Israel/Palestine/Gaza

I was chatting to a friend of mine the other week, a journalist who used to work for a Palestinian news agency. He was telling me how many younger people in Palestine would favour a confederal peace settlement. By this he means the creation of a joint Arab/Jewish state where all citizens were afforded the same rights and opportunities. He also said that such a settlement would be impossible. Such is the entrenchment and hatred on the extremes of both sides.

One begins to get a sense of the racist and supremacist ideology of some Zionists by reading, the dire vitriol of, for example Ralph Peters. A quick glance at various Hamas manifestos throughout history and you will find terrifying anti-semitic language and calls for the destruction of Israel. Even a cursory understanding of history lends credibility to the motives of such extremism however.

History is a role-call of tragedy. The persecution of Jews throughout Christian history, a process which found ultimate expression in the atrocities of the holocaust, makes the desires for a Jewish homeland completely understandable. The diaspora had failed spectacularly to protect its people. This also makes sense of the suspicion with which the the non-Jewish world is held by some Israeli factions. Really, despite periods of tolerance, there have been episodes of extreme violence and persecution against the Jews for generations.

History however should not be used as a blank cheque book. Persecution at the hands of Europeans in decades and centuries past does not excuse the Israeli actions of now. This is a very real and very modern persecution that is being inflicted on the Palestinians as their lands are blockaded and occupied and their people, soldiers and civilians alike, are left destitute and murdered. It seems geo-political convenience will not permit the application of International Law. Israel continues to hold illegal nuclear weapons and occupy land while the international community (europe, US, and arab nations) wrings its hands in muted complicity, making only overtures to the notion of a peace process. This reality does not at all justify acts of violence against the larger Israeli populace, but it explains it.

Most vile of all has been the Israeli government using attacks against their population as an excuse to press home their ideological and geographical advantage in the region over the last week. The silence from the international community, in part down to leaders unwilling to interrupt their Christmas break I imagine, has been a disgrace. A new administration is on the way in over in Washington, and they are unlikely to be as pliable as the Bush hawks. In light of this the Israeli government has presumably moved to decapitate the Hamas leadership and attain as many bargaining chips as possible when dealing with new Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama.

Hamas are a beast from the sludge and desperation under the colonial boot. Seen from the Palestinian side that beast is most like a Phoneix. This Phoneix, as it appears to some, offers hope, and that is the currency all political organisations wish to posses. It is hope that wins elections, and why Hamas are a democratically elected party of government.

This current Israeli incursion deserves to be condemned from every humane and educated quarter as it moves, without regard for civilian life, to cement its supremacy in Gaza.