See-Saw
I begin by the usual disclaimer: I deplore and condemn the brutal killing of innocent civilians in Kfar Aza by the murderous and idiotic Hamas leadership, meaning it with every fibre of my body. They share 50% of the blame for the Gazan holocaust taking place now.
The Western media, the BBC included have always reflected the Israeli point of view with only lip service to the concept of two sides to every coin. “Israel has every right to defend itself” is the inevitable mantra one hears. David Lammy backs Starmer’s order to Labour MPs and councillors not to attend pro-Palestinian marches, but when asked (on Laura Kuenssberg Sunday program) if they can go to pro-Israeli demos promptly answered that Britain is a democracy. In the US, Biden is electioneering and bending over backwards to please his Jewish constituency, as are Sunak, Macron et al, theirs. Clearly one of the failings of democracy.
There are at least three paradigms to the cycle of violence in the Palestine/ Israel situation. The see-saw, the chicken and egg, and the tit for tat, or should it be tat for tit?. Which comes first, the tit or the tat? One’s instinct is to say tit first then tat, but what does the proposition for stand for? Could it not be first there was tat, and then followed the tit? The tit being an answer for the tat? A see-saw, left alone would stay horizontal; for one end to shoot up, pressure must be put at the other end, and once motion has started, it may well go up and down alternately. Likewise the chicken and the egg. The egg hatches, becomes a chicken which lays an egg which hatches …
The ideas above can be summed up in the famous Le Chatelier’s Principle: If to a system in equilibrium a constraint is added, forces are developed in the system attempting to nullify the effect of the constraint.
For centuries the Middle East, as far as its Jewish populations were concerned was in a relative state of equilibrium. What was the constraint? The need to drive away local Palestinians to fit in Jews fleeing the holocaust, the nakba, and providing them with a homeland. Who provided that original constraint? Irgun, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Menachem Begin, Lehi, the Stern Gang and Haganah, Israeli groups, but no less terroristic in their practices than Hamas. In the nineteen forties there were no Hamas or Hezbollah, no Qassam Brigade. The Israeli terrorists committed massacres as bloody as Kfar Iza, with, the worst, Deir Yassin, where Irgun and Lehi attacked a peaceful village in spite of their having signed a peace agreement with the Jewish Resistance Movement, killing over a hundred civilian villagers, including women and children. This was the chicken that laid the egg of the first beast with a big tat. Or provide the impetus to push down the end of the see-saw, or, trigger the first tat.
This egg would hatch into first Arab-Israel war in May 1948, as the other end of the see-saw went upwards. Tit. Now when the see-saw swings Israel’s way the Brits and the Americans go tut tut, please avoid civilian deaths unless you can’t, whilst the French say, Zut alors, Israel needs to defend its borders. And the cycle of death keeps pedalling on, with ten Palestinians killed for every Israeli death.
Small wonder the Third World stops short of laying the blame for Ukraine at the door of Putin.
