When allied armies reclaimed Europe in the closing days of the second world war the horror of the Holocaust was revealed for all to see. Concentration camps, poison gas and vast ovens used in an attempt to exterminate an entire race of people !
Sympathy had a lot to do with the creation of the state of Israel by the newly formed United Nations. Unfortunately, this created ongoing hostility because giving a home to one race of people displaced another from land they claimed as their own.
The world held it's breath as Arab states combined to wage war on the new nation. Despite the odds, the Jewish people were victorious - and in their victories the borders of Israel expanded with the addition of conquered territory.
As a result this area of the middle east is in a constant struggle between Israel and the Palestinians and the only hope of peace seems to be the creation of an Arab state - and this would require Israel to relinquish land captured in earlier battles.
It now seems that the roles of oppressor and oppressed are reversed.
Israel had every right to invade an area from which rocket attacks were being waged against it's citizens, but the ferocity of that invasion seems to have been mounted with the sole aim of creating civilian casualties.
Famine and hardship are being imposed on the Palestinian people as the deliberate policy of the Jewish state.
The building of settlements on land claimed to be part of a Palestinian state is in defiance of the United Nations and the rest of the world. It seems that Israel has no intention of handing back this captured territory - and it is now a race to install a permanent presence and make it's inclusion in Israel an accomplished fact.
Sympathy for Israel is fading in the minds of many people. The image of brave pioneers struggling to establish a Jewish state in the face of implacable foes is slowly morphing into a ruthless and predatory country imposing it's own version of a holocaust on a conquered neighbour.
It seems that hate replaces hope and aggression replaces sympathy when the soil of a homeland becomes the issue !
No comments:
Post a Comment