And The Walls Came Tumbling Down?

The first known military coup was when Elah, the fourth King of Israel, was overthrown by his chariot commander, Zimri. Zimri reigned as the fifth King of Israel for all of seven days before committing suicide in the face of imminent defeat at the hands of the army of Omri, who reigned for 12 years as the sixth King of Israel. The seventh, eighth and ninth Kings of Israel were Omri's son and two of Omri's grandsons. Meanwhile, "Zimri" became the word for a treacherous servant who murdered his master, all the way down to John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, in which the character of Zimri stands for the Duke of Buckingham. Think on.

As the late Rabbi Lionel Blue once said to me of the Jews, "You only have to look at us to see that we are all the descendants of converts."  I later came across the same line in his published autobiography, one of the most remarkable books that I have ever read. I once annoyed a Blair groupie no end when he asked whether I had seen "the Leader" on this or that, and I replied that, no, I had been, "at Rabbi Lionel Blue's birthday party, what can you do?" "Yes, David," he snarled back, "What can you do?" But I digress. "You only have to look at us to see that we are all the descendants of converts," could also be said of the Palestinians, and they are about to get quite an influx, not without disturbance to their chronically useless leaders.

"Palestine" has contracted over time from the name of the southern part of a Levant that was meant as a whole by the name of "Syria", to that of the area covered by the British Mandate, to that of the land west of the Jordan. There are still people who would adhere to each definition; the Hashemites never have any trouble finding people who were Palestinian enough to harass on that East Bank where numerous Biblical events took place, while there will possibly never be a ruler at Damascus who fully accepted the existence of a distinct identity or of an independent state in Syria Palestina.

And the Palestinians used to be everyone in or from Palestine, descended somewhere along the line from everyone who had ever traversed that crossroads, on which stands the oldest continuous human settlement on Earth, which was well over seven thousand years old at the earliest date that the Israelites might have entered the Land by conquering it. By the way, I am not disputing that they did, although most historians now deny the Conquest outright, and that includes most people teaching the Old Testament in universities, where the Histories are widely held to be the invented past for the people without a past. Having been brought in from all over the place by the Persians, they were in need of narratives to define a common culture that identified them with their new homeland, but those narratives had little or no factual content. Not everyone would go that far, but the days of John Bright's History of Israel are long gone. Like so much of secular Modernity, secular Zionism is baseless in its own terms.

Bringing us to the creation of the State of Israel, which, for the first time ever, effectively redefined Palestinian identity to exclude Jews, not as an act of the remaining Palestinians, but as an act of a section of the Jews, the section most recently arrived there. And now comes the potential triumph within that section of the ethnic supremacists over those who cleaved to a vision, however improbable, of their state as an outpost of liberal democracy. Everyone is a one-state solutionist now. That lies at the root of the revolt against the Palestinian Authority, the elderly stalwarts of which are the last significant holdouts for two states, since they would be finished on any other basis.

Other than them, from the River to the Sea, the divide is now between those who wanted the one state to have constitutionally guaranteed rights upheld by universal suffrage and an independent judiciary, not that we should overrate the Israeli judiciary hitherto, and those who wanted an apartheid state. Should the latter prevail, then what was already the open military mutiny against the role of upholding the New Order would mean that a New Force would have to be constituted. Let the probable brown majority of Israeli Jews, and the definite brown and black majority, take note that that Force would recruit white supremacists from every continent. By, in and for the only state certainly to have nuclear weapons without confirming that fact. The international coverage of this crisis is not disproportionate.

With the possible but unclear exception of Alba, every political party in the present House of Commons has picked the same side. Little has changed there. Throughout the existence of apartheid South Africa, its two staunchest allies were Britain and Israel. It was supported by British Governments of both parties. Opposition to it in Britain was confined to the churches (although by no means always all the way down to the people in the pews, or even to a fairly sizeable section of the clergy), to a few extremely liberal upper-class Tories, to the Liberal Party, to the Labour Left, to the Communist Party, and to the Far Left. The last three had some influence in and through the trade unions and the student unions, but beyond that all six were politically marginal.

Things may be better this time, though. When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And I say again that on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.