Gaza is the Defining Moral Crisis of Our Time

We have to talk about Gaza. It is the defining moral crisis of modern history. One of the reasons people don't get it is that you cannot understand what is happening in Gaza without understanding the history of Israel and Palestine, because October 7 did not descend from the sky and history did not begin the day Hamas attacked Israel.  Not at all.   When Britain issued the Balfour Declaration which gave Israel a homeland in 1917, approximately 90 percent of the population of Palestine was Palestinian, while roughly 8 to 10 percent was Jewish. The Balfour Declaration itself did not divide Palestine or assign a percentage of the land to a future Jewish state.  Things were okay. Thirty years later, when the United Nations proposed partition, Jews made up roughly one-third of the population and Jewish individuals and institutions owned approximately 7 percent of the land, yet the proposed Jewish state was allocated about 55 to 56 percent of Mandatory Palestine, while the proposed Arab state received approximately 43 to 45 percent, with Jerusalem placed under international administration.