genocide

 The recent weeks have had the media filled with pictures of a genocide happening in Gaza. Hamas shot rockets into Israel and killed a bunch of people...difficult to give a number as Israel is having to correct its initial briefings all too often and acknowledge that a significant number of those killed were killed by them. Hamas took hostages...all bad stuff. Israel then decided a proportionate response was to bomb Gaza flat...including hospitals and schools. Hundreds of children and babies have been killed.

Hamas is bad, that hardly needs saying...that Israel is bad definitely does need saying. The major problem for Israel in this situation is that people have access to a lot of information...TikTok and Instagram ..... and people have been finding out all sorts of stuff we didn't know before. I didn't know Israel was an apartheid state, nor that Jews and Palestinians are not legally allowed to marry or that 23andMe is effectively banned because it would destroy the myth of Jews as genetically tied to Israel/Palestine...while Palestinians are. All the information was there but I was lazy and only looked at the surface information about all the many problems in the area and accepted that Israel...while not perfect... was necessary as a haven for Jews and that supporting Palestinian rights was a code for anti-Semitism. 

I have read a lot in the last week or so and I can now say that Zionism is a colonialist ideology and that Palestinians have been treated badly by everyone...their leaders...the organisations that professed to be working for their benefit...PLO, Hamas, other Arab states...the Western world...

There have been protests around the world...as there were before the Iraq war, for BLM, when the Russians invaded Ukraine... I also remember marches to stop Apartheid in South Africa and to protest the Poll Tax... so sometimes protests work. I really don't see anything good happening for Palestine any time soon. There is no political will in America and they are the ones who control the purse strings and they have too much tied up with supporting Israel. But Israel will struggle resume any aura of morality over the situation.

For me personally it is painful to have to abandon the hope that Israel could be a moral country...it should have been. It was created after the Holocaust and having endured so much I truly expected...naïve I know...that  Israel would remember the horrors and not recreate them...but they totally have. Even the language us the same, I totally expect Netanyahu to call for a 'Final Solution' of the Palestinian problem...maybe through 'resettlement'!

DP is being his usual arsy self and taking the opposite view on any topic the rest of us express an opinion... he is sooo much wiser than us and such a genius so only his view is correct of course... DD did loose her temper with him last week...understandably. He was 'parenting' DS2 from another room, which he does like to do...extremely unhelpful which he has been told on multiple occasions. Anyway DD, who was in extreme pain and very tired after helping DS2 make Xmas cards erupted on DP and shouted at him that we all hate him and that they had prayed he died when he was in hospital. No one said anything as every word was pretty much true. DP has avoided the 'parenting' from afar since...long may that continue! 

Luckily DP is finally back at work...the month he was off on sick was interminable...and he is away! We are all enjoying the peace and quiet. Unfortunately its his last stint of working away in this job...pretty much his last stint of actually leaving the house for work at all. He starts his new job after Xmas so we'll see how how that goes...hopefully at least some travelling... we all need to time to relax.