exceptions

Wow. Your post is replete with historical revisionism and blood libels. Let’s break it down: 1. Israel’s 2005 Evacuation from Gaza: Approximately 8,000–8,500 Israeli Jewish residents of Gaza were forced to evacuate their homes, communities, and places of worship. It was not simply security forces who evacuated. The Jewish residents of Gaza who had been there for generations had to leave their homes and exhume and take their dead. The disengagement plan explicitly stated that Israel aspired to a two-state solution and a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people. On January 25, 2006, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank voted in legislative elections, and Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. 2. 1948 War of Independence: Israel publicly and in writing invited its Arab inhabitants to remain and participate in the new state as equal citizens. Israel's Declaration of Independence explicitly appealed to the Arab inhabitants of Israel: "We appeal ... to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions." The Arabs who stayed behind were in fact made full Israeli citizens with equal rights under law. The 700,000 who chose to leave did so at the behest of the five Arab nations who attacked Israel, so that they could slaughter the Jews unencumbered. Approximately 150,000–160,000 Palestinian Arabs remained in Israel and after the 1948 War of Independence and became Israeli citizens. Today, their descendants constitute a substantial part (20 percent) of Israel's population (2.1 million Israeli Arabs).  3. Forced Expulsion of Jews from MENA: What you conveniently omit is that between 1948 and the early 1970s, approximately 850,000–900,000 Jews were forced out of Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). They were not people who had recently immigrated to the region. Many belonged to Jewish communities that had existed for thousands of years, long before the establishment of modern Israel and, in many cases, before the arrival of Islam in those same territories. Within two decades, an ancient Jewish civilization all but disappeared from the Arab world. There are literally more Arab doctors in Israel today than there are Jews in the MENA. Babylon and Mesopotamia: Jews lived there for more than 2,500 years. This was one of the world's oldest Jewish communities. Yemen: The Jewish community had roots extending back centuries. Egypt: Jewish communities existed there in antiquity, including during the biblical and pre-Islamic periods. Morocco: Jews lived there for centuries, developing distinctive religious, cultural and linguistic traditions. Libya: This was an historic Jewish community extending back to antiquity. Syria: Damascus and Aleppo’s Jewish communities dated back centuries. Tunisia and Algeria: Both had long-established Jewish populations with distinctive Sephardic and North African traditions. There are less than 10,000 Jews across all these countries today. In 1948, there was almost a million. 4. The Hamas-Israel War: You (undoubtedly wittingly) failed to mention how the war began, as if it never happened, as if entire families weren’t slaughtered. Oct 7, 2023 was a genocide during which Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Druze (men, women, children, the disabled, the elderly, civilians, soldiers, family dogs) were burned alive, gang raped, shot down, blown up, mutilated, kidnapped, starved, tortured, and executed point blank. Israel was legally and morally duty bound to defend her citizens and to try and rescue the hostages. Their lives may not have mattered to you, but they did to us. Not one Gazan family tried to save the hostages. Not 1. And yet my heart still breaks for all the innocents on both sides who have been killed in this war.