A Post-Rambam Hatchet Job for Israel

Just one passage from Ben English's post-rambam hatchet job for Israel in last Saturday's Daily Terrorgraph suffices as a reminder of why you wouldn't touch the Terri even with the proverbial barge pole:

"Down the road from Bethlehem, patriotic murals adorn the 8m walls that tower over sections of the West Bank, celebrating yet more soldier 'martyrs' of the cause. Blood is the dominant motif, the blood of the enemy and martyr flowing together without a trace of irony. Listen to the spokesmen for Palestine and the language is equally stark. The barrier is branded the 'apartheid' wall, a prison that cuts them off from their true homeland to the east - the Palestine that was 'theirs' until statehood for Israel was decided in 1948." (Parallels of hate never meet, 28/11/15)

A mere four sentences to be sure, but what a surfeit of scribbling idiocy!

"Blood is the dominant motif."

Is it now? What a surprise! With almost 100 civilian martyrs gunned down since October you were expecting, like, flowers?

Israeli and Palestinian blood "flowing together."

What? 50/50?

It probably wouldn't mean anything to English, but I think the rest of us have got what it takes upstairs to understand the Australian explorer Edward John Eyre's 1845 reflection on settlers, Aboriginals and bloodshed on the colonial frontier and extrapolate to Palestine today: "Could blood answer blood, perhaps for every drop of European's shed by natives, a torrent of theirs, by European hands, would crimson the earth."

So the language of Palestinian spokesmen is "stark," is it?

Well, it is a stark situation, isn't it?

Maybe, just maybe, the fact that Palestinians are being gunned down at a rate of knots might have something to do with that.

English's Israeli PR interlocutors, of course, can come on all smooth and plausible because, really, they haven't a care in the world. All they have to do is feed fools like English bullshit and get paid for it. How hard must that be?

You see, life's sweet when you're a seasoned performer and you've got know-nothing foreign journalists and politicians hanging on your every word. When you're not dodging bullets. When your kids aren't being ripped out of their beds at 2 in the morning and carted away to be tortured. When your home isn't going to be bulldozed or burnt down by settler fanatics while you're still inside trying to sleep.

And those Palestinian "spokesmen" got it all wrong when they called the Apartheid Wall not only an Apartheid Wall but also a prison, did they?

I guess Ronnie Kasrils, a South African Jew who fought apartheid and calls Israel's West Bank Apartheid Wall "an apartheid wall of dispossession and a prison by any name" also got it wrong. But, hey, what would he know?

Now I take it that, by "their true homeland to the east," English means Israel.

I hate to tell him this, but Israel's actually to the west.

Anyway, if his geography's shit, his history's even worse, because, in point of fact, every inch of historic Palestine, from the River to the Sea, is the Palestinian's homeland - in exactly the same way as every inch of Australia is Aboriginaland.

The stark reality is that the Palestinian spokesmen's families were ethnically cleansed from Jaffa or Haifa or Lydda or any one of hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages by Zionist terror gangs in 1948. That crime against humanity, the Palestinian Nakba, was unacceptable then, and it's just as unacceptable now. That Israeli Jews have profited from the crime and continue to do so (most refusing even to acknowledge the fact), changes nothing. The homes, lands, and possessions stolen by Israel from those driven out in 1948 still belong to the descendants of those Palestinian refugees, many of whom are still refugees whether in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria or Jordan. There is no use-by date on human rights.

And in what parallel universe does the mere proclamation of a state in someone else's country confer legitimacy on that state and put an end to the matter?