I don't know how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever be solved. But what I do know is that shooting unarmed protesting citizens with live bullets is against international law and is morally wrong. Sixteen people were killed on the edge of Gaza yesterday and hundreds of unarmed citizens, including many children, were injured. They were shot by the Israeli army.
Instead of hanging their heads in shame, unapologetic Israeli spokespeople try to justify the murders and injuries by saying that the demonstrating Palestinians were preparing to attack the fence that Israel erected to turn the Gaza strip into a kind of prison camp. After the shootings, the fence remained undamaged.
There are also reports that the Israeli army used drones to drop canisters of tear gas on the protesters who were gathering within their own territory - not on the Palestinian land that Israel purloined.
I expect that these terrible events will effectively be swept under the carpet. The United Nations will fail to step in in any meaningful manner and Israel will continue to enjoy the unqualified support of The United States now happily boosted by President "Me-Me-Me" Trump.
You may have guessed that my instinctive sympathies lie with embattled Palestinians. However, most certainly and quite definitely, this does not make me anti-Semitic. It is the self-righteousness and the brutality of the Israeli state that I seriously question and not the Jewish faith.
May those who were murdered yesterday rest in peace. They were people too.
Who knows how it will be solved ....who knows
ReplyDeleteCertainly not Tony Blair who was the highly paid UN Middle East Envoy for so long.
DeleteThe "holy land"....for what that's worth. It's 2018, humans should be more evolved than this.
ReplyDeleteYou are right. "Holy Land" has become a bitterly ironic name.
DeleteAll through history there have been wars. It seems to me that until humans are extinct they will never cease.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I believe that you are right Briony.
DeleteI was going to say what Briony said, only less succinctly. This particular conflict has been going on for so long.
ReplyDeleteSuch a long time but once jews and arabs seemed to live in relative harmony in this region.
DeleteThe amount of murders committed in the name of religion - just in the last century and into this one - is absolutely and horrifyingly unconscionable!
ReplyDeleteI am a firm believer in the notion that all persons born have the same potential. What happens to them and what they achieve during their lifetimes is a matter of circumstance and opportunity. Along the way, every person is striving for the same thing. To survive, to live in peace, to feed and cloth and house themselves and their offspring. And when something tragic happens to one of them, if you think, it happens to all of us. Because there is one less person on whom we can say that they reached their potential.
And it continues ad nauseam................
As the English poet John Donne wrote, "Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee",
DeleteWell said !
DeleteAs a species we just never learn. If only "religion" could be overcome by "humanity".
ReplyDeleteI sometimes wonder how it might have been if more women were leaders,
DeleteThe Palestinian / Israeli situation is irrational. The bullies seem to be able to get away with anything.
ReplyDeleteSadly, nothing changes. Lessons will never be learned.
ReplyDeleteMan's inhumanity towards man will continue ad infinitum..
I feel essentially the same way, but I am always hesitant to speak out about this issue for fear of being misconstrued as anti-semitic. It seems to me that to criticize Israel as a state automatically makes one an anti-semite in many people's eyes.
ReplyDelete