Beware Palestine's False Friends

OK, so now i have a blog....what to do?

This came about after a conversation with a friend currently sitting in her mothers home in the Israeli town of Ashdod. For the past weeks or so she and her family have been living under threat of missiles fired from Gaza. Three days ago, one of the missiles, destroyed an apartment building in their street, just four buildings away. I call every day to see how they are doing and to ask. Mt friend is beginning to wonder how good my connections are, as it would appear every time I call the alarm sounds and she and her family have thirty seconds to get to a safe place before a missile falls. In their case the safe place is an internal room closest to the staircase and away from the windows. They sit and stand in the room each praying a silent prayer that the missile or missiles on their way will land on them this time. For the people of Ashdod, this is a relatively new phenomenon, however for the town of Sderot and the settlements surrounding Gaza this has been going on for the past eight years. I do not have the exact figures, however I gather that over the past eight years in excess of five thousand rockets have been fired at the civilian population in the south of Israel.

I don't want to talk about the fact that Israel left Gaza three years ago, uprooting Jewish settlers and removing all military presence from the strip; in the hope that the Palestinians may take the opportunity to build a civil society and use Gaza as a template for the establishment of an independent democratic Palestinian state. I don't want to talk about the fact that in 2007 Hamas initiated a military coup in Gaza in order to rest control from Fatah. I don't want to talk about the brutality with which they treated their enemy, their Palestinian brothers. Tying up prisoners and throwing them off high rise buildings to their death is not the actions of a responsible government. Shooting unarmed demonstrators is not the behaviour of a leadership which cares about its people. Threatening political rivals with death and violence, threatening Christians practicing their religion, limiting the freedom of women, banning all forms of protest and encouraging their young to become suicide bombers; none of these are the actions of a leadership who has the interests of its people at heart.

I do want to talk about the Palestinians' False Friends. The supposed friends of the Palestinian people who's hatred for Israel and the USA leads them to exploit the Palestinian cause for their own selfish means. The same supposed friends who with a nod and a wink will ignore the gross violations of human rights and international law committed by Hamas, on their own people (never mind the Israeli civilians; then advocate that the civilised world recognise these monsters as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. The very same "armchair" Palestinians who from the comfort of their homes in the UK and other places in Europe, advocate extreme and unrealistic positions for the Palestinians which are sure to damn the Palestinian people to another fifty years of occupation and suffering where their aspirations and hopes for a better life for their children are sacrificed by their so called friends in order to maintain their irrational and racist campaign against the state of Israel. Why is it, that when their is indeed a moderate Palestinian camp with goals to realise the national aspirations of the Palestinian people by way of a two state solution. When their are leaders who are prepared to make the compromises necessary to bring a Palestinian state into being. Why is it that their so called friends in the UK and Europe choose to support their rivals, choose to give succor to a bunch of murdering Islamic extremist terrorists, the very people who will do everything in their power to ensure that the two state solution, the only solution which could ever provide the Palestinians with their own state and their children with a brighter future; will never happen. Why do their supposed friends choose to support an organisation which would rather send its young to murder innocents in a "martyrs" death, than to school to learn and prepare to build a future Palestinian civil society in their own state. Unfortunately the answer is all too apparent. Palestine's false friends are much more interested in destroying the state of Israel than they are in seeing the new state of Palestine being born. The very same people who admire the indefatigabiity of Saddam Hussein, who name dictators like Colonel Qaddafi amongst their friends, who rush to embrace an Islamic cleric who supports suicide bombing and believes homosexuals should be stoned to death, are the people who today stand side by side with the one organisation which has done more to harm Palestinian interests in the past decade, yet still have the cheek to call themselves true friends. They should be ahsamed of themsleves, although that would entail some degree of integrity; and well intentioned celebrities should stear well clear of them. With friends like these, the Palestinians must be careful. After all you are often judged by the company you keep.