Israel-Gaza VI: Finding Criteria For A Just Resolution

Thıs ıs a long post in which I try to link different ideas together.  Since I'm not posting every day nowadays, you can come back and finish this one over a few days. :) 


[OVERVIEW:  This post looks at the question:  What criteria would you use to determine the legitimacy of the Palestinian and Israel claims to Palestine?  Then it uses information from the previous five posts, as well as additional information, on Israel and Gaza to show why this is not the black and white issue both sides claim it to be.  Sounds pretty simple, but I started this back in early March and I've been trying to tease out the key points since.  Not sure it will get any better so posting it now. Have fun.]

Map from https://www.quora.com/What-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-mean

Parts I-IV of this series of posts briefly discussed a number of subjects to show how complicated the Israeli-Gaza war is and why ıt ıs hard to speak intelligently and knowledgeably about the topic. 

 Part V outlined a few observations I came to while researching and writing the first four posts.  

In this post, I want to give an example of how those complexities make simple answers to any of this an easy, perhaps, but uninformed response. I'll refer to a number of the issues I identified in the earlier posts. I get that people grasp for some easy answer, especially in response to the unconscionable killing of Palestinians in Gaza.  But as comforting as that might be, slogans based on ignorance lead to even more confusion and anger.   

Let's look at the question of who has the best claim to the land between the river and the sea.  This refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  On the map you can see that would cover all of modern day Israel as well as the Palestinian areas - Gaza and the West Bank.  

I include the map here because it's been said that many people shouting the motto "From the river to the sea" supposedly didn't know which river and which sea were meant.  [But are these claims true or just made to discredit demonstrators?  The link talks about hiring a polling company to ask students - but it didn't say that they were specifically students demonstrating and shouting the phrase.  There is so much spin going on over this topic we need to take everything with a grain of salt. We need to ask people what they mean before we attack them.]

While the Hamas declaration of 1988 (highlighted in Part IV) clearly says Hamas wants an Islamic state controlling all of historic Palestine (the British Mandate), this NPR article says many students chanting the slogan mean they want peace and freedom for all people living between the river and the sea. 

Hamas originally claimed all the land (see the section on the Hamas declaration in Part IV) which would mean the elimination of Israel, on the grounds that Palestinians have lived there for generations.  They claim that Israel is a colonial state taken from the local Palestinians by Europeans and Americans.   Israelis claim that Jews have lived there for thousands of years.  

That's very different from wanting peace and freedom for everyone living from the river to the sea.  

Basically, the current Israeli government led by Netanyahu wants Israel to exist and to have control over the Palestinian areas, because, as I understand it, they do not trust Arabs to peacefully live in their own country adjacent to Israel. 

And Hamas wants an Islamic State to control the whole area.  At least that's what the 1988 declaration says.  Yesterday (April 25, 2024) AP said.

"A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders."

But the AP article goes on to say:

"Over the years, Hamas has sometimes moderated its public position with respect to the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But its political program still officially “rejects any alternative to the full liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” — referring to the area reaching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which includes lands that now make up Israel."

So one of the issues that both sides seem to totally disagree about is who has the right to live in this territory between the river and the sea.  Both groups?  One group? or the other?  How can this disagreement be resolved?  Let's just look at this one question to get a sense of how NOT easy this all is.  

Who has the most legitimate claims to the territory Israel occupies?

I would ask people to step back now and contemplate how one would evaluate those claims?  How should an impartial judge answer that question?  What criteria would such an objective observer use to determine who had the most legitimate claim to that land?  Must it be all or nothing?

Even coming up with criteria is fraught with problems.  Philosopher John Rawls has proposed a way to create rules for a just society - it would have to be done collectively, before anyone knows what role they will be assigned in that society.  Otherwise you give your role favorable conditions.  

",,,everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This "veil" is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves so they cannot tailor principles to their own advantage:

"[N]o one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."

The same problems are true about setting up the criteria for evaluating the claims to this land.  People will favor those criteria that they know will lead to the outcome they prefer.  But in the world we live in, that veil of ignorance is not possible.  

So which criteria to use?

1. Who's been there the longest?  
1. How would you measure this? 
1. Jews have lived in and around Jerusalem and other parts of Israel for about 3000 years.  
2. Christianity is 2000 years old, and 
3. Mohamed didn't found Islam until 610 AD.  
2. Whose traditions are connected to the land?     
1. Jerusalem holds major holy sites for all three religions. Plus others like Bahá'ì.
3. What group's culture has no other homeland where the majority of the population share their language, religion, and customs other than in this disputed land?  
4. What group has the most people?
5. Who will make the best use of the land? 
6. Flip a coin?

Below are some thoughts on intricacies of answering the questions above (particularly 1-3)

1.  National borders change constantly over time.  Hong Kong was under British rule from 1898- 1997.  India was a British colony for nearly two hundred years. After India became independent,  Pakistan split from India in 1947.  Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971. Russia colonized parts of Alaska from the 1830s until they sold all of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Though they only had colonized  relatively small portion of Alaska and the indigenous population had no say in any of this. Alaska became a US state in 1959.  Hawaii became an internationally recognized kingdom in 1808 but then was conquered by the US in 1898.  

Today's African nations' boundaries were dictated mostly by European colonial rulers, focused on exploiting natural resources, not which groups of people lived where.  

The Ottoman empire controlled Palestine for 400 years until the British took over and eventually, through the Balfour Declaration created Israel.  After the creation of Israel in 1948, the West Bank was basically controlled by Jordan and Gaza was controlled by Egypt until the 1967 war.  

2. Colonization

The Hamas Charter talks about Israel as a colonial power.  But let's look at that a little more carefully.  Here's a generally common definition much like this one from dictionary.com

"-a country or territory claimed and forcibly taken control of by a foreign power which sends its own people to settle there:

-a group of people who leave their native country to form a settlement in a territory that their own government has claimed and forcibly taken control of:"

European nations set up colonies in the Western Hemisphere, South America, Asia, Australia.  In all cases the colony was controlled by a mother country elsewhere.

Israel is a special case.  There is no mother country.  Instead we have a people scattered around in many other countries - always a small religious minority, often reviled and with fewer rights than other citizens.  And then, of course, there was the Holocaust.  

So Jews had no homeland where their religion and culture was protected and where they weren't a minority.  From Wikipedia:

"According to the Hebrew Bible, the First Temple was built in the 10th century BCE, during the reign of Solomon over the United Kingdom of Israel. It stood until c. 587 BCE, when it was destroyed during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.[1] Almost a century later, the First Temple was replaced by the Second Temple, which was built after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. While the Second Temple stood for a longer period of time than the First Temple, it was likewise destroyed during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE."

My sense is that Hamas knows there is no Jewish mother country (in the US where Jews have their largest population, they make up less than 3% of the total population.)  Hamas seems to be using 'colonial' to imply that Western nations, in some sense, are the 'White" mother nations of Israel.  And Britain was the last European nation to have control over Palestine and agreed to the creation of Israel.  

But if the State of Israel were to be dissolved, there really is no 'home' country for Jews to go to.  Though Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, in their 2005 book New Jews argue that the idea of diaspora may be out of date, that there are vibrant Jewish communities around the world where Jews feel rooted and do not long to return Israel.  They argue for exchanging fear - and Israel as the safe home for Jews - for hope based on all the new ways Jews are redefining themselves.  But this is a tiny minority opinion.

On the other hand, Palestinian Muslims speak Arabic and follow Islam.  There are many Islamic countries in the world, where Arabic is spoken.  Yet their argument that being Palestinian makes them different from other Arab cultures is partially confirmed by the fact that neither Egypt nor Jordan - both close neighbors of Israel - do not want a large influx of Palestinians.  

But the Islamic State that Hamas declares (in their declaration) is mandated for Palestine, would be radically different from the culture that Palestinians have developed in Palestine.  

"The Islamic Resistance Movement [firmly] believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Trust] upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection." 

Such an Islamic state would be more different from current Palestinian culture than if Palestinians moved to most other Arab countries.  Or even non Arab countries. And how does this accommodate the Christian Arabs who live in Palestine?   

3.  Countries where Indigenous Populations regained control have been former colonies

Most former colonies that are now independent countries  are former European colonies.  The  borders imposed by the foreign conquerors often didn't match the local indigenous boundaries and led to countries that have different ethnic groups competing for power.  Israel and Palestine is such an example.  

So while it's accurate to say that England left behind the seeds of conflict in the former Palestine Mandate as it did in other former colonies, the Jews of Israel are different from the colonialists who exploited other European colonies.   While many, if not most, came from Europe, they can trace their historical connection to the land back 3000 years.  And others have come from Arabic countries in North Africa and the Middle East.  These are people who spoke Arabic as well as ancient biblical languages into the 20th Century.

In other cases - say the US and much of South America  - the European settlers simply attempted to Christianize the indigenous populations, move them,  and if that didn't work, annihilate them.  

When the Soviet Union collapsed, former member states, such as the Yugoslavia, broke up, not peacefully,  into smaller states based on ethnicity.  East Germany, more peacefully, joined West Germany.  

Is there a solution both sides would agree to?

To the extent that Hamas and Netanyahu's government are negotiating, probably not.   

The parties' demands are mutually exclusive 

The Israeli government under Netanyahu says elimination of Hamas and Israeli control of Gaza is what they will accept.  [But note, the wording changes regularly, but the basics seem to stay the same.] While Hamas has pulled back, at least on paper, from demanding that they will not be satisfied until the Jewish state no longer exists, they still believe that all of Palestine is rightfully an Islamic State whose laws should be based on the Koran.  

Could other nations get Hamas and and the current Israeli government to come to an agreement?

The world leaders have been trying since the creation of Israel with no lasting success.

What leverage do outside players have on Israel and Palestinians?

Both parties get their weapons from foreign countries, though Israel itself has a formidable arms industry of its own.  

The outside supporters could tell Israel and Hamas that they will cut off all weapons until there is a peace treaty.  Let's look at the key countries involved.

Middle East Eye says that while the US is by far the biggest arms supplier to Israel, they also get weapons from Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada, 

The American Friends Service Committee has put out a list of companies that profit from the Israeli attacks on Gaza.  Go to the link to see the list.  Besides major players like Boeing and Lockheed, there are many others.  

This AP article identifies sources of Palestinian weapons:

“'The majority of their arms are of Russian, Chinese or Iranian origin, but North Korean weapons and those produced in former Warsaw Pact countries are also present in the arsenal,' said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms who is director of the Australian-based Armament Research Services. "

 There are Israeli Jews and Palestinians who would like a two state solution with peace and cooperation between the two

My conclusion is that both parties have legitimate claims to independent states in the land between the river and the sea.  I don't see an easy path to that option.  In fact the only paths I see now are in people's imaginations.  Here are visions of peaceful coexistence, one Israeli, one Palestinian.  : 

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib     https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1782241783843553568

Haggai Matar   https://www.972mag.com/lament-israelis-gaza-october-7/

Whether the voices of fear and anger will continue to dominate or whether some versions along the lines these two call for is possible, only time will tell.  

Finally, are students wrong to protest against the killings in Gaza?  Absolutely not.  Are they protesting perfectly?  Of course not.  Protest organizers often lose control of the protests they've organized.  Let's not get distracted from the issue they are protesting - the slaughter of almost 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.  And administrators and police groups are reacting to them the same way administrators and police groups reacted to the anti-war demonstrations in the US in the 1960s and 70s.  Four students were shot by National Guard troops at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.  From the pictures I'm seeing of current demonstrations, Kent State might well be repeated soon.  Let's hope not.  

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part V

This is Part V on this topic.  Previously:

Preview:  GUERRILLA WARFARE - A brief discussion of guerrilla warfare, then you can watch the classic film on the Algerian war for independence from France:  The Battle Of Algiers.

Part I of this series is here.  It identifies and briefly discusses the following topics I think important to be aware of when confronting the Israeli-Gaza war.

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

Part II is here.  It looks at:

4. GENOCIDE

5. ZIONISM

6. ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

Part III is here.  It covers

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

9.  IGNORANCE

10.  GUERRILLA WARFARE]

11.  FACTORING IN WHAT'S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES

Part IV is here.  It focuses on Hamas.  Particularly the Hamas Declaration of 1988 and the update in 2017

PART V:  Is there any resolution?

The point of these posts was for me to get a better understanding of the context of the Israeli-Gaza war - more depth about the history, the players, the truth.  Posting what I found would share what I was learning with readers.  I wasn't looking for conclusions.   But I think I can at least make some observations, that could be thought of as tentative conclusions as of now.

Observation 1:  Resolution of the Israel-Gaza war will not come from the parties themselves

The parties here means Hamas and the Netanyahu government of Israel.  

Hamas wants to remove Israel from the land it now controls - West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself.  They want to install an Islamic State with the laws coming directly from the Koran.  See previous post that looks at the Hamas Declaration.  

Netanyahu has been truculently anti-terrorist most of his life and sees all Palestinians as either complicit with Hamas, or potential Hamas members.  In addition, prolonging the war delays his removal from office and potentially facing the consequences of his corruption trials.

Observation 2.  Killing every last member of Hamas Won't Solve Israel's problems

Netanyahu has said he has to root out every member of Hamas.  It's his justification for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.  But the deaths and destruction the Israelis have wrought in Gaza is only sowing the seeds of future terrorism.  

The children who are experiencing this war are not going to say, "It's terrible, but we understand Israel needs to destroy Hamas."  There may well be many Palestinians who resent Hamas and who would feel oppressed in a Hamas controlled Palestine.  Some may even blame Hamas for the retaliation against Gaza.  But all will hold generational hatred for the people who have killed so many of their family members and destroyed their communities.  

Netanyahu's war may wipe out all the pre-war members of Hamas, but it ensures that every Palestinian has a lifelong animosity toward Israel and probably Jews as well. The survivors may not join Hamas, but they will support organizations that resist Israel's power over them.  They will never trust Israelis.  'Nakba' is still a rallying cry for Palestinians.  It refers to the forced expulsions of Palestinians in 1948.  The destruction of Gaza will be added to the generational hatred.  

Observation 3:  Netanyahu's war has used up any moral capital Jews may have still had as survivors of the Holocaust.  

Need I say more?  Netanyahu and his far right supporters in Israel have become morally equal to those who exterminated Jews in WW II.   

Observation 4:  Any lasting peace is now only possible post-Netanyahu and post-Hamas

And given Observation 2 there will be no easy path.  Israelis will have to radically change how they feel and think about Palestinians.  That will be very difficult.  Harder yet will be for Palestinians to trust Israelis.  

But there were reports of tens of thousands of Israelis in the streets calling for new elections and a cease fire.  

Mahmoud Abbas has formed a new cabinet in the West Bank.  I don't know the politics of the West Bank well enough, but he's been the leader for 20 years.  Probably new leaders need to take over before there is any meaningful change.  

Observation 5:  There has been conflict between Palestinians and Israelis since even before the State of Israel was created.  People have been trying to make peace for 70 years.  I'm not holding my breath for anything more than a temporary period of relative quiet until the next explosion.  

I have more observations on at least one more issue still being debated by people who range from totally ignorant to understandably biased to intentionally polluting the truth.  Those trying to bring more clarity to the issue are drowned out, attacked even, by those whose passions are amplified over social media, by Russian and Iranian trolls, by true believers of all stripes, and those using the destruction of Gaza as a righteous outlet of their own personal demons.  I agree that the war against Gaza that Israel is waging is horrific and should end, but then what?  

The topic I've begun working on, and which will probably be my next piece in this series, will look at the criteria for how to judge the claims of people to a section of geography in the world.  It's worth looking at, but my observations here suggest it's more an academic exercise than anything that will have any influence on anyone.  

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult - Part IV Hamas

This is Part IV on this topic.  Previously:

Preview:  GUERRILLA WARFARE - A brief discussion of guerrilla warfare, then you can watch the classic film on the Algerian war for independence from France:  The Battle Of Algiers.

Part I of this series is here.  It identifies and briefly discusses the following topics I think important to be aware of when confronting the Israeli-Gaza war.

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

Part II is here.  It looks at:

4. GENOCIDE

5. ZIONISM

6. ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

Part III is here.  It covers

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

9.  IGNORANCE

10.  GUERRILLA WARFARE]

11.  FACTORING IN WHAT'S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES

Part IV, in the end focuses on Hamas, mostly on the 1988 Hamas Charter and the 2017 update.   It has been the most difficult one for me.  I had never read the Hamas Charter of 1988 or the revised charter of 2017.  

And to be clear, I'm just scratching the surface.  My point in these posts is NOT to teach anyone about this subject, but rather to reinforce the idea that few people know the many issues, the complicated histories, the religious nuances, the political machinations to have a strong basis to form anything but the most tentative opinions on the Israel-Gaza war.  Including me.  

But what I've found preparing this post is that Hamas appears to be an extreme Islamic organization not that different from ISIS and the other organizations that want to set up states that adopt laws directly from their interpretation of Islam.  

Doing this research in English is a handicap though. It's relatively easy to find information online about Hamas from Western sources, but finding English reports from Arab or Islamic sources takes a little more work.  Then comparing translations to make sure that what you have is relatively authentic takes longer.  

11.  HAMAS

I've been stuck on this one for several weeks.  I looked up Hamas.  I couldn't find a Hamas website.  I found other sites that posted Hamas' 1988 Charter.  Most are from Western institutions.  Here are two:

Yale University Law Library

Wilson Center 

But I did find one by what ostensibly is an Muslim/Palestinian site:

The Journal of Islamic Studies (I got access to this journal through JSTOR, "a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994" that is not directly open to the public.  I have access through the University of Alaska Anchorage library.  If you don't have a university access, you might also try your local library to get access through them.)

The first 'Topic' in Part I of this series of posts is called  Propaganda, Misinformation, and Disinformation.  It's there to remind readers that there are nations out there trying to  misinform the world, even to obliterate any sense of verifiable truth, to create opportunities to change the world to their advantage.  

So, with that in mind, I wanted to make sure what I was reading was real, that it was not propaganda intended to make Hamas look bad.  I've reviewed the various versions of the key document - The Hamas Charter.  They basically say the same things, though different translations use different wording.  For example, it's called a Covenant in one translation, a Charter in another, and a Manifesto in yet another.

I went to all that trouble because I found the Charter (the Islamic Studies version's word) to be alarming.  It's in the same mold as ISIS documents - an Islamic extremist document that weaves Islamic justifications for everything it says. Its tone is:  "We know the Truth and anyone who differs from us is wrong." [See, for example Article 11.]  It calls for the Israeli government to be destroyed and for an Islamic state of Palestine to take over all the land that is now Israeli, Gaza, and the West Bank.  

So I wanted an Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian version to compare to the Western translations.  As I said, while the translators used different words and phrasing, the basic tone and content is the pretty close in the three I looked at.  

It's the kind of document that gives Right Wing Israelis like Netanyahu easy justification for their need to wipe out Hamas.  Because Hamas' goal is to wipe out Israel.  That doesn't give Netanyahu justification to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians who are not Hamas supporters.  But I suspect that Netanyahu feels Palestinians are all Hamas or Hamas sympathizers.  And, again, the Charter gives ammunition for that sort of interpretation.  It tells us that every Muslim is obligated to join the fight to throw out the Jews - including women and children.  [Note:  the 2017 revision distinguishes between Jews and Zionists.]

"When an enemy occupies some of the Muslim lands,   Jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim. In the struggle against the Jewish occupation of Palestine  the banner of jihad must be raised. (Article 15) (emphasis added)

The Muslim woman has a role in the battle for the liberation which is no less than the role of the man, for she is the factory of men. (Article 17)"

And, presumably, because the Charter seems to justify Netanyahu's stated goal to wipe out Hamas, there's even an Israeli Missions Around the World website which has a page of quotes from the Hamas charter.  

These would appear to be parts of the Charter that Israel would like to share with the world to make their point that Hamas is a terrorist organization whose goal is to wipe out Israel and Israeli Jews and that Hamas will never give up that goal. And thus Israel feels justified in taking extreme action against Hamas.  

Presumably, these are some of the worst things Israel thinks are in the Charter.  But are they accurately portraying the charter?  I'm going to offer you, in the charts below, on the left the Israeli wording and on the right the wording from the Institute of Palestinian Studies.  In some cases I added a little more from the Palestinian translation in [brackets] to give the citation a bit more context.  Again, you can read the whole Charter at the links above to the Yale Library version, The Wilson Center version, and the Islamic Studies Journal. (You'll probably need to get access through a library for the last one.)

I'd note that a revised Charter was publicized in 2017 which I'll address below.  But first let me offer you what Israel says is most offensive along with the same sections as translated by the Institute of Palestinian Studies in the Islamic Studies Journal.  

Israeli Translation

Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation

Goals of the HAMAS: "The Islamic Resistance  Movement is a distinguished Palestinian  movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and  whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the  banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine."  (Article 6)

Differentiation and Independence Article 6: The Islamic Resistance Movement is an  outstanding type of Palestinian movement.  It gives its loyalty to Allah, adopts Islam as a system of life, and works toward raising the  banner of Allah on every inch of Palestine.  [Therefore, in the shadow of Islam, it is  possible for all followers of different religions  to live in peace and with security over their  person, property, and rights. In the absence  of Islam, discord takes form, oppression and destruction are rampant, and wars and battles  take place.]

On the Palestinian side I've added a little more of what they wrote in [brackets] to give more context. 

Israeli Translation	Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation
On the destruction of Israel: "Israel will exist and will continue  to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."  (Preamble)	Israel will be established and will stay  established until Islam nullifies it as  it nullified what was before it. The  Martyred Imam Hasan  al-Banna  (may Allah have mercy upon him)

Israeli Translation	Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation
"Ranks will close, fighters joining other  fighters, and masses everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to the call of duty, loudly proclaiming: 'Hail to Jihad!'. This  cry will reach the heavens and will  go on being resounded until liberation is achieved, the invaders vanquished  and Allah's victory comes about."  (Article 33)	The ranks join the ranks and the Mujahids join Mujahids and other groups which come forth  from everywhere in the Muslim world answering the call of obligation, repeating “come to Jihad” " -a call bursting forth into the heights of the Heavens, reverberating until the liberation is completed and  the invaders are rolled back and the victory of Allah  descends.

Israeli Translation

Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation

The exclusive Moslem nature of the  area: "The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day.  No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it." (Article 11)

The Islamic Resistance Movement [firmly] believes  that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Trust]  upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection.   It is not right to give it up nor any part of it.  (Article 11)   [Neither a single Arab state nor all the Arab states,  neither a King  nor a leader, nor all the kings or leaders, nor any organization -Palestinian or Arab-  have such authority because the land of Palestine is an  Islamic Trust upon Muslim generations until the day of Resurrection. And who has the true spokesmanship for all the Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection?]

Israeli Translation	Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation
The call to jihad: "The day the enemies  usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad  becomes the individual duty of every  Moslem. In the face of the Jews'  usurpation, it is compulsory that the  banner of Jihad be raised." (Article 15)	Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is Obligatory  When an enemy occupies some of  the Muslim  lands, Jihad becomes obligatory for every Muslim.  In the struggle against the Jewish occupation of  Palestine, the banner of Jihad must be raised.

Israeli Translation

Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation

Rejection of a negotiated peace settlement: "[Peace] initiatives, and so-called peaceful  solutions and international conferences are  in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic  Resistance Movement... Those conferences  are no more than a means to appoint the  infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam...  There is no solution for the Palestinian  problem except by Jihad. Initiatives,  proposals and international conferences  are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility." (Article 13)

Initiatives, Peace Solutions and International Conferences The initiatives conflict, what are called "Peaceful  Solutions" and "International Conferences" to solve  the Palestinian problem.As far as the ideology  of the Islamic Resistance Movement is  concerned, giving up any part of Palestine is like giving up part of its religion.There is no  solution to the Palestinian Problem  except by Jihad. The initiatives, options, and  international conferences are a waste of time  and a kind of child's play.  The Palestinian people are nobler than to be  fiddling with their future, rights, and destiny.

Israeli Translation

Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation

Condemnation of the Israel-Egypt  Peace Treaty: "Egypt was, to a great extent, removed  from the circle of struggle [against Zionism]  through the treacherous Camp David  Agreement. The Zionists are trying to  draw other Arab countries into similar  agreements in order to bring them  outside the circle of struggle. ... Leaving the circle of struggle against  Zionism is high treason, and cursed be  he who perpetrates such an act."  (Article 32)

[World Zionism and Imperialist powers try with  audacious maneuvers and well formulated plans  to extract the Arab nations one by one from the  struggle with Zionism, so in the end they can deal  singularly with the Palestinian people.] It already  has removed Egypt faraway from the circle of  struggle with the treason of “Camp David,"  and it is trying to extract other countries by  using similar treaties in order to remove them from  the circle of struggle.”

Again, above, for the IPS translation I've added with [brackets] the previous sentence that the Israeli translation left out.  

I did the same with the quote below.  

Israeli Translation

Institute for Palestinian Studies Translation

Anti-Semitic incitement: The Day of Judgment will not come about  until Moslems fight Jews and kill them.  Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks  and trees, and the rocks and trees will  cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew  hiding behind me, come and kill him."  (Article 7)

[Even though the Islamic Resistance Movement  looks forward to fulfill the promise of Allah no matter  how long it takes because the Prophet of Allah  (saas) says:] The Last Hour would not come until the  Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims  would kill them, and until the Jews would hide  themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone  or a tree would say. Muslim or Servant of Allah  there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him;  but the tree of Gharqad would not say it, for it is  the tree of the Jews (Bukhari and Muslim).3

For more on the tree of Gharqad.

The Israeli site has a few more quotes and then a summary of the Israeli issues with the charter.  You can see that here.

The language of the 1988 Hamas Charter basically calls for an Islamic state - ISIS like - to take control of all the area now occupied by Israel and the Palestinian territories.  It calls for getting rid of all the Jews.  It says attempts at Peace Treaties are useless.  Little, perhaps none, of the Charter is reasonable for Israel to accept as written.  It's essentially a declaration of war.  No country in the world, that has the power to oppose it,  would accept a close neighbor who says similar things about them.  

A revised Covenant was published in 2017. Hamas says that it is merely the consolidation of various changes made by leaders over the years, but which hadn't been codified in a single statement.  

I've read several versions and explanations of the differences between it and the original 1988 Charter.  The Guardian's overview, which came out in 2017, is perhaps the most succinct and direct (though not necessarily the most accurate.)

"Hamas has unveiled a new political programme softening its stance on Israel by accepting the idea of a Palestinian state in territories occupied by Israel in the six-day war of 1967.

The new document states the Islamist movement is not seeking war with the Jewish people – only with Zionism that drives the occupation of Palestine.

The new document also insists that Hamas is a not a revolutionary force that seeks to intervene in other countries, a commitment that is likely to be welcomed by other states such as Egypt."

Here are some other analyses of the changes: (let me warn you - these are not easy reading)

Institute for Palestine Studies' overview of the changes

Rand - "Hamas' Strategic Rebranding"

The Wilson Center 

My main takeaway after reading the Hamas Charter is to sadly shake my head about those who have championed Hamas.  You can only support Hamas if all you know about them is that they are fighting to stop Israeli atrocities.  But if you read their Charter, even with the 2017 modifications, you know this is a radical Islamist extremist group that only recognizes their version of Islamic doctrine.  

The idea that Hamas is fighting to give Palestinian culture its land and culture back seems to me to be terribly wrong.  There never was a strict Islamic state ruled by Islamic law in Palestine.  Not under the British and not under the 400 years of control by the Ottoman Empire. 

There are so many trails to follow to understand this.  For instance, how did Hamas come to power in Gaza?  Here are two links to start your research on that question:

Wikipedia's History of Hamas 

Al Jazeera - History Illustrated, The Story of Hamas And Its Fight For Palestine 

Those two citations are not meant to be exhaustive or even adequate.  They just give a sense of the history that led to Hamas' official formation until now.  Just expanding one's awareness of their ignorance.

Everyone knows about the Hamas attack on October 7 so I don't have to discuss that, except to put it into the context of Topic #10 GUERRILLA warfare and terrorism.  The point is often for the militarily weaker side to commit acts of terror to provoke the more powerful enemy to make horrible counter attacks that will make them look bad in public opinion.  Hamas was wildly successful in this objective.  With help, undoubtedly, from Russian and Iranian misinformation campaigns.  

The Israeli response has been a public relations nightmare.  But my sense is that the far right in Israel simply assumes that an anti-Semitic world will disapprove of anything they do.  That logic lets them do terrible things.  

But I'd remind them that much of the world saw Israelis as heroes after the 1967 war and when they made the Entebbe rescue.  

12.  WHY GETTING JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL SEEMS EASIER THAN NATIVE AMERICANS GETTING EUROPEANS OUT OF THE UNITED STATES?

Topic#12 (it was #13) was at the end of the last post as a heading that I postponed to this post - it made more sense after discussing Hamas.  But as I work on this, I don't think the title clearly expresses the issue I'm wrestling with.  And as I try to flesh it out, it seems it really should be part of Part V.  

It will deal, not so much with options from here, but with the question of how should those options be evaluated.  What criteria should be used?  What factors should be considered?

And to be clear, my ignorance of all of this, while perhaps slightly lower than the ignorance of most people, is still vast.  I'll be raising questions more than supplying answers.  

[It's Saturday March 2, 2024.  I just want to let you know I'm still working on PART IV.]

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part III

Preview:  GUERRILLA WARFARE - A brief discussion of guerrilla warfare, then you can watch the classic film on the Algerian war for independence from France:  The Battle Of Algiers.

Part I of this series is here.  It identifies and briefly discusses the following topics I think important to be aware of when confronting the Israeli-Gaza war.

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

Part II is here.  It looks at:

4. GENOCIDE

5. ZIONISM

6. ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

[Part III was going to include a section on Hamas.  But that has turned out to be lengthier than I first imagined.  The Hamas Charter is pretty explicitly an Islamic call to overthrow the State of Israel.  But in the spirit of topic 1 in Part I - Propaganda, Misinformation, and the Obliteration of Truth, I needed to be sure I was not being misled and then I wanted to present it in a way that showed different translations to assure readers as well.  So I'm going to make that Part IV. And I'll probably add a Part V to organize my thoughts after doing all this research and writing.]  

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

I don't have a lot to say about this, other than to say it is an important factor that has helped empower Netanyahu and the Israeli political right wing.  From a Brookings Institute report:

"The over one million people who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in a wave from the beginning of the 1990s have changed Israel to its core — socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Within the first six years, they formed what became a large secular nationalist political camp that secures right-wing rule to this day."

The immigration of Ultra Orthodox US Jews also plays an important role - especially in the policies of taking Arab land in the West Bank and turning it into Jewish settlements.   While their numbers are tiny compared to the Russian immigrants, their interest in settling in the West Bank exacerbates conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.  

9.  IGNORANCE 

Ignorance by itself is not bad.  We are all ignorant about many things.  Just go in any library and peruse the book titles.  Some topics you know well.  Others not at all.  The important things about ignorance are:

1. You are aware of your ignorance
2. You don't act as though you know what you're talking about on subjects you're ignorant on
3. You recognize that expertise in one area doesn't give you expertise in other areas
4. What we know, what science uncovers, is merely a model of reality.  That model is often incomplete and new discoveries require changes in our models.  So what you learned in the past may be out of date, or it may have been wrong in the first place.

My basic point here is that lack of knowledge, and the lack of awareness of one's ignorance, combines with Topic 1:  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH, to make thinking out the Israeli-Gaza situation even harder than it already is.  The rest is some background to own ignorance.

Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity.  It means that someone hasn't been exposed to certain knowledge, information.  Perhaps one has lived in one location forever and been around people who mostly look and think and behave like them. 

First radio, then television, and then the internet have made it easier to escape such isolation and to learn more about the world and the people in it.  [And I'm not saying that never having been more than 100 miles from your home is necessarily a bad thing either. Being grounded in a geographic location can give someone connections and insights that people without such permanence lack.]

Spending a year as a student in Germany made me see things I could never have seen had I stayed home.  I don't mean so much that I saw Germany and Europe, but more that I saw my life growing up in California from a whole different perspective.  Learning that I could exist reasonably well without using English also rearranged my brain.

When I first arrived to teach English in Thailand so many years ago, I was gaining ability in my Thai language skills, and rapidly learning about my community and Thailand.  It took me six months before I realized:

As much as I was learning, the volume of what I didn't know, grew ten times faster.  My ignorance wasn't growing, just my awareness of my ignorance was growing..   

As a blogger, I'm reminded daily about how much I do not know.  I'm constantly googling to learn more about the background of someone or something I know little or nothing about.  It's a constant fight to resist unconsciously filling in, from my prejudices, what isn't said about something I learn about in the news or online.  I write something and then realize I don't know if it is true or not and have to verify it.  

The internet makes such fact-checking much easier than it ever was before, but I come to this having spent years painfully tracking references in bound volumes that then led me to track down the books and journals that might hold the answer.  I've had to go through articles by people who make conflicting arguments, and then had to look for more evidence that would give one side more likelihood of being accurate than other positions.  

A friend pointed out that he's not so sure the internet makes it easier because there's so much disinformation.  Experience in critical thinking and sleuthing is important on the internet.

That's why Topic 9 - IGNORANCE is closely related to Topic 1 (in Part I) PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH.   And why Propaganda is the very first topic.

Without a substantial foundational web of of knowledge, it's hard to figure out 

• where to store in your world view every new bit of data
• how to evaluate its accuracy
• when and how to shift your own understanding of a particular subject

10.  GUERRILLA WARFARE - I covered this as much as I think I will  in a previous post that invites to you see the movie The Battle of Algiers.  Here's the link to that post, which was like a sneak preview to this series of posts.  

11.  FACTORING IN WHAT'S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES

I've just finished reading Michael Nolan's Ike's Gamble.  It's 258 pages focused on President Eisenhower's policy toward Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser from 1954-1959.  Nolan uses a vast volume of State Department files that only have been recently made public, reviewing the memos sent by different State Department officials as well as other correspondents and notes taken by people then and there.  

I understand the people protesting Israeli killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.  I  understand and share the frustration of US citizens who object to the US supplying weapons to Israel to carry out the attacks.  I get that people want President Biden to pressure Netanyahu to call a cease fire.  I think that is a legitimate request.  But the people who then condemn the Biden administration and say they won't vote for him because of Israel, well those folks I don't get at all.  

There is so much going on behind the scenes that we know nothing about, that we really have no idea of exactly what the Biden administration is doing to try to stop the attacks in Gaza.  The Nolan book makes that point very clear.  It also makes it clear that they may or may not be doing things that will help the situation improve.  

[Sorry, a bit of editorial here:  But for sane US citizens to argue that Israeli policy is a good enough reason to not vote for Biden, when the alternative is Trump, suggests to me incredible shortsightedness.  There is nothing that Trump will do to improve the situation of Palestinians.  Nothing.  He's cozied up to Netanyahu.  He helped to move the Israeli capital to Jerusalem, something Palestinians vigorously opposed.  In fact, it's clear he would do his best to end the US experiment in democracy.]

Here's a  Tweet that makes the same point on a different subject that also reminds us that much goes on behind the scenes that we will only learn about much later on if ever.

The takeaway: Much of DOJ’s investigative work takes place out of the public eye. DOJ speaks through its filings. And just because the public doesn’t see action/movement on a matter, that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. End

— Anthony Coley (@AnthonyColey) December 19, 2023

13.  WHY GETTING JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL SEEMS EASIER THAN NATIVE AMERICANS GETTING EUROPEANS OUT OF THE UNITED STATES

This was originally going to follow the section on Hamas.  Since I'm moving Hamas to the next post, it makes sense to move this one as well.  But if you're curious - be my guest and think out, even write down what you would write on this question and see how similar your ideas are to what I'll write.  That's always a good way to move from a passive to an active reader.  

 

Hope to see you soon with Part IV.  I'll make this link live when it's ready.  

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part II

This is a truly touchy topic all around.  I'm listing here some of the aspects that I feel are critical to understand (no, be aware of is a more realistic goal).  Assume that I am torn in different directions and not pushing an answer one way or the other.  

Part I of these posts gives an intro to these posts and covers:

 1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

PART II

4.  GENOCIDE

The word "genocide" was coined to give a name to what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.   

"Seventy years ago this fall [2014], the word "genocide" made its debut into the English language, on page 79 of the 674-page Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [which you can find here in Reading 3], in a chapter called "Genocide—A New Term and New Conception for Destruction of Nations."

The writer was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer who had fled the persecution of the Holocaust and moved to the United States in 1941. A few months after his arrival, he heard a radio address in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told listeners about the horrors of World War II. . .

[Lemkin] decided to create a name for the crime without a name. He came up with genocide, which he defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he created the word by combining the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). In 1948, nearly three years after the concentration camps of World War II had been closed forever, the newly-formed United Nations (UN) used this new word in the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," a treaty that was intended to prevent any future genocides."

The US Holocaust Museum defines the term in more detail 

"Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories:

• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

There are a number of other serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide. They include crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing."

Netanyahu would argue that his intent is to secure Israel from terrorist attack, not to kill Palestinians.  

Whether what's happening in Gaza is genocide or one of the other crimes listed probably doesn't matter too much, but I'm sure those fighting against Israeli bombing in Gaza are relishing the irony of charging Israelis with genocide.   

Since I wrote these words on genocide, the South African complaints about Israeli genocide to the  International Court of Justice has become available.  In it, starting from page 60, they quote a number of Israeli officials, in different ways saying things that suggest Israeli intent to obliterate Gaza.  Here's just one example from Prime Minister Netanyahu:

"The Israeli Prime Minister also returned to the theme in his ‘Christmas message’, stating: “we’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents . . . This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism”.445 On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.  And we do remember."

"The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “ The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “ Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses."

This is the tenor of the evidence of intent that the South African complaint offers to International Court of Justice.  And as I write this, I always keep in mind the possibility that this whole document is a fake, that the quotes are fabricated.  But I don't think so.  Some of the Prime Minister's remarks are almost identical to the "Civilization versus Savages" theme  I posted above in Section 2 on Netanyahu that appeared in his 1995 book.  

But remember, these are like the prosecutor's opening argument.  It's their side of the story.  The defense hasn't yet had a chance to put things in context or to refute the arguments.  

Because I'm taking forever to write this, I can add the Israeli response.  Ha'aretz, the oldest Israeli newspaper, has this report on the Israeli response to the South African allegations.

[Being mindful of Issue #1 - Propaganda, Misinformation - the first link in the previous sentence is to the Encyclopedia Brittanica  article on Ha'aretz.  The second links to their report.]

5.  ZIONISM

This is another term that gets bandied about.  I'm not going to try to define it here, but you can see a couple of differing definitions/commentaries at the links below.

Wikipedia's treatment

The Foreign Policy Institute's take

The Promise and Failure of Zionism

Many people seem to have trouble distinguishing between Zionists, Jews, and Israelis and use two or all of those terms interchangeably to mean the same thing.  As though all Christians believe the same thing or act the same way.  People who identify (or are labeled) Jews come in many flavors, beliefs, ideologies, lifestyles.  The same is true of Israelis.  

6.  ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

After World War II much of the world was shocked to learn of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis.  (If you don't believe the Holocaust happened, don't comment here.  I'll delete it as soon as I see it.  Rather educate yourself and get past your ignorance.)  Among Jews, the campaign to create a Jewish state in historic Israel was not universally supported.  But after the war, with many displaced Jewish refugees, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, sentiment supported establishing the state of Israel.  The newly formed United Nations approved. 

For the first years, the world heard heartwarming stories of the "Land of Milk and Honey," of the miracle in Israel making the desert bloom  When Israel was attacked in 1967 by surrounding Arab countries, Israel fought back and quickly defeated their enemies and kept the territory they took.  Moshe Dayan was an international hero, easily recognized with his black eye patch.  

But from the beginning the story wasn't so rosy.  Jews forced Arabs to abandon their homes and land.  Many fled to other Arab countries.  Over the years attempts to establish peace were thwarted by Palestinian rejection of the idea of Israel even existing.  Israeli supporters in the West used this rejection to show the Arabs were intransigent.  But it's clear that from the Arab perspective, the creation of Israel was similar to other colonial conquests where the indigenous people were simply removed for the colonists.  Even if the colonists were themselves a displaced people.

In the last 20 years or more, Israel has increasingly been a very oppressive ruler over the occupied territories.  Israel's annexation of West Bank Arab lands to build settlements for Israelis has exacerbated things.  People began talking about an Israeli apartheid. One can easily see similarities between the occupation and the way Black Americans are frequently treated by the police in the US.  

It's clear that many Israeli soldiers treat Palestinians with disdain. There are many places you can read about this, but I would offer Colum McCann's Apeirogon as a good place to start. [I highly recommend  reading Apeirogon]  It's the story of one Palestinian and one Jewish father who have both lost teenage daughters to the violence in Israel.  They are brought together and work with a group that advocates for peace and understanding.  There are very detailed descriptions of the indignities that Palestinians suffer daily.  

I believe that this treatment comes from 

• Israelis always feeling threatened (and Hamas does its best to stir up those fears) and 
• the ethnocentrism evidenced in Netanyahu's belief they are fighting a noble war between civilization and savagery.  [See Part I on Netanyahu]

As I mentioned in the post on The Battle of Algiers, people with little or no power, dominated by another people with lots of power, have few options other than guerrilla warfare.  

I'd also mention that other Arab countries tended to not take Palestinians as refugees into their countries.  One explanation was that by making Israel the collective enemy of Arabs, they could distract the Arab world from intra-Arab conflicts, and they could distract their own citizens from protesting their own authoritarianism.  Another explanation has been they simply didn't think they could handle the influx of so many Arabs with a somewhat different history in their own countries. 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

There are lots of articles about how Palestinian schools teach hate, such as this 2022 Times of Israel headline:

"UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog

Israeli organization says that rather than taking the material out of the 2022 curriculum, the UN Palestinian refugee agency has merely taken it off its public education portal"

It takes a little more digging to find counter arguments such as this one from The Palestine Chronicle by Rima Najjar:

Zionism is an insidious ideology. Its ideologues often gain traction by well-placed and oft repeated constructs – in films and TV series, in posts and comments on social media, and even in academia. So, it is no wonder that people end up having ideas about certain things, like the nature of Israel, the Zionist Jewish state, or the nature of Palestinian Arab culture and identity, or the nature of Jewish culture and identity, as if by osmosis.

One of these “memes” in the air, if you will, is the oft repeated comment by hasbara agents on social media that says Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews. This notion can also be found in numerous attacks on the Palestinian Authority curriculum with the same accusation of “teaching children to hate Jews”, when in fact, the opposite is true, as is often the case with Zionist propaganda (see Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education – Library of Modern Middle East Studies).

My understanding is that 

"'teaching children to hate Jews', when in fact, the opposite is true, as is often the case with Zionist propaganda"  

doesn't mean the Palestinians teach their kids to love Jews, but rather means that Israelis teach their kids to hate Palestinians.  

Michael Kaplan gave this example, in 2014, of Jews teaching their kids to hate Palestinians.  When Israelis Teach Their Kids To Hate. 

Two, more thorough, academic studies of Israeli text books suggest it's more subtle, but just as invidious.  

Here's the abstract of 2012 book by Nurit Elhanan-Peled

"The present book presents a critical multimodal study of one aspect of the Israeli-Zionist narrative as it is reproduced in school books of three disciplines: history, geography and civic studies. It consists of an analysis of the visual and verbal texts that represent the 'others' of Zionist Jews, namely Palestinians – both the citizens of Israel and the non-citizens who have been living under a military regime in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967.The book shows that Israeli textbooks use racist discourse, both visually and verbally to represent Palestinians."

I only could find a few passages at the link to the publisher, but here's one to give you a sense of the book:

"... Texts present Palestine before 1948 as barren land and empty territory, abandoned since biblical times, waiting for Jews to redeem it while expunging Palestinian history and culture transforming 'Palestinian Arab students into "present absentees" as they learn about "the land of Israel"' (Abu-Saad, 2008: 24) without them. These texts are 'designed to "de-educate", or dispossess, Indigenous Palestinian pupils of the knowledge of their own people and history' (Abu-Saad, 2008: 17;Al-Haj, 2015;Mazawi, 2011;Peled-Elhanen, 2012;Raz-Karkotzkin, 2001). Textbooks construct Palestinians as 'backward, unproductive and untrustworthy; or even more negatively as murderers or rioters' while Jews engage 'in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refused to accept or acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel' (Abu-Saad, 2019: 101; Bar-Tal, 2001;Meehan, 1999). ..."

A 2020 Ha'aretz article - eight years later than the Elhanen book -  describes a Tel Aviv University study:

"Ben-Amos set out to explore how Israeli textbooks and pre-college matriculation exams address the occupation. He calls the situation 'interpretive denial.'”

Ben-Amos set out to explore how Israeli textbooks and pre-college matriculation exams address the occupation. He calls the situation “interpretive denial.” . . .

In most textbooks, “the Jewish control and the Palestinians’ inferior status appear as a natural, self-evident situation that one doesn’t have to think about,” he writes in an article to be published in a book on teaching history edited by Eyal Naveh and Nimrod Tal. . . .

Ben-Amos says the textbooks’ ignoring of the occupation or attempts to normalize it stem from self-censorship. In the absence of clear guidelines, nobody wants to be blacklisted and denounced, which was the fate of teachers and publishers who tried to convey a more nuanced message than the one permitted by the Education Ministry. . . .

Elhanen has continued writing articles on the subject of how 'the other' is treated in Israeli schools and textbooks.  You can see a list of books and articles here, some with links to full text.

I did find one more book- Palestinians in Israeli Textbooks (2016) - which seems to  say that it was bad in the past, but things are much better now.  

It's hard to find ways to peace when Palestinian children are regularly taught in schools and in the streets  to hate Jews and when Jewish children are given texts that either omit Palestinians or reinforce the idea that Jewish superiority over Palestinians is the natural order of things. 

Though as one Palestinian responded (paraphrasing), "Palestinian kids don't need to be taught in schools to hate Jews.  They pick that up by living under Israeli occupation."

Part III is still being written.  Here's the link.