Double Standards

The democratically elected Palestinian government are told they will not be talked to or supported or anything unless they “renounce violence” and recognise the state of Israel. Fair enough, perhaps. And I certainly have no time for Hamas and their tactics in the past. It’s clear there needs to be dialogue and discussion in order to get closer to some kind of just peace, and it seems unlikely that an organisation which doesn’t even recognise the right of the State of Israel to exist is going to be able to negotiate with it.

The new democratically elected Israeli government are welcomed to the table and feted by world leaders. Funding and investment is free to flow. Has this government been asked to recognise the State of Palestine? No. Has it, even more crucially, been asked to renounce violence? Has it bollocks. It is still as violent as ever, and the daily tally of Palestinians killed by the Israeli state mounts. Why are there these double standards?

No need to answer that question. We all know why there are double standards, and why there will continue to be double standards even if the Palestinians elect a party of neo-liberal Gandhis. The world will continue to shit on the Palestinians, and nobody in power will do the slightest thing about it. Indeed, it’s in Israel’s interests (and a fair few other countries) if Palestine dissolves in Civil War and implodes. It certainly looks like that’s the current intention of the “international community” (whoever they are).

Now Olmert wants to redraw the borders, ignoring the internationally recognised borders of the Palestinian State. As laid down in various UN Resolutions. How is this supposed to help anyone? Israelis fundamentally want safety and security (and I believe that while there are some scummers within Israeli society who want to annex Palestine and ethnically cleanse the territories and even commit genocide, the vast vast majority just want to live in safety). How is this supposed to help that? Israel will forever have on its borders a dispossessed angry bitter people, supported by tons of other people around the world who see the injustice of the situation, me included. Is that what Israelis want? It may be what Sharon and his ilk want, but it’s not, I suspect, what the average Israeli wants. Israel will always be a pariah state and the people living across the green line – fundamentalist settler or not – will always be hated by most of the world. Sorry guys, that’s your fate and that’s your future if you go along with this Olmert plan.

Blog resurrection

I have decided to resurrect this blog as I can no longer sit idly by and say nothing as the world’s media seemingly bows down to the idea that starving Palestinians because some of them voted for the wrong people is kind of an OK policy, and that the Olmert proposal to steal even more Palestinian land is the best way forward. (Of course, Israel still claims that the world’s media is against them, which is laughable. Even the BBC is seemingly just ready to kowtow to the Olmert/Sharon line – though I was glad to see recently that an independent inquiry had discovered what most non-blind people had been able to tell for years, that the Beeb is actually biased against the Palestinian cause). Anyway, whatever’s below this post and written before 2005 is stuff I wrote when I was in the West Bank, and everything above this post and written in 2006 and beyond is stuff I am writing from elsewhere.