A partially religious assessment of the Hamas-Israel conflict
In an op-ed in The Australian, foreign editor Greg Sheridan gave a partially religious assessment of the Hamas-Israel conflict in a column headlined “Israel has acted with morality in Hamas war”.
In part, he wrote, “There’s a lot of wishful thinking that Arab nations, Egypt, Jordan etc, might provide security.” He failed to mention the history of those two Arab nations with respect to their Palestinian cousins. On 17 September 1970, the Jordanian Army surrounded Jordanian cities with a significant Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) presence and shelled fedayeen posts that were operating from Palestinian refugee camps.
The conflict only ended in July 1971, when the fedayeen were expelled to Lebanon, which led to the creation of the terrorist Black September movement. When, in 1978, Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat signed their historic peace treaty, Israel returned all formerly Egyptian territory, except the Gaza Strip, which Egypt refused to take back. Could that be the reason that Arab nations have not offered to take in any displaced Gazan Arabs in the current conflict? Our Australian government has issued visas to 860 Palestinians. Arab nations refuse to follow suit. Perhaps they fear history repeating. Despite the ugly Australian anti-Jewish incidents to date, we hope that history will not repeat here.
Alan Slade
Dover Heights, Sydney
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