A Proper Response to slc1 – Israel and Palestine

I was going to leave this as a comment, but I figured that it would do better as a post. This is in response to slc1 who wrote a comment on a report on the shooting of 17 year old whose only crime was to throw stones at a symbol of oppression.

Mr. avicenna seems to have a selective memory. He has apparently forgotten why the security fence was put up in the first place. The purpose is to prevent Palestinian terrorist homicide bombers from coming into Israeli cities and blowing up pizza parlors. And it has been quite effective in that regard as such incidents have been greatly reduced.

You have to realise one thing.

The Palestinians don’t see Israel as an entity, they seem them as invaders. These are effectively a bunch of Europeans who have displaced them from their homes.The people who lost their homes to the Israelis are still alive. West Bank isn’t “home”. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and pretty much the entire Israel is “home”. They are a bunch of “White” people who showed up to take all their shit and then have the temerity to make the moronic claim that their ancestors used to live there. That’s like rounding up the population of New York to go live in a refugee camp because the Native Americans suffered “buyers remorse” and want their land back.

If a powerful alien race were to appear and demand that their chosen people (the native Americans) be restored to the USA and then take all the non-native americans and throw them into a refugee camp, would people in the USA fight back? What? White guys can get mad about losing their homes to space aliens but Palestinians cannot to real Israelis?

The Palestinian suicide bomber is a symptom of a problem. And that problem is that Europeans and Americans circa 1940 to 50 were “proper racist”. They gave no fucks about the Palestinians and repeatedly demonstrated how few fucks they gave about them by repeatedly backing some very dubious Israel stunts. When Israel pulled off a “first strike” it was called a pre-emptive strike and tactical genius. When Saddam did it, it was mindless aggression of a monster.

You think Israel has a right to exist. I think that the formation of Israel was one of the stupidest plans on the planet because any one with an ounce of any understanding of human beings would have grasped the end result. I think Palestine has an equal right to exist and a better claim to the land that is now Israel. For fuck’s sake, I have a better claim to that land than the Israeli claim of “It was our ancestor’s land”.

Green are Palestinian, White are Israeli, Dots are Settlements

The second problem is evident if you look at the map.

Palestine is “not” free, it has a fair few fences cutting it up and around 30% of it is suspiciously Israeli. In addition Israel has straight up built settlements inside the Green Line which is “illegal”. Extremely illegal. In modern parlance we call this an “invasion”.

So to recap… Palestinians already see Israel as some sort of invader taking all their stuff (because that totally happened) but also see them adhering to double standards (When Israel massacres Palestinians they don’t get sent to the Hague. Also the illegal settlements and fences are involved in taking what little stuff they have.

They aren’t free to travel in their own country, they cannot vote for who they want and they get shot trying to make a living. This is what breeds anger. To the Palestinian, a suicide bomber is not a terrorist but a freedom fighter, because that’s what they want.

Incidentally, the Palestinians should be thankful they are on the West Bank, as inconvenient as their situation is. Their compatriots in Syria are in much worse case, where over 800 have been killed since the uprising began. That’s several times more then were killed in both Gaza Strip actions by the IDF combined. The Syrian armed forces don’t bother with precision munitions, like the IDF does. They just apply Hama Rules.

In addition I should tell Greta and Jen to stop fighting for women’s rights in the USA because it could be worse, they could be living in Rajasthan (Shoes!? Fuck shoes! Boys get to wear shoes! You are lucky we didn’t drown you in a well!). Ian Cromwell should stop complaining about racism because he could be living in Ukraine (Neo Nazis were filmed at a major football match giving out the olde nazi salute just prior to last year’s Euro Cup Football Tournament). Or he could be living in the DRC where AIDS and Diarrhoea are a lot more pressing issues than what western culture thinks about the colour of people’s skin.

That’s the fucking attitude that got us into this mess in the first fucking place. Palestinians shouldn’t complain! In the 1900s we would have just machine gunned the lot of them while wearing some really jaunty shorts. Aren’t you lucky we magnanimous brits didn’t do that?

There are two solutions to the problem.

Either we recognise Palestine as a nation and provide it with an equal level of development and pay war reparations for the losses incurred since the formation of Israel. Also to pay for the loss of their old homes we give Jerusalem to them under a UN mandate that Jerusalem’s Jewish monuments are to be protected and Jews and Muslims both have free travel through the city.

Or we have to dissolve Israel as a Jewish state and make it a secular nation giving Palestinians equal rights as Israeli citizens along with reparations and other financial assistance. I don’t know… Call it Phoenicia or what have you.

To keep supporting Israel blindly is to keep supporting the cause for the instability.