ISRAEL, THE GAZA STRIP AND THE PALESTINIANS

The first and most important thing to be understood in this Post is that Israel is a Jewish State. In fact it is the Jewish State, the historical and geopolitical State of the Jewish people even with many non-Jews living there alongside Jews who are not in any way religious! Many Jews in fact, who’d had former nationalities are now Israelis. Added to this is the key historical fact that Israel has been a Jewish State for thousands of years. Despite the brutal expulsions of the Jews from their land by the Romans, accompanied by mass murder and genocide, such attempted depopulations were never total or complete. Jews continued living there in small numbers one way or another. Furthermore, despite earlier conquests by Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks, then Romans and Christian Crusaders, Mamalukes , Arabs, Ottoman Turks and finally the British, Jewish people have always lived there under one kind of occupation and subjugation after another.

The Jewish people of Israel, scattered to the four winds by conquest and persecution over thousands of years have always somehow returned to their historical land. Millions of Jews might have left it over time or were destroyed in it, but a handful always stayed and held onto the soil and their faith. And through all this long time the descendants of those who’d left always seemed to drift back. And to make the story even more fascinating, the Jews of the Jewish State today don’t mind sharing it with the Arab Israelis who live there, who of course have the right to vote. Something the Jews themselves never had for thousands of years until 1949 when the State of Israel was created anew by Resolution of the United Nations.

Up until 1918 the land was ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire until its defeat by the British in the First World War. The latter then took over a Mandate to rule the territory. During the 1930’s and up until 1945 the Jews of Europe were persecuted and mostly annihilated by Hitler’s Nazi Germany. They had very few friends. The nations of the world wrung their hands and looked away. Between 1945 and 1949 the pitiful remnants of those who’d survived the death camps along with others who’d somehow stayed alive elsewhere crawled back to British Palestine. There they were helped by those Jews and their families who’d lived there from the 1800’s, mainly immigrants from Russia and Poland working the land, and there they slowly, painfully returned to their human selves with little help from their British rulers. In fact it’s true to say that the British Labour Government of the time put every obstacle in the way of Jews who’d survived the death camps from reaching Palestine, going so far as to imprison large numbers of them in barbed wire camps on Cyprus. And this despite the fact that thousands of Jewish men from Palestine fought in British army detachments during the Second World War!

Further to the Resolution of the United Nations the British departed in 1949 but not before handing large quantities of arms to Arabs living inside the territory who immediately attacked the Jews living there supported by surrounding Arab states. This was Israel’s first modern War of Independence with its Jewish population emerging victorious. A new independent Jewish nation state had been born out of the blood of the holocaust and thousands of years of persecution along with this latest sacrifice by its soldiers. Subsequently the Jewish State was attacked by Arab armies in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In the Six Day War of 1967 Israel captured the Gaza strip of land from the Egyptians and the West Bank of the River Jordan from the Jordanians including the eastern part of Jerusalem. Both the Gaza strip and the West Bank were now militarily occupied by Israel.

Subsequent to this, under substantial political pressure from the United States, the main international supporter of Israel on the world stage, along with Britain, never really a friend, there have been substantial changes to the occupation and political character of both territories. A new national political grouping had emerged from among Arabs displaced by Israel’s initial victory of their War of Independence who called themselves Palestinians and have over the last five decades, through various terrorist campaigns and attacks on the Jewish State and on Jews and Jewish organizations internationally, gained support from the Western media and passed themselves off as representing the rights of all Arab opponents of Israel. Giving way to international pressure and receiving continued promises of support from its supposed political friends, Israeli Governments subsequently gifted control of the West Bank to Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah terrorist movement, allowing its towns and cities to be occupied by the Palestinian Arabs while at the same time creating settlements of Jews in that territory.

It is currently the political demand of the Palestinian Government of this West Bank that such settlements be removed and control handed to the Palestinians for the creation of a purely Palestinian Arab state.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict concerning the Gaza Strip is more disturbing. It’s a problem in my view  created essentially by the Israelis, or more accurately by the staggeringly short-sighted and stupid Israeli politician, former hero-general Ariel Sharon. Having for years wanted to enter Israeli politics, this well-known military figure initially attached himself to the Likud Government of Menachem Begin. However finding little room there for his personal ambition decided to move out and form his own political party, Kadima a kind of right-centrist outfit. Jewish settlement of the captured Gaza strip had already begun prior to the time of the Begin Government but during its period in office went forward in earnest. Large numbers of orthodox and secular Jews felt inspired to move there, setting up a wide variety of agricultural settlements and enterprises along with schools, synagogues and housing.

The Gaza Strip, having formerly belonged to the Egyptians, became a place of passionate though benign Jewish settlement. Ariel Sharon however saw it as something else. A kind of stepping stone for his national and international political aspirations. In a General Election his Kadima Party emerged victorious and seeking above all to be recognised as a peacemaker after his long military career, both by an Israeli public tired of conflict and by the Americans, Sharon decided to commit himself to a peacemaking agenda with the Palestinians. His aim being to give his country what he thought would be a lasting peace. He’d fought in many wars and was now driven by the dream of peace, convinced he was the one to achieve it. To this end he’d therefore make a binding deal with the long term Palestinian enemy and to show he was in earnest, in a gesture nothing short of astounding, offered the Palestinians political and territorial control of the Gaza Strip. What followed was nasty and stupid. To back up his commitment to the Palestinians and belief that peace would come from his generosity,

HE ORDERED THE ISRAELI ARMY BACKED BY LARGE NUMBERS OF POLICE TO EVICT ALL THOSE JEWS WHO’D SETTLED THERE!

In a period that ran into months thousands of Jewish Settlers along with their wives and families were forcibly removed amid terrible scenes from their homes and agricultural settlements by Ariel Sharon’s police and soldiers, all of these being destroyed to make way for Palestinian occupation by, among others, members of former terrorist groups. Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip had already been subjected to a long campaign of hostility and hatred in the Western media often being described as extremists and fascists when the truth is that most of them were simply Jewish idealists wanting to further extend and create the land of Israel, something that infuriated the Jew-hating, Israel-hating European left with the British left and British media, BBC and Channel 4 Television standing out in particular as open enemies of the Jewish State. Their pro-Palestinian hatred of Israel only a cover for their fundamental anti-Semitism in general.

So with the Jewish Settlers of the Gaza Strip vilified as extremists and facing a hostile international climate now backed up by the United States, Ariel Sharon made his gesture of compromise and friendship and handed the territory over to the Palestinians. Within months all trace of Jewish people having lived there was obliterated and their synagogues desecrated and destroyed. Tens of thousands of Palestinians began moving in with no more Jewish presence tolerated. The secular now former terrorist movement took political control only worse was to come. Within a couple of years trouble of a far greater consequence began.

Alongside Yasser Arafat’s secular Fatah movement another terrorist grouping began to emerge. Hamas was not simply Muslim but Islamic and Fundamentalist. Entirely opposed to the very existence of the Jewish State of Israel. Since its inception it had only one political aim, the destruction and annihilation of the Jewish State. Ariel Sharon had handed control and occupation of the Gaza Strip to Fatah, all Jews forcibly removed. Now a struggle began between the military wing of Hamas and Fatah within the Gaza Strip for its control. Within weeks the secular Fatah was defeated and ousted by the Muslim fundamentalists and in 2007, Israel, a tiny country as it is, faced a new and deadly threat. From its immediate west a fanatical and well-armed Muslim terrorist group and from the north the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorists. In short Ariel Sharon’s totally short-sighted political gesture, born of a mixture of personal ambition and political ignorance now placed Israel in serious jeopardy.

The Hamas Movement is not only anti-Israel it is also virulently anti-Semitic. It’s stated aim is to wipe out and destroy the Jewish presence in their ancient historical land and to that end has fought a relentless  terrorist campaign against the Jewish State. When it wasn’t kidnapping Israeli citizens it was manufacturing rockets and launching them into Israel, and in breaks between doing this it was digging tunnels for its terrorists to get into Israel and kill Jewish civilians. Even with the hateful holocaust denying regime of Iran dedicated to destroying the Jewish State and preparing nuclear weapons for this, the Hamas regime in Gaza is currently Israel’s prime military enemy. Since taking over the Gaza Strip in 2007 it has received the political and electoral support of Palestinians living there but done little to nothing for their welfare, preferring instead to launch endless attacks on Israel from that territory. Three serious conflicts have now been fought and many truces called, Hamas unilaterally breaking them all with kidnappings and rocket fire.

Another conflict is currently ongoing. Having recently kidnapped and murdered three Israeli youths, Hamas launched a three week rocket offensive against Israel. Their missile capability has drastically increased. The distance achieved now no longer a matter of dozens of miles but hundreds, putting many Israeli cities under threat. These have all been manufactured under previous terms of truce. So the threat to the existence and survival of the Jewish State is serious. The attack on Israel by endless rockets from an anti-Semitic Islamic Fundamentalist group will not suddenly end by fruitless negotiation however much the Americans wish it. Hamas does not recognise the right of the Jewish State of Israel to exist and will not deviate from that policy so how the Americans, the British and the rest of Europe expect Israel to offer compromises and make a truce with its deadly enemy only bent on its destruction IS A MYSTERY.

The United States is no longer Israel’s friend as it had once been. Israel is certainly no friend of Barak Obama and likewise no friend of the British Government and its Arabist Foreign Office. Right now Israeli soldiers in Gaza are bravely fighting for the life of the Jewish State and its Jewish people with their dearest blood. And right now the Governments of the West like those of Scandinavia along with France, along with the entire wretched anti-Semitic British left are rolling their eyes and shaking their hands in disgust.  So here’s a message for all you anti-Semitic hypocrites…

WHEN THE JEWISH PEOPLE WERE PERSECUTED DOWN THE AGES AND BEING MURDERED IN MILLIONS DURING THE HOLOCAUST YOU ALL WRUNG YOUR HANDS AND CRIED OUT OH DEAR OH DEAR HOW DREADFUL… BUT ALL OF YOU DID NOTHING.

NOW THAT THE JEWS HAVE THEIR OWN STATE, ONE THEY CREATED WITH THEIR OWN SWEAT AND TOIL AND ARE AGAIN FIGHTING FOR THEIR SURVIVAL AGAINST MURDERERS YOU GET UP AND SAY,

HOW DARE YOU FIGHT BACK… YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES KILLING CIVILIANS! I MEAN HOW HORRID… YOU JEWS FIGHTING BACK!

Ariel Sharon gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in the hope of creating a lasting peace between the Palestinian people and those of Israel. In this he was totally naïve, as are most Israeli generals turned politician. Golda Meir and David Ben Gurion would never have done such a thing. The consequences of his ridiculous gesture to those who could never understand such a thing has been a disaster. The Palestinians, fully supporting their terrorist political leaders, only saw it as an incomprehensible gift by someone who must have been stupid. You gave us territories from which we could attack you, you arsehole, so that’s what we’re doing!