“You cannot continue to victimise someone else just because you yourself were a victim once - there has to be a limit,” ~ Edward Said.
Buckle up because I’m about to be brutally honest! If only because of the rage I’m feeling about the world in which I live. Simply put, Israel has been given a “Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card by various combinations of the chief colonisers; UK, US, France and the USSR since before the First World War. They have been allowed to engage in Terrorism of the Palestinian people since Theodor Herzl’s manifesto, “Der Judenstaat”1, in 1896, outlined the dream for a sovereign Jewish state.
The trauma of the Holocaust, which saw Jews unjustifiably terrorised by the Nazis, ironically, now sees Zionist Jews, by process of transference, choose to terrorise the Palestinians in their homeland. As heinous as the atrocities of 7th October were, it’s not just a bit rich, it’s an abomination for Israel to play the victim. In simple terms, the bully, Israel, got a bloodied nose. And before the Zionist Jews start playing the “anti-semetic” card let me shut that shit down with some empathy. Sawubona! I see you! But I don’t simply see you in your victimhood, no matter how legitimate that may be, I see you for who you are - warts and all! The atrocity of the Holocaust, and the centuries of anti-semetic oppression in Europe before that, has led Zionist Jews to believe that their humanity was/is an innate weakness. They can no more eradicate that weakness than embrace it so they suppress it. In order to suppress that weakness, the bullied becomes the bully - hurt people, hurt people.
“A long-term squatter can become the registered owner of property or land they’ve occupied without the owner’s permission.” ~ https://www.gov.uk/
Israel is the brattish, self-entitled, privileged squatter, bullying its indigenous Landlords via superior military might and their geopolitical gerrymandering. There is no legitimate defence for this fimble-famble! Indeed the most compassionate thing I can say to the Zionist Jews, from my own experience, is, “go see a Shrink!” Zionist Jews are an abjectly traumatised people completely emotionally paralysed in a posture that prevents them from taking their foot off the neck of their Palestinian victims. Why? Because if they engage Palestinians with their humanity, as they did in Europe for centuries, they fear the Palestinians will do to them, what the Christians and the Nazis did to them.
Zionist Jews have been in Palestine (yes, I said Palestine and not Israel!), for so long that through its hegemony, the western world sees it as Israel. More significantly, the Zionist Jews have a sovereign right to be there. For those of you who care to read my newsletters, you will be aware that I have identified as agnostic since my teens. However my formative years were rooted in Catholicism and that’s not something that you can uproot. So though I am no longer Catholic, there are still tenets that guide my ethics. “Thou shalt not steal.” Israel violently stole that land, give it back and do penance! Prior to Theodor Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” manifesto, Jews and Palestinians lived in relative harmony. When Arthur Balfour came up with his bullshit Declaration in 1917, when Jews made up just 6% of the population, he wasn’t honouring Jews, he was going about stopping an influx of Jews into Britain. My point is Israel’s overlords, be they the UK or the US, have never had their best interests at heart. Since they once lived peacefully, as a minority, alongside the Palestinians, before Hitler put the fear of God in them and turned them wretched, they have more in common with the Palestinians than any of their overlords.
The UN should have been the impartial arbiter in this dispute between Palestinians and Zionist Jews. But the UN has been emasculated, since conception, to the degree that it can’t seem to get the US’s dick out of its ass! And since the US were long since masters in colonising stolen land, a do-over in the Arab world was the kind of porn to which they could jack off. It is a pernicious pet project which looks like they are serving all Jews, albeit at the expense of Palestines, but was/is a dummy with which to self-soothe, given the United States of America’s nefarious conception. That’s how an Israeli state was allowed to come into existence in 1948. While the ensuing Nakba, in which 700,000 Palestinians (half of the Palestinian population at the time) were kicked out of their homeland. 78% of Palestine’s land mass was skulduggerously redeclared as Israel - the cheek of it!
“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.” ~ Edward Said.2
Edward Said’s chilling words only serve to highlight the fact that, while the Palestinian’s have pursued sovereignty for more than a hundred and six years, Israel has never wanted a two-state solution. No less exemplified by Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli ambassador to the UK, when, on 14/12/23 she said “the answer is absolutely no!” With every negotiation, over the past seventy-five years, the sub-text to Israel’s position has been one of disingenuity. Tzipi, overtly, called forth the ghosts of her ancestors, all the way back to the Holocaust and before, and made Israel’s intentions clear all along. Israel is not, nor has it ever been, interested in a two-state solution.
The Zionist Jews will try to convince you that Palestinians do not live under occupation. That they co-exist, that Gazans have autonomy in self-governance. That is an out-and-out lie. Not only do they have no right to self-determination, no sovereignty. They have no control over their water supplies. They have no control over their airspace or Mediterranean Sea along its coast. They can neither fly abroad nor take a dip in their sea. Gaza is completely fenced off by land. It is, as David Cameron describes, “a prison camp”3. Israel has been punching down on Gaza and the West Bank by imposing an apartheid since 1967. In addition, the Israelis have all the military aid of America and the UK at their disposal. The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 were stitch-up jobs for Palestinian people. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), led by Yassar Arafat, was naive and inept in dealings but Israel was still that spoiled child, unscrupulous and ill-spirited at the negotiation table. It refused to permit a two-state solution and had its sinister daddy, the US, to enforce its aims.
As a consequence of the Oslo Accords, the PLO, who downgraded its aims of a sovereign Palestine to merely making a quick buck, resigned themselves to keeping Israel’s foot on the neck of Palestinian people. Rather than represent the stated aims of all Palestinians it chose to be Israel’s puppet. What’s more, in agreeing to allow the PLO to govern Gaza, Israel was able to play respectability politics for all the world to see. The Palestinian people grew increasingly disillusioned with an apparently authoritarian and corrupt PLO administration. For they were more concerned with filling their boots and hard-line policing, rather than governing, on behalf of the people. All the PLO succeeded in doing was opening up a vacuum which Hamas was only too happy to fill when it was elected in 2007.
Since Hamas came to power, Israel has imposed a blockade of the Gaza strip, preventing the receiving or sending of food, supplies, weapons, or communications, and people, by the IDF. Indeed Israel has employed classic bully boy tactics, or as they passive-aggressively define it, “mowing the grass”. Wherein they would periodically beat the shit out of Gaza, with unprovoked indiscriminate wars in psychological warfare designed to fuck with the minds of all Palestinians in order to elicit subservience. They did it in 2008-2009 with Operation Cast Lead. They did it again in 2012 with Operation Pillar of Defense. And then in 2014 with Operation Protective Edge.
Which brings us to 7th October. The Western media has long cast Israel in the role of victim but what’s really on show here is Israel’s ego. With all it’s military might and political persuasion, it is clear Israel has a schlong so big with which it is happy to fuck its own ass! Israel still inexplicably believes that if it keeps its foot on Palestine’s neck then Israel’s security goals will be achieved. Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud are the systematic architects of 7th October.
If ever there was proof of how misguided and flat-out dumb Israel’s strategy and behaviour are then it’s people like Bisan Owda, a 25 year old Gazan woman, who makes the case so charismatically. Her pronunciation of the word “bombing”, in pronouncing the second b, is quirky-cute, like she’s being deliberately ironic. But I digress, for it is her mastery of the English language that makes the Palestinian narrative so compellingly and eloquently accessible. As she dices with death, she and her comrades on the ground are a potent counterbalance to the Israel-biassed western media machine. She is nothing short of a hero, given the IDF’s genocidal attrition, boldly publishing content about the state of affairs in the Gaza Strip through her social media platforms on a daily basis.
I wake up each morning and check her Instagram handle @wizard_bisan1 and am gleeful to receive new content, if only because it is proof that she is still alive. If you watch this video you will see the sadness and the trauma in the eyes of someone who doesn’t know if they are going to live or die from one moment to the next. Yet there also exists the indomitable spirit of someone who won’t give in. Short of ethnic cleansing, whether Bisan survives or not, it is she, and her comrades, who, while in the thick of it, are the reason why Israel cannot win. The very humanity Zionist Jews have shunned in themselves since the Holocaust is manifesting in the hearts and minds of people around the world. Israel, along with its magic money tree - the US - has succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of the indolent masses but there is a growing minority who are doing the work and educating themselves about this feud. I, myself, started with Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Year War on Palestine. Rashid is a Palestinian-American Historian and Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University who not only has skin in the game yet is a wise head who champions the two-state solution. There is a strategic mobilisation of people into large-scale marches, in cities all over the world, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation in Gaza/West Bank. Israel and the US are fixing to be left with their tails between their legs - history will not be kind.
#FreePalestine
#CeaseFireInGazaNow
As ever, all views are appreciated, feel free to let me know in the Comments.
Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (1896)
The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said (1994)
Mr. Bumbo, I'm impressed by how thorough and detailed this analysis is. You also read it well.
Why thank you, Good Enough Mama! I simply had to find a productive way to vent on this subject. Thanks for listening in!