III. The Bad Karma that Caused the Conflicts Between Israel and Palestine/Iran
For every war and disaster, there is always some bad karma from both sides that eventually leads to the final wars and disasters.
Although Judaism and Islam do not talk about Karma, it is the key factor that
determines the reward and judgment of God. Only when we can address these bad karma can we find the solution to end this war and disaster.
1. The Bad Karma on the Israeli Side
Since the Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel Defenses Forces have launched the counterattack against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. However, Israel as the victim of this terrorist attack received far more criticism than Hamas who initiated this brutal attack on the civilians in Israel. What’s the problem here?
The main reason for most people calling for a ceasefire is the death toll of civilians in Palestine, including women and children. Hamas built their military facilities and underground tunnels inside residential areas as well as public civilian facilities like hospitals, schools and mosques, and used Palestinian civilians as their human shields.
It is Hamas' plan to sacrifice Palestinian people's life to gain international
sympathy. Therefore when Israeli troops counterattacked Hamas military targets, they would cause large civilian casualties which would lead to the international pressure on Israel to cease fire.
In the last seven months since Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, Israel had declared war against Hamas and started the total blockade of the Gaza Strip of any food, water and medicine supplies. That had caused a great humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, as people in Gaza are facing severe food shortages and lack of medicine for patients. A big famine is happening in Gaza as the majority of Gazans are suffering starvation due to the lack of food supplies. The large civilian casualties and big famine for Palestinian people have become bad karma for Israel, which caused more Anti-Israel protests around the world, especially in the universities across the United States of America.
Another bad karma on the Israeli side is the way they treated Palestinians before the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023. Since the victory of the “Six-day War” in 1967, Israel has established its military supremacy in the Middle East. Israelis began to encroach into Palestinian territory through new settlements, which often involved the confiscation of Palestinian land and resources, leading to displacement of Palestinian communities and creating a source of tension and conflict. Because the expansion of these settlements was often protected by the Israeli military, it frequently caused bloodshed and violence against Palestinians. That’s another bad karma for Israel, which led to more international sympathy and support for Palestine against Israel.
Currently, in regarding the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, most nations are sympathetic toward Palestinians and Israel is isolated like an orphan in the international community except the support of the United States. But with the younger generation of Americans gradually turning left against Israel, how long will the American support for Israel last?
In the last eight months, hundreds of
thousands Israeli soldiers fought with Hamas in Gaza in revenge of Hamas brutal
massacre on October 7, 2023. It is understandable after 1200 Israelis were
killed in this unprovoked terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. But if the
revenge caused excessive death of civilians, especially women and children, it
would become bad karma for Israel itself. That's why more and more foreign
militia groups joined the fight against Israel now.
Another bad karma needs to be pointed out is that before October 7, 2023, there was an upsurge in spitting and hitting attacks on Christian clergy and vandalism of Christian sites by some Orthodox Jews in Israel. That’s really bad karma for Israel, which added to the misfortune and tragedy of the October 7 terrorist attack. Currently, Israel gets most support from Christians around the world, but if those Orthodox Jews keep attacking Christians in Israel, it will lose the support of Christians around the world and cause serious consequences for Israel.
Therefore, it is important for Israelis to acknowledge this problem and avoid more bad karma for their own nation. It’s time for Israelis to learn the teaching of Jesus, who is the most influential Jew in human history, on
“love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39) and “love your enemies, and do good to those who hate
you.” (Luke 6:27) That’s the key to avoiding more bad karma for Israel and ending the conflicts and wars in the Middle East.
2. Bad Karma on the Palestinian Side
Ever since the First Middle East War in1947, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes and become refugees in the Middle East. Most countries in the United Nations have sympathy for Palestinian people and support the statehood of Palestine for Palestinians.
In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO) was founded with the goal to establish an Arab State over the entire territory of the former British Mandatory Palestine, advocating the elimination of the State of Israel. The PLO's militant wings openly engaged in acts of violence against Israeli civilians, both within Israel and outside of Israel. That goal of genocide of all Jewish People in Israel and the terrorist attacks against the Israeli civilians became the bad karma for Palestinians. Consequently, the United States designated PLO as a terrorist group in 1987, and PLO failed gained any ground in several decades except causing more conflicts between Israel and Palestine.
In September 1993, under the mediation of the United States and the United Nations, the PLO and the Israeli government signed the peace agreement in Oslo Norway, which is called Oslo I Accord. In the Letters of Mutual Recognition signed by both parties, the Israeli government recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, while the PLO recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist and renounced terrorism as well as other violence, and its desire for the destruction of the Israeli state. An Israeli-Palestinian Economic Cooperation Committee would be established in order to develop the Palestinian region together.
Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat
shake hands on the Oslo I Accord brokered by US President Bill Clinton
Since the signing of the Oslo I Accord in September 1993, the armed conflicts between two nations were replaced by negotiation and diplomacy between the newly established Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. In 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East" following the signing on the Oslo Accords.
Unfortunately, this Oslo Accord only lasted seven years as some extremist groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, opposed it. In July 2000, the supposed final agreement on Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process failed to reach an agreement in the 20000 Camp David Summit in Maryland of the United States.
In the Camp David Summit, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinians initially 73% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip to form a Palestinian state, which would expand to a maximum of 92% of the West Bank in the next 10 to 25 years. These are the territories that Israel took back from Egypt and Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967 and gave to Palestinians to form their own state, but due to his personal ambition and unrealistic expectation, Yasser Arafat rejected that offer and walked away from the negotiation to reach a final agreement.
In the next year, Ehud Barak lost the re-election to Ariel Sharon on his over-compromise to Palestine, as the majority of Israelis thought he compromised too much. Because Yasser Arafat rejected the most
generous offer from Israel, Palestine lost the opportunity to become an independent state for the next twenty more years. That’s another bad karma on the Palestinian side.
In September 2000, after the Israeli hardline prime minister candidate Ariel Sharon made a provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa compound, which is situated atop the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem, Palestinians started to protest and riot against the Israeli occupation. Israeli police and IDF responded with rubble bullets, tear gas and live ammunition to crush down the uprising. And Palestinians began the terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and military posts with suicide bombing and rocket attacks. That’s the bad karma on both sides, which led to about 1,000 deaths of Israelis and over 3,000 deaths of Palestinians from September 2000 to January 2005.
After the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon agreed to take definitive steps to de-escalate the hostilities between the two sides in the Sharm El Sheikh Summit of 2005 in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt. The Palestinian Uprising, also known as the Second Intifada beginning in September 2000, finally came to an end in 2005.
As a goodwill gesture, the Israeli government unilaterally dismantled 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, which compromised 20% of the Gaza territory, and evacuated 8,000 Israeli settlers inside the Gaza Strip. Many of those Jewish families had lived in the Gaza Strip for decades and were forced to leave by Israeli Security Forces. Israel also withdrew its troops from the Gaza Strip and redeployed its military along the border. In that way, Israel basically gave 100% of the Gaza Strip back to Palestine for the full autonomy of Palestinians.
In January 2006, Hamas defeated Fatah and won the election in the Gaza Strip. Shortly after, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in the course of the Battle of Gaza in 2007, driving the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority government out of the Gaza Strip. As Hamas insisted on its genocidal goal of eliminating the state of Israel and refused to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist, Israel and Egypt closed their border crossings with Gaza and imposed full blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas was given the opportunity to govern the Gaza Strip for the next 16 years and had received billions of dollars from
the United Nations and international donations. Instead of using these funds to improve the infrastructures of Gaza and make the life better for the Palestinian people in Gaza, Hamas used it to smuggle weapons to Gaza and built massive network of underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip to launch attacks into Israel, which led to the 5000 rocket attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
During the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis and took 250 Israeli civilians back to Gaza as hostages. Some of the Hamas militants even committed horrible crimes of raping women and killing babies. That’s really a Bad Karma for Palestinian side. No matter what the cause people are fighting for, these barbaric brutal crimes
against women and children will negate the legitimacy of the cause.
Some Palestinians and Palestinian supporters claimed that they could use “any means necessary” to fight against Israel. That is wrong. When people committed horrible crimes, like raping women and killing babies, against another nation, it would cause bad karma for themselves, which would lead to big disasters for their own people. What happened to Gaza after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, proved the consequence of this bad karma.
The biggest bad karma of Hamas is its
genocidal goal of eliminating Israel from the Middle East. That means over 8
million Jewish people in Israel will either be killed or be driven out of the
Middle East, and Israelis will fight to death against their enemies. That will
lead to a huge catastrophe of "Armageddon" in the Middle East. If
Hamas does not renounce its genocidal goal of eliminating Israel in the Middle
East, millions of people will die, including both Palestinians and Israelis, and
possibly other nations in the Middle East. That's the consequence of this bad
karma. Hopefully people can be aware of it and do their best to stop it.
3. Bad Karma for the Iranian Side
Iran and Israel used to have a good relationship in the past twenty five hundred years until the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s. In the 6th century BCE while Jewish people were held as slaves in Babylon after Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the Solomon’s Temple, Persian king Cyrus the Great led his army defeated the Babylonians and liberated Jewish people from the Babylonian captivity.
In 539 BCE, Cyrus issued the Edict of Restoration, which authorized and encouraged the Jewish people to return to the land of Israel and subsequently rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. According to Chapter 45:1 of the Book of Isaiah, Cyrus was anointed by God for this task as a biblical messiah; he is the only non-Jewish figure to be revered in this capacity.
In the first century when Jesus was born, three Magi from the east came to Jerusalem to look for the newborn “king of the Jews”,
“who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.” (Matthew 3:6) According to the historical research, these three Magi were most likely the astrologers from Persia, where priests paid particular attention to the stars and gained an international reputation for astrology in the ancient time.
After Israel was established in 1948, Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel as a sovereign state after Turkey. The relations between the two countries significantly improved during the Pahlavi ruling period. But after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, and its theocratic government does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a state.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, the relative power in the Middle East shifted to Iran and Israel, and their relationship has turned from cold peace to open hostility. Iran began to fund
Islamist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as being involved in terrorist attacks such as the 1992 attack on Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 AMIA bombing. These terrorist attacks on civilians became bad karma for these terrorists as well as bad karma for Iran who sponsored these terrorist attacks.
For the last couple decades, Iran has become the major sponsor for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When Hamas committed horrible crimes against women and children in the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, Iran also shared the bad karma with these terrorists who committed the horrible crimes against humanity. That’s why it drew retaliatory attacks from Israel after the October 7 attack.
On April 1, 2024, Israel bombed an Iranian consulate complex in Damascus, Syria, killing multiple senior Iranian officials. In response, Iran and its proxies seized the Israeli-linked ship MSC Aries and launched strikes inside Israel on
April 13. One week later, Israel carried out retaliatory strikes on April 19,
2024, attacking multiple Iranian and its associated military sites in Iran, Syria and Iraq, including one site near the nuclear facilities in Isfahan in central Iran.
The Israeli strikes were limited, just as warnings to Iran that if Iran continues to sponsor the terrorist attacks on Israel or even directly attack Israel, Israel will destroy the nuclear facilities in Iran, which will be a catastrophic disaster for Iran.
To avoid more bad karma for its own nation, the Iranian government should stop funding the terrorist attacks on Israel but provide more funding and support to help Palestinians rebuild their homes in the war-torn Gaza Strip. That’s actually the right way to help the Palestinian people to have a better life after all these years of suffering.
4. Genocide vs Casualty of War
Recently, many students in the universities across the United States have held protest against Israel’s war with Hamas. They may have the goodwill to stop the war, but they may not understand the difference between genocide and casualty of war.
According to the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
For example, during the Holocaust in World War II, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe between 1941 and 1945. That’s genocide. During the same time in World War II, about 40 to 50 million people died, about half of them were civilians. This is the casualty of war, not genocide.
Since Israel took control of the Gaza Strip after the Six-Day War in 1967, the population of Palestinians in Gaza had grown from 395,000 in 1967 to 1,300,000 in 2005 when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. There was no sign of genocide on Israel side before Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023.
After Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023, Israel began to counterattack on Hamas military operations in the Gaza Strip. Because most of Hamas military operation bases were built in the residential areas, or under the schools, hospitals and some public facilities, the bombardment from Israel did cause about 30,000 casualties, including some women and children. That’s the casualties of the war. Even though we all want to avoid the civilian casualties during the war, these casualties of war cannot be equivalent to genocide.
However, after October 7, 2023, due to the lasting military conflicts and tightened blockade on the Gaza Strip, people in Gaza are facing severe food shortages and the majority of them are suffering from starvation and extreme hunger. In May 2024, the head of the World Food Programme(WFP) stated there was “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza. If Israel does not open up to more humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, there will be more people die in starvation than in the war casualties. That will be similar to the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-1933. That will be bad karma for Israel.
On the other hand, Hamas set its goal to eliminate the state of Israel and kill all of Jews in the Middle East. That goal is the genocide or ethnic cleansing of Jewish people in Israel. During the terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed all the Israelis they could find, including those who were there helping Palestinians, except those they took back to Gaza as hostage. That’s the act of genocide, which is bad karma for Palestinians that led to the total destruction of the Gaza Strip and deaths over 30,000 Palestinians as the casualties of war.
If Hamas does not renounce its genocidal goal of eliminating the state of Israel and killing all Jews in the Middle East, there will be much bigger disasters for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the future. This time, Hamas only launched 5,000 rockets against Israel and killed about 1200 Israelis during the terrorist attack on October 7. Next time, if Hamas could get some nuclear bombs through smuggling from other countries, there would be millions of people die in both Israel and Palestine. That will be a catastrophe for the Middle East as well as for the world.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States of America formed the international coalition to wage the War on Terror against the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and its host Taliban government in Afghanistan. Although the coalition forces used highly targeted missiles to bomb the military facilities and hideouts of al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, it still led to an estimated 176,000–212,000 casualties, including 46,319 civilians, during this war in Afghanistan from October 7, 2001 to August 30, 2021. Once the war started, the casualties of the war would be inevitable. Those terrorists who started the war with terrorist attacks are responsible for all these casualties, including the death of the civilians during the war.
In the recent history of the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War in 2011 caused over 500,000 casualties and the Yemen Civil War in 2015 caused over 377,000 casualties. If Israel wants to carry out genocide against Palestinian people or simply acts like the Syria government or the Yemen government, the death toll in Gaza could be much higher than the current number.
To miscategorize the war in Gaza as genocide will not help ending the war, but
only incite more hatred to escalate the war, which will lead to more death in
the end.
During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, there were also many anti-war protests in universities across the United States of America. These anti-war protesters had goodwill to stop the war after they saw some Vietnamese civilians die during the Vietnam War. What they did not know
was that after the United States troops pulled out of Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communist Party from North Vietnam killed over one million Vietnamese people who
were educated or worked with the United States in South Vietnam and over 3 million Vietnamese fled the country as refugees to the western world. The goodwill of the anti-war movement in the 1960s eventually led to a catastrophic tragedy of a million deaths and three million refugees in Vietnam.
Therefore, we need to find the solution to end the war permanently, not just a temporary cease-fire to defer the war into the future with much bigger casualties. To permanently end the war between Israel and Hamas, including the backer of Hamas, we need to resolve the problem from its root and avoid more bad karma for both nations.
I. The Recent War Between Israel and
Hamas/Iran in the Middle East
II. The Historical Causes of the Conflict between Palestine and Israel
III. The Bad Karma that Caused the Conflicts Between Israel and Palestine/Iran
IV. The Political Solution to
Cease Fire in Gaza and End the War in the Middle East
V. The Spiritual Solutions for Permanent Peace and Reconciliation
