Tell me please, someone, why is Israel so special – more so than any other piece of God’s earth? The land was there before the Jews were thought of and will still be there long after the last Jew and the last Palestinian has perished. I am fully aware of recent Jewish history and the Holocaust and the Death Camps of horrific memory and why the State of Israel was ‘given’ to the Jews (and ‘taken’ from the Palestinians). That is now past and hopefully the world has learned something from those events. But I wonder if the Israelis have moved one iota from the Old Testament dictum of, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. This does not work – never has, never will. All it does is to build resentment and continue a cycle of injustice, the seeking of revenge and feuding, which helps no one and harms many without solving the original problem. The Israelis should know this. They have been victims of the self same tactics!!
The Israelis know all this very well. Their history is replete with Jewish persecution and they quite rightly complain, loudly, to the world about anti-Zionism. If they persecute others, it is presumably pro-Zionist and therefore ok? So why should they use the same failed tactics, failed against them that is, against others and expect the tactics to work against ‘other’ ie Palestinians, this time around? Attacking Hamas, while at the same time killing innocent Palestinians in the hope that the surviving innocent Palestinians will blame Hamas (their elected Gaza government) for the slaughter and not Israel (whom they consider the occupying forces and also the oppressors) is a very unlikely scenario indeed.
I have said it before and I will say it again, and again – remove the causes and the reason for the formation and popularity of Hamas, Fatah and other hard line Arab organisations no longer exists. Think about the following:-
• The illegal and unjust occupation of Palestinian lands by the Israelis. Against the specific ruling of the United Nations the Israelis have continued with their construction of illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian lands. No compensation is offered to those Palestinians denied access – for 60 years – to what is rightfully their land.
• The Israelis complete clamp on all movement by Palestinians to prevent suicide bombs (so they say and yet the Israelis themselves developed terrorist tactics and used them against the British – see the destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946 when a bomb placed in the basement by Israelis demolished part of the Hotel, killing 91 people -mainly British and injuring a further 46 people. Israelis celebrated the 60th anniversary of this event!)
• The blockade of Gaza. This prevents all shipment of food, water, medical supplies and any form of aid and causes untold misery in Gaza.
• The Israeli practice of using ‘collective’ punishment against ALL those in Gaza for the activities of those few who feel motivated enough to take some action. This is both unfair and unjust - and the Israelis know it!!
My sympathy for the Jewish people and my support for their ‘right’ to live in their Promised Land is rapidly diminishing. Because of their intransigence and obsession with the belief in their ‘rights’ to the land of Israel and as a ‘special’ people the Israelis are building up such a massive problem that we, in the West, will have to bail them out and clean up the mess they will be leaving. All for what? Pray tell me.
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