The UN Secretary-General recently gave a speech in which he said that the Hamas attack of 6th/7th October did not come out of nowhere, implying that there is an explanatory history.

This led to Israel and its most lickspittle allies demanding his resignation.

The only history that Israel wishes to propagate is the biblical bullshit that God gave the whole of Palestine to the Israelites, as the land of milk and honey, as they emerged from their fictitious forty-year trek around the desert on their escape from slavery in Egypt.

It was not God, but Britain and its World War One allies, in 1918,  that gave parts of Palestine  ─ although it was not theirs to give  ─ as a homeland for the Jews, regardless of the fact that Palestine was already inhabited by scores of Arab tribes, as it had been for centuries of recorded history.

Jewish migration to Palestine had a quantitative leap after WW2 as Holocaust survivors left the “displaced persons” (DP) camps of post-war Europe, seeking a place of safety. Countries like Britain were no more prepared to receive Jewish migrants from the DP camps in 1945 than they had been in the 1930s, when Jews were  seeking to escape the Nazi concentration camps.

The western allies found it convenient to ship the displaced Jews to Palestine, relieving  themselves of the problem and feeling that they were thus achieving some exoneration for Europe’s  responsibility for the emergence of the Nazis and the grotesque evil of the Holocaust.

In achieving statehood in 1948, Israeli militias drove half a million Palestinian Arabs from their homes. These people have lived in refugee camps all over the Middle East for the past seventy-five years, including several camps in the Gaza Strip.

Since the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Palestinan Arabs have been confined to Gaza and the west Bank of the River Jordan.

In 2005, Israel withdrew Jewish settlements from Gaza and relinquished control to the Palestinian Authority. The people of Gaza elected Hamas to control the territory. This is not what the Israeli government expected to happen when it disengaged from Gaza. It was assumed that the less militant PLO would take control and that the Palestinian population would be quiescent, not opposing the continuous settler occupation of Palestinian territory.

Gaza became the biggest open-air prison in the world with strictly controlled borders, military occupation and restrictions on imports and exports. Occasional outbreaks of violence have been put down by aerial bombardment, demolition of homes using British-built armoured bulldozers and cuts to essential imports, such electricity and medicines.

When the UN Secretary-General recently said the attacks of 6th/7th October did not come out of a vacuum, the Netanyahu gangster government could not tolerate this  taste of the truth.

Antonio Guterres said “The Palestinian people have been subject to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation.”

He continued by explaining that they have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people dispersed and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing. But the grievances of the people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas and those attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Even war has rules.

The Israeli government found these truths to be intolerable.

The Israeli military is not beyond committing or conniving in atrocities. In 1982, a Lebanese Christian militia massacred 1,600 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, while the Israeli military, which was in the control of the camps, stood idly by. As a consequence of the international outcry, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defence Minister, was forced to resign.

Israel’s  strategy is obvious to anyone with eyes to see. In pursuit of Hamas, the Israeli military will blast Gaza into the Stone Age, destroying homes and any infrastructure that makes the territory  habitable, content to kill any people who do not run away.

The callousness of the Israeli government is illustrated by their recent warning to the people of northern  Gaza to move south, whereupon they shifted their bombardment to the south.

Meanwhile, the concern of the British people, as  indicated by the massive weekly demonstrations, is ignored by our pathetic Prime Minister and spineless Leader of the Opposition, who bleat  platitudes  and dare not utter a word against the Israeli government,  nor a word in sympathy for the people of Palestine.

If they think their inaction is in the interests of the people of Israel, history may prove them wrong. Israel is surrounded by heavily armed Arab states, which may not remain mute and paralysed forever.  and these neighbouring states need not resort to military attack; they have potential control of Israel’s water supply, which would enable them to hold Israel to ransom.