“Explain It To Me Like I’m Five Years Old…”

Someone posted:

Explain to me like I’m five years old why random Russians aren’t being chased down in the streets of London or Toronto or Melbourne because of what Putin did.

Chinese tourists aren’t being screamed at in cafes because of the CCP.

No one’s smashing Sudanese restaurants or boycotting Yemeni-owned shops.

No one is demanding Iranians sign loyalty oaths to prove they hate their regime.

Even Americans and Brits — with all the wars and interventions in their name — still get to walk around the world unbothered.

But Israelis? And Jews?

Okay, here's how I would explain it to a five year old:

There are good people and bad people in every group of people in the world.

Some groups are ethnic groups, bound together by common ancestry or history.

Some groups are religious or political groups, bound together by a common philosophy.

In all of these groups you will find people willing to do very bad things. They typically say they do these bad things to protect their group but in reality they usually do the bad things to personally benefit from them.

Today there are a large number of people in the Israeli group who are deliberately causing the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, in the hopes of terrorizing their enemy into surrendering.

This tactic almost never works. Both sides tried in in World War Two, with the Germans killing millions of Russians, Poles, and Jewish Germans, the Italians killing Ethiopians, and the Japanese killing millions of Koreans, Chinese, and Filipinos while failing to subdue those nations, and the Allies killing millions of German, Italian, and Japanese civilians.

One might argue it worked against Italy since they overthrew their government in the middle of the war and switched sides to join the Allies, but Germany fell only when its military was nearly obliterated and Japan surrendered only when it became apparent Russia would invade them even if the Japanese managed to repel the planned American invasion.

Since then wars of terror and attrition against civilians have not succeeded. The American portion of the Vietnam War lasted nearly a decade with the U.S. dropping more bombs on North Vietnam than it dropped on Germany in WWII and the Vietnamese won that war.

There are people of Jewish descent who believe their holy book gives that portion of the world to them. Actually, it gives that portion of the world to the descendants of Abraham, which includes the Arab peoples as well as Jewish people.

After the Germans -- or more specifically, the Germans who were Nazis, a sub-group of a larger group -- tried killing all the Jews in Europe, many Jewish people renewed efforts to reclaim a homeland in what was then called Palestine.

There was opposition to this in Palestine, much of it led by bad people of Arab descent who wanted to boost their own fortunes. It should be noted there were many Palestinians at that time who had no problem with Jewish people coming back to Palestine.

America and various European countries promised the Arabs there would be no independent Jewish state unless and until the matter had been negotiated and thoroughly agreed to by all people living in the area.

However, in 1947 the United Nations announced a plan to partition Palestine into two separate regions, one Palestinian, the other Israeli. The way the map was drawn virtually guaranteed it would create future conflict. The following year Israel declared itself an independent nation and the United States immediately recognized them as such.

This led to the first of several wars in which Israel fought against Palestinians and their Arab allies. The Israelis have proved themselves the dominant military force in the area and have won all these wars, frequently taking large swaths of Palestinian and Arab territory in their victories.

Sometimes, as when they captured the Sinai Peninsula during the Six Day War, the Israelis returned the captured territory in exchange for a peace treaty.

Other times, however, they have kept it, frequently forcing out Palestinian civilians who have lived there for generations.

There are, unfortunately, many bad Palestinian and Arab and Muslim and other people who want to reclaim all of Palestine and have committed themselves to acts of war and terror to attempt to force Israel to capitulate.

Conversely, there are many bad Israelis who are willing to terrorize Palestinians in return in hopes of getting them to capitulate and leave Israel alone.

Many of the Israelis who currently are deliberately acting to bring about the suffering and deaths of Palestinian civilians proudly proclaim they are Jewish, and that their holy book lets them do this with impunity.

This unfairly brings criticism and outage against Jews elsewhere in the world who are not involved in these actions, many of whom oppose the deliberate suffering being imposed on the Palestinians.

This is not unique to Israel and the Jewish people. In what is now the United States, entire native tribes were often attacked and annihilated for the actions of individuals or small bands of native warriors, people of African-American descent were brutally oppressed when a handful of small slave rebellions occurred and later when individual African-Americans were accused of crimes, during WWII American citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were put in concentration camps (although the number of Germans and Italians in such camps pale in comparison to the Japanese imprisoned there), and after 9/11 Arabs and Muslims and even Sikhs whom ignorant Americans thought were Arab Muslims were persecuted by individuals and the federal government.

The tactics the bad Israelis are using to inflict suffering on innocent civilians in hopes of forcing their military / political foes to capitulate not only isn't working, it is only creating a generation of new terrorists who will see little reason to negotiate with an enemy that killed their family and friends. However, many of the bad Israelis doing these bad things aren't doing so because they hope to eventually achieve victory, but because keeping the Palestinian people perpetually angry at Israel lets those bad Israelis stay in power.

If there should ever be lasting peace, those bad people -- and their opposite numbers on the Palestinian and Arab sides -- would lose power.

What Hamas did to Israel was a terrible atrocity. Israel absolutely has the right to defend itself and to pursue those responsible and bring them to justice.

But killing tens of thousands of innocent people in the hopes to forcing the surrender of a small handful who have the ability to retreat and regroup to fight another day is counter productive and will only lead to more conflict in the future.

That it also encourages attacks against innocent Jewish people around the world only helps those bad Israelis remain in power.

© Buzz Dixon