The horrible events in Israel have really shone a spotlight on how some on the ‘progressive’ side really think, and what kind of people they are.
Arguments are being waged on Twitter about whether babies were beheaded or not and claims of “propaganda” abound. It kind of misses the point. Children have been targeted and killed by those oh so brave and fearless freedom fighters of Hamas1.
The number of ‘progressive’ ghouls who are cheering this on, or making excuses, or lauding this as “decolonization in action” is awful. These people are disgusting.
Even those who will pay lip-service to the horror do so with clear intent. You can see this in statements which are essentially of the form :
Yes, it was horrible and wrong, but . . .
There is no fucking “but” here.
Even if some of the deaths turn out to be propaganda, then so what? The point is that these sick people defended it, even celebrated it - propaganda or not.
The essence of a lot of the arguments is that Israel “colonized” the land and displaced the rightful owners and have since oppressed non-Jewish people and so Israel is to blame for the terrible response of Hamas.
This got me thinking again about something I haven’t been able to figure out since I first started thinking about politics and the world back when I was an addled adolescent and now, as an even more addled adult, I still have difficulty.
Who “owns” land?
Basically, at some point in the past, a group of humans banded together into a community and created a village or settlement so that they could live on the land and, erm, live.
A bit later on, some twat with a big army came along and said “I want that bit of land for myself”. And the land “ownership” changed.
History seems to revolve around this. Various twats with big armies expanded their empires until twats with even bigger and better armies came along.
This isn’t, perhaps, the most academic of analyses, but I maintain it’s a reasonably accurate “potted history” of the world.
With similarly high levels of academic rigour, let’s see about the history of Palestine2.
God uses early version of mobile phone (Bush 1.0) which, because of a technical malfunction, bursts into flame. Moses is still able to get the message: there’s this bit of land I’ve promised to you.
Getting totally pissed off with being forced to build huge great big pointy things for the Egyptians, the Jews make a run for it. They turn out to be better swimmers than the Egyptians and head for the Promised Land.
The Jews start cravening all over the place, and doing other naughty things, and so God disables their GPS app. They wander about for 40 years, completely lost.
Finally getting the message, the Jews reach the promised land and establish a country.
All sorts of stuff happens - the usual story of land acquisition, battles and expulsions - until the Romans finally kick the Jews out of the place and, dismissively, change the name of the region to Palestine to disassociate it with any connection to the name of Judea.
The Jews wandered about again - spreading all over Europe. But they were blamed for killing the Christian wonder boy and so they were reviled and persecuted everywhere.
A few hundred years after the Romans kicked them out, some dude called Muhammad decided to culturally appropriate the Jewish religion and, to compete with the Christian wonder boy, he had to become something of a wonder boy himself. He wasn’t any old prophet, no Sir, he was the best, the brightest, and, somewhat conveniently, the last of them all.
In a mostly peaceful™ colonization, this new religion of Muhammad swept over the region and lots of others and land ownerships changed again. But the lands were not in thrall to a person, rather they were said to “belong” to a religion; they became Muslim lands. Nice twist on the previous concept of land ownership - and an astute political move on Muhammad’s part.
History rolled on as the religion of peace launched many military campaigns to colonize more of the world. This always resulted in massive and immediate improvements to the lives of the colonized. The men who were left had their equipment chopped off and their wives got to enjoy the bedroom pleasures of their new masters - when they weren’t doing the dishes, of course. It was a veritable Golden Age, I tell ya. Colonization done right.
Meanwhile, this Palestine place - not even significant enough to be a country in its own right gets settled by Arabs and others who mingle with the Jews who never left. Nobody, except the Jews, think of it as a country or as a “homeland” in the usual sense of the word. It’s fairly sparsely populated. It’s important because Holy Stuff™ is said to have happened in and around Jerusalem. Something about temples, tablets, crosses and flying donkeys - all imbued with enormous significance depending on which version of the murderous magic man in the sky you believe in3.
Fast forward to around 1920, the Turkish Ottoman empire had been defeated and the British were the new custodians of the region. Around this time the international community were warming up to the idea that maybe the Jewish people ought to have their own place - a place of safety where they can determine their own fates and be free of the rampant persecution that has followed them ever since they got kicked out of Judea. A good solution seemed to be to return them to the place they got kicked out of - it’s not a country, and has not been one for centuries since the Jews got a dose of Pax Romana and nobody seems to want to claim it, and to be fair to the people already living there we can split the land 80/20 in their favour. This was the solution proposed, and agreed upon, by the League of Nations.
The Jews were chuffed and accepted it. Naturally, it was rejected by the Arabs, who didn’t see it as fair at all. They did the riot/attack thing against the British. The British custodians, who had all been to Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and taken advanced courses in “How to really fuck things up when you have to let go of empire” carried on with their mandate and messing things up even more until, after a brief interlude involving some nasty little Austrian git with a stupid moustache and something of a problem with Jews, they decided after 1945 that the people of the region were just too much to handle and gave the problem over to the newly-formed United Nations, saying “we’ve had enough of these arseholes - you deal with it”.
Deal with it they duly did, and they proposed another two-state solution; this time with the Jews having 55% of the land and the Arabs 45%. But that was OK, because the Arabs had got 100% of the other places like Syria and Jordan. The Arabs didn’t like it and decided to start a war. The British, not having managed to get out fast enough, were caught in the middle and really wished they could go back home to enjoy a decent cup of colonial tea with their cucumber sandwiches.
The 650,000 Jews faced up to the more numerous Arabs and won. Meanwhile 700,000 Arabs got displaced - some because (understandably) they didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire, some because their leaders told them to bugger off, and some because the newly-formed Israeli state kicked them out. It’s this last bit that gets all the attention. With utterly incomprehensible reasoning, the Jews decided they didn’t want a whole bunch of people who hated them, who started a war against them, who wanted to obliterate them, in their back yard. Jeez, those Jews were just nuts.
Over the years, solution after solution was proposed and largely accepted by the Jews. The Arabs? Not so much - and they tended to keep on doing the whole riot/rockets/war thing and losing every time. One notable incident was the Jewish prime minister acceding to the demands by the now-defunct PLO. The PLO leader, thoroughly horrified by this egregious, and inhumane, agreement walked out of the negotiations and carried on the fight.
And this is the potted history - with elements of real truth, although substantial bias and maybe one or two slightly inaccurate parts.
The whole “Israel are colonizers” narrative can be confirmed with this map of the region and we can see just how appalling and effective these colonizers have been
I’m not entirely sure how regions like Somalia get described as “Arabic” here - but the main thrust of this map is correct. Perhaps the UN didn’t do Jews many favours by placing them right in the midst of a bunch of people who just wanted them gone, wiped off the face of the earth.
The painting of Israel as the eternal aggressor here is a rather partial take by the ‘progressives’. Most of the subsequent measures taken by the Israeli’s, sometimes way over the top and appalling, have been defensive in nature. From Israel’s perspective, when you’re surrounded by bullies who basically want to kill you and have repeatedly tried to do so, you can’t afford to be all lovey-dovey; it really is, for them, a question of fighting for their very existence.
The weird thing is that no one, not a single Muslim country, actually wants the Palestinians. They’re in a lot of trouble - let’s face it, Israel have not been entirely kind to them (one could argue about whether that unkindness has been justified or not - and personally I think Israel has been too aggressive and oppressive at times). The problem is that accepting the Palestinians as refugees would only strengthen Israel - and so the Palestinians are a bit fucked - they can just stew and be miserable and have shitty lives because we want to stick it to Israel seems to be the thinking.
The poor Palestinians are used as political pawns by everyone - including their own “side”.
The jocular potted history aside, it’s just one huge big clusterfuck - and all centred around this notion of land “ownership” and the passions and aggressions this evokes.
Part of the problem seems to have been the influx of Jews into the region around the 1920’s looking forward to, once again, having a homeland of their own - an idea that had been cherished by many for centuries. But isn’t immigration a good thing?
Except when Jews do it, apparently.
I’m a bit of a dreamer; I don’t think lines drawn on a map ought to mean anything - at least in principle. But I don’t know how else to “organize” and manage the world without the concept of nation states and land ownership, however brutal and bloody the historical realities of that “ownership” have been.
Imagine all the sarcasm in the universe condensed into a single point, and then multiply it by at least a factor of 10, when reading the words “brave” and “fearless” here.
Those of you with religious sensibilities, look away now
The version of “God” that seems to be ‘approved’ by some religious people includes things like drowning the whole world, sending bears to kill children for taunting a prophet, and the allowable rape of the women captured in conquest. Nice “God” that. So forgive me if I think some people’s conception of God seems to paint Him as a bit of a murderous cunt.
Siding with arab moslems is nothing but a safe way for marxists and related sickos to display their hatred of The Jew. Always was too, even before the palestinians were allied to nazi-Germany or Egypt and Syria and others employed Wehrmacht and SS-veterans to train their military, intelligence services and secret police forces in the 1950s-1970s.
Not to mention hiring whatever was left after Operation: Paperclip and the soviet and british equivalents of same, to make weapons for the arabs to kill more jews with.
I'm no friend to Israel or jews as such myself, due to supremacist racism being at the core of judaism and Israel being one of the most hypocritical states ever to exist - but:
The arab and the moslem is much much worse. The arab and the moslem delights in sadistic cruelty for its own sake. To let them in your door is akin to dropping a rabid ferret in the baby's crib.
Churchill's quip about collaborating with Stalin against Hitler fits the situation very well, in essence if not in scale.
The mentality of 'Progressive' demonization of Israel is beneath contemptible. It is not truly even primarily about a concern for the Palestinian people. The real driver is to signal that your narcissistic little (privileged) wonderful self is on the side of the 'oppressed'. To these people 'oppression' is a shallow abstraction that serves to inflate their personal vanity as one of the good guys. This poisonous vanity has been pouring out of Western academia for decades. I still remember the drug-addled anti-Zionist 'sit-in' at my UK university in 1972.