FROM NOON WEDNESDAY.
This midweek I am joined by Dr. Yvonne Ridley, Lloyd Quinan and my special guest Mick Napier founder member of the Scottish Palestinian Campaign Group.
Our topic is, of course, Gaza and the events before and since the ICJ judgement. Israel may be ignoring the findings however, as my guests discuss the rest of the world is taking notice.
We even have the UK Government talking of recognising the Palestinian State. Something unheard of for the past 75 years. Norway has pointed out that the nations of the world that withdrew funding from UNRWA may just find themselves in the Hague for assisting in a genocide.
We discuss the assassinations carried out on patients in the Jenin Hospital by members of the Israeli armed forces. A blatant war crime that has now been beamed all round the world. We marvel that even the very pro Israeli BBC carried this war crime story although in true BBC modus operandi they was very specific with their language in an attempt to lessen the impact of this barbaric act by the IDF.
We bring news of a ground breaking court case from the USA that could possibly set a precedent for dissatisfied Democrats throughout the corrupted western world.
We highlight and discuss more heinous actions on the Palestinians and try to find something positive in their plight.
Please share our video the more people who see this the bigger the chance we can bring to an end the illegal slaughter in Palestine.
I want to say that I absolutely and unequivocally abhor the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza and Israel, whether by Israel or by Hamas. The wholesale slaughter of people is a war crime, and Israel will, with Hamas, have to answer to the ICJ in due course. Netanyahu seems to be perfectly sanguine about that future verdict, and, meantime, a two-state solution is being sought by the UK.
Having said that, I am a realist and a pragmatist, and I think that Yvonne is right: the Israelis are very angry and they will not stop now. They will obey the substance of the ICJ interim ruling, but they will not obey the spirit of it: instead of killing Palestinian civilians in their quest to eliminate Hamas, they will now concentrate on taking out Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthie/Iranian National Guard wherever they are. Those were not IDF soldiers in that hospital; they were Israeli intelligence/secret service and the operation was similar to the one in Uganda when Israeli athletes were slaughtered.
The UNRWA funding will start up again just as soon as those responsible for diverting the funds are held to account. I am not sanguine about the UN agencies. They have been complicit in vile human rights violations in Grenada, in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in a few of the African states, with sexual services being exchanged for food, human trafficking, etc., and private fortunes being made. It is always a minority, but the UN is always damaged. Alternative sources of funding will have to be found if the Palestinian aid is not to be disrupted for long.
The threats of settlement in Gaza are just that, threats, chutzpah. This would not be an encroachment against a UN directive; it would be a blatant disregard for international law, which even Israel cannot afford to ignore. For the moment, it is bluster and retaliatory sabre-rattling. What they will do is try to push more Palestinians to seek refuge in Egypt and Jordan (the Israelis claim, with some justification via DNA, that although the ancient Philistine bloodline appears to have been absorbed into others, the mass of the present Palestinian population is Syrian (with other Arab DNA, in origin). That pre 1939 Palestine was a settled and largely Arab area cannot be denied either, but, if Israel falls now, what will happen? Where will they go, the survivors?
I don’t think that an Arab Spring is possible in the West, Yvonne, but it would be an admirable thing in the Middle East for Arab peoples to follow their own ways of creating democracy. I am not sure that that is even possible now, given the reaction of the authorities in Egypt, the religious police and Ayatollahs. If it happened in the West, it would lead to a direct confrontation with Islam, Sharia Law and all the other Islamic practices that would not sit well here. Islam and Christianity, the two philosophical entities behind each are, largely, incompatible and spring from very different sources. I listened to Netanyahu the other day and he said that every Western leader who had come to Israel had stated their private sympathies but were unable to support Israel openly because of public opinion. He is a wily, old fox, but, nevertheless, he is probably being truthful.
Unlike Islam, Judaism is not a religion of ‘conversion’ enforced or otherwise, which is why it, and the Jewish people, have survived thousands of pogroms in more or less every country in the world. Trying to put an embargo on funding for Israel would, I suspect, meet with great disapproval from the Zionist and Jewish lobbies, and money would still find it way to the ‘homeland’. Whatever we feel about the Palestinians and the justice of their cause, the Jews did live in Israel two thousand years ago, were expelled by the occupying and colonial Roman forces and settled all over the known world, including in many what are now Arab states. The dream of returning to Israel has always been a Jewish ancestral aim, just as returning to Palestine as was, is the Palestinian dream.
Israel, however, will never allow itself to be overrun or to be eliminated. What if Israel did fall, though, what would happen? The state would be taken over again by the Palestinians (and the other Arab allied nations) not one of who has ever agreed to recognize Israel or, indeed, the right, if it exists in international law, and I think it does, of Israelis to live again in Israel, and its nuclear weapons would fall into Arab hands. A dream or a nightmare for the West? An independent Scotland would also need to think about its alliances and mesalliances. We, too, would require to be pragmatic, as Ireland is being. We are no better and no worse than anyone else. The kinds of hard left, just be kind, attitudes that appear to be prevalent today, and which have served us ill over the past nine years, will not wash in an independent Scotland when the cold wind of reality starts to blow.