careful not to encourage it.
The other thing is that a large percentage of Palestinians, even among the educated upper class, believe that most Islamic terrorism is actually engineered by Western governments to make Muslims look bad. I know this sounds absurd. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s comical until you hear it repeated again and again as I did. I can hardly count how many Palestinians told me the stabbing attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016 were fake or that the CIA had created ISIS.
For example, after the November 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris that killed 150 people, a colleague of mine ‒ an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist ‒ casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad. Though she was a journalist like me and ought to have been committed to searching out the truth no matter how unpleasant, this woman was unwilling to admit that Muslims would commit such a horrific attack, and all too willing ‒ in defiance of all the facts ‒ to blame it on Israeli spies.
USUALLY WHEN I travel, I try to listen to people without imposing my own opinion. To me that’s what traveling is all about ‒ keeping your mouth shut and learning other perspectives. But after 3-4 weeks of traveling in Palestine, I grew tired of these conspiracy theories.
“Arabs need to take responsibility for certain things,” I finally shouted at a friend I’d made in Nablus the third or fourth time he tried to deflect blame from Muslims for Islamic terrorism. “Not everything is America’s fault.” My friend seemed surprised by my vehemence and let the subject drop ‒ obviously I’d reached my saturation point with this nonsense.
I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible. Countless Palestinians told me they didn’t have a problem with Jewish people, only with Zionists. They seemed to forget that Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years, along with Muslims, Christians, Druse, atheists, agnostics and others, more often than not, in harmony. Instead, the vast majority believe that Jews only arrived in Israel in the 20th century and, therefore, don’t belong here.
Of course, I don’t blame Palestinians for wanting autonomy or for wanting to return to their ancestral homes. It’s a completely natural desire; I know I would feel the same way if something similar happened to my own family. But as long as Western powers and NGOs and progressive people in the US and Europe fail to condemn Palestinian attacks against Israel, the deeper the conflict will grow and the more blood will be shed on both sides.
I’m back in the US now, living on the north side of Chicago in a liberal enclave where most people ‒ including Jews ‒ tend to support the Palestinians’ bid for statehood, which is gaining steam every year in international forums such as the UN.
Personally, I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea. If the Palestinians are given their own state in the West Bank, who’s to say they wouldn’t elect Hamas, an Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction? That’s exactly what happened in Gaza in democratic elections in 2006. Fortunately, Gaza is somewhat isolated, and its geographic isolation ‒ plus the Israeli and Egyptian-imposed blockade ‒ limit the damage the group can do. But having them in control of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem is something Israel obviously doesn’t want. It would be suicide. And no country can be expected to consent to its own destruction……

Angel Gabriel says
I think the most salient point in all of this that the leftists’ hate of Israel and their “love” for the Palestinians all boils down to “Identity Politics”. The stupid notion that it first must be determined which “group” is more “powerful” or “privileged” and then the “weaker” group has free rein to commit all sorts of atrocities upon the “privileged” group with no consequences, moral or otherwise. And the “privileged” group deserves all of the death and destruction solely by virtue of them being labeled “privileged” by the leftists.
It is a sick and depraved ideology that some stupid leftist invented — the most dangerous ideology, along with Islam (the “least privileged”, therefore the “most virtuous” ideology as deemed by the leftists) the the world faces in our time.
Les says
And one of the biggest irony is that nearly 80% of American Jews vote for liberal Democrats who assist in Israel’s destruction.
How pathetic and mentally ill can the left get??
RichardL says
unfortunately, almost no liberal will go to Israel in the first place. Our only hope is that at least they see the other side: islam. More and more European neighbourhoods are taken over by Mohammedans and I know many formerly hard-left people who now want Muslim immigration stopped.
Thus, there is hope that reality will correct opinions based on ideology and stupidity.
RonaldB says
There is a big problem with trying to judge Israel with a morality brush. The fact is, Israel is a country like any other, has its own national interests, and may very well act in ways that we consider immoral…the same as virtually every other country in the world.
Any sort of identity politics in a country spells problems, and is trouble if it gets too strong. The Palestinians have not only the Arab and cultural identity driving them, but Islamic imperialism. There is a built-in tension between Israel as a Jewish state and the existence of the Palestinians. Israel is not going to exist if it doesn’t recognize and discriminate based on this tension. So, it’s crazy to subject Israel to a moral microscope, as if Israel is a Sunday school lesson, rather than a functioning country, with its own pimples and warts.
Israel has encouraged this view in the past, as an entry to plentiful US foreign aid. It’s to Israel’s interests, I believe, to wean itself from foreign aid from the US and to be seen as another western-type country whose existence is part of the fortress of western civilization. The international organizations supported by the US, like the UN, are probably more harmful to Israel than the foreign aid is helpful…if the foreign aid is helpful at all.
I think Hunter Stuart vastly underplays the extremely strong liberal Jewish support for the two-state solution and the liberal Jewish hostility to US support of Israeli nationalism that includes, sometimes, heavy-handed tactics in dealing with Palestinians and even Muslim Israelis, who can also be hostile to Israel as a state.
https://www.urj.org/blog/2017/02/15/urj-president-rabbi-rick-jacobs-president-trumps-abdication-two-state-solution-could
Funny enough, some right-wing Trump supporters, including Jewish? right-wingers, are also fixated on Israel abuse of Palestinians. Not all Trump supporters, or anywhere near a majority, but some. And these people are perfectly cognizant of the threat that Muslim immigration, or even Muslim-majority
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2017/01/zionist-extremism-as-product-of-the-internal-dynamics-of-judaism-part-1/
BEN TRAINA says
My wife and I have attended dozens of Tea Party-Trump rallies and have never, never heard one word of support for Palestinian nationalists’ Is my Space Coast of Florida unusual? I think not and demand evidence of Trump supporters supporting Palestine. BTW. My 1906 Encyclopedia Britannica states that a British census of Jerusalem in the 1870’s showed 5,000 Christians, 5,000 Muslims and 10,000 Jews with thousands more arriving every year from Poland and Russia. Where were the Palestinians?
WTF is wrong with people says
It definately shows how ignorant and biased leftists can be. They jump on the bangwagon without researching or looking at situations objectively. There is no excuse or right for a group to be waging war and terror on another. The leftists really need to get their heads out of their tailpipes. I don’t know if this will ever happen though. I have yet to find one that can listen and talk without throwing a fit or name calling. By association they are responsible for much of these crimes. You cannot support groups who want to get their way by murdering people. They stand and sympathize with the attackers and don’t feel an ounze of empathy for the victims. They essentially have lost their humanity. The loss of humanity will be the downfall of all Western civilizations. If you live in a country that promotes the murder of millions upon millions of babies, you have lost your humanity. That was the start of the downfall in the west. If people support and the government pays for abortions and mothers are so cold that they don’t even care that is a very telling problem. If you have no problem killing your children why would you have a problem supporting a group that commits murder and rapes worldwide and brags about. Not to mention they think they have the right to do it. Leftists are the most hypocritical people. They have inhumane values and their viewpoint and politics will only lead to destruction of the west. Leftists look at the Right and think they are racist, intolerant and heartless. But the truth is they are all of these things and prove it in their stance and actions. Nothing is more blatantly clear. The right is merely struggling to hold on to their free countries and to stop their countrymen from getting murdered and terrorized. That is humanity, caring for humankind and not just your own selfish needs.
Custos Custodum says
Hard core leftist totalitarians know EXACTLY what they are doing. They are working flat-out to delegitimize a stong, nationalist, anti-totalitarian country in the Middle East.
In other words, their aim is to make the world safe for one-world totalitarianism. The REAL purpose of one-worldism is to create a system where nobody can escape the clutches of the unified government (which leftists expect to control). All human rights would, of course, be abolished, and death camps would start churning within weeks.
Doc says
Exactly. World government is a logical aspiration to them and of which the present head of the UN Antonio Guterres, a former socialist Prime Minister of Portugal, is a prime advocate. Unsurprisingly the largest voting block in the UN, the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), voted for him. Guterres has long been a staunch supporter of Palestine and critic (to put it mildly) of Israel.
Doc says
Exactly. World government is a logical aspiration to them and of which the present head of the UN Antonio Guterres, a former socialist Prime Minister of Portugal, is a prime advocate. Unsurprisingly the largest voting block in the UN, the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), voted for him. Guterres has long been a staunch supporter of Palestine and critic (to put it mildly) of Israel.
billybob says
“If you live in a country that promotes the murder of millions upon millions of babies, you have lost your humanity. ”
What country promotes the murder of millions upon millions of babies? I am not aware of any. However, there are several countries who leave the moral question to the bearers of said babies, rather than impose their own morals upon them. These countries realize that the State has no monopoly on morality.
Biff H says
And when the bearers of babies are left to their own devices they often murder a viable life form in the womb. The fruit of their moral compass is the murder of the innocent.
Jimdandi says
Answer: Planned Parenthood and the leftists who support that murderous entity which Margaret Sanger founded for the express purpose of limiting the population of “undesirable elements in society”, i.e. people of color or blacks.
H says
Obama and Hillary were certainly ardent promotors of abortions.
Les says
Amen!!!!
Ciudadano says
ME is the mother of conspiration theories and the greatest conspiration theory was created by Mohamed: the coran.
Diane Harvey says
“Personally, I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea.”
That’s it? That’s the strongest statement he can make?
How about, “I now KNOW that that’s not a good idea.”
Or,
“Until the world understands the true nature of Islam, and treats it as a threat to all of us, this worldwide killing in the name of Islam will continue.”
Or,
“From now on I will make it a part of life’s work to sing the praises of the Judaeo-Christian ethic, and begin to educate others on the deadly aims of the Islamic Jihad.”
Guest says
Baby steps…
billybob says
“Personally, I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea.”
It’s called understatement, and it is a literary device. It is a figure of speech employed by the writer to maintain a cool, detached, professional stance. He makes it abundantly clear that in fact, by his logic the Palestinians’ bid for statehood is not a good idea at all.
no_one says
Even some Christians now days call Israel “Palestine” and think that the Holy land should be called Palestine. I am for Jerusalem being the eternal capital of Israel. That way I would feel safe to visit the Holy sites. Not so much if PA rules there. Palestinians are aggressive.
jewdog says
Good start, but he should continue his deprogramming by subscribing to this web site and reading Robert’s books. As President Kennedy once put it, the greater our knowledge, the more our ignorance unfolds.
Shmooviyet says
@diane harvey & @jewdog: agreed.
Some detectable wobbliness, Israel vs PA-wise. A regimen of JW knowledge would aid him well now he’s returned to the leftist comfort zone.
MorrisBCanada says
Hooray!!! another lefty journalist comes up against the hard truth of muslims vs Jews. Prior to the Jews getting Israel via the League of Nations the land was nothing but desert with nomads running around. The Jewish State has turned it, through their hard work and INVENTIVENESS, into a ” land of milk of honey”.
Now that the Jews have turned the land into a thriving state, the muslims want it back. Jewish history should be enough for any THINKING person to realize the land is JEWISH and NOT muslim . There is NO other country in the ME that has accomplished what the Jews have done. They have a DEMOCRACY which allows their people to thrive. There’s no overbearing threat of being accused of a whole assortment of crimes with the chance of being subjected to a lot of BARBARIC punishments.
The muslim majority countries try to emulate Mo’s life and follow his rules. This means that consanguinity comes into play — HUGE problem. These countries have only been able to improve the quality of life for their people because of the aid given by Western democracies and their having stolen patents and ideas from us plus the higher learning facilities also brought in by the West.
A good read is “Son of Hamas” (forgotten the author’s name). In one section he highlights, while he was in an Israeli prison, the muslim on muslim violence and torture. HORRIFIC. If by any chance, GOD FORBID, through the efforts of the UN and coerced Western “democracies”, muslims gain control over Israel, it’ll be destroyed by the muslim on muslim violence and brought back to its desert state.
Excuse the rant.
dumbledoresarmy says
There should also be, for ‘progressives’, the historically and archaeologically demonstrable fact that, actually, the Jews are .. indigenous to the Levant, and indeed, indigenous to eretz Israel. Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Golan are *the traditional ancestral homeland of the House of Israel*, NOT of the so-called ‘Palestinians’ who are, for the most part, a bunch of Muslim Arabs descended from very recent arrivals; from a ‘hijra’ of Muslims that flooded into the area from many parts of the dar al Islam, mostly in the 1930s, to try to crush the perceived reemergence of a non-dhimmi Jewish community.
There is a very interesting Native Canadian activist, Ryan Bellerose, who is a staunch and outspoken Friend of Zion. He loves Israel and the Jews, and he argues *very* cogently for the indigenous status of the Jews of Israel, and for Israel as an indigenous people who have liberated part of their own traditional homeland and there asserted and achieved sovereignty and created a modern nation.
Kay says
Good to know about this Bellerose. I was with a friend recently, Jewish American. She blamed all the struggles in the ME on “the British drawing a line.” Somehow in her mind, if Israel had different borders, there’d be no conflict.
mortimer says
One of the best ways to convince people about the value of Israel is to let them SEE ISRAEL and then COMPARE ISRAEL with its dysfunctional neighbors.
When they recover from the shock of Arab dysfunctionality, many of these fools come to their senses, including many Muslims who realize that HARD WORK and EDUCATION are in evidence in Israel and lacking in dysfunctional Arab countries.
RAB says
Right on! I have not experienced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly but over time as the evidence built up I too made a complete 360 degree turn. At first I supported the Palestinians. I recall the pictures of the poor little Palestinian kids throwing stones at the big bad Israeli tanks. I deplored the destruction meted out to the Gaza strip during Israeli attacks. But then I noticed something else. I spite of all the death and destruction of their own people Hamas kept lobbing rockets into Israel, even though it took about a thousand of their rockets to kill a single Israeli. Why did they keep on doing it? The answers came to me little by little. How many times have we heard the phrase from Muslims “we love death more than you love life” and seen Muslim mothers overjoyed because their sons died as martyrs in the cause of Allah? Then I read the Koran and found out the real reason for Jew-hatred. The perfect man, Muhammad hated Jews, therefore devout Muslims must also hate Jews. Finally, I read the Hamas charter. That did it. These people have no intention of negotiating a peace settlement. For example, the Charter reads: “[Peace] initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the Islamic resistance movement.” And again “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it has obliterated others before it.”
That’s all I needed. I don’t like or agree with some of the things Israel does but I am now 100% in favour of whatever Israel does to defend itself and the rest of the “free” world, which still hasn’t got the message.
Jon Sobieski says
And no country can be expected to consent to its own destruction……
Isn’t that what Merkel is doing in Germany and the left doing in Sweden?
Doron says
You were a useful idiot for their murderous cause, and now they will use another useful idiot, and you will be called by ugly names.
somehistory says
So now he sees it for more than “all this violence was a natural, if unpleasant, reaction”? Does he now see it as more than *unpleasant* that people are slaughtered for no more reason than they are Jews?
And “I didn’t let my roommate win the argument early morning hours.”… if he saw the stats on the ones who love violence and terrorism, he didn’t *win* the argument even if he didn’t admit it. The roommate proved the point.
IMO he still has a lot to learn..
davej says
All Muslims claim they are “defending their religion”, thereby casting themselves as the eternal victims and justifying all terror attacks, stabbings and truck massacres as purely “defensive”. The Leftists swallow this line without scrutiny and automatically sympathize with the “underdogs”.
The sad and unfortunate fact is that Palestinians have no intention of coexistence or tolerance. They have been brainwashed since birth to hate Jews so all they think about is the complete destruction of Israel.
Hindu American says
So, let me get this right. This “free lance reporter” who was once upon a time anti-Israel goes to live in Israel, a free society, and everyone welcomes him. I wonder if he would choose or dare to live in the palestinian part if he was anti-palestine? Shouldn’t that have been his first “wake up” moment?
I am glad he has finally come to his senses.
Reminds me of those “liberal millennial feminists” who live in the free west and choose to walk around wearing the hijab/bag to prove a point. They should try the reverse in an islamic country and walk around not wearing a bag. See how welcome they would be. That will be their “wake up” moment.
Kepha says
Hindu American:
Yes, reality can be pretty hard on a modern American [mis-]education.
Long ago, in the early 1990’s, when I was handling humanitarian parole cases for Cambodian DP’s in border camps in Thailand, I ran into some wonderful ladies working with NGO’s that were helping the DP’s. Back in prim and PeeCee NewEngland or the Left Coast of the USA, they would’ve been screaming, needs-a-man-life-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle feminists. Face with the realities of a series of Cambodian horrors only starting to wind down, they observed that one of the big security problems inside Cambodia was threats to women and children due to the numbers of men who had been killed.
Some of my former Foreign Service colleagues started all starry eyed about Mao’s experiment in China and the “liberation” of Viet Nam, but a tour in either country soon made them into bigger anti-Communists than I am (and I cannot think of a single good thing to say about Marxism-Leninism).
I am glad that Hunter Stuart (two Anglo last names and liberal Protestant: good US ambassadorial material) came to his senses.
As for me, I’m the kind of Evangelical who doesn’t think that Zionism heralds the soon return of Christ. I believe that the Chosen People of God are gathered about the Messiah Jesus, not a piece of Middle Eastern land. However, I will be pro-Israel on natural law grounds and refer to “Eretz Yisroel or the Holy Land rather than “Palestine”, since I know what a nasty business the Islamic religion is and that its revival anywhere is a harbinger of terror and dysfunction.
DFD says
Off topic, News from Europe
=====================
By and large the same as with you….
However, here’s something I have to share with you, to draw your attention to. A man on his way to a PEGIDA demo in Germany. His sign reads:
‘“Allah is great” But here in this land the AfD and PEGIDA are even greater and stronger!’
The police stopped him, questioned him, and looked for ways to prevent him joining, they even measured the dimensions of his sign to check that it was within regulations! It was. Oddly enough, they don’t do that normally, and certainly not with lefty demos.
Anyway, here’s the picture, enjoy. https://pi-news.net/wp/uploads/2017/02/A4.jpg
HugoHackenbush says
The author of the story has traveled a path previously walked. Joan Peters was a NYT journalist (an actual journalist) in the 1980’s who simply followed the facts (but had started from a pro-“Palestinian” assumption). The facts shocked her and her book “From Time Immemorial” was the result: https://www.amazon.com/Peters-Joan-Time-Immemorial-Arab-Jewish/dp/B00J5TDXZQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1487278487&sr=8-2&keywords=joan+peters+from+time+immemorial
Mark says
“You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.”
Supporting pluralism, tolerance, diversity, and gay rights is a good reason NOT to support Islam.
Kepha says
Maybe we’re seeing how a dominant liberalism in this country has dumbed-down everyone to the point where they see nothing but surface phenomena? And that the liberals have especially dumbed-down themselves.
Angemon says
Do they assume all Jews are Zionists?
Tim says
“Arab states surrounding Israel have been seeking its obliteration since the Jewish state was born in 1948…”
Let’s not feed the idea that Israel was born in 1948. Israel was created in 1917 with the Belfour declaration. It’s important to mention this. By using a much later date the Palestinian use it as a handicap in their argument, since their population only began pouring into the region in the late 1920’s and 1930’s. The 1948 date gives the false impression that they always lived there – which they never did.
HugoHackenbush says
See my reference above to the work of Joan Peters in documenting the facts that you discuss. Her references for the the facts are superb. In addition: I once went to an exhibition at the Getty museum (Los Angeles) of photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the “Holy Land”. It bore out one of the main points discussed in Peters’s book: The fact that the area was nearly uninhabited (except for the remnant Jewish population and some transient nomads.
Max Publius says
Decent article, but it appears that Hunter Stuart still fails to realize the root of Palestinian terrorism isn’t about “wanting autonomy or for wanting to return to their ancestral homes,” it’s about their indoctrination into deep-seated Islamo-supremacist beliefs and loathing or non-Muslims that’s straight out of the core texts of Islam and the mosques of today.
ElderlyZionist says
Being personally threatened focuses the mind wonderfully. I admit that I completely re-evaluated my own beliefs regarding the 2nd amendment the first time a thug threatened me with a gun.
Muslim international jihad threatens everyone in Christendom, in the US and in Europe (still fundamentally Christian societies – rich, successful and kuffar). The mujahidin are raising up a civilization against them, one that has never been defeated, once aroused.
Meshulam says
It is “nice” that this young man awoke from his previous uniformly toxic attitude towards the world’s only Jewish state, but I wonder if he questions why it is that it took him so long to do so.
I grew up in New England also and it is no mystery to me why that is. “Nice” Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Unitarians and Quakers and so forth so desperate to believe they have “outgrown” the evil of the “less advanced,” including their own ancestors. The presence of Jews, not usually in their own communities but there when they venture to Boston or other urban locales, or when they matriculate at a university, reminds them of where they come from. Our very existence frightens them, they worry they are not so very advanced after all, and for that they cannot forgive the us. They hate us because we remind them that they are not pure. Their reaction-formation is thus to find reasons to justify it. These days the justification is how we “stole” someone else’s homeland – as did they when they descended on and usurped “New England” (think about that name for just a moment) and most of the rest of the world over the past 600 years. Before that it was how we polluted their gene pool, before that we poisoned their wells, before that we usurped “their” holy land. There has always been this with them.
I wish the man and his wife well on their philosophical and emotional journey. I hope they get down to the heart of the matter.
Manny says
Now here was a liberal that was mugged by reality. Literally!
But really, what a dope. I guess I’m glad he saw the light.
politicalqrm says
What he really needs is to start reading the koran and educate himself on how violent and hateful the culture of Islam is…
I think there would be no question on who is the victim and who is the bully.
underbed cat says
The story of Hunter Stuart’s transformation for more tolerance of Israel defending itself, and his initial pro-Palestinian views..and the sum of experiences that formed his views before and after, is complicated underscores the mix of history, but omitted the doctrine.
Since in my belief it is the doctrine of the religion of no peace that adds the relentlessness of pursuing Israel since long before the state of Israel was granted, it was pursued with the DNA of the verses and commands. The video of rocks being thrown by children drew sympathy but the intensity was hidden and so were the other methods of slaying which is enforced by sharia and hardened views that reveals how Israels has had not peace from these attacks.
Brian Ozzy says
It’s good to see that even some of the intractable people can sometimes listen to reason and open their eyes to the truth. Now all Hunter Stuart needs to do is brush up on the (true) history of that area and reach the final conclusion that actually, the Palestinian fantasy is a very recent myth, and that they historically have no claim whatever to the region. They are Arabs so let them go live in one of the other 28 Arab countries, not that they would be welcomed!