Zionism, Humanitarianism, and the Progressive Dilemma:
Part 1 – Introduction – Zionism and the Humanitarian Question.
The British family members of hostages held in Gaza by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas held a news conference from London, England, on Sept. 30th, 2024. The video screengrab is courtesy of Sky News.
NOTE: Nazia Saeed, a Human Resources professional living in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, contributed significant research and writing for parts of this article.
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Can Zionists be humanitarians?
Objective analysis reveals the answer to be an emphatic NO – despite the international humanitarian objectives that founded the state of Israel in 1948. Nonetheless, it is clear the current widespread death, civilian infrastructure carnage, and public health crises in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen will not end unless Zionists in Israel and America demand a ceasefire deal to return the remaining hostages.
However, the most recent research polls of Israel’s Jewish population reveal that most citizens support the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) military campaign in Gaza. About 39% of Israelis say the IDF’s response against Hamas in Gaza has been correct. Thirty-four percent say the IDF has not gone far enough, while only 19% say the military has gone too far.
Furthermore, despite the widespread unpopularity of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s embattled Prime Minister – the spread of the war to Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran is allowing him to consolidate political power.
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Official portrait of Israel’s 9th Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Before Hamas’ horrific October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel’s southern border and an open-air music festival, Prime Minister Netanyahu was facing corruption charges in Israel for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust in three cases filed in 2019.
Mr. Netanyahu might still receive a sentence of up to 10 years in jail and massive financial fines. Yet, the year-long nightmare that Hamas unleashed on IDF military personnel and Israeli citizens – especially its women and children, is threatening to engulf all the Middle East.
We are exactly one week shy of the first anniversary of the Oct. 7th terrorist attack by Hamas. A dispute over ancestral land and traditional religious beliefs that has raged for over a century is at the foundation of the current military conflicts in the region.
All this week, Public Health Policy Reviews will endeavor to highlight once again the humanitarian and public health conditions in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen.
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The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) showed international journalists raw footage of the Oct. 7th, 2023, Hamas terror attack. The video screengrab is courtesy of NBC News.
Our focus for this week’s series will be how Zionists in the United States of America and Israel who identify as political leftists view the rapidly diminishing hopes that a ceasefire will someday lead to safety for Israel and peace in the Middle East.
By extension, the frustrating lack of a ceasefire means the Israeli hostage families, Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and the West Bank - and Lebanese residents will continue to suffer. Hamas is the Sunni Islamist terrorist organization that has governed the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip since 2007. The Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, launched a surprise attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians last year. They massacred 1,139 people – 815 of which were civilians.
During the Oct. 7th attack, Hamas deliberately targeted civilians with random attacks at the Re’im music festival, the Psyduck festival, the Kfar Aza kibbutz, the Be’eri kibbutz, and the Nir Oz kibbutz. Video footage and eyewitness testimonies have since revealed that Hamas militants deliberately killed children and systematically committed gang rapes of girls and women during the terrorist attack.
The Al-Qassam Brigades also kidnapped 251 hostages.
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Supernova Music Festival survivor Vlada Patapov flees from Hamas attackers in a video screenshot that went viral on international social media platforms.
Human Rights Watch categorizes the mass killing of civilians, organized gang rapes, and the taking of hostages by Hamas on Oct. 7th as war crimes under international humanitarian law.
However, since the unprecedented and remorselessly sadistic terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas one year ago – the IDF has conducted an exponentially more deadly military campaign against the civilian Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF claim that the current military offensive in Gaza - which began on Oct. 27th, 2023, aims to “root out” Hamas terrorists from Gaza’s government, civilian infrastructure, and social life. Yet, current unofficial estimates put the civilian death toll in Gaza at over 41,000 Palestinian civilians.
International human rights organizations such as UN Human Rights, UN Women, Save the Children International, and Human Rights Watch estimate that up to seventy percent of the civilians killed in Gaza have been women and children.
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Lebanon and Hezbollah.
A graphic illustration of Hezbollah propaganda images.
Multiple instances of forced mass migration of Palestinian children, women, and non-combatant men by the IDF’s indiscriminate bombing raids and sniper attacks on civilians since October 2023 have created a humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
International fears of full-blown war engulfing all of the Middle East materialized into a nightmarish reality when Israel began a mass bombardment of Lebanon with air strikes on Monday, Sept. 23rd, 2024. Hezbollah, the Shia Islamist terrorist organization that governs Lebanon, has attacked the northern regions of Israel with artillery and rocket fire since Oct. 8th, 2023, in support of the Hamas October 7th attack.
At the beginning of the bombing attacks last week, the IDF reported the targeting of over 1,300 locations, with a focus on sites where they claimed Hezbollah was storing military weapons and equipment. Until now, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the IDF have refrained from a mass counterattack on Lebanon and Hezbollah out of respect for American and NATO attempts to prevent a wider regional war.
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Iran and exploding electronic devices.
A video screengrab of a YouTube video explaining how Israel orchestrated and conducted the September 2024 pager explosive attacks in Lebanon. The video screengrab is courtesy of YouTube.
According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, more than 1,030 people have died in Israeli airstrikes since Sept. 23rd.
Eighty-seven children and 156 women are among the dead. Iran funds and supports Hezbollah and has also traded long-range bombing attacks with Israel since Oct. 7th, 2023. A covert operation by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence force, assassinated Ismail Haniyeh – the political leader of Hamas – in Iran on Jul. 31st, 2024. Iran provided Mr. Haniyeh sanctuary after Oct. 7th, 2023.
The Mossad also exploded thousands of communication devices across Lebanon on September 17th and 18th – before Israel’s mass bombings on the country. Israeli intelligence operatives secretly placed explosives in pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah and, unfortunately, some Lebanese civilians in September.
Multiple numbers of those injured by the booby-trapped electronic devices were civilians unaffiliated with Hezbollah. The simultaneous mass explosions of electronic devices across Lebanon and Syria killed at least sixty-four people and wounded more than 2,931 people. Four of the dead were children.
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A memorial display for former Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 28th, 2024. The video screengrab is courtesy of CNN.
Israel detonated the electronic devices during the third week of September when intelligence sources revealed Hezbollah operatives might learn of the operation.
In addition, Iran has promised to avenge the death of Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah after an Israeli air strike on Beirut on Saturday, Sept. 28th. The IDF has severely degraded the senior leadership of Hezbollah over the last two weeks, killing at least nineteen officials – including Nasrallah.
Naveed Ahmed, an independent security analyst and expert on Hezbollah, said, “Hezbollah is facing a reality much worse than any worst-case scenario they might have ‘war-gamed.’ The chain of command is obliterated.” Israel also began bombing Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on Sunday in response to missile fire by the Iran-aligned militants, creating what is now a four-front war waged by the IDF in the Middle East.
The IDF bombings in Yemen killed at least four people and wounded twenty-nine, according to a statement by the Yemeni Health Ministry.
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A photo image of Yemeni Houthi rebels. The photo image is courtesy of Anadolu Ajansı.
The Houthi rebels from Yemen have attacked the merchant ships of Israel, the US, and their international allies in the Red Seas since November 2023 because of the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Israeli warplanes struck Houthi military targets after a Yemeni drone hit the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and killed one man in July. After the July attack, the IDF released a statement saying, “Over the past year, the Houthis have been operating under the direction and funding of Iran, and in cooperation with Iraqi militias in order to attack the State of Israel, undermine regional stability, and disrupt global freedom of navigation.”
No matter from which side of the conflict between Israeli Zionists, the Palestinians, and Islamic radicals you advocate for – the humanitarian situation in the Middle East is bleak. Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF are intent on eliminating terrorist resistance and destroying the civilian infrastructure of multiple Middle Eastern countries – no matter the cost to the remaining Israeli hostages or civilian lives.
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Young people gathered with Israeli flags at Jaffa Street in the center of Jerusalem in 2007 to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. The photo is courtesy of iStock.
Moreover, even amongst political left-wing and progressive Zionist groups in the US and Israel – there is an implicit desire and acceptance for removing the Palestinians and other non-Jewish population groups from Gaza and the West Bank.
Upon messaging with a member of a pro-Zionist organization that considers itself progressive, I learned that this person believes Zionism is not a colonialist movement that originated in Europe. The individual prefers to remain anonymous for now.
“It is a scientifically proven fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel,” wrote the group member. “We know this to be true, such as [because of] DNA testing and archaeologists discovering Hebrew artifacts from thousands of years ago,” the participant continued.
“Jews were forced out of Judea (now known as Israel) by Roman and Arab colonizers,” the group member wrote. The opinion of this individual is interesting because all the other pro-Zionist organizations and information that we researched and read for this series categorize Zionism as a pro-colonialist movement that originated in Central and Eastern Europe.
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The image is an engraving by Jewish artist Ephraim Moshe Lilien (1874–1925). Lilien produced the engraving for the 5th Zionist Congress, which took place in Basel, Switzerland, in 1901. The Hebrew inscription at the bottom is the prayer, “May our eyes behold your return in mercy to Zion.” The image is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Still and all, the person from the pro-Zionist group we corresponded with via email offers an alternative anthropological history and philosophy of the origins of Zionism.
“To claim that Indigenous people (Jews) are colonizers of their own Indigenous land (Judea/Israel) is akin to arguing that Native Americans are colonizers of America— it is an insulting claim, but moreover, it is a claim that makes no sense.” The individual from this pro-Zionist group stopped well short of explicitly communicating a preference that Palestinians vacate Gaza and the West Bank.
We here at Public Health Policy Reviews are not anthropologists, sociologists, or professional historians. But we will submit that the person we messaged has a point, given that natural scientists and academic historians trace the origins of the Jewish people back to this region of the Middle East.
However, biological, anthropological, ethnographic, linguistic, and cultural facts do not answer the question of what should happen to the Palestinians. Indeed, the Palestinians also claim cultural roots in the region since at least the seventh century AD.
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Supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad participated at a 2023 public rally in the southern Gaza Strip to celebrate a deadly shooting attack in Tel Aviv, Israel. The photo is courtesy of Attia Muhammed and FLASH90.
Nevertheless, it is pro-Zionist groups who wish to see an end to the continuous cycle of violence and hate with the Palestinians that will ultimately decide what will happen in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran.
All of the Arabian Sunni-Muslim states in the Middle East have abandoned the Palestinian cause. Consequently, Hamas – an organization of Sunni origin, is reliant on Shia states like Iran and Lebanon for solidarity and military support.
Over the next four days, we will investigate and offer our amateur opinions on how pro-Israeli security advocates who also want the killing to stop can look to international diplomatic, legal, and humanitarian solutions to Israel’s escalating military actions against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels, and Iran.
We will post “The Roots of Zionism” on Tuesday, and Wednesday’s essay will be on “International Law, the United Nations, and the Establishment of Israel.”
“The Palestinian Question” will be Thursday’s Substack post. We will end the week on Friday with a review and our Conclusions.
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