For decades, the EU has devised ever more convoluted ways to avoid penalising Israel's illegal settlements, even as they devour a two-state solution it claims is the only path to regional peace
I tend to recoil at terms like "Western elites", but then I read this article, and, just, well, wow...
Main topic: oil.
"CSA’s annual reports show that in the 30 months between Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the council held at least 300 briefings with lawmakers of both parties and their staff."
Israel is a terminal cancer with global metastases across every human endeavour.yet it was and is welcomed into its hosts careless of the ultimate cost.
I had a friend several years ago with whom I had an ongoing friendly argument. He'd retired from the diplomatic service and knew a lot about how the world worked. He maintained that Israel and the Israel/Palestine conflict would (or could easily) lead to WW3, or at least some huge international conflict. Around the same time, another friend maintained that "the conflict at the eastern end of the Mediterranean wasn't 'big'", it just seemed big "because of the way it is thought about."
At the time although I was deeply involved in supporting the Palestine cause and was still "in recovery" from my cognitive dissonance over Zionism, I thought the first friend was exaggerating (ie "wrong") but thought the second one was complacent and minimising (ie wrong the other way).
Clearly, friend #1 was right and friend #2 wrong. But what did the latter mean by his "the way it is thought about"? Oil? Gas? Even "antisemitism" (he'd said back then he wasn't a Zionist but I notice that recently in print he's accepted the designation so we might reasonably draw a conclusion)?
The late Irish politician and scholarly writer (later called "statesman") Conor Cruise O'Brien was a non-Jewish Zionist and I remember him once writing very dismissively, "People have always been displaced throughout history", as if morality wasn't something human beings could develop and grow. And O'Brien was a self-proclaimed liberal, which at the time I think meant socially so and for the freedom of the individual.
I suppose his attitude would accord with saying that had an "Israel" been forced upon the indigenous people of Palestine in the nineteenth or eighteenth century there wouldn't have been a problem, and compare, say America, Australia, New Zealand et cetera. But we're supposed to be better than that now.
Are we really? Better than that now? Liberal guilt isn't much use if it doesn't make amends practically.
While Western corporate media supports Israel, nothing will change. Just imagine Sky News or the BBC regularly showing video evidence of West Bank settlers terrorising Palestinians with the full support of the IDF at the top of each hour! Cries of antisemitism or bias would echo through the corridors of power. The elephant in the room, the fact that Palestinians are Semites, is suppressed vigorously. Conditioning audiences to automatically think 'Jew' at every utterance the word has been successful.
It’s down to us to share this and bring this into the conversation. I’ve changed my name to bring up BDS in conversations. Put a poster in your window, go on a March or write on a T-shirt. And BDS, USA and Israel . It’s working and it makes you feel good, not buying stolen goods. BDSbarb
You are so right when you say: "The West’s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don’t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror."
We are looking into the mirror. The rubble, the murders, the starvation, the land grabs--that's our future in the West if we don't shut down the three evils of zionism, militarism and capitalism, the real power behind the first two.
Suppose that Hitler hadn't invaded and taken over France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and maybe Czechoslovakia, and hadn't tried to invade Britain. Suppose he had restricted his imperial ambitions to Slavic states, and his mass murder to Jews, Roma, disabled people, and communists.
Don't you think the UK, the US, maybe France etc., would have been happy to support him as their pit bull against communism and the Soviet Union?
The UK, the US, et alia would have made the same kind of protests that they make today about the Palestinians. And Germany would be a Nazi state today.
I'm not sure that would have been the case. Germany would have been, one assumes, immeasurably strengthened by those acquisitions in the East and social consolidation internally brought about by a decisive victory over the USSR. This potential expansion of any German Reich was long held to represent the greatest danger to their own imperial fortunes by Britain's ruling caste. Churchill in particular hated Germany regardless of whether it was ruled by a Kaiser or a Fuhrer. The same could be said of the United States under Roosevelt, who regarded Nazi power as a lethal threat to America's political system and global ambitions. These men didn't oppose Germany out of a sense of lofty principle, but material purposes linked to economic gain and suppression of rivals.
See the prophetic article by Michael Barnett, Nathan J. Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, "Israel's One-State Reality", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2023. (The subject also brings to mind the book "Middle East Illusions", by Noam Chomsky, from years earlier.)
I confess I increasingly feel really hopeless in the face of all of this...Is it just a question of 'chipping away' with letters and protests and boycotts or is there something more we could or should be doing? :(
I tend to recoil at terms like "Western elites", but then I read this article, and, just, well, wow...
Main topic: oil.
"CSA’s annual reports show that in the 30 months between Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the council held at least 300 briefings with lawmakers of both parties and their staff."
https://councilforsecureamerica.org
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/harold-hamm-trump-oil-israel-iran
The Eurocolonial empire does want a two-state solution. Problem is, the state that they envisage for the Palestinians people, is a state of death.
The Eurocolonial empire does want a two-state solution. Problem is, the state that they envisage for the Palestinians people, is a state of death.
Two state solution? Which state? It ALL belongs to Palestine. Until 1948.. Then the Zionists' genocide
began and has never ended.
Yeah. I saw some soap "Made in Israel" in Dollar General, supposedly from the Dead Sea. I didn't believe it for a second.
Netanjahu wants every last Palestinian dead, especially children, because they could continue their
precious lineage. And I do mean precious.
Oh Jonathan, I rage
Israel is a terminal cancer with global metastases across every human endeavour.yet it was and is welcomed into its hosts careless of the ultimate cost.
I had a friend several years ago with whom I had an ongoing friendly argument. He'd retired from the diplomatic service and knew a lot about how the world worked. He maintained that Israel and the Israel/Palestine conflict would (or could easily) lead to WW3, or at least some huge international conflict. Around the same time, another friend maintained that "the conflict at the eastern end of the Mediterranean wasn't 'big'", it just seemed big "because of the way it is thought about."
At the time although I was deeply involved in supporting the Palestine cause and was still "in recovery" from my cognitive dissonance over Zionism, I thought the first friend was exaggerating (ie "wrong") but thought the second one was complacent and minimising (ie wrong the other way).
Clearly, friend #1 was right and friend #2 wrong. But what did the latter mean by his "the way it is thought about"? Oil? Gas? Even "antisemitism" (he'd said back then he wasn't a Zionist but I notice that recently in print he's accepted the designation so we might reasonably draw a conclusion)?
The late Irish politician and scholarly writer (later called "statesman") Conor Cruise O'Brien was a non-Jewish Zionist and I remember him once writing very dismissively, "People have always been displaced throughout history", as if morality wasn't something human beings could develop and grow. And O'Brien was a self-proclaimed liberal, which at the time I think meant socially so and for the freedom of the individual.
I suppose his attitude would accord with saying that had an "Israel" been forced upon the indigenous people of Palestine in the nineteenth or eighteenth century there wouldn't have been a problem, and compare, say America, Australia, New Zealand et cetera. But we're supposed to be better than that now.
Are we really? Better than that now? Liberal guilt isn't much use if it doesn't make amends practically.
Andy Burnham? Prime minister?
"People have always been displaced throughout history" Conor Cruise O'Brien
Coming from an Irish citizen, that's more than true. It's tragic.
While Western corporate media supports Israel, nothing will change. Just imagine Sky News or the BBC regularly showing video evidence of West Bank settlers terrorising Palestinians with the full support of the IDF at the top of each hour! Cries of antisemitism or bias would echo through the corridors of power. The elephant in the room, the fact that Palestinians are Semites, is suppressed vigorously. Conditioning audiences to automatically think 'Jew' at every utterance the word has been successful.
It’s down to us to share this and bring this into the conversation. I’ve changed my name to bring up BDS in conversations. Put a poster in your window, go on a March or write on a T-shirt. And BDS, USA and Israel . It’s working and it makes you feel good, not buying stolen goods. BDSbarb
You are so right when you say: "The West’s only real concern is in ensuring its own publics don’t realise, as they watch a genocidal state disappear the Palestinians, that they are looking into the mirror."
We are looking into the mirror. The rubble, the murders, the starvation, the land grabs--that's our future in the West if we don't shut down the three evils of zionism, militarism and capitalism, the real power behind the first two.
Here's a counterfactual thought-experiment.
Suppose that Hitler hadn't invaded and taken over France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and maybe Czechoslovakia, and hadn't tried to invade Britain. Suppose he had restricted his imperial ambitions to Slavic states, and his mass murder to Jews, Roma, disabled people, and communists.
Don't you think the UK, the US, maybe France etc., would have been happy to support him as their pit bull against communism and the Soviet Union?
The UK, the US, et alia would have made the same kind of protests that they make today about the Palestinians. And Germany would be a Nazi state today.
I'm not sure that would have been the case. Germany would have been, one assumes, immeasurably strengthened by those acquisitions in the East and social consolidation internally brought about by a decisive victory over the USSR. This potential expansion of any German Reich was long held to represent the greatest danger to their own imperial fortunes by Britain's ruling caste. Churchill in particular hated Germany regardless of whether it was ruled by a Kaiser or a Fuhrer. The same could be said of the United States under Roosevelt, who regarded Nazi power as a lethal threat to America's political system and global ambitions. These men didn't oppose Germany out of a sense of lofty principle, but material purposes linked to economic gain and suppression of rivals.
Thank you, Mr. Cook
"Out, damned spot!
See the prophetic article by Michael Barnett, Nathan J. Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, "Israel's One-State Reality", Foreign Affairs, May/June 2023. (The subject also brings to mind the book "Middle East Illusions", by Noam Chomsky, from years earlier.)
Jeff Stokes
San Diego, USA
https://thenewinvestigator.substack.com/
I confess I increasingly feel really hopeless in the face of all of this...Is it just a question of 'chipping away' with letters and protests and boycotts or is there something more we could or should be doing? :(
Any pol uttering the phrase should have a map of the two supposed viable states and plan for rolling back settlements in the way.