One Hundred Years After Balfour

A video by Independent Jewish Voices, marking the upcoming one-hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. I think the film pretty much speaks for itself.
—Daz

Read Full Post »

“They Made The Desert Bloom”

It's a claim you hear all the time, that the Israelis made the desert bloom; the implication being that they had moved into an uncultivated wasteland and, by dint of sheer effort had turned it into a veritable Eden. And every time I hear it I wonder to myself, What do you think the Palestinians had been eating, sand?

As always where such claims of Israeli cultural superiority are made, however, the truth turns out to be far nastier—unless, of course, you think "blooming" and "polluted" are synonyms.
—Daz

Read Full Post »

Giles Fraser On Objectivity

I can't shake the feeling that, in these circumstances, screaming is the most rational thing to do.
—Giles Fraser

I have no idea how many times I've found myself wanting to write something about the Israel–Palestine situation. How many sentences and paragraphs have arranged themselves in my head, only to be discarded as not good enough, clear enough, descriptive enough. Quite simply, it deserves prose better than I seem to be able to apply to it.

So, okay, having had something of a go at one of Giles Fraser's efforts in the Grauniad a while back, it only seems fair that when he produces something as good as this, I should point that out too. And so, Gentle Reader, I have.
—Daz

Read Full Post »

Stealing People’s Land Tends To Make Them A Mite Tetchy

If Britain was declared by U.N. resolution to be the rightful home of anyone who could trace their ancestry back to the ancient British Celts, that these "modern Celts," wherever in the world they happen to currently abide, had the "right" to "settle" my land and force me into a ghetto, to do to a map of my country what has been done to the above map of Palestine…

Would you claim that the roots of my hostility toward these invaders—oh, I'm sorry, "settlers"—lay in the soil of religion, not territory or politics?

Read Full Post »