Daily archives: December 27, 2008


The Continuing Horror of Palestine

The call by the US Presidential spokesman for Hamas to stop its rocket attacks on Israel, as Israel pours over 100 tonnes of high explosive into that cooped-up territory, illustrates perfectly the “Big lie” school of propaganda about Palestine to which the people of the United States have been subjected for the past sixty years.

Of course Hamas should stop the rocket attacks. But the Israeli response is wholly disproportionate. Only today did Hamas kill their first Israeli in the last twelve months. So far today Israel has killed 212 Palestinians, and counting.

I regard Hamas as an unpleasant aberration, but just the kind of aberration you will get when you steal the land of an entire population, and ethnically cleanse them into a ghetto so tight, poor and beleagured it is simpy a prison. What Israel has done to the Palestinians for decades, with strong US support, is as unconscionable as the crimes of Hitler and Stalin. It may not reach those tyrant’s full scale, but there comes a level of evil where further scale is irrelevant. After what has been done, and is being done, to the Palestinians, did people seriously expect them to turn round and vote for Liberals?

The Israeli state is an appalling racist aberration. Israel’s creation was, exactly like the growth of Hamas, an understandable but deeply regrettable phenomenon arising from a terrible evil done to a people, hijacked by a rampant religious extremism and its pre-existing plans. For cultural reasons, and in strong contrast to the religous extremism of Hamas, the religious extremism of Zionism found strong support in the West.

Zionism is complete bullshit. I have just as much right to claim the Celtic lake sites in Switzerland that were holy to my vague and supposed ancestors.

It is high time that thinking Europeans had the courage of their convictions and completely rejected the notion of the racist and mystic Israeli state. There can and should be no two state solution. What is needed is a single state, blind to ethnicity or religion, on the lands of Israel/Palestine. That is the only path that has any hope of leading to peace.

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