Image: The British in Gaza, 1917.1 I say nothing.
Long, long ago, when geography was, for me, obligatory and carried a capital letter, I got a mark of C for effort. “There must be no ‘C’s for effort,” was the headmaster’s admonition in his report. Mother and father were concerned. I was in the dog house. The geographic dog house.
Nobody ever asked me why I thought I’d been given a C. So, having kept the secret all this time, I’ll tell the world why I got a C. It’s because the schoolmaster who gave me it had made a sexual approach to me, which I rebuffed. And I don’t care a fig about it, but that’s why I got a C. I dropped geography as soon as I could.
People so often say, “You bad boy!” but so rarely ask why boys are bad. There are bad boys everywhere, to tell you the truth, but my Dutch friend’s doctor was just on the line to inform him that shigella bacterium infections constitute a notifiable disease and she now has a task ahead of her: to determine the ground zero, the patient nil of this outbreak: where did he get the disease from? and where did whoever or whatever he got the disease from get the disease from? and so further. Mr Rutte’s “commercial health service” is being scientific today.
So, where are all the bad boys and why are we getting so many Cs for effort for them? Because there could be reasons that nobody’s even asked about.
Hamas and Israel are bad boys, because anyone who shoots a gun instead of petitioning a court of law for the settlement of their differences is bad. We institute courts of law in order to avoid shooting games. Court petition = good boy; shooting guns = bad boy.
If only things were that simple. Ukraine is a bad boy which is not so bad. They raised a petition with the Security Council of the UN, of which they’re a member, and the Security Council refused their petition, pretty much because the nation that was attacking them is on the Security Council.
That means we need a qualification to this court petition route: the court has to be fair and impartial. It needs to have power to apply the law. If it is disenfranchised by being occupied by an aggressor, then the aggressor’s target is naturally denied its standing as plaintiff. It can then only shoot back.
The other arguments advanced by Russia justifying its attack are spurious: if it’s aggrieved that Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and whoever-ia joined NATO against Russia’s will (and we may soon be hearing that one or another of them joined against their own will), then Russia’s gripe lies with the countries that joined NATO against its will, or their will, or with NATO itself, and not with a country that didn’t join NATO. Don’t talk to me of three-dimensional chess: if you’ve a gripe, take it up with those who cause the gripe. Unless they’ll hit back and the party who’s got nothing to do with it won’t. Well, that’s what Moscow thought.
So, who’s bad between Hamas and Israel? The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are the two constituent parts of Palestine, and Palestine is recognised as a sovereign nation by the United Nations and the Holy See. It is not recognised by Israel, unless someone can tell me different, but, if the Gaza Strip is claimed by Palestine, from whom do they claim it? Well, pretty much, from Israel. The bigger question is what is the Gaza Strip?
Not “what is it?”; any encyclopaedia can tell you that; but what is it under the Oslo accords? And, under the Oslo Accords, it is in actual fact bigger than it is now. There are six million (now, there’s a figure to conjure with: 6,000,000) Arabs who are unable to return home from Palestine because Israel is occupying land that it said it wouldn’t under Oslo. Israel is an invader.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, saying, “This is ours”, the world, or large parts of it, rallied to the Ukrainian cause: in short to Ukraine’s inherent right to assert its self-determination, to be separate from Russia. Many cite in support of their stance the 31 years of independence that it enjoyed before being invaded and, while positive prescription (usually covering a period of 30 years) is a persuasive argument in such land claims (i.e. any right Russia had had had ceased to exist in December 2021) the fundamental principle is not thereby undermined: those who wish self-determination should be allowed their self-determination. And, out of that now arise two problems.
Number 1: Ukraine wants all its land back, which includes the Donbas in its entirety and the Crimean peninsula. But Ukrainians are reluctant to allow any referenda, which would not happen in any case until peace is re-established of course, for Luhansk and Donetsk. They add that the situation’s been coloured by the emigration of ethnic Ukrainians from the regions since 2014 and the Russification of the area since then, which is deemed unnatural. Unnatural or not, it’s my view that the people who live there are the people who live there. You can’t claim territory against the wishes of its majority population on the ground that, once taken under sovereignty, it’s your plan to reoccupy it with ethnic Ukrainians. You can’t move peoples across the globe like furniture across a room, and stoke up problems for the Russians in Donbas. If you think Russia will step in and start its aggression again, then you need to destroy Russia, and that’s another problem. But if the majority in Donbas is Russian, then it is Russian. Borders drawn on ethnic lines must, if ethnicity is the deciding factor (which I dispute fundamentally), prove movable when ethnicity changes over time. (My solution is to dissolve the borders altogether. Everywhere.)
Number 2: If Ukraine can have its self-determination, why can’t Palestine? The state of Israel was implanted in that place where it has traditionally been, according to biblical tradition, as the homeland of the Jews, who had suffered so dreadfully in the war (albeit in the places the ravages of that war caused them to suffer, that is: one must not overlook the fact that there were Jews during the second world war who did not suffer, just as there were Brits who didn’t get bombed in the Blitz, and Austrians who didn’t rip down Nazi flags from their châteaux and hoik it over the Alps to safety). The stance I take relates to the Israeli state, and not the Jewish people, therefore.
Russia’s irredentist claims against Ukraine are rejected, but Israel’s, effectively irredentist, claim was approved. Israel was established and, within two decades, had engaged in wars to extend its territory, to subjugate people just as the Jews who suffered in the war had been subjugated. If Germany was to have atoned for the Jewish diaspora, then Israel should have been established on the territory of that country, surely: Germany. In the State of North-Rhine Westphalia, or Thuringia, or Lower Saxony. If the Jewish question was raised so high by the Nazis, then it is the country that raised it so high that should have paid the penalty for trying to eradicate the race. Instead, it was Arabs. But where is patient zero in this epidemiological investigation?
What, then, of the Germans who lived there in our supposed German location for Israel? Manchmal muss man einen Beschluss fällen. They can stay, or they can go. If they stay, they’re Israeli, if they go, they’re German. Is that not what happened when Israel was established?
Well, not exactly. The choice wasn’t quite as free as that. Which just makes the clearances that more ignominious.
Israel must abide by Oslo. Palestine must gain international status. And Jews may live wherever they want, as may Arabs. And, if that’s so, maybe one day they can learn to live together in harmony, without identifying each other as Jews and Arabs, but as Palestinians and Israelis.
The shooting should stop, on both sides.
Forget patient zero: you’ll never find them. This goes back to pre-biblical times and no epidemiologist can track a virus that far back.
Forget past rancour, and forget future rancour.
These neighbours should have a barbecue to learn what neighbourliness is.
Release the blockade of the Gaza coast and, for the rest of the world, decide what principles guide your support and denigration of others, and look long and hard in your mirrors before you cast aspersions about those who are unjustified in their actions. Stop judging, start healing.
Then, everyone will get an A for effort and all will wuv each other again.
It’s not that simple, of course; but simplicity is a good start.
By .Original uploader was תמרה at he.wikipedia.Later version(s) were uploaded by Yonidebest at he.wikipedia. - Transferred from he.wikipedia; transfer was stated to be made by User:מתניה., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10085502.