By Col. Bill Connor —— Bio and Archives November 11, 2023
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Since the October 7 Hamas massacre of over 1,400 Israeli civilians (with hundreds taken hostage back to Gaza) the Hamas propaganda arm has moved into high gear.
Despite Hamas being responsible for the current war with Israel and continuing to endanger civilians by hiding amongst them, pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli rallies have been held in various parts of Western Europe and “blue” United States.
Unbelievably, many in these protests are repeating the repugnant Hamas line “from the river to the sea”, which comes from their stated aims of destroying the Jewish people. Even more shocking was a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll which found around half (48 percent) of college-age students support Hamas over Israel. To provide prospective, ARTICLE 6 of the 1988 Hamas covenant calls for the complete annihilation of the Jewish State of Israel and replacement with the “banner of Islam over every inch of Palestine.”
ARTICLE 13 claims: “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 7 exhorts: “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.”
The shocking protests and poll prove universities have brainwashed students with a warped understanding of Israel as “oppressor” and Hamas on par with BLM (which immediately came out for Hamas after Oct 7). The woefully ignorant students and other progressives need a history lesson they aren’t getting in progressive biased Universities.
To keep this concise, I will start with the withdrawal of the British and the end of the British “mandate” over then-Palestine in April 1948. At that time, Palestine included both Jews and Arab Muslims. With the impending end of the Mandate, in 1947 the United Nations provided a partition plan for Palestine providing for Jewish and Arab-Muslim (Palestinian) states. Of note, the partition plan internationalized Jerusalem and gave the Jews much of the uninhabitable land like the Negev desert.
In May 1948 as the last British soldiers left, the Jewish state of Israel was declared in the land provided for by the partition plan. The surrounding Arab nations immediately declared war on Israel and told many Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes so the Jewish state could be crushed. Miraculously, the rag-tag Israel was able defend against the invasions of multiple Arab armies and by the end of hostilities in 1949 was able to gain a more secure position with the lands outside of Gaza and the West Bank and a capitol in West Jerusalem. From 1949 until the 1967 “six-day war” against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Jewish Israelis were denied access by Arabs to their holiest sites including the “Wailing Wall” in the Old City of East Jerusalem. Ancient synagogues there were demolished in the sacred Old City. Jews had been attacked repeatedly by Arabs. In 1967 Israel defeated their Arab neighbors in a lightning preemptive war and gained control of East Jerusalem along with Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights (previously Syrian) and the Sinai Peninsula.
After the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt unsuccessfully fought to regain the Sinai, Egypt and Israel came to a peace agreement in which Israel agreed to give the Sinai back to Egypt. This came with the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979. Of note, the Sinai is over twice the size of Israel and controls access to the critical Jewish port of Eilat. The Jewish state forced its citizens out of Sinai. The Jews depended upon Multinational Forces and Observers (of which I served as an Infantry Officer in the mid-90s) to help keep the peace from within Sinai.
The Jewish state went further and pulled out of major parts of the West Bank to allow for Palestinian control. In 2005, Israel forced out 9000 over its own citizens living in Gaza to give Palestinians full control of the Gaza strip. The “reward” for this action was the election of Hamas by Palestinians to run Gaza in 2006, knowing Hamas was an anti-Jewish Jihadist terror group. Hamas immediately began setting up rockets where Jewish settlers had built extensive greenhouses in northern Gaza and firing at Jewish civilian targets. In 2014, after missiles and terror attacks, Israel had to operate against Hamas but limited its reaction. In 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Southern Lebanon, but was rewarded with Hezbollah attacks from its previous positions within a few years.
The position of moderate (non-Jihadist) Arab nations has been for Israel to withdraw to the lines the occupied before the 1967 Six Day War. Not the destruction of the Jewish state. Hamas was beyond extreme, even among Arabs after the Camp David peace treaty in not recognizing Israel’s right to exists, though Hamas was designated a terrorist group by the United States and other nations decades ago. The chant of “from the river to the sea” was considered beyond extreme to most, as it went against any just understanding of the groups involved.
That Hamas appears in alliance with Western university student progressives should cause alarm bells of concern. We must regain control of Universities and teach true history, including the history of Israel.
Bill Connor, received his Bachelor’s of Arts from The Citadel in 1990. After serving over ten years as an Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army he received his Juris Doctorate from University of South Carolina in 2005.
He is currently an attorney with Hamilton and Associates in Columbia, South Carolina.
In May 2008, he returned from a yearlong combat deployment in Southern Afghanistan. During that time, he served as Joint Operations Officer for the Southern Region of Afghanistan developing and implementing the US advisory effort for Afghan National Security Forces. This effort occurred during the 2007 Taliban spring/summer offensive.
Due to success in that position, he was promoted to take command of the US advisory effort in the volatile province of Helmand. Shortly after arrival in Helmand, he was promoted in rank from Major to Lt. Colonel. In addition to command of US advisory teams, he was the senior American working with the United Kingdom senior staff. Upon return from Afghanistan, he published the book “Articles from War,”a memoir of his experiences and thoughts in Afghanistan.