Why Is There a War in Gaza?

Yesterday, there was a pro-Palestinian rally in Springfield, MA which is where I happen to live. Several hundred people holding signs and chanting slogans marched up to City Hall, listened to a couple of speeches and that was that.

These rallies calling for an end to the IDF attacks on Gaza and support for an independent Arab state on the West Bank have been going on for the last week or so, with some of the rallies in other countries massing thousands of demonstrators but with much of the political agitation in the United States breaking out on various college campuses here and there.

Right now, it is estimated there are some 3.5 million Muslims living in the United States, which is roughly 3.5 million, with New York, New Jersey and Illinois counting 3% of their statewide populations as Muslims, and some other 15 states holding between 1% and 2%, with the remaining 30 or so states counting almost none.

Many of the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, particularly on college campuses, aren’t Muslims but happen to be Jews. This is because there has always been a Jewish opposition both in America and Israel, to the Jewish occupation of the West Bank. But neither the Jews nor the Muslims who are right now protesting the actions of the IDF in Gaza were mounting any degree of public concern about this situation until the pictures of how Gaza City is being…