A State Divided . . .

To declare that the Gaza Strip and West Bank could be in the foreseeable future a 'single viable state' was, and is, it has always seemed to me, an absurdity. It is as if someone were to say that Canada and Mexico could be a single unified state with a United States in between forbidding all physical communication between them even including the Panama canal, the Atlantic and the Pacific.

That has effectively been the geopolitical policy of Israel (and tacitly that of the USA) since Oslo. Were anyone to look at the map of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, from the beginning, it is clear that their geographical placement has never been dictated by the likelihood of expanding some Israeli agricultural industry for those who desire to live in what will always be ‘Indian territory’ as far as they are concerned.

They are military outposts like Roman or US Army forts in the West, the roads that connect them organised like wagon trails designed for the speedy deployment of armed forces, not for trade between an Israeli-populated town or city and a Palestinian one.

No viable state in any case can be constructed in the interstices of this kind of geo-miltary structure to begin with unl ess the population that falls through the cracks is either exterminated or demoralised and demilitarised to the extent they can be herded into reservations that are far away from tribal homelands, the earth that supported them, the gods that sustained them spiritually. Ask the native Americans.

Ask any of those Jews around the world who so vehemently make demands for a ‘biblical’ Israeli estate. The cry is that the land, the history of another people is irrelevant. That the Palestinians can all find a better home by ‘going to their brothers’. It is as though there were to be an orchestrated demand that I, whose English ancestry is Viking, and therefore of less antiquity that Palestinian Arabs, should join ‘my brothers’ in Norway.

Or, by a more recent analogy, since genetically I am part Italian, I should be forced to emigrate to Italy, a country and a culture, having been brought up entirely in England, I know only from visits, as a Palestinian would know Lebanon, Syria, Morocco or Libya (whose Arabic dialects are sometimes almost as different as English and Italian.) And why should Norway or Italy be at some time required to accept hundreds of thousands of people like me?

Even though I would actually be quite happy to live in Italy, a country and a civilisation I have grown to love, the Palestinian analogy is more akin to the Norwegian one, a country I have never visited, a language I know nothing of (not even from the Old Norse Sagas, which I have never felt any affinity with whatsoever).

It is clear that Israeli policies must inexorably, decade by decade, lead to the depopulation of the West Bank and Gaza. The withdrawal and demolition of settlements in Gaza was not a colonist’s abandonment of a foothold in a New World. It was merely a withdrawal of Israeli citizens to avoid their being caught up in the ‘collateral damage’ of a blitzkrieg that was, no doubt through biennial repetition over decades, if not centuries, to leave a country’s population no alternative but to flee the rubble and ruin for ever, or stay and die.

But people are stubborn. Especially when there are a million and a half ot them in a reatlivel small extent of land. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Native Indian tribes scattered over a continent frequently at war with each other and therefore unable to combat the approaching threat.

Unable to combat an armed threat, certainly, since even the Palestinian police, the organisation that in most countries protects the population from the criminal depredations normal in every society have been denied the arms they need. And the nascent Palestinian army that was to protect it has been dismantled, disarmed and made impotent.

So what do the Israelis want from their war on Gaza? The reduction of a physical state into dust and rubble out of revenge, that much is clear. And then? Having failed to persuade the majority of the population to abandon their country voluntarily to seek comfort with their ‘cousins’ and ‘brothers’ in Saudi, Dubai or Sudan, to deprive and starve them completely until we see hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, skeletons covered with nothing but skin, like those in Leningrad or Belsen? And the few hundred pitiful survivors are finally helped onto C-45 transports provided out of charity by the USAAF by the Israeli Medical Corps?

To close the tunnels that keep up a minimal amount of what Palestinians require merely to avoid starvation, would have in the end almost precisely that effect. It is naiveté in the highest degree, or pure unadulterated cynicism (neither of which surprise me in anything Blair is associated with) to expect the Israelis to open up road air and sea communications now with any hope of permanence, when for forty years they have closed off all of them at will or whim.

Was this—the total destruction of a land and the effective deportation of a population reduced to numb acquiescence by malnutrition and despair—the ‘war aim’ of the Israeli’s latest operation? Or was it just brutal revenge? It has been presented to the world as the latter and that is unpalatable enough to much of it. I cannot help suspecting now the former.