Singing songs and carrying signs, mostly say, “Hooray for our side”

Posts around the Gaza slaughter on this blog are becoming almost obscene. And this one is another gross example of the type.

I don’t mind opinions, but half cocked pontification is the very worse form of blogging.

So it’s not an “anti-war” rally? Does that mean that the many thousands who have come out internationally should have staid at home? And those who organised these protests have done something reprehensible?

Yes, there is the chance that decades more of struggle may be at stake — but the poster here wants the Palestinians to lie down, admit defeat and accept their lot — and do that on Israel’s and the US’s terms..

Have you any idea what the situation has been like for the Palestinians these past 60 long bitter years? This ignorant blogger wants us to believe that there is nothing much at stake in this conflict and “peace’ can be negotiated in the same way as one would chose a t-shirt.

All that is apparently needed is a desire to shop.

As for the Northern Ireland analogy….! Who says peace has come to the Six Counties? What has happened is that the guerrilla war is over but the political situation has remained very much the same as the recent marching season indicated.

That was a ‘peace’ bought at the price of a defeat complicated by the massive mistake of the guerrilla campaign.

In the same sense we could have prevailed upon the Vietnamese to accept peace in any year over almost three decades of war for the sake of “peace” . But whose “peace” would that have been? Lyndon Johnston’s? Nixon’s?

And in East Timor why didn’t we all insist that Fretilin accept the Indonesian annexation and get down to an accommodation with the regime in 1973 rather than spend so many lives (all their fault of course!) trying to win a crippled independence?

War is always the continuation of politics by another means and in war or any form of conflict there are winners and losers. And most times when there are defeats the issues don’t magically disappear because there’s a living reality that people have to deal with in their daily lives.

Lecturing the Palestinians on what they should be doing so that the ethical universe can be bought into peaceful symmetry has nothing to do with bitter reality. War isn’t a ‘bad’ habit of which people need to be cured.

The US Civil War was slaughter with substance and with reason. That didn’t make the slaughter — so much of it so terribly wasteful — any less historically significant. There is logic in history, and a terrible logic in war and similar conflicts. There may indeed be other means to do this but we are still stuck with a situation not of our own preference and making.

In the case of Palestine the core issue is the geoplolitical relevance of the Middle East as a key hub of transit and energy production. The Palestinian “issue’ is a product of the relevance the ME has to the imperialist powers. In that sense the whole Zionist card is a tool to wards that end, as is the invasion of Iraq.

While those issues are in play, there are always going to be victims as both the Iraqis and the Palestinians are so bitterly aware. IF Israel is defeated — and I don’t mean militarily as that’s hardly a possibility — then the whole Middle East strategy of containment and cooption begins to fall apart –as it is doing during this slaughter now.

Israel is paying a massive political price for its murdering spree. Israel’s brutal arrogance is undermining the whole ‘war on terror’ ideology. Caught under the guns are these people — a few thousand really, as not many Palestinians live in Gaza or the West Bank — who will not accept the theft of the homeland nor the brutality of their oppressor. And the means that Israel deploys to contain them is now under close international scrutiny when what Israel wanted was to slaughter and terrorise the Palestinians into submission.

It won’t happen because the Palestinians have nothing to lose. That is the actual case. And while that situation remains there are but two options: genocide or beginning of the end of the Zionist project.

At stake is whether the US will shift ground as Israel is totally dependent on US patronage. But while the US remains committed to the Zionist project the slaughter will continue without seeming impunity.

I want the Palestinaisn to win as that is the only path to peace in the Middle East.

Paraphrasing what the Irish say:” A country unfree will never be at peace.”