Pipe Dreams

UNICEF has lately described the situation in Sudan as “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history”.

Over 5.6m people have been displaced as a result of the ongoing spat between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group. But the eyes of the performatively-caring world are apparently glued elsewhere.

That situation has a concentrated cluster of antecedents. During the course of the twentieth century millions of people were displaced by wars, famine, revolutions and so on. The two global wars and the conclusion of European colonial adventures resulted in multiple border changes which left vast multitudes standing without a seat, so to speak.

Of all of these, the one that continues to haunt the conscience of the world is ‘Palestine’. There are very specific reasons for this and Israelis certainly cannot be blamed for all of them.

Over in Florida there are thousands of Cubans and their descendants who wish for nothing else than to turn the clock back, for a glorious ‘homecoming’ in which they are restored to their ancestral lands, Havana mansions etc. The Global Left has no interest whatsoever in their pipe dream, because they persist in their obstinate support for the island’s repressive, calamity-inducing dictatorship.

At the end of WWII there were many native German-speakers living to the east of what is now Germany. They had been there for generations, but the end of the Third Reich meant that they had to up sticks and shift to the west where they were reabsorbed into the Germany of today. This process is precisely what has not happened with the Palestinians.

Remember, historically there were few Arabs in the Levant. They came en masse as conquerors behind their Caliph and with a truly fanatical belief in their own worldview. They built their prestige religious centre smack on top of the ruins of the temple where the indigenous people has worshiped in Jerusalem, in a move that the Spanish would soon after imitate in the New World.  Now they are effectively trying to guilt trip the West into thinking that the state of Israel is one of its own colonial impositions, and that any Jews demanding access to the Temple Mount are guilty of causing abominable offence.

Queen Rania berates us for our leaders’ attitude towards the inhabitants of Gaza, but the dirty secret of the Arab world is how they shut the door back in the 1940s and have kept it shut, and the Kingdom Jordan has been one of the worst offenders in this respect, even though Egypt's position has crept into the international consciousness during the past week or so. The Arab states have allowed this situation to fester and one might conclude that this was the plan all along.

The Global Left has always supported the cause of the Palestinians and this is not a bad thing per se as long as recognition is given to the fundamental constraints which operate on the situation, beyond any supposed Israeli malice, and as long as this support is not consciously or even unconsciously feeding the cycle of reciprocal violence.

The acute problem today is that a significant sub-set of this ideological movement are moving very blithely into “be careful what you wish for" territory. Do the fellow travellers of rampant political, expansionist Islam really understand the implications of that “from the river to the sea” chant?

Israel is a broadly prosperous, peaceful and liberal state that provides a national identity for 7m Jews and 2m Arabs. If this were somehow swept aside in a genocidal orgy, giving rise to an fundamentalist state backed by Iran right on the shores of the Med, there is nobody living today in a pluralist European society that could genuinely feel safe.

Gaza is not Palestine and Hamas is not Gaza, but each time it is Hamas that opens up the wound with its rockets and then cynically hides beneath the citizens above who once voted them in, but have been denied the opportunity to vote them out. The people of Gaza very specifically lack the right to protest that many outside Gaza have been exercising since the Hamas pogrom on October 7. 

Some of the nonsense I've been hearing recently reminds me of stern lectures I used to receive from bleeding-heart lefties in the eighties who were in complete denial about those 'resistance' fighters of the Republican movement in Ulster. Women and children were being slaughtered indiscriminately, but this did not fit the narrative. Nor did the fact that the IRA explicitly functioned as a terrorist organisation set up like a thuggish criminal gang which preyed on vulnerable members of the wider community even as it supposedly took on the British. 

"Free Ulster" they said, as if that would result in anything other than a bloodbath until some of the fundamentals were resolved. 

As elements of the Global Left shifts from wishful thinking in the Middle East to frankly genocidal thinking, they have to know that there can be no peaceful solution whilst the likes of Hamas remain as a force in the region.

Peaceful coexistence is not, by definition, what the protagonists of Jihad are after.