And nobody wants peace

Monday 19th November

It seems like groundhog day, you know the film where the hero is forced to relive every day over and over again.  Isreal and the Palestinians are at it again; it only seems like yesterday that we had the nightmare of the 2008/2009 invasion of Gaza by Isreal, and here we are again facing yet another bloody war, yet more children orphaned, yet more violence, yet more stubborn stupidity.

My sympathies are with the Palestinians and always have been ever since 1967.  We all know there have been wars and possibly, though one sincerely hopes not, there always will be.  Civil wars are often the ugliest but wars between nations or peoples can be devastating.  But for the last hundred years or so it has always seemed that once a war is over, or the fighting has stopped then you try to find a political solution to living together.  This never happened in the Middle East, and worse the Isreali’s have refused to seriously contemplate giving back the land they have taken by force.

The Arab nations have mostly made some sort of peace with Isreal, and one by one have stopped posturing about driving them into the sea, but the problem of the Palestinians has never been seriously addressed.  Even by the Palestinians themselves who lurch from supporting one radical group to one even more radical, and they must realise that they will never be strong enough to beat Isreal in a war. So why do they continue to provoke Isreal by firing rockets again and again at them.

And Isreal is even worse, using these ridiculous attacks as an excuse for even more disproportionate shelling of tiny beleaguered Gaza.  I cannot help thinking that neither side wants peace  – Hamas, because a state of constant threat unites their tiny state-let and reinforces the credentials of the extremists; and Isreal, because it shunts the infamous road-map of the Americans even further down the road.

So both sides are hurtling into another bloody conflict which neither side, unless Isreal kills every single Palestinian, can possibly win.  And the world looks on with amazement, that in the twenty-first century we can still have this amount of bloodshed and this amount of stubborn stupidity.