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Israel-Palestine: the original sin ignored – again
23/01/2019 10:32 / Leave a comment
As I read the article on Israel and Palestine below, I thought for a moment that The Guardian was being uncharacteristically fearless. But no. It’s OK on the actions of the present but silent about the more distant past. Even the Amos Oz quote helps it to do that. What’s this talk of unavoidable occupations? The original occupation in 1948 wasn’t unavoidable. But few people point that out. Even my hero Daniel Barenboim has glossed over this: the problem, he said, is that Israel is currently breaking its own human rights declaration by its treatment of the Palestinians. So it is. But what’s a human rights declaration worth when it’s signed by an an ethnic cleanser? When Corbyn was forced to sign the “anti-semitism” document last year, which included the codicil on not referring to the state of Israel as a racist endeavour, Barnaby Raine, a Jewish member of the Labour Party, told Channel 4 News that Israel was a racist endeavour because it involved the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinians.
Now, I’m not asking that, because of this, Israel should be bombed out of existence. But there must be an acknowledgement of the past before there can be a viable future.