What is wrong with #israel….?

This is not a post where I angst about the lat­est atroc­i­ty in #Gaza, or the #West­Bank, or Israel or South Lebanon where Irish peace­keep­ers are increas­ing­ly in dan­ger. There are plen­ty of those posts on this and oth­er pages. This post is about some­thing else.

There’s only so many body parts, dusty dead tor­sos, dead children’s faces, scream­ing grief strick­en dad’s, oblit­er­at­ed ambu­lances and bombed hos­pi­tals and shred­ded Jour­nal­ists that you can see before ask­ing ‘how did Israel come to be like this?’.If the visu­als are hor­rif­ic the sound­track is bare­ly any bet­ter. Hour after hour we have Israeli Politi­cians, mil­i­tary and cit­i­zens scream­ing tox­ic hate, vio­lence, denial, geno­ci­dal mania and bare­ly sane dia­tribes at us jus­ti­fy­ing inhu­man­i­ty. They have now suc­cess­ful­ly cre­at­ed a world where to call for a #cease­fire is to sup­port ter­ror­ism, to be on the side of human­i­ty jus­ti­fies you being hat­ed, where the Unit­ed Nations is accused of being on the side of evil and, today, where Gaza and (appar­ent­ly Ire­land too) deserves to have a nuclear bomb dropped on it.
How did this out of con­trol mania, this lunatic speak, this nor­mal­i­sa­tion of bar­bar­i­ty come to be how Israel is?

It strikes me that Israel is the ulti­mate echo cham­ber. A coun­try born of the most hor­rif­ic holo­caust it began its life as a gift from a guilty world. A world that per­pet­u­at­ed (in Ger­many and its allies cas­es), or allowed too long (every­body else), the most hor­ren­dous treat­ment of Jews was imme­di­ate­ly on its knees plead­ing for­give­ness as Israel was cre­at­ed and began its Nak­ba — the mass expul­sion and per­se­cu­tion of Pales­tini­ans that began in 1948 and has ebbed and flowed since, but has nev­er real­ly ceased.

The world looked on and sup­port­ed this as Israel grew. Its peo­ple, quite jus­ti­fi­ably, vowed ‘nev­er again’ and Israel began work­ing to pro­tect itself from the begin­ning. That pro­tec­tion was mil­i­tary but also polit­i­cal and social. The ‘Israel lob­by’ is a mas­sive­ly pow­er­ful net­work work­ing world­wide to make sure Israel and its actions always has inter­na­tion­al sup­port. That’s one thing when it’s defen­sive but, as any map of Israel and Pales­tine from 1948 to today vis­i­bly demon­strates, Israel has always, always been aggres­sive.

The aggres­sion is inter­nal too. The last Israeli Prime Min­is­ter to seri­ous­ly seek peace with Pales­tine was Yitzak Rabin. He signed the Oslo Accord for a 2 state solu­tion and agreed bor­ders with Yass­er Arafat. The #zion­ists (who now rule Israel) assas­si­nat­ed him for it.
Shu­lamit Aloni, a for­mer Israel cab­i­net mem­ber and win­ner on the ‘Israel Prize’ in 2000 told the world how they cyn­i­cal­ly use #anti­semitism as ‘a trick to silence legit­i­mate crit­i­cism of Israel’. Yet still a guilt rid­den world runs from the trick in sheer ter­ror every time.

After 8 decades of these phe­nom­e­na the world itself has now been land­ed in a des­per­ate place. With­in the Israeli echo cham­ber itself it seems many, includ­ing those in pow­er, now actu­al­ly believe their own pro­pa­gan­da and have reached a stage where they have devel­oped the char­ac­ter­is­tics of those who per­se­cut­ed their fore­bears. The dis­re­gard for human rights and the xeno­pho­bic fer­vour for their own ide­ol­o­gy as it drips with the blood of inno­cents is stag­ger­ing.

Out­side Israel Politi­cians cow­er in fear so much they con­strain any crit­i­cism even in the face of the gross­est inhu­man­i­ty, the most egre­gious war crimes. The likes of Biden, Blinken Sunak and Starmer are lit­er­al­ly los­ing their souls while they par­rot non­sense and spon­sor deprav­i­ty frozen in fear from say­ing the word ‘stop’. I won’t even deal with Von Der Leyen and the trag­ic out work­ing of the Ger­man guilt com­plex (but please Ger­many, please have the good sense to not ever lec­ture any­one on anti­semitism again).

Anto­nio Gut­tieres at the UN brave­ly tries his best and is lam­pooned. Lit­tle Ire­land looks for a cease­fire and is reward­ed by its cit­i­zens being detained in Gaza and the coun­try being threat­ened by Israeli Politi­cians. I’m per­son­al­ly glad they notice we don’t con­form to their bul­ly­ing and deceit. But that won’t save a sin­gle Pales­tin­ian life.

On Fri­day I watched a video. Some Jews were protest­ing on a street look­ing for a cease­fire. They were in tra­di­tion­al dress and dig­ni­fied. An elder­ly Jew­ish women approached them and then vicious­ly attacked them. You could see the poi­son com­ing out of her. She told them, wait for hit, that Hitler should have ‘gassed them’. That she wished he had. To her brand of Zion­ism, Jews who agree with her are sacred and can do no wrong, and those that don’t should be gassed. The video is avail­able.

Last week Jew­ish peo­ple with­in the Israel echo cham­ber itself were bat­tered by the IDF for call­ing for a cease­fire. It appears that Jews who don’t agree with #geno­cide are anti-semit­ic.
What hope do the rest of us have?
(PS — and yes, I did crit­i­cise Hamas. I despise them and think they are evil)