Israel - Palestine. My view

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a complex one. It's origins lie in a British government declaration in 1917 to set-up a Jewish state in Palestine

 

 Key words for me in the text are these:

"it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine",  

After the First World War the British controlled Palestine and from then, but particularly from the the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian have been losing land.

Israel didn't just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders. The 'settler' project, as we call it, is really Israel's ethnic cleansing programme.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel's ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier. New technology allowed Israel to besiege Gaza remotely by land, sea and air in 2007, limiting the entry of food and vital items like medicine and cement for construction. Automated gun towers shot anyone who came near the fence. The navy patrolled the sea, stopping boats straying more than a kilometre or two off shore. And drones watched 24 hours a day from the sky. The people of Gaza were sealed in and largely forgotten, except when they lobbed a few rockets over the fence – to international indignation. If they fired too many rockets, Israel bombed them mercilessly and occasionally launched a ground invasion.

The rocket threat was increasingly neutralised by a rocket interception system, paid for by the US, called Iron Dome. Palestinians tried to be more inventive in finding ways to break out of their prison. They built tunnels. But Israel found ways to identify those that ran close to the fence and destroyed them. Palestinians tried to get attention by protesting en masse at the fence. Israeli snipers were ordered to shoot them in the legs, leading to thousands of amputees. The 'deterrence' seemed to work. Israel could once again sit back and let the Palestinians rot in Gaza. 'Quiet' had been restored. Until, that is, last weekend when Hamas broke out briefly and ran amok, killing civilians and soldiers alike.

 So Israel are using the attacks on 7th October, which I totally condem, to perform ethic cleansing in Gaza. The half of the population in the enclave's north is being herded south, where there are not the resources to cope with them. And even if there were, Israel has cut off food, water and power to everyone in Gaza. The enclave is quickly becoming a pressure cooker. The pressure is meant to build on Egypt to allow the Palestinians entry into Sinai on 'humanitarian' grounds.

In the West Bank too, Israeli settlers are running amok, killing Palestinians, burning or bulldozing homes, with the blessing of the Israeli state. There has been pogroms, there will be more. These settlers have no regard for International law and they think they are a superior race to the Palestinians. It is the mentality of fascists.

 Amnesty International report explains how life has been like for Palestinians

Israeli Apartheid

 

It is very sad that we are witnessing a genocide and the western powers are doing nothing to stop it, in fact they are giving Israel support. The response by the powers that be in countries such as the USA, UK and Germany has been shameful.