All over, everywhere, pro-Palestinian demos, like in the centre of London. And in Sydney (*). And in the New York. Hard to find any pro-Israel demos. It’s both sobering and sad to see how widespread is the worship of Hamas, the celebration of murder, of rape, of kidnapping, of infanticide. Wild, heady, excited celebration.
(*) ADDED: the Sydney pro-Hamas demo.at the Opera House where they chanted “Gas the Jews” has gone global. Saw here in CNN and ABC. Pointing out that Sydney Jews had been told to stay at home. And the only man waving an Israeli flag was arrested. All, international. I mention this because Australians are so often so worried about what the rest of the world thinks of it. “Never again”. But now, on the steps of Australia’s icon.
The celebrations are so skewed to pro-Palestinian, that when I search “pro-Israel rallies”, the output is all pro-palestinian videos. Worse, there’s one Short: “Orthodox Jews show solidarity with Palestinians”. Honestly. With “allies” like these....).
It seems that the lighting up of public buildings with the Jewish flag lasted all of five minutes.
Someone has framed the battle like this: One Side believes the Other Side has stolen its stuff. And it wants it back. When the One Side all believe that, there’s nothing that can possibly get better, if the Other Side is not going to give the stuff back to the One Side.
The “stuff” of course, is land. And that goes back to 1938 and the Peel Commission. Then the creation of the Jewish State by a resolution of the United Nations in 1947. And in 1948, and 1967 and 1990 and 2000 and 2002. All times that Israel offered land back but was rebuffed. Lubra Lips Yasser Arafat admitted once, after the Camp David accords, that if he’d agreed to the offer, which was for everything the Palestinians had asked for, he would have been assassinated. Because the dirty secret (then, now open) was that they didn’t want a settlement. Because then they’d have to live in peace with Israel.
Despite which Israel made a unilateral move to give some “stuff’ back. In 2005 Israel its army drove jews out of the Gaza strip and handed it over to the Palestinians. It was explicitly a test at a the time; if it went well, then more “land for peace”, would lead to the creation of the Palestinian state, the second state in the region, the Two State Solution. None of that was to be. And the fault lies squarely on the side of Hamas. So say I.
And hence “The Death of the Two State Solution”.
I don’t want to get back into the whole “who did what when?” issue around the land for Palestine and Israel. And the 1947 war and all that. Save to make one point: several hundred thousand Palestinians were forced off their land. Both by Israel and by the Arab states telling them to “get out of the way” because they were going to annihilate the new Israel. That’s a well-known and well-studied story.
What’s not so well known is that about one million Jews were driven out of their homes at the same time, from their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries. And they continued to be driven out in the decades since. So the now there are virtually no Jews in the Arab world, most now in Israel.
What’s my point?
This: Shit happens. How you handle that defines how you get on in life.
Shit happened to the Jews. Really bad shit. But everywhere they’ve escaped to, they’ve made a life.
Shit happened to the Palestinians in 1947. The couldn’t escape to any of the Arab states surrounding, because they weren't welcomed (and still aren’t to this day, despite being Arab Muslims). And so they made no life there. And they descended into victimhood; amply encouraged by the likes of UNRWA (a deeply corrupt organisation), the only refugee group in the world that has been tended to — nurtured— for over 70 years.
When they were handed Gaza back in 2005, they had a choice. They could have continued working the infrastructure left by Israelis, like the greenhouses growing produce for the world. Or they could destroy the infrastructure and work on ways to kill Jews. Hamas chose the latter. That was a choice. Gaza could have been a flourishing strip. The first bit of a Palestinian state. Israel would have helped them to do this. But no. They chose the kill option. Kill your neighbour. Tell your neighbour you hate them and consider them sub-buena. Then become a failed state.
Lash out at the Jews.
Become a Gazan Gangster.
ADDED: Jews in Sydney not safe to walk the streets.
