A question for Zionists

Playboy interviewed veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, who recently lost her job because of her comments on Israel. Unsurprisingly, Playboy's interview generated some disgustingly vitriolic feedback, one piece of which reiterated an old Zionist argument: Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, which they have continuously occupied for millennia. The Palestinians, as most famously put by Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, are a made-up people.

I'm quite deliberately leaving out the Biblical part, because it's the same thing as saying that Israel belongs to the Jews because God said so, a position also put forward by Golda Meir. Anyone who thinks they are privy to information from God qualifies as insane and isn't someone that can be reasoned with.

If you accept this argument in favor of Israel's unquestioned right to its territories, are you also in favor of abolishing the United States of America? After all, the Native Americans have inhabite their ancestral homelands continuously for millennia, and certainly the Americans are a made-up people. They're just a bunch of Europeans who showed up a couple of hundred years ago and conquered America for themselves. At least the Arab conquest happened well over 1,000 years ago; by those standards, the people who call themselves Americans today are newcomers. So if the Arabs living in Palestine have no right to be there, surely the Americans of European, African or Asian descent who form the vast majority of the population of North America have even less right to their current homes. Obviously, if over 1,400 years of living in Palestine doesn't make Palestinian Arabs a "real people", then how can a few hundred years in North America mysteriously create the "Americans"?

Certainly the same must go for the European and African-descended populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as well: if Arab Palestine isn't a real country and a real people, then there's no way something like Brazil or Peru is.

Where, in fact, do we draw the line? Will most of Britain have to be vacated? After all, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes only showed up in what is now England slightly before the Arabs took over Palestine. The English, as a made-up people, will be forced to leave, and the Welsh, Scots and Irish can divide up the islands among themselves. Can the Germans and French stay, or will they need to head back east as well? The question of the Slavs is even trickier, because no-one's quite sure where to count that from.

So if you accept the Zionist argument referenced here, you really have to be in favor of a very large-scale rearrangement of the Earth's population. Resetting everything to the criteria given will involve moving around a billion people, because if the Arabs had no right to be living in Palestine in 1948, there's no way in hell today's Americans have any right to be living where they are now. In short, this is an unworkable and monumentally stupid argument that no-one can seriously advocate as a justification for territorial claims. We simply cannot accept the idea that if a people were living on a certain territory c. 600 CE, their descendants, or people who claim to be their descendants, have a right to that territory over everyone else. Also, to maintain that a people who have lived on a certain territory for over a millennium aren't a real nation is to maintain that many other nations aren't real, either; most explicitly, if there are no such people as the Palestinians, then it's clear that there are no such people as the Americans, either.

That this argument can be put forward at all is testimony to the sheer idiocy of the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No reasonable person should stand for it.

The BBC: more neutral than you think

I was comment-spammed on Facebook recently by a school friend, who's very adamantly pro-Israel. She insists that the Arabs are engaged in some kind of global conspiracy to destroy the entire Western world or something like that. I like her, so I don't want to lambast her here. What I wanted to point out is that she firmly believes that the only reason we don't understand why Israel is the bulwark of civilization and a shining light of virtue is because we're been "brainwashed by the BBC".

Here's what I find slightly ironic:

Gaza aid ship protesters try to storm BBC Manchester

Protesters demonstrating against the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid ship have attempted to storm the BBC in Manchester.

More than 800 people marched through the city centre and down Oxford Road, where the crowd surged at the BBC's entrance, smashing its front doors.

One man climbed to the top of the building to plant a Palestinian flag and there were at least three arrests.

Protesters said they were also angry about the BBC's coverage of Israel.

Police officers formed a chain across the BBC's Oxford Road entrance and surrounded the building with police vehicles and officers.

Protesters from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, who organised the demonstration, chanted slogans including: "BBC tell the truth."

From this, I'd like to propose two hypotheses.

First of all, if ever you can tell a situation has gotten out of hand, it's when both sides of the argument insist that the BBC is in cahoots with the opposite side.

Secondly, and most importantly for us as that first point is, in this context, a bit of a no-brainer, the BBC is far more neutral than you'd think. If both sides hate it, I guess they really must be pretty unbiased!

US: Israel is exempt from international law

FOX: Biden: Israel Has Right to Stop Gaza Ships

The U.S. has been careful in its response to the deadly raid and has not joined the international condemnation of Israel's use of force to stop the ships after its commandos were attacked as they rappelled down from helicopters.

"Israel has an absolute right to deal with its security interest," Biden said in an interview on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show, while reiterating the Obama administration's support for a transparent, impartial investigation of what happened.

(...)

A day earlier, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs did not question Israel's motives in trying to enforce its 3-year-old blockade of Gaza, which is ruled by Hamas, designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization.

Of course, it's hardly surprising the United States won't condemn an at best questionable blockade, as that might raise questions about some other blockades.

What is interesting is that as a spokesman for the US government, the vice-president seems to be endorsing the idea that Israel is not bound by international law. The legal case is fairly clear: Israel has no business attacking ships sailing under a foreign flag in international waters and murdering passengers on board those ships. What Israel did constitutes either piracy or an act of war against Turkey.

Except according to the White House, Israel doesn't seem to be subject to any kind of law. Again, it isn't that surprising that the United States don't want military actions to be put under too much juridical scrutiny, but still. If, say, an Arab state were to violate international law, you can be sure we'll never hear the end of it, not to mention how hideously awful it is when an organization like Hamas violates an international agreement. But strangely, when Israel does the same thing, it's defended.

It's depressing, but again, not surprising, to see that the Obama administration is equally in thrall to the Israel lobby as the previous administrations were. And it's even more depressing, and actively disgusting, to see Israel's useful idiots dress up an act of piracy in international waters as "self-defence".

I shot the relief worker

but I did not shoot the MEP.

BBC: Deaths as Israeli forces storm Gaza aid ship

After least nine people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.

Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of the 500 people on board.

It happened about 40 miles (64 km) out to sea, in international waters.

Israel says its soldiers were shot at and attacked with weapons; the activists say Israeli troops came on board shooting.

(...)

The six-ship flotilla, carrying 10,000 tonnes of aid, left the coast of Cyprus on Sunday and had been due to arrive in Gaza on Monday. (...) [Israel's deputy Foreign Minister] accused the convoy of a "premeditated and outrageous provocation", describing the flotilla as an "armada of hate".

Motivating the troops, Israeli style

The Independent: Army rabbi 'gave out hate leaflet to troops'

The Israeli army's chief rabbinate gave soldiers preparing to enter the Gaza Strip a booklet implying that all Palestinians are their mortal enemies and advising them that cruelty is sometimes a "good attribute".

When people say that Palestinians are religious fanatics, one would do well to keep this stuff in mind as well.

Some others have commented on this news item as well. For a frightening look at the mental health of one particular man, go here.