Palestinian Lives Matter

While the murder of George Floyd provoked genuine public outrage, the death of this unfortunate individual has long since been hijacked by people who don’t really give a stuff about him or other blacks but are simply using it as a pretext for looting, wanton criminality, and an attack on America’s past. On July 4, people in Britain will be protesting a different injustice, the annexation of the West Bank by Israel. Hopefully, these protests will be peaceful as they usually are.

No reasonable person would deny that historically many blacks have had a hard time in America, and some still do, not for the ludicrous reasons claimed by Black Lives Matter and their fellow travellers, but due to poor social policy and economic upheavals. No one in the American Government has ever really been out to get blacks or to hold them down, certainly not since the 1970s, and some would say a long time before that. On the other hand, the suffering of the Palestinian people from the early Twentieth Century to date has been thoroughly documented.

Their problems really began with the issue of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, the most remarkable document in political history, one in which the government of one nation promised to a second the land of a third that was currently ruled by a fourth.  After the First World War, European Jews began arriving in their thousands  in what was then the Ottoman Empire, many more arrived with the British Mandate, and the Nazi persecution accelerated the new arrivals.

Israel and its apologists would have the world believe there ensued a titanic struggle in which the gallant Zionists surrounded on all sides by bloodthirsty A-rabs fought back heroically to establish the State of Israel. The reality is there was no Israeli War of Independence, the Arabs had no more chance against the well-armed settlers than tribal Africans against the colonial powers. Furthermore, the Zionists actually began a terror campaign against the Arabs and the British at the very time the Western democracies were fighting to save Jews from the Nazis. This “war within a war” included the November 1944 assassination of the British minister Lord Moyne in Cairo.

After the Second World War, the atrocities continued, including the notorious July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, in which 91 people were killed including 28 British citizens and 41 Arabs. The establishment of the State of Israel led to the great expulsion known as the Nakba, an act of ethnic cleansing.

The 1980s were a particularly turbulent time for the Palestinians, in particular the September 1982 massacre of Sabra & Shatilla followed by the First Intifada which began in December 1987 lasting until September 1993. This saw Israeli soldiers engaged in a particularly shocking tactic – breaking the arms of defenceless young men. A lot worse was to follow including two massacres in Gaza, erroneously called wars by the Zionists and their apologists. The shocking brutality of the First Intifada in particular alienated many people, including Jews, and would eventually prompt a serious fracture in the Zionist movement.

The decades long virtually unconditional support of the American Government due to pressure by a powerful political lobby that no mainstream politician dared name led to the situation we have today in which the Palestinians of the West Bank are treated little better than dogs. The West Bank was occupied by Israel at the start of the Six Day War, way back in 1967. Now, Israel’s rulers have decided mere occupation isn’t enough and plan to annex it. The aforementioned National Day of action has been organised in Britain for July 4, probably because unlike the Americans the Palestinians have nothing to celebrate on that day.

For all the good he has done at home, Donald Trump is a dedicated Zionist, but he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner have come up with a novel peace plan that would see the West Bank and Gaza united by a tunnel. Although it is better by far than what they have now, the Palestinians don’t think much of it. One doubts it will have much support either by those organising the July 4 protests.