Free Walestine

Palestine is much less an ideal of nationhood than an ANTI-ideal of nationhood. It’s been that way since the Romans first came up with the cunning plan to un-brand the homeland of the Israelites with a Greek place name referring to its neighbouring polities.

Palestine thus came into human historical existence very specifically as ‘Not Israel’ or even “Seeya Israel’, and this turned out to be the basis of its appeal to Arab ‘nationalists’ in the last century.

Nations are imagined communities and this one, almost uniquely in today’s world, specifically contains a starkly negative component: a national community imagined without its location-specific indigenous people.

And not just in politics either. Visit a so-called Palestinian restaurant in New York and this project of erasure is baked into almost every aspect of the aesthetic, on the plates, on the walls. This all belongs to us and nobody else, it all screams. The others are like, usurpers.

The flip-side of this dogged negativity is the insistence that Israelite nationalism is in its very nature a dark and unpleasant thing — and in that way the anti-ideal contained within ‘Free Palestine’ is freely projected onto its nemesis, making it possible for seemingly fair and reasonable people everywhere to be “Anti-Zionist” in a manner they would almost certainly never imitate in relation to any other community’s national aspirations.

To understand the absurdity of this situation, imagine Wales divided into two extremely hostile 'cultural' camps: Welsh-speakers and English-speakers.

Now consider that the latter have always refused to be part of ‘Wales’. Indeed, when it was first proclaimed independent, they immediately attempted to completely destroy it — with considerable help from over the border in England — even though they had been given the opportunity to have their own part of the country where only English need be spoken: WALESTINE.

No, they absolutely wanted the whole place for themselves, and not in order to share it either, even though in Wales itself English-speakers had the full rights of every citizen, in spite of being a potentially troublesome minority. (It was always a given that the Welsh-speaking zone would be more hospitable to English-speakers than vice versa. )

The forebears of the Walestinians had been around in this area speaking English and generally lording it over all other minorities including those annoying Welsh-speakers for centuries, and could see no reason at all why this situation should not be preserved for all eternity.

And so Walestine has always been conceived of as a place where only English-speakers with a certain well-defined set of values would be welcome.

Everyone else would have to get with the programme, basically a somewhat extreme spin-off of English nationalism elsewhere on the island. (Though it must be said that even the English — white van, St George's flag-waving fanatics aside — have become more than a bit fed up with their Walestinian ‘cousins’ over the years.)

Meanwhile, the UN has been perpetuating what was already an almost un-resolve-able situation by declaring that all the Walestinians (plus their progeny), long ago displaced as a result of their own failed attempt at eradicating all the Welsh-speakers, have become forever refugees, even if they are working in the city of London and making a fortune.

And in spite of the fact that the UN recognises Wales and was clearly 'at fault' for the original bungled attempt at partition, a rather radicalised section within it, the one responsible for the Walestinians — now possibly ten times in number, leaving it unclear how many of them are just plain English — is committed to the idea that they should all have the right to flood back into Wales at some point in the future, thereby destabilising this vulnerable little democracy completely, and most likely leading to a replay of the original attempt at country-cide.

While there may be fairly strong underlying ethnic component to this conflict, one suspects that any attempt to map it onto DNA will result not only in several surprises, but also a good deal of additional confusion and murkiness.

One has to recognise therefore that the essence of the ‘argument’ however, is cultural identification: do you speak English and align with England, or do you want this rather small area to be at least partly a sanctuary for those weird Welsh-speakers, where they can determine their own destinies (and manage their own historically-fraught security issues).

Yet under the auspices of the so-called international community, this argument has been spun into a terrible cycle of violence and a catalytic process of fortified unreasonableness wherever one chooses to look.

(For the record, as I am quite used to being misrepresented when I make statements relating to this topic, and not just by the usual suspects as it turns out. My base position is broadly similar to the one promoted by leading British historians of Jewish heritage, such as Sir Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore, who consistently promote a pro-peace, anti-Netanyahu position set within a sincerely-held compassionate take on the whole ugly situation.

And just like them, I would draw a clear line between these views and the faux-humanitrarian, antisemitic toxicity of the 'Free Palestine' campaign with its rather prominent ties to Jihadi intolerance and attempts to delegitimise and overrun the Jewish state entirely.)