Current Affairs

Its a game of whack-a-mole, as the hammer goes down on one hole, then a mole pops up from another hole. That is Israel’s problem, it is fighting a continual battle to suppress the voices of the Palestinians, whether you agree with the analogy or not, Israel is playing a game that it cannot win. The answer according to settlers is to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza from a myriad of voices, religions and ethnicities, which is always forgotten by the majority of newsrooms.

Trump has fallen into the trap of the settlers language and arguments, no doubt because of his son in law Kirchner, but the reality is that Israeli’s are from as diverse landscape as the West Bankers and Gazan’s, but what you don’t know is there are conversations that are just as angry and racially motivated about the ethnic make up of the Israeli state. Those standing in the square in Tel Aviv are thought of as a by-gone generation that once held enormous power in Israel. They are an elite that is dying out as the kibbutzs are privatised and the safety of their positions in universities as philosophers, geneticists and designers are the last vestiges of a liberal argument that once held the same view as the majority.

The diversity of the Israeli state is also a realisation of arguments put together by the states political elite. The settlement to get the hostages back is also thought of as a weakness of the super state that can do anything. Israelis are confident in their military, most have served and most Israelis believe in the military strength of the state. But that was not what happened on the 7^th October, and it was the shock in the failure of the security apparatus that has led to a hardening of views among Israelis.   

Trump has fed into this argument, naive and a bit stupid, he has fed into arguments of ethnic cleansing as an answer to the Israeli problem. It is a nice way to think that you can cleanse a state of voices, especially as two thirds of those in the West Bank and Gaza were ethnically cleansed in the Nakba, or as the Palestinians put it more succinctly, the great tragedy. The Palestinians a mobile people who are neither sure whether to fight to the last voice or to live a life under Israeli rule; but what the great tragedy is to Palestinians, is what Belsen, Auschwitz and the final solution is to Jews in Israel.

Whether the Israeli state recognises the parallels to what happened in Europe is also a question of the arguments that emanate among the Palestinians and that is whether they can voice their concerns. The voices in Washington have heard their President argue that Gaza is a valueless property, which he would like to develop into a US haven in the Middle East, but the concept is colonial in its inception and the argument is whether there are different voices, identities and ethnicities in Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

The arguments are hardening, two brothers were arrested for owning a bookshop that held books which detailed Palestinian arguments. A favourite bookshop among journalists and tourists, it also served the community of East Jerusalem. The censor confiscated two-thirds of the books that they owned and the shop was closed in much the same way as books were burned in the 1930s. But it is very much the control of the narrative that is at the heart of the Israeli censor and though they are trying to control the narrative in Israel, the same arguments found in the bookshop are being publicised right across the West. The arguments that have been put forward by Trump is also an argument that came from the Israeli state, which is – there is not a Palestinian people and an Arab is an Arab. Naive and very ill informed after the battles of the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Israeli State got the news it wanted after Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, but there are voices that think the idea of ethnic cleansing is nonsense. The idea that was put is very much the argument of the hard right in Israel, which wants an Eretz Israel, a super state that has borders from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean sea, it is an idea that the super state will be peopled with living space, much the same way Hitler viewed Ukraine. Ideologically it believes in the racial superiority of the Jew and as such it is an argument that percolates among the hard right.

In digressing from the argument of what the Israeli state is and what it wants is difficult to fathom out. Netanyahu, who was rudderless on the outcome of the war in Gaza, is also feeding into the arguments of his coalition. The concepts that have been put forward to the American’s originated as a joke by a cartoonist who put together an image of condominiums stretching from the border of Gaza down to Rafah. The argument like all bad jokes was picked up by a settler community that had lost out in the withdrawal of the Israeli state from Gaza in 2005, but the idea fed into the hard right in the cabinet. That Trump has fed into these arguments means that he is abandoning the Abraham Accord and is feeding into the hard rights arguments, which is an isolationist state that does not want open borders with other states.

The hard right is racially motivated by arguments of supremacy and ideological arguments that challenge the majority in Israel. But due to the make up of the electoral system they have power though their voice makes up a tiny minority in the state. It is a question of the thirst for power of Netanyahu, that the state has these voices in positions of power. There are arguments that Israelis are open to – the argument to annex Gaza by the United States is one of those arguments, but the world is aghast at the idea.

The two states earmarked by Trump to take the Palestinians from Gaza, have shown their disapproval of the argument put forward. The threats by Trump to cut US funding to these states has proven to be falling on deaf ears. King Abdullah II of Jordan was humiliated by Trump, which does not bode well for US Middle East arguments in the future, and argued that Jordan would not and could not take any more Palestinians. Pushed by Trump further, the king agreed to take two thousand injured Palestinian children from Gaza. President Sisi from Egypt cancelled his trip to Washington and has not made plans to travel to the United States and for the foreseeable future eliminates Trump’s plan to a dustbin.

Meanwhile Gazan’s have returned to the rubble that was once their homes. They are sweeping the floors of their homes with cavernous holes where a shell or missile was used to destroy their property. The argument across the Middle East is how has it come to this that Palestinians who were not involved in the conflict are to be ethnically cleared from their homes and an argument that fed off a cartoon has been put forward to the President of the United States and accepted as a proposal to ethnically cleanse a people who are as diverse as their neighbour from the land they have lived on since the last Nakba.