The contemporary violence in Sudan has taken the lives of about 9,000 people, mostly civilians.  There are no mass protests about this in London, Paris or New York.  The contemporary violence in Israel and Gaza since Oct.7 has taken a comparable number of lives.  There are widespread protests around the world for and against the two sides and especially against the civilian death toll (about 1,200 in Israel and over 10,000 and counting in Gaza). The Israeli-Palestinian morass can stir passions as few other conflicts anywhere.  Israel is about the size of New Jersey.  Its population (including Israeli Arabs) is about that of New York City.

One view helps explain things. It is familiar in broad outline to many Americans.  This view sees Israel as a unique and noble effort to provide a safe haven to Jews around the word from persistent antisemitism.  It arguably deserves support as a national home to Jews, much needed in the face of vicious attacks over the years culminating in the German Holocaust of the 1940s. But other European states all have antisemitism woven into their histories — as per Russia, France, Poland — as do Britain and the United States and still others in the West.  After the Holocaust, about a million Jews found themselves trapped in camps in and around Berlin. But the United States and other victorious nations did not want to resettle them at home. British-controlled Palestine was one of the few locations open to Holocaust survivors — or sometimes open. Even after the Holocaust there was widespread bias against Jews.

A second view competes with the first and is less appreciated in the United States. British-controlled Palestine after 1919, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after 400 years of rule, was not empty. Zionists might adopt the slogan of a national home for the Jewish people who lacked a land of their own. But the British mandate of Palestine under the League of Nations was full of people, mostly Arabs whether Christian or Muslim. After Britain created Trans-Jordan in 1921, the remaining Western Palestine — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — was predominantly Arab. Even after waves of immigration into British Western Palestine by European Jews fleeing fascism in the 1930s, Jews in Palestine never numbered more than about one-third of the population.

Whereas the first view sees Israel as a needed homeland for a persecuted people, the second view sees the creation of Israel as settler colonialism in which outsiders push the indigenous people off the land they have inhabited for generations. The first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, was born in Poland. Later prime ministers also came from abroad, for example, Golda Meier from the United States and Menachim Begin from Belarus. So, it is argued, the only difference between the creation of Israel and the creation of the United States and Australia, inter alia, was elapse of time. It was all settler colonialism. But what was accepted in the past, namely an assumed superiority of whites from the North Atlantic area, was arguably not so acceptable in 1948, the year the state of Israel was declared. Syrian independence was recognized in 1946, Iraqi independence in 1932.

The arguments pile up in support of the two views. The Zionists claimed to be recreating the Jewish kingdoms that had existed in Judea and Samaria in the past, land given to them by God. This argument has little traction with those who do not believe in the Hebrew God or the Jews as His chosen people. And in any event, there were multiple polities in the eastern Mediterranean over the centuries. They came and went with regularity, as did the empires that suppressed or incorporated them — Roman, Persian, Ottoman. Appeals to the distant past are a recipe for chaos. Ukraine wants to rename Russia as Muscovy. Russia says Ukraine is part of greater Russia. African states decided not to challenge borders drawn by colonial powers.

It is said that Israel as the Jewish homeland was endorsed by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947. But both these documents were nonbinding, issued in the first case by a Britain that was trying to entice the United States to enter World War I on its side by appealing to American Jews, and in the second case voted by a U.N. General Assembly of 57 members that was Western dominated and subject to heavy lobbying by the Truman administration. In neither case were the wishes of the majority Arab residents of Palestine respected.

It is also said that the Zionists were in the last analysis just better at hardball politics than the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters, who should have accepted the compromise of two states offered in the U.N. Partition Resolution. The Palestinians, or more accurately some Palestinians, continued to resist — and continued to lose, as in the 1967 Six Day War. But this interpretation does not alter what even some Israeli historians have documented — namely that in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-1949 there were Zionist massacres of Arab civilians to spread terror, and Zionist-forced ethnic cleansing of certain Arab areas where the inhabitants were told to leave or be killed. About 750,000 Palestinians left or were forced out. If an armed and brutal thief enters your house, so it is morally argued, normally people do not offer half of what is there. But that does not really speak to painful compromise in the face of superior power.

Hamas, based in Gaza, sees itself as continuing the resistance to the Nakba or Great Disaster for the Palestinians of 1948-1949. It justifies its brutal tactics as necessary, mimicking the Stern Gang and the Irgun and the other extremist organizations of the Zionist movement. After all, if the Palestinians play nice, they are dominated and forgotten.  This is why Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and others, started hijacking airliners and used other forms of violence against civilians after the 1967 war. They thought it was the only way to put the question of Palestine back on the agenda for political discussion. But terror tactics, in addition to being illegal and morally repugnant to many, particularly against the powerful Israeli state and its military machine, the strongest in the region, has thus far produced mostly misery for the Palestinians — including for the more than 2 million trapped in the open air prison of Gaza where the unemployment rate in approximately 45%.

This editorial was republished from the Nebraska Examiner, an editorially independent newsroom providing a hard-hitting, daily flow of news. It is part of the national nonprofit States Newsroom. Find more at nebraskaexaminer.com.