Time Travel Machines and Palestine
In 2006, the residents of Gaza took part in a carefully monitored, free democratic election. Everything took place under the watchful eye of America, the last world superpower, which was championing democracy with a publicly announced drive for democracy promotion. All of this was happening right on the borders of the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel. And all because democracy is good and great.
The residents of Gaza all cast their votes and democratically elected Hamas. Suddenly democracy was no longer good and no longer great. America, the greatest democracy on earth, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, didn’t like the way democracy was working in Gaza. They were both very angry.
As you all know, the situation in Israel is very, very, very complicated. There’s a lot of confusion and you’re really just all too stupid to understand the complexities and history of the whole thing. But let’s see if we can make sense of it. We’ll also need to talk about time travel machines.
Thousands of years ago, God promised the land from the River to the Sea, to the Jewish people. But you can’t say from the River to the Sea, because that’s an anti-Semitic chant that suggests you want to see all Jews dead. However it is okay to say from the River to the Sea if you’re Israeli, and presumably okay with all Palestinians being dead. It gets even more complicated. If you’re Jewish, saying from the River to the Sea is disgustingly anti-Semitic unless you’re Zionist and talking about the whole land mass being part of a greater Israel. The last condition is suppressing the political and expressive freedom of Jews, which is also anti-Semitic. Funny old world isn’t it?
Zionism is a political movement that was founded by a few people including Viktor Herzl, who didn’t believe in God, but was well aware that the non-existent God had promised Palestine to the Jewish people. With God being non-existent, Herzl decided to seek the help of existent mortals in establishing the state of Israel, and wrote very nice letters to people like Cecil Rhodes, who was very good at subjugating Africans and stealing the riches from their lands. He was a leading colonialist. In the early 1900s, being a colonialist was very cool. Herzl asked Rhodes to help him impose superior Western civilization on the native savages of Arabia.
Herzl’s good idea caught on, especially amongst Europeans who didn’t like Jews and thought they should all go somewhere else. Palestine seemed like a really good choice, especially because the idea was very popular with Christian Zionists. Christian Zionism was around before Herzl’s brand of atheist Zionism that we should all call Jewish Zionism. The nice Christian Zionists wanted all the Jews to go to Palestine, because when that happens, they believe Jesus Christ will come back to earth and all the heathen Jews who insist on remaining Jewish and not becoming Christian will be killed in the worst war that mankind has ever seen, or they will burn eternally in Hell. That sounds like a death cult to me. It definitely sounds terribly anti-Semitic, but let’s not forget how nuanced and complicated the whole Middle East crisis is.
After the horrors of World War 2, the drive to establish Israel in Palestine really got underway. Finding Jewish survivors in the Nazi concentration camps Western powers decided that something really should be done to help them, but they still didn’t want any Jews in Europe or America, so shipping them off to Palestine seemed like a good idea.
As soon as the decision was taken, there ceased to be any people in Palestine. Palestine became ‘a land without people, for a people without a land!’ Miraculous. Suddenly there were no Christians, no Jews, and no Muslims in Palestine. Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is in Palestine, so I wonder where all those Christians went. Mary and Joseph were both Jewish, so God knows where all the Jews went. And what about those other native savages of Arabia, the Muslims? Very puzzling.
Later on, when it turned out that there had actually been people in Palestine, it didn’t matter anyway. Those people you see, were all nomads with no relationship to the land. They were such cultural philistines, the world was told, that Israel was basically a desert. The ancient temples, mosques, and churches, including some of the oldest in the world, must have just sprung up out of the sand when the Israelis arrived.
In 1947 and 1948 hundreds of thousands of those people who weren’t there in the first place, and were useless barbarians anyway, had to be forcibly removed from Palestine to make way for the Israelis. This was a little bit embarrassing for the only democracy in the Middle East so they introduced a law making it a crime to mark it or mention it. The forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 is called the Nakba, meaning the catastrophe. All of the Palestinians who got kicked out of Palestine in the Nakba were forced into neighbouring countries. To make sure they never returned, Israel introduced a law stating that any Palestinian trying to come back to the land they’d been kicked out of should be shot by the IDF. Hoorah! If you’re unsure what IDF stands for, it’s not Israeli Death Force, it’s Israeli Defence Force. Got it? Good.
Despite the good work of the very moral IDF, the presence of so many refugees didn’t make them look good, and the existence of Palestinians Israel hadn’t managed to kick off of their land, was a real nuisance for Israel. Illegal settlers did all they could over the decades, diligently terrorising and abusing Palestinian families, stealing their land and killing them, but the whole process was very slow, and the Palestinians proved very hard to get rid of. This is where Israel could really have benefited from a time travel machine. If Israel had possessed one, they could have travelled to the twenty-first century when something very significant happened. On September 11th 2001, Al Qaeda operatives flew passenger planes into sites across the USA, including the Twin Towers in New York, killing a total of 2977 people. America quickly announced the global war on terror. By 2015, it had killed 4.5 million people.
As all of the ‘terrorists’ targeted by America’s new global war were Muslim, Israel was able to say that all of the Palestinians were now terrorists (ignoring the fact that not all of them were Muslim). All over the Western world, the idea that Muslims are all terrorists was aggressively marketed, especially in America and Britain, two of the countries that really like Israel. In those countries, and others that weren’t so friendly, Israel paid for the careers and political campaigns of people whose only job is to spread Islamophobia. People who were critical of Israel were all called anti-Semitic, and people who believed that Palestinians should be allowed to have the same human rights as others were all called terrorist sympathisers. Some people were called terrorist sympathisers and anti-Semites at the same time, even if they were Jewish themselves. With helpful politicians and media telling the whole world that Israel was wonderful and moral anyone who disagreed was a terrorist sympathiser, Israeli settlers were able to kill two Palestinian children a week between 2000 and 2014. It all worked very well.
But not well enough. So much time had been wasted!
In the first few years of the 21st century, Israel killed 3000 Palestinians in the second intifada. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, just before the dreadful elections in 2006. After so many decades of being killed and oppressed, the Palestinians should have known better than to elect a party that actually said it would stand up to Israel. But being the crazed terrorists that they all must be, because a lot of them are Muslim don’t forget, the Palestinians went and voted for Hamas. How silly!America decided to teach the Palestinians a lesson about democracy by staging a military coup to impose a government that did exactly what America and Israel wanted. It couldn’t be that difficult. They had already done similar things in Iran and Chile, so doing it in Gaza should be no sweat.
Can you guess what happened next? Hamas foiled the military coup and took control of Gaza in 2007! A democratically elected leadership that America and Israel didn’t like and couldn’t kill off was totally unacceptable. Israel blockaded Gaza, creating the largest open air prison in the world, limiting supplies of water, power, fuel, and food and stepping up the violence against those awful Palestinians.
A pattern of events was quickly established . Settlers and the IDF would terrorize Palestinians, arrest them without charge, attack them in their mosques, especially in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, beat up men, women, children, the elderly and the disabled, spray them with sewer water, burn their crops, and wait for a reaction. The reaction would come from Hamas, or another Palestinian military group, and then the whole world would be told that Israel had suffered another terrorist attack.
After every terrorist attack Israel had to protect itself. Each episode was given a grand title. Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) killed 1181 Gazan civilians and 286 combatants. On the Israeli side, 10 soldiers and 3 civilians were killed. Operation Pillar of Defense (2012) killed 103 Gazan civilians and 55 combatants. On the Israeli side 4 civilians and 2 soldiers were killed. In Operation Protective Edge (2014) 2251 Palestinians were killed, with 65% of them being civilians. 67 Israeli soldiers and 6 civilians were killed. In the 2021 war, 128 civilians and 128 combatants were killed in Gaza. In Israel, 14 civilians and 1 soldier were killed.
Thousands of homes and hundreds of schools, mosques, churches, hospitals and shelters were destroyed in Gaza. Israel refers to these wars as mowing the lawn. Of course, Israel doesn’t use lawnmowers for self defense. They use tanks, fighter jets, chemical weapons, and everything else at the disposal of one of the world’s most powerful armies.
The Israeli government has revised the number of civilians killed during the Hamas attacks on 7th October more than once. The most recent official estimate is 1200. It’s important to say killed during the Hamas attacks and not killed by Hamas as there is increasing evidence that some of the Israelis who perished were killed by the IDF. I’ve yet to figure out how that would fit with being the most moral army in the world.
For months Israel and the West have told the world not to trust reports about how many Gazans have been killed because those numbers come from Hamas, and we must all remember that Hamas are Muslims, terrorists, monsters, human animals, rapists, baby decapitators, Nazis, swastika bearers, baby bakers, and liars. What we must not remember is that Israeli intelligence uses the very same numbers that we have been told to discount, as Israeli forces do not waste time counting the dead before moving on to the next target. The latest number, from Hamas, that we mustn’t trust, even though Israeli intelligence trusts them, is around 30,000 dead Palestinians. That’s not counting the thousands lying dead under the rubble of demolished buildings.
Since October 7th 2023, the whole world has been told to get in a time machine and skip over the last 8 decades. We’ve all been told that this whole conflict started with the terrible, unprovoked terrorist atrocity committed by Hamas in October last year. We’ve been told that there is no history and that context is irrelevant. Hamas apparently started this whole mess. It’s all their fault.
The International Court of Justice has said it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide and it must take measures, along with all signatories of the Genocide Convention, to do everything in their power to prevent genocide in Gaza. Israel has gone the other way, intensifying its attacks and killing even more Gazans every day, and pre-emptively discrediting the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and UNRWA, the aid agency set up to look after the millions of Palestinian refugees created by Israel. America and Britain are standing right by Israel. I wonder if they would all like to go back in time and never sign up to the genocide convention. It’s really proving to be inconvenient.
In 1950, after the Nakba, Israel ratified its own laws, making incitement of or calls for genocide a capital offence, punishable by death. With Israeli government ministers, military leaders, soldiers, Israeli civilians and celebrities all calling for genocide and even posting videos of themselves doing it on TikTok, there are going to have to be a lot of death sentences handed out. With a time machine, Israel might want to go back and unwrite its own laws.
I’d like a time machine too. It might allow me to keep up with the rapidly mounting Israeli atrocities that are being reported; the desecration of Palestinian graveyards, the rounding up and executing of Palestinian boys and men, the use of tanks to murder entire families in their cars and their homes, the firing on Palestinians trying to access humanitarian aid, the assassination of patients in hospitals by IDF soldiers dressed up as medical staff, the settler conventions advertising Israeli towns on the ruins of Gaza. The list goes on. But the sad fact is that time machines aren’t real, and Israels' war on the Palestinians is. I wish that wasn’t the case.
