The way I see it, the Palestinian Götterdämmerung is at hand. Maybe this week, maybe this month, or maybe in a year from now, but it is coming. Israel will take the view that unless it either turns the West Bank into a vast concentration camp (literally not figuratively) on a pretty much permanent basis, or completely ‘ethnically cleanse’ it of its Muslim and Christian Arab population, because otherwise civil life within Israel will become completely intolerable.
Unlike many in the media and blogosphere who are gleefully baying for the streets of the occupied territories to run with Palestinian blood, I cannot add my voice to that ghastly chorus. Yet in fact I think that an apocalyptic end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just inevitable now but perhaps the sooner Israel gets it over with the better. I can see no prospect for a political solution. Thirty years of criminally stupid Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, aided and abetted by the Palestinian’s own psychopathic, inept and suicidal leaders, have worked to ensure that the forcibly collectivised Palestinian people are ‘ruled’ by a dependably duplicitous pathological liar with not even the prospect of a rational alternative leader, and so there is now no solution other than the effective destruction of the Palestinian people as a coherent society.
Yet the fact I regard the Israeli state as being a huge contributor to the horrors being visited upon themselves, that actually changes nothing. The time for blame has passed. It will come again but not for a while. Regardless of who is responsible, Israeli society finds itself where it finds itself and no amount of finger pointing will change one iota of the reality of that. People are now dying on a pretty much daily basis and in increasing numbers. Israel will either do what it must to survive or it will gradually bleed to death as a seemingly endless supply of Palestinians demonstrate that they have been given nothing to live for except hatred and revenge, and thus blow themselves up in Israel’s supermarkets, pizza parlours and hotels. That is the terrible reality. The other terrible reality is that when the IDF finally gets the order to kill Arafat, it will make not the slightest bit of difference. The killings will go on, the bombings will go on, the murderous hatreds will continue unabated until Israel shrugs off the last political restraints and finally by sheer force of arms imposes the quiet of the graveyard over the occupied territories.
Israel must do terrible things to survive and be damned for doing them. Do them they must… and be damned they must. Israel will survive but there will be no winners in this ghastly inter Semitic madness. Now today Tel-Aviv has been subjected to the insane horrors and thus individual Palestinians move a day closer to the end of their identity as a member of a distinct identifiable society, regardless of their personal responsibility.
I would just love to be completely wrong about this.
