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_{This is a world map of the support of governments for Israel in the present war against Hamas and the Palestinian people. It does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the populace of each nation.}

It’s hard to know where to begin with regard to the horrors emanating from the Middle East right now. The vile atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th, followed by the ongoing revenge attacks on Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli government forces, have evoked so much comment and often bitter side-taking that the first response is to walk away, leaving official media  outlets to their lurid headlines and social media to it’s manic hysteria.

Yet, to ignore it is to surrender to a false normality; to bury one’s head in the sand and allow all to pass over apparently unnoticed. It cannot go unnoticed, and must be seen and noted in the context of all that is happening in our world today.

Our media rushes from one catastrophe to the next, leaving the first pushed into the oblivion of interior pages and near forgotten. The ongoing war between Ukraine and Vladimir Putin has been relegated to the dark depths of the media as the broadsheets line up and take sides in this latest conflict to enthrall their readers.

The argument is simple: who is in the right? Joe Biden is quick to tell Netanyahu Israel has a right to defend itself. In the next breath he says they must abide by International Law. Netanyahu nods, but is not listening. Three days later 8,000 Palestinian innocents are dead. Meanwhile, Israel buries 1,400 of it’s citizens, the victims of the slaughter by Hamas.

Who is in the right?

The answer to that question is buried deeper than any funeral corpse. It plunges far into the depths of history, back at least to 1917. Then all the land now occupied as Israel was known as Palestine. The history of the area from 1917 onwards is well-written. After WW1 the British controlled the area under a Mandate, but reconciling the growing Jewish populace and the Arab Palestinians proved too difficult. The Arabs rejected what they considered unfair solutions put forward by the British, and revolted against them. In typical, heavy-handed, colonial fashion, the British police and army slaughtered an estimated 2,000-5,000 Arabs.

Who is in the right?

It’s been a question asked almost incessantly since then. The British and Americans came down heavily on the side of the Jewish people, who despite being banned from immigration into Palestine between the two world wars, were easily smuggled in with the assistance of Zionist organizations.

Eventually Britain pulled out of Palestine and handed it to the newly-formed United Nations who decided to partition the land. The British Mandate ended on 15 May 1948. Twenty-four hours earlier the State of Israel had declared independence. It sparked the first  Arab-Israeli War.

“The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.” [cfr]

From then until the present day,  Israel has used overwhelming military might to push the Palestinians off the land ceded to them on the West Bank,  and use it for Israeli settlements.

There can be little doubt that the aggressive and often brutal actions of the Israeli government, especially under Ariel Sharon and later Benyamin Netanyahu, coupled with it’s intransigence to adopt any form of compromise during peace talks, has escalated tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.  When Israel erected a huge security wall around Gaza it effectively became a prison for two million Palestinians. Israel became the jailor in control of the sea, airspace,  and  all fuel, water, and medical supplies into the area.

When that huge number of people, half of them children, are imprisoned in an area of 141 square miles (365 sq kms) with little or no hope of any sort of decent life, resentment builds like a pressure cooker. They see the Israelis as their jailors, which in every practical sense they are. The Israeli government keeps them trapped by military force.

Whatever one may think of Hamas, and there can be no doubt as to their innate brutality, as witnessed on the 7 October by their murderous incursion into Israel, the Israeli government over many years has created a foment of hatred in Gaza that exploded on that fateful night. It has resulted in the desperate situation we witness today.

Hamas seized control of Gaza after the failure of the Palestinian Authority to win better conditions for it citizens. On the 7 October, 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered and two hundred taken hostage, because the successive government’s of both failed to sit down and work out a compromise that would allow for a peaceful, civilized outcome for both sides.

As always in such confrontations it is the innocents who suffer most. Over 8,000 deaths in Gaza and 20,000 injured; over 1,400 Israeli innocents killed and more than 5,000 injured. There will be many more.

While power-hungry egos on both sides work their murderous intent with bombs, rockets, and mortars, it is those innocent human beings, Israeli and Palestinian, who are the true victims of the insanity that has prevailed in this region for over fifty years.

Who is in the right?

No-one. Two wrongs can never make it right.

 

 

 

 

It’s been seven months. it seems strange to come back to Sparrow Chat after such a long break. In a sense I never really went away, just never published my thoughts at the time. March 21st was my last post. I never anticipated it would be so when I wrote it, but it seemed fitting somehow, a sort of last plea to a deaf world.

I’ve grown a lot older in the last seven months. Grief has that effect. March 21st was just two days following the second anniversary of my beloved wife’s death from cancer in America. A death I could not be a part of, imprisoned as I was by Covid lockdowns in France, and a merciless America that refused my many pleas for a visa to be at her side as she took her final journey.

“US citizens and green card holders only, by order of the President,” was the continuing response as the number of my telephone calls  to the US Consulate mounted. Ah, yes, “by order of the President”:  Donald J Trump, America’s shame. The very name worthy only to be hated, despised, abhorred alongside Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benyamin Netanyahou, and the other power-crazed and rising dictators who sense a human race in chaos and believe their time has come.

The western media is making much of Israel’s suffering at this present time.  Warfare  has already claimed too many lives on both sides. We’re told Hamas started it all. Israel is the poor victim.

When the fuse on a powder keg is ignited it inevitably explodes. Israel ignited the fuse of Gaza a long time ago. It has sputtered and smouldered over the years but grown ever closer to the powder keg that is Gaza. Two days ago it finally blew up.

Depending on how one’s ideals twist the situation to suit, Hamas is either a violent and bloody terrorist organization, backed by the murderous regime in Iran,  or freedom fighters for the very worthy cause of oppressed Palestinians.  It matters not. As always, the victims of this violent chaos will be the innocents, the expendables, the children.

There is no doubt Israel will exact a long and murderous revenge on Gaza. It’s unlikely there will be much left at the end of it. Meanwhile, western nations will sit back, do nothing, and search diligently through their mindsets to find the righteousness in Israel’s avenging slaughter. One can be sure they will find it.

_{10 Downing Street, London – 8th October 2023}

While many in Britain are forced to live out of food banks, suffer mountains of debt, and in many cases eviction from their homes, the UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has offered to send aid to Israel…

“…the fourth most successful economy among developed countries for 2022. The IMF estimated Israel’s GDP at US$564 billion and its GDP per capita at US$58,270 in 2023 (13th highest in the world), a figure comparable to other highly developed countries.”

Israel does not need British aid, Prime Minister Sunak, perhaps you could consider sending it to the innocent, poverty-stricken, soon to be homeless or dead, Palestinians of Gaza instead?

As the climate emergency worsens, economies stagnate and desperate citizens reach out to any political Messiah filled with a zest for power and full of  promises to lead the people out of poverty and into the Promised Land. The tragedy of Israel/Gaza will be forgotten, overtaken by far worse wars and acts of terror as the power-crazed dictators fight among themselves for the ultimate prize of King of the World.

I never really knew what it was to be, “…with no closure,” when a loved-one passed away. No proper funeral and just a lonely cremation. I know now that the grief never goes away. It stays locked inside, no matter the extent or even violence of the tears and emotional outbursts. I can never fully recognize my wife is dead. She will always be just, “somewhere else.”

I was not alone in my grief. Thousands, maybe millions worldwide, were denied closure after their loved ones died in that Covid-plagued world. So many, “somewhere else’s.”

The future is bleak. Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, Azerbaijan/Armenia, soon to be China/Taiwan, the  list will grow longer. The slaughters more prevalent. The “somewhere else’s,” more numerous.

 

 

 

^{A View of Venus taken by a Russian Veneras Lander in the 1970’s. It shows a dead, desolate, planet. It may have been once like Earth, but suffered catastrophic climate change.} 

There are still a few head buriers who refuse to believe in climate change, or that Homo sapiens is responsible for it happening. Most sane folk accept that the evidence is overwhelming.

Unfortunately, we are at a point in our history where not only are we faced with planetary catastrophe, but those who have the power to do what is necessary to prevent it, the politicians, are corrupted and controlled by the capitalist powermongers. These parasites (for that’s what they are) care only for money and the power it bestows on them. They have the power of life or death over us, and little concern for either.

Thirty-three years ago a spacecraft, Voyager 2, was passing the planet Jupiter while on it’s way out of the solar system. One man, Carl Sagan, a Nobel Prize winner who was heavily involved in the two Voyager missions, suggested the spacecraft should be turned around and it’s cameras point back the way it had come, some 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) from the planet we inhabit.

It was expected to photograph a dark and empty space, yet one photo took NASA by surprise. For in one of them, illuminated by a stray and diffuse sunbeam, was a tiny, tiny mote of light, Planet Earth!

Thirty-three years is a long time. Memories fade. The processes of life and living go on, and even momentous moments can be forgotten. In my last post I quoted John Naughton. His words:

“…the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic…”

Powerful, indeed. In the thirty-three years since Voyager 1 took that momentous photograph we have discovered that we are systematically destroying that minute dot hanging in a sunbeam. We don’t have to, we can save it and ourselves. It all comes down to choice. Whether, as a species we choose to, or not.

Carl Sagan named it the “Pale Blue Dot“. He went on to write what for me is one of the most moving pieces of literature ever to be put on paper. It defined what we are, who we are, but most of all, where we are.

In case you’ve forgotten, here it is. You’ll need to look closely or you’ll miss it:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

How much longer will we allow the parasites* to destroy our world in their insatiable greed for power?

One thing is certain. If we do nothing, no-one will miss us.

“The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.” Oxfam.

^{*PARASITE: an animal or plant that lives on or in another animal or plant of a different type and feeds from it. A parasite is also a person who uses others to obtain an advantage without doing anything in exchange ~ Cambridge Dictionary}

Erratum: an earlier version of this post named the spacecraft that took the photograph of Earth as Voyager 1. It was in fact Voyager 2. The text has been corrected.