The intractable problem that is Israel.


"The combination of blue and white as the colors of the Jewish flag was derived from an 1860 poem, “Judah’s Colors,” by Austrian Ludwig August Frankl, which explained that the blue symbolized “the splendors of the firmament,” and the white represented “the radiance of the priesthood.” The blue stripes on the Zionist flag were also inspired by the stripes on the tallit (prayer shawl). They provided “religious and ritual symbolism of Jewish life guided by precepts of the Torah, while the Star of David reflected the unity of the Jewish people.”" From: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/israeli-flag/


The Israeli position has never been neutral or honest. From the outset it was aggressive, acquisitive and discriminatory.

Never content with the original boundaries, from the al-Nakba ("the Catastrophe") as Palestinians refer to it.  It has always aimed to expand to a 'Greater Israel' set between the Tigress and the Nile, which its modern flag indicatively denotes.

To do so it has used terrorism consistently from the King David Hotel to the Twin Towers; expulsion and a refusal to repatriate; military superiority in battles; domestic repression and injustice; and a blatant programme of settlement, land theft, economic and social strangulation, to make life as difficult and uncomfortable for the indigenous people, who possess a greater legal right to live where they do than the largely foreign newcomers.

As such it is just a modern example of classic imperialism, constructed on a very dubious claim that has been in abeyance for two millennium. Britain the great imperial power of the 19th Century is deeply implicated in both the theory and practice of the current situation and uncomfortably so.

Where would we be if the whole world sought to re-establish borders and populations based on AD 70? For a start over 300 million Americans would need to return to where they came from!

Perhaps this is a factor in the fawning and irrational support America has afforded this nascent, but deeply flawed state, which from the late 1970's has been taken over by un-apologetic professional terrorists. The results are today obvious to everyone: children being removed from their beds at night by heavily armed soldiers; authorisation to shoot dead and injure unarmed demonstrators with live rounds; fences and 'Berlin' walls entrench political apartheid; badly injured children refused medical attention; assassination and agitation abroad.

Imagine what political capital the West would make of this if it had been Russia doing it? Remember that the West went to war to so say defeat this sort of tyranny in Germany, yet is largely silent and impotent now Israel does the self-same thing!

The League of Nations collapsed largely because it failed to respond effectively to Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia. Israel is now the acid test of the United Nations, inexcusably neutered by the United States, owing to a disproportionately influential Jewish lobby and fundamentalist Christian Right. Both of these groups are obsessed with a prophetic but different Messianic vision, of which a Jewish Israel is an essential prerequisite.

In reality this just the age-old phenomenon of a human lust for power and domination; an hegemonic exercise in which all human values and empathy is blown to the wind. Men become monsters and no suffering is too great to achieve the desired end by those with the bombs and bullets.

Meanwhile the whole world stands aside as if nothing evil has happened or is happening. That is where we all share part responsibility as elsewhere we eat and drink and party our short lives away.