BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
SEPTEMBER 2010.
POLITICS IN THE
PUB
I am a political
conservative. I think less government is better, and that our
government should keep it's fingers out of foreign politics. I am
also a libertarian. So believe that if fellow citizens wish to
express either captious or lauditory opinions about Mahommed,
totalitarian forms of government, feminism or race etc, then they
should be free to do so, and enjoy the utmost protection from our
forces of law and order against those who have differing opinions.
Sometimes I go to a hotbed of radical extremism in Surrey Hills at the
Gaelic Club. The group calls itself Politics in the Pub" and meet
Fridays. They provide featured speakers on, well, radical
subjects. Last Friday there was a film maker whose subject was
the poor mistreated Palestinians. So far as I could establish,
she felt that the Palestinians were in the right because they were so
hopeless at winning against the Israelis. "You just have to look
at the fatality count comparison" she said.
"Well Duh" I thought. "Would you sympathize with the crooks
because the cops seem to always win?"
Lets look at a brief
narrative of Israeli history. Israel has been occupied since
Roman times. (and before that, if you read it up). The
count of Jews living there has been subject to the whims of the
occupying power. The Turks transported a lot out in the 19th
Century. The Turks transported lots of their subject races, just
ask a Greek. Then after the Turkish defeat of WWI the Brits got
Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations.
Back in the 1940's the Israelis and the Palestinians were having a
civil war. The newly formed UN did what it should have done in 1994 in
Rwanda. It divided the country along the ceasefire line, and
declared two nations, Palestine and Israel. Neither side was
happy, but it was better than civil war.
In the 1950's the Suez Crisis increased tension, when UK and France
joined up with Israel to counter Egypt's unilateral abrogation of the
Suez Canal treaty.
In 1967 the Palestinians united with others (Syria, Jordan and Egypt)
and broke that peace by mobilizing for an invasion of Israel.
Much to the humiliation of Arab pride, the Israelis took six days to
wipe them off the map. The Israelis ended up with the Sinai
peninsula and Golan Heights, and the West Bank (Palestine).
The Egyptians subsequently signed a peace treaty with the Israelis, and
got all of their territory (Sinai and the Suez Canal) back. Since
then relations between Israel have been civilized, if not cordial.
The Syrians declined to sign a peace treaty and still have not got
Golan Heights back.
The Palestinians have refused to sign a peace treaty, but nonetheless
have got most of Palestine back, but as an occupied country with
limited self rule. The Israelis have at times (e.g. under the
auspices of Bill Clinton?) offered all the territory (to UN 1967
borders, even including parts of Jerusalem, I believe) back, but balked
at granting the "Right of Return".
My own narrative of why peace is not happening is that there are too
many players, too much oil money, and overriding religious reasons.
The Shia Sunni struggle is between the Iranians and the Saudis.
Both have oil money. The Iranians have a theocratic Shia
dictatorship with a somewhat rebellious population of around 70
million. The Saudis have a non sectarian kingdom of about 25
million with an independent extremist wahhabi cleric estate. Iraq
is mostly Shia. Egypt has no money but 80 million people.
The Israeli Palestinian struggle is between proxies for those powers.
All middle eastern states are Muslim, and Mahommed taught that they
should not fight among themselves. He also provided the example
of persecuting Jews. (Although his actions belied his words, such
as "do as I say, not as I do". Mahommed was a powerful warlord
and slaveowner who always spoke words of peace and spoke against
slavery.) Israel is thus a state of extreme interest to all
Muslims.
I have no respect for those who seem to assume that the Israelis are in
the wrong because the fatality count is what it is. My answer to
them is, compare that fatality count to the populations of Muslims and
Jews, or Arabs and Israelis.
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