Earlier this week BBC Mundo published an article about the brave resistance of the people of Gaza in the face of invasion by an army led by Alexander the Great. Fascinating as it was, rather like the recent Metro piece on the 'cultural appropriation' of Hummus, one could sense the underlying determination to distract us from the one historical narrative that the hyper-liberals seem hyper-determined to suppress at all costs, that of Arab theocratic colonialism.
For those of us who long for peace in the Near East (not least for the peace and quiet that this might engender) it seems evident that the realisation of Palestinian Arab national aspirations will be a prerequisite for longer-term concord.
Yet these national aspirations, such as they are, have become bound up with the idea of Palestine, itself a composite of the aforementioned unmentionable historical narrative, indeed a version of it in modern, radicalised format, and thus so infused with both Jihadist extremism, anti-westernism and antisemitism, it is truly hard to see right now how they might be realised any time soon without feeding the fascist beast, so to speak.
And the worst part is of course that this rather toxic supremacist idea has fostered a mirror image of itself within Israel, such that a nation which was essentially tolerant and socialist for much of its early history has adopted a virulently defensive posture comprising its own undeniably supremacist gestures.
This has of course only enhanced the fundamental incompatibility at the heart of the conflict, and even if some territorial solution could be found along the lines that the majority of European bien pensants have long hoped for, there is an unwillingness on their part to acknowledge that the idea of Palestine contains additional incompatibilities with the formalised collective fictions which currently prevail in the Arab and wider Islamic world, and that the Jews and their doggedly-defended civic rights are really not the sole problem here.
Many of those who currently self-bamboozle with the idea of Palestine are out there calling out the worst effects of Israel's 'self-defence', often mis-appropriating historically-specific and highly-loaded terms like Apartheid and Holocaust, and one is inclined to surmise that they do so to a large extent in order not to have to pause to consider that their own central idea promises all these supremacist side-effects in a radically purer form: genocide, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, gangsterism and state-sponsored evils of the more obvious varieties.
To appreciate what a sovereign Palestinian state might portend, one only has to consider the already marginalised and oppressed state of several highly vulnerable minority communities in Gaza: LGBTQ+, facing intimidation and worse, Christians, facing forced conversion and a pressure to leave, and black Palestinians, descendants of the African slaves that the Ottomans kept in to the 20th century (another stream of history that the mists have enveloped) who face all kinds of systemic racism and exclusion and are predominantly concentrated in a Gaza City neighbourhood sometimes referred to as al-Abeed, “the slaves.”
Indeed anyone who rushes to denigrate Israel as an 'Apartheid state' should pause to ponder the fuller implications of From the river to the sea, Palestine will be 'FREE'.
Today the 'Nakba' is primarily used to refer to the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Arabs by Israel after the 1948 war, or so says Wikipedia, at best an over-simplification of what actually happened, but at the time the tragedy referred to was not the loss of land, but the cosmic shame of failing to wipe out the 'zionist entity'.
And the fact that a greater number of Jews were simultaneously ethnically-cleansed from locations around the nearby Islamic world is yet another unmentionable in progressive circles today.
The displaced Palestinians, most of whom were complicit in a failed attempt at radical ethnic cleansing in 1948, were 'rewarded' with permanent, heritable refugee status. The displaced Jews' equivalent reward was, in effect, Israel. Neither have had anywhere else to go since the Arabs' ill-advised attempt to bypass the UN compromise.
Even if the competing supremacisms are now somehow suppressed and the Palestinians accept a territorial compromise, simultaneously surrendering that seriously problematic 'right of return' (as once did those many millions of Germans shunted lastingly westwards at the end of WWII), there would remain the matter of how they would treat the Jews of Judea, a continual presence in that particular geographic space since both it and they acquired the name.
One is inclined to think that this population would end up being lumped in legally with the so-called settlers, and their eventual fate marked by the merest of shrugs by the 'international community'. Though the zombie-progressives would surely cheer on a successful 'de-colonisation' event with guttural enthusiasm.
(With regard to Elica's last point in the text with the white background, I'll add that the most gobsmackingly racist society I have ever encountered on my travels is socialist Cuba, where people of predominantly African descent have long been formally excluded from certain sections of the economy and where one constantly hears racist tropes being openly shared in 'polite' conversation.)
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