In Gaza, on the West Bank, and inside the Green Line, Christmas is focusing attention on the fact that Israel is waging a war on three fronts to remove the Holy Land from Christendom by removing the Christians from the Holy Land.
It is clear from the Bible that the pre-Israelite population, the founders of Jerusalem, never went away. They never have. They became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did, and they adopted the use of Arabic at the time of a Muslim Conquest contemporaneous with the Saxon Conquest of what is now England. Those ancient indigenous Christians are still there. The founders of modern Palestinian identity, they are the people of Shireen Abu Akleh, the people of Saint George. They have never been more imperilled than they are today.
The seasonal concern about that is only one of the growing number of worries that are being expressed by a growing number of people. Now including even Ben Wallace, even in the Daily Telegraph. “Netanyahu’s mistake was to miss the attack in the first place. But if he thinks a killing rage will rectify matters, then he is very wrong. His methods will not solve this problem. In fact, I believe his tactics will fuel the conflict for another 50 years.”
You could have read that on here every day from 7th October onwards. Yet as with the utterances, and indeed the occasional actions, of David Cameron, Andrew Mitchell and Rishi Sunak, any Labour MP who said such a thing would lose the whip, and any other member of the Labour Party would be expelled. Labour is now worse than Wallace, and worse than the Telegraph. It is now the greater evil, worse than the Tories. We should no more want Labour to win the next General Election than most of its MPs wanted it to win the last two, or than any of its staff wanted it to win the last four.
But 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 on the day that 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.
Thank God, someone who understands. All the founders of Palestinian identity in the nineteenth and twentieth century were Christians, the founders of the PFLP and DFLP came from Christian families, I expect you know all this.
ReplyDeleteInside out, as I expect that you do. George Habash was given an Orthodox funeral, and Nayef Hawatmeh remains a practising Melkite. The Melkite Church, of course, has its roots in the same Arab opposition to Greek clerical hegemony that characterised Falastin and its founders from within the El-Issa Christian dynasty of Jaffa. It and they were marked doubly by that and by anti-Zionism.
DeleteDefined by Christians as explicitly Arab, explicitly Palestinian identity was already strong enough to launch a runaway successful weekly newspaper in 1911, daily from 1929. The El-Issa brothers behind it were born in the 1870s, and both the Ottomans and the British danced to the Zionists' tune by repeatedly trying to shut down their publication, but it lasted until 1967.
There is simply no doubt that the Arabs, led by the Christians of immemorial descent in the Land, identified as a distinctly and specifically Palestinian people by the time that Yousef El-Issa was born in their then stronghold of Jaffa, Canaanite and Crusader, in 1870.
You get people who say it dates from only the 1960s, just barking mad like that. Or do they not believe it but it's where the money is? Plus did you see that loony on Channel 4 News accusing Layla Moran of a blood libel for saying two women had been killed by a sniper in Holy Family Church?
DeleteThey do not believe it, but it is where the money is. For now, anyway. The Royal Family of Abu Dhabi is about to buy the Telegraph Group, for a start.
DeleteYuri Edelstein, sometime Speaker of the Knesset, and all-time Ukrainian-born son of an Orthodox priest in Russia. Self-identification is very much the spirit of the age.
10 Tory MPs including ex-Cabinet ministers have written to Cameron tonight to call for a ceasefire.
ReplyDeleteAnd the supremely spooky Alicia Kearns, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, says that Israel has "gone beyond self-defence", thereby losing moral authority. Bring on another Commons vote. If only to show them all up as gobs on sticks. But preferably not.
DeleteInterviewing a Catholic priest based on Jerusalem, a BBC news presenter just asked whether Israel was or was not discriminating between "Palestinians" and "Christians" in its attacks on Gaza. A profoundly revealing comment.
ReplyDeleteHow did Father reply? I know how I would have done.
DeleteThey've finally gone too far saying there are no churches in Gaza and all that, people are starting to call them out as liars generally. "There never used to be any Palestinian people, not until the twentieth century." Bullshit.
ReplyDeleteYou'll be aware of those funny people who say "Palestinians used to mean Jews".
DeleteTreasure them while we can. We and they are living in their very last days.
DeletePassports, coins, stamps, maps, they all said Palestine until 1948, the publicly owned railways were called Palestine Railways, none of that referred to the terrorists who blew up the public infrastructure.
DeleteThose who come out with any old rubbish instead are used to being agreed with, but even the Americans are tiring of such indulgence. From Stephen Fry to Bill Maher, when all that you have left is elderly comedians, then you have lost.
DeleteBoth bitter Boomers, it's truly shocking to American and British metropolitan liberal elites how pro-Israel most young people in America and most people of all ages in Britain aren't.
DeleteMaher is now ranting against politically active students. That generation's dotage is sublime.
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