What has been happening to Palestinians over decades is described, if it is described at all, in the blandest of terms. Are they 'settlers' - excuse me old chap whilst I borrow your house'? Or people armed and supported by the IDF, brutalising and killing Palestinians and destroying or stealing their property and land? Sounds pretty close to pogroms as the general said. Whilst there are mass arrests of Palestinians of all ages, thrown in jail and if they are lucky getting tried by a military tribunal. A brief look at the map of the West Bank and how it has been utterly fragmented shows how the Israeli state has set about destroying any possibility of a feasible Palestinian state and made life impossible for Palestinians there.
Whilst Gaza has been surrounded and blockaded like the worst of the ghettos. And now destroyed without regard to casualties. Using AI to provide supposed objectivity - or rather to avoid any moral responsibility.
Berlin has the magnificent Jewish museum which is an essential visit, perhaps even more so than the concentration camps, to explain what happened and how. It includes a section which describes in a series of banners how laws and regulations were steadily introduced that excluded Jews from society, marginalised them and set them apart. Enabling the wider population to think of them as less than human and to ignore their suffering. Dachau was after all, only just outside Munich. At the time I was thinking of recent events in the USA and UK with leaders with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. But then I realised that it exactly describes what has been happening in Israel and its treatment of Palestinians over the decades.
Look at the language of the current Israeli government, in words and writing, driven by their ultra-orthodox, ultra-Zionist partners. Unequivocal in their ambitions of establishing a greater Israel - from the river to the sea in other words, with no space for Palestinians. When you find that your 'allies' are coming from the Far Right in other countries, the traditional home of the worst of anti-semitism, you should be asking yourself some tough questions. Whilst courageous Israelis and NGOs protest and are themselves persecuted.
As you describe in your own book Matt - just finished and excellent if tough reading - terrorism does not usually come from nowhere. When a group is persecuted for decades, with a massive imbalance of conventional power and wealth, it provides a breeding ground for responses in the form of terrorism. Not 'justifiable' in any humanitarian terms but they are often 'explainable'. Dismissing all criticism as just anti-semitism feeds the cancer of that appalling bigotry, and as you describe here, the real anti-semites have broken cover. Similarly somehow invoking the Holocaust to justify the most brutal of responses debases the memory of that horror.
That great political philosopher Gary Winston Lineker got into a certain amount of hot water for comparing the rhetoric of Suella Braverman* to that of the Nazis; some Israeli spokesdroids have been uttering /way/ worse things of late.
* I learned yesterday that “Suella Braverman” is an anagram of “smaller Eva Braun”. This made me happy.
Thanks Matt - willingly misunderstanding a contemporary hell by misinterpreting another shows Murray and his ilk to be what they are: ideologues with a barely veiled agenda with allegiances and principles so light that they are tacked to any convenient trend.
A comment on Murray. Piers Morgan invited him on (why?) after Norman Finkelstein had given a perfectly clear and transparently honest explanation of his earlier comments about not condemning Hamas for October 7th. Undeterred, Murray, virtually frothing at the mouth, said that Finkelstein was a sociopath and a psychopath. A new level in argumentum ad hominem!
It was an Israeli general, reported in Israeli media, who described what was happening in the West Bank as 'pogroms': https://www.timesofisrael.com/settler-extremists-sowing-terror-huwara-riot-was-a-pogrom-top-general-says/
What has been happening to Palestinians over decades is described, if it is described at all, in the blandest of terms. Are they 'settlers' - excuse me old chap whilst I borrow your house'? Or people armed and supported by the IDF, brutalising and killing Palestinians and destroying or stealing their property and land? Sounds pretty close to pogroms as the general said. Whilst there are mass arrests of Palestinians of all ages, thrown in jail and if they are lucky getting tried by a military tribunal. A brief look at the map of the West Bank and how it has been utterly fragmented shows how the Israeli state has set about destroying any possibility of a feasible Palestinian state and made life impossible for Palestinians there.
Whilst Gaza has been surrounded and blockaded like the worst of the ghettos. And now destroyed without regard to casualties. Using AI to provide supposed objectivity - or rather to avoid any moral responsibility.
Berlin has the magnificent Jewish museum which is an essential visit, perhaps even more so than the concentration camps, to explain what happened and how. It includes a section which describes in a series of banners how laws and regulations were steadily introduced that excluded Jews from society, marginalised them and set them apart. Enabling the wider population to think of them as less than human and to ignore their suffering. Dachau was after all, only just outside Munich. At the time I was thinking of recent events in the USA and UK with leaders with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. But then I realised that it exactly describes what has been happening in Israel and its treatment of Palestinians over the decades.
Look at the language of the current Israeli government, in words and writing, driven by their ultra-orthodox, ultra-Zionist partners. Unequivocal in their ambitions of establishing a greater Israel - from the river to the sea in other words, with no space for Palestinians. When you find that your 'allies' are coming from the Far Right in other countries, the traditional home of the worst of anti-semitism, you should be asking yourself some tough questions. Whilst courageous Israelis and NGOs protest and are themselves persecuted.
As you describe in your own book Matt - just finished and excellent if tough reading - terrorism does not usually come from nowhere. When a group is persecuted for decades, with a massive imbalance of conventional power and wealth, it provides a breeding ground for responses in the form of terrorism. Not 'justifiable' in any humanitarian terms but they are often 'explainable'. Dismissing all criticism as just anti-semitism feeds the cancer of that appalling bigotry, and as you describe here, the real anti-semites have broken cover. Similarly somehow invoking the Holocaust to justify the most brutal of responses debases the memory of that horror.
About which it was said, never again.
That great political philosopher Gary Winston Lineker got into a certain amount of hot water for comparing the rhetoric of Suella Braverman* to that of the Nazis; some Israeli spokesdroids have been uttering /way/ worse things of late.
* I learned yesterday that “Suella Braverman” is an anagram of “smaller Eva Braun”. This made me happy.
That might just have become my favourite anagram!
I think it's just edged into second place by “Virginia Bottomley” = “Im an evil Tory bigot”.
Thanks Matt - willingly misunderstanding a contemporary hell by misinterpreting another shows Murray and his ilk to be what they are: ideologues with a barely veiled agenda with allegiances and principles so light that they are tacked to any convenient trend.
A comment on Murray. Piers Morgan invited him on (why?) after Norman Finkelstein had given a perfectly clear and transparently honest explanation of his earlier comments about not condemning Hamas for October 7th. Undeterred, Murray, virtually frothing at the mouth, said that Finkelstein was a sociopath and a psychopath. A new level in argumentum ad hominem!
As a rule of thumb, being in favour of something Douglas Murray the KKK is against, and vice-versa, rarely fails.