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I’m not one given to reminiscing. Life goes forward, not backward. I suppose it was reading of the sad death of Roselynn Carter, US President Jimmy Carter’s wife. He’s been in hospice care for some time and his wife only joined him there two days before she passed away at the age of 96.  It was a long life, yet however old one is it’s never quite long enough, if one isn’t in serious pain or distress.

It wasn’t her long life that set me reminiscing, or the ex-president’s at 99 years of age. No, it was reading that they were married in 1946. That’s a date burned into my memory. It would be, it’s the year I was born. I had a sister five years older than me and when we were old enough to have an inkling of such things, we would giggle together that she was the last thing our Dad did before he went off to World War II, and I was the first thing he did when he returned. Then she’d nudge me and giggle, “I wonder if he took his boots off first!” Still embraced in at least the partial innocence of childhood we thought it the funniest thing.

Looking back now over seventy-seven years, it’s just amazing how the world has changed. There’s no sense of time or distance. Events of  a long time ago can be brought into focus as though they only occurred yesterday.

There were very few cars back then. My parents were the first in our road to own one. I have a vivid recollection of the day it happened. The sales area wasn’t the plush sort of polished floor palace where one buys a car these days. It was a piece of wasteland on a slight hill and the sales office was a corrugated iron shack, not very pretty but surprisingly strong as we were to discover.

After the initial test drive my parents decided this was the vehicle for them. It was an Austin 10, meaning 10 horse power, quite small but with huge running boards on each side.

^{1936 Austin 10.}

It wasn’t new, probably well pre-war. My parents could not have afforded a new car.

Once the decision was taken to purchase the salesman invited my parents to sign all the documents in the sales office. My father parked the car on the slight slope and my sister and I, who had occupied the back seat during all the goings on, were told to stay put and behave ourselves while the paperwork was completed.

Once the adults were gone we both chatted and giggled at the thought of actually owning one these cherished horseless carriages. My sister started to show off her rather scant knowledge of the vehicle’s various equipment, pointing to the steering wheel, and then the gear lever.

At the age of five years I was not going to be outdone by a mere female when it came to mechanical matters, so leaping up from my seat I reached forward between the front seats for the handbrake. It was a very long, upright device with a silver lever attachment at the top that needed to be pushed forward before the brake could be released. In my enthusiasm not to be outdone by a girl, even if she was five years older, I was halfway through announcing, “And that’s the hand….brake,” while realising my forward momentum had caused me to hit the silver lever rather harder than I had anticipated.

There was a loud, “Click,” followed by a low rumble as tyres gathered momentum. With horror we realised the vehicle was moving down the slope and gathering speed, and heading directly towards the sales office.

Corrugated iron is noisy stuff when disturbed, and it took a violent dislike to being assaulted by a motor car. With hindsight, the old Austin was probably moving at no more than walking pace when it made contact with the front of the sales office. The resulting cacophony of those metal sheets was still sufficient to send mother, father, and salesman rushing outside, ears no doubt still ringing. They soon learned it was not an earthquake that had caused the pandemonium of rattling and noise.

As no actual damage was done to either office or vehicle, recriminations were remarkably few, though on the journey home in the Austin 10 there were lectures from father on the dangers of touching anything within the driving compartment of an automobile.

Frankly, I just couldn’t wait to get behind the steering wheel.

Once in a while there appears a word or phrase so overused it becomes virtually obnoxious. At present, for this writer at least, the latest word is “antisemitism.”

After the appalling October 7th attack by Hamas on innocent Israelis, world sympathy for Israel reached a peak. It took a nose-dive in the hearts of many at the cold-blooded revenge meted out by the Israeli government on innocent Palestinians.

Social media took sides and yelled at each other, as always.

Western governments, who should know better, debated new rules to strengthen laws already in place to curb the so-called “antisemitism,” of people peacefully marching in support of innocent Palestinians in Gaza.

“Anti-Semitic?” What exactly does this word mean? Most definitions state simply: “a prejudice against or hatred of Jews.”

So what are Jews? Again,  definitions clarify: ” a member of the Semitic people who claim descent from the ancient Hebrew people of Israel, are spread throughout the world, and are linked by cultural or religious ties. 2. a person whose religion is Judaism.”

The Semitic people claim to be descended from Shem, the son of Noah. Genesis 11.10 states that Shem lived to be 600 years old. Either years were much shorter back then, or Shem was a Superman!

The second definition is perhaps a little less complex: the religion of Judaism. Religions can be fascinating, if only for the huge numbers of human creatures who believe in one of them. Some estimates suggest there are around 4,000 differing religions around the world. Most of them fall into one of five categories: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or Judaism.

Each is totally dependent on one common factor: the existence of a God, Gods, or some form of omnipotent power “out there” somewhere in the ether. A power responsible for the creation of the human creatures, whose main attribute is a need to kill, maim and torture it’s fellows.

It’s also weirdly strange that most of that killing, maiming and torturing occurs between members of different religious groups. They fight over whose religion is the right one. Either that, or a common scenario reveals members of the same religious group fighting one another, each staunchly believing the God of their religion is on their side and not that of the other.

It does seem that the human creature this God, Gods, or omnipotent power created is a very flawed being indeed. It could also indicate that the creator is as flawed as its creation.

Or maybe there’s another explanation? Perhaps the God, Gods, or omnipotent power supposedly responsible for creating the human creatures is flawed because it doesn’t exist. It  is merely a figment of the human creature’s egotistical imagination. Could it be that the actual creator of the human creature was really this thing called “evolution” and the human creature is just a product of four and a half billion years of evolution from primitive, single-celled, life-forms that lived in the ancient seas?

Which, in a rather convoluted way, brings everything back to that one recently overused word, “Antisemitism.”

If there is no God, Gods, or omnipotent power, and the human creatures are all one family evolved from the planet’s early life forms, then religion is a lie, a make-believe. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism can all be consigned to the dustbin of history. Words like “antisemitism” would cease to exist, along with one of the major reasons the human creatures kill, maim, and torture each other.

Of course, being the weirdly illogical creatures they are, there’s no guarantee they’d not find other excuses to do so.

 

 

_{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.