Only a one-state Palestine is possible
The concentration camp that is Gaza
Christopher King looks beyond Israel’s latest crime against humanity, its murder in international waters of aid workers bound for Gaza. He argues that it is high time to accept the fact that Israel is a fundamentally illegitimate entity and that the only chance for peace lies in a one-state Palestine shared among Palestinian Arabs and Jews.
Anthony Blair said on television prior to invading Iraq, “Well, we won’t kill as many people as Saddam has!” He underestimated his ability. Sanctions had already killed half a million Iraqi children and the American invasion sold to this country and Europe by Blair killed about one million persons, created four to five million refugees and devastated the country. This war criminal has subsequently been enriched by America for his work and was presented with one million dollars by Israel.
In creating the Gaza concentration camp where food from humanitarian organizations is allowed in to 1.5 million Palestinians on a basis calculated as the minimum necessary to sustain life, Israel is similarly challenging Nazi achievements. Israel claims that it does not ration food to Gaza on this basis but the calculation exists. We must draw our conclusions from it.
Israel’s action in attacking the humanitarian relief flotilla that was attempting to breach the illegal blockade of Gaza is nothing less than piracy with murder. At least nine and perhaps 19 persons are reported to have been killed, according to reports. One cannot comprehend why the international community tolerates the existence of this regime, much less supports and protects it as America does.
Israel was established by terrorism. We might recall that between 1944 and 1948, when the state of Israel was declared on Palestinian land, Jewish terrorist gangs murdered about 280 British soldiers as well as uncounted thousands of Palestinians in driving them from their land.
The enmity of the surrounding Arab states to Israel is not due to anti-Semitism. It is opposition to the confiscation, with murder, of Palestinian land by the Jews from 1944 until the present day. If dispossessed Palestinians and their descendants were allowed to return and United Nations-approved arrangements were made for their compensation and partial restoration of their land, there would be peace in Palestine and the Middle East. Palestinians are willing to share their country equitably with Jews.
This is the one-state solution. It would be well worth the European Union facilitating it by investing funds equivalent to those spent on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two-state solution is dead due to Israeli theft of land outside its borders and seizure of Palestinian water resources. It is equivalent to the bantustans reserved for Africans by the Apartheid government of South Africa in areas of the country that the government did not want. Anyone who now promotes a separate Palestinian state is either ignorant of the facts on the ground or has no genuine interest in Middle Eastern peace and justice.
Israel’s attack on Gaza, 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, conducted with tanks, artillery, military aircraft, helicopters, rockets, bombs and white phosphorus shells, as well as soldiers with the usual weapons, killed over 1,400 Palestinians. This murderous action by a well-protected, mechanised army against the Hamas government of Gaza, who had a few hundred fighters with rifles, was supported by Jewish civil and religious leaders in the UK and other countries. Since then, Israel has maintained its blockade that is starving Gaza as well as denying it medical supplies, fuel, electricity, construction materials and really, everything.
| "...the purpose of the Gaza blockade is to starve and bludgeon, by military means, the population into submission and acceptance of Israel’s claims on the land from which they have been dispossessed." |
Israel maintains that the blockade is necessary to contain Hamas. Hamas is, of course, the legitimate, democratically-elected government of Palestine that emerged following elections that the United States and Israel promoted. It is irrelevant that the result was not what they wanted. Surely, the purpose of democratic elections is to express the wishes of the people. The US response to these elections demonstrated to the world that its mission to spread democracy to the benighted downtrodden of the world is a sham and a fraud. There are no people on earth more downtrodden than the Palestinians of Gaza. Indeed, most Gaza residents do not originate from there at all. Over three quarters of them were driven from their homes in Israel during past conflicts. They and their descendents are forbidden by Israel to return to their homes and lands that have usually been taken over by Jews. It is common crime – theft and murder – on a monumental scale.
In fact, the purpose of the Gaza blockade is to starve and bludgeon, by military means, the population into submission and acceptance of Israel’s claims on the land from which they have been dispossessed. Israel claims that the aim of the aid flotilla that it has pirated is to delegitimize it. The Jews have never had legitimate claim to Palestine. Israel is merely a haven of terrorists. The only people who can possibly legitimize Israel’s existence are the Palestinians and even they cannot legally and absolutely do so while under the extreme duress of military occupation, attack and privation.
Cardinal Martinho, a critic of Israel’s behaviour, is accused by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre of “using the language of a Holocust denier”, a new term for vilifying Israel’s critics. The cardinal’s robust response to this was, "They can say what they want. I say, look at the conditions in which people live; conditions that run contrary to human dignity. What is happening in these days causes horror."
The good cardinal is right. Since the Gaza invasion when he made these remarks, conditions have worsened.
The deaths suffered by those of the Gaza humanitarian flotilla are both a tragedy and an international crime. Israel must answer for them. The world is now beginning to see this terrorist haven for what it is.
With its sponsor the United States, which is creating havoc not only in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel is planning to attack Iran. Iran is no friend of Israeli land thieves and murderers and why should it or anyone else be? As for Israel’s sponsor, the US, seizure of Iran’s oil and gas reserves is part of its strategic planning in support of its failing economy. As in the 1953 coup by the US Central Intelligence Agency that overthrew the democratic Mossadeq government, the US wants Iran’s oil. That coup again shows the lie to the US’s claim that it promotes democracy.
The accusation that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme has no foundation. It has no support whatsoever from inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency or the US’s own security services. It is a political lie promoted as much by Israel as the Obama administration and the Bush administration before it.
There are men and women of goodwill in Israel who know righteousness, the aim of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Living as they are on land stolen from the Palestinians, it is their primary responsibility to bring Israelis to their senses. As a racist, religious state situated on stolen land, Israel will never have legitimacy. Legitimacy is impossible.
The future lies in sharing the land equitably with the Palestinians and so living in peace. The alternative is a vast tragedy for Israelis and worldwide Jewry that will not be brought on by anti-Semitism. We are tired of that old nonsense. It will be a result of their own actions.
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Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.
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Source: http://www.redress.cc/palestine/cking20100601 Illustration: http://sabbah.biz/mt/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Map-of-Palestine-one-state.jpg
