The Unprovoked — The Great Lie of Our Age — Palestine and Russia

When words suppress rather than reveal

Another great barbarism has come to visit the human race.

5,000 killed in Gaza thus far with large areas pulverised and reduced to rubble; blown to smithereens by the Israeli Army with some of the most advanced military weapons in the world. And the devastation and carnage is escalating and intensifying with every single second.

1,400 Israelis slaughtered at the hands of Hamas after the terrorist organisation launched a brutal attack on Israel, with a few hundred taken hostage.

Few serious commentators and non-partisans would argue that what Hamas have done is anything other than horrifying to the extreme and unconscionable in the deepest sense of the word.

Equally, few with their heads screwed on, their hearts in the right place and their moral compass intact would say that what Israel is doing is anything other than the extermination of a people who are all but powerless as if they are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas, as if they are the scum of the Earth.

The power is unassailably in the hands of Israel; Gaza is a willow before the storm. And Israel’s rage is seemingly boundless as it continues to wash over the Gaza Strip, as the violence grows ever greater and the bodies pile up.

The nature of events should induce in any sane moral person horror and anger at what Hamas have done, but still greater horror and anger at what Israel is continuing to do. More to the point, any cursory glance at the long, sad and storied history of Palestine would tell any reasonable person that this has been a very long time coming.

And yet the greatest political lie of our age has once again spread across the world like wild fire — the unprovoked.

It was rammed down our throats ad nauseam with Russia and Ukraine. And now it is back to shut down our critical faculties and expunge our minds of any knowledge of history.

Let us examine one of the great lies of our age and that which it seeks to wash from our minds.

Russia

The ‘unprovoked and unjustifiable’ trope metastasised across the Western World after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There are hundreds and thousands of instances of the trope and it became an essential calling card to showcase one’s immaculate moral credentials and undying commitment to see things in the binary.

Yet, as many have pointed out, regardless of how much the phrase is bandied about, it simply isn’t true.

And provocation is not justification. Russia has committed a great barbarism against Ukraine. There is nothing that could justify such a war short of facing imminent extinction at the hands of pure evil.

It is not justifiable. But it was repeatedly and wilfully provoked.

Expanding arguably the most powerful military alliance in history right to the doorstep of an erstwhile enemy and fallen power is always going to be seen as a threat sooner or later. This is an iron law of power politics. The only way to nullify this is either to not expand in the first place or to bring the former rival into the fold.

And the expansion of NATO has been swift and far-reaching in speed and scope: 3 states in 1999 (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary); 7 more in 2004 (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia and Bulgaria) and 5 more from 2009 to 2023.

When the security of one state or a group of states comes at the expense of another’s, particularly a powerful one, then no one will have lasting security and war will be all the more likely. And this is exactly how events played out.

You may remonstrate and suggest that NATO is a defensive military alliance (which no one in it really believes). And this may be true for those inside the clubhouse, but when everyone outside the club sees it very differently, then the defensive characterisation holds little water. The hard truth is that Russia and China are never going to observe those Aegis Ashore and Aegis at Sea ballistic missiles positioned all over the place and think them perfectly harmless.

This doesn’t mean that Russia and China enjoy sole right of assignation as to what NATO is and isn’t, rather, how they view actions and how they are likely to view actions must be part of any approach to policy that seeks to understand the real lie of the land and doesn’t want to precipitate large-scale conflict.

And it is not only the Russian political class that has repeatedly vociferated its deep antipathy to the unending expansions, prominent figures in the West have long spoke of the folly and danger of such an enterprise, with one of the seminal figures in USSR-US relations, George Kennan, voicing his warnings back in 1998, 2 years before Putin came to power, and 50 esteemed public figures writing to Bill Clinton in 1997.

All this militarism, expansionism and complete disregard for what Russia has being saying for a long time make the ‘wholly unprovoked’ assertion simply untenable and more than a little ridiculous.

And then we have the special case of Ukraine and its unique relationship with Russia.

Kiev is known as the ‘Mother of Russian cities’, both for better and for worse. There is huge historical, cultural, social and spiritual affinity between the two with a great degree of overlap and interpermeation in a great many areas.

More to the point, and moving from the nebulous to the concrete, Russian is spoken as a first language by at least 29% of the population, and approximately a fifth of the population identify as Ethnic Russian, with this moving to three quarters for Crimea.

According to a number of polls conducted by the Levada Centre at the behest of the Washington Post, Crimea does consistently and genuinely want to be part of Russia. This is not necessarily true for other eastern regions, but it should be emphasised that the cultural monism of Orange Ukraine and its vision of a single destiny for a single people are particularly problematic in a country that is both diverse and divergent.

And then there’s the instability of Ukraine, its tendencies towards extremism and the length of the borders shared by the two countries, all of which mean that Russia perceive its neighbour fundamentally different than a country like Finland.

Given all this, the level of involvement and infiltration both the US and the UK have had in Ukraine, during the Maidan Revolution or Coup, whichever way you want to see it, in terms of fomenting social unrest and military training, and in terms of being wholly unyielding and unrelenting on Ukraine joining NATO, even when there is evidence to suggest that both Zelenskiy and France and Germany did desire some form of neutrality agreement with Russia, reveal just how little the US-led West sought a path towards peace, compromise and de-escalation and just how much it sought to provoke Russia, extend it and draw it into a insuperable quagmire.

Scores of sharp, penetrating, far-seeing people, sober-minded and level-headed thinkers from right across the political spectrum have been saying that most everything the US-led West was doing amounted to massive provocation and portended an imminent violent conflict.

The evidence is both profuse and damning. Russia’s war against Ukraine is not justifiable; let us be clear, emphatic and unequivocal on the matter. It was, however, provoked both wilfully and systematically over a great many years.

Palestine

The fact that history was doomed to repeat itself with Russia and the West is both deeply tragic and farcical, given how easily it could have been prevented.

There is nothing farcical about the plight of Palestine, however; it is only heartrendingly tragic. There is also nothing of the undulating vicissitudes of history, swinging on their axes to complete their irresistible rotations, rather there is only the ever-present torture of the incarcerated and the ceaseless, pitiless grind of being slowly and steadily erased from existence.

If you think the war between Russia and Ukraine wasn’t provoked, then you understand neither politics nor history. If you think Hamas’s heinous and horrifying terrorist attack wasn’t provoked, then there is no such thing as provocation in our world.

Of course, zealotry never let little things like history, reason, logic or knowledge stand in its way, and sure enough the great lie of the unprovoked came deluging across western media in its droves.

Let’s take a look at the history of Palestine and Israel.

The Zionification of Palestine did not begin in 1948 but is rooted in the Zionist movement which emerged some time in the late 19th-century. And it is vital to distinguish Zionism from Judaism; the former is a political ideology, the latter is a religion. It is Zionism that proclaimed Palestine as the land promised to the Hebraic People by God.

After taking control of Palestine following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the British, those arch-colonisers of lands and supreme subjugators of peoples, helped make God’s promise a reality in the shape of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which vowed to carve out a home for the Jewish People in Palestine.

From this point on the Jewish population of Palestine began to grow rapidly, increasing by 160,000 from 1932 to 1935 alone. The pace of immigration was such that Britain itself had to stem the tide, to the ire of Zionist terrorists. The Palestinians were deeply unhappy with what was happening and revolted; Britain crushed the revolt, killing 10% of the male population and torturing its leaders.

The United Nations put forward a plan to divide Palestine in two in 1947, with 62% of the land going to the Jewish side despite having half the population (this in itself is testament to the Sisyphean struggle of the Palestinian People, when even the supposed Gods of impartiality are so firmly against you). One way or another, the situation was uncontainable and it escalated into full-blown civil war which prompted Britain to exit in 1948.

From here the First Arab-Israeli War erupted with Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria invading to intervene on the side of the Palestinian Arabs. They lost.

The Zionist Jews found a home for themselves by evicting another from theirs — paradise for the first meant perdition for the other.

The newly-formed Jewish State took 77% of the land of Palestine; the Arab states took the rest. 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, roughly half of the population. And 15,000 Palestinians were butchered at the hands of Zionist forces.

After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel swallowed the remaining territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Henceforth, these came to be known as the Occupied Territories. The UN Security Council unanimously condemned the occupation, stressing the flagrant illegality of such an action and called for Israel’s immediate withdrawal.

The Zionist Jews found a home for themselves by evicting another from theirs — paradise for the first meant perdition for the other. This is called the Nakba by Palestinians, which means catastrophe. The United Nations chose to mark the Nakba for the first time in May of this year.

Israel has ordered the evacuation of more than 1 million people from Northern Gaza. As I write this, the death toll has broken 5,000, with almost half of the dead children. Israel is blowing Gaza to bits with the most brutal of means at its disposal and committing other war crimes against the Palestinian People, including the use of white phosphorus. Gaza is besieged on all sides and invasion to raze the whole place to the ground seems imminent.

This is beyond barbaric. A second Nakba is nigh.

Israeli apartheid

Both Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch call what Israel is doing to the Palestinian People an apartheid and a crime against humanity:

Since 1948, roughly 130,000 Palestinian homes and other structures like mosques, community buildings and schools have been demolished.

There are 700,000 Jewish settlers living in approximately 279 settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Zionification of the Occupied Territories has reached record levels under Benjamin Netanyahu. Even the USA has denounced such abject disregard for human life.

From 2008 to 2021, 5,739 Palestinians were killed to 251 Israelis; this is 23 Palestinians to every 1 Israeli.

Since 2007, when Hamas came to power, a sea, air and land blockade has been imposed on Gaza by Israel with the support of Egypt, with the movement of people and goods heavily restricted.

Consequently, Gaza is often called the world’s largest open-air prison. 98% of groundwater is undrinkable, 80% of Gazans are unemployed, Secretary-General of the UN Antonio Guterres called it ‘hell on Earth’ for children and the UN also said that life in Gaza would simply be ‘unliveable’ by 2020.

Any Palestinian who needs to reach another zone for reasons of work or otherwise must run the gauntlet of control, fear and domination.

Gaza has been under blockade for 16 years, all but shutting it off from the outside world. But the all-suffocating control and dominion over most every facet of Palestinian life runs still deeper. The Occupied Territories are segregated and cordoned off from one another; each territory is chopped up into zones, with each zone, in, turn, segregated from the others.

The West Bank is split into 3 zones — A (18% of the land, under PA control), B (22%, under joint control) and C (66%, under Israeli control). Israel controls exit and entry from and into B and every facet of life in C). The zones are regulated by an elaborate patchwork of checkpoints, towers, temporary irregular barriers and up to 705 permanent road obstacles, which is further undergirded by a heavily restrictive permit regime and a highly repressive biometric surveillance system. Any Palestinian who needs to reach another zone for reasons of work or otherwise must run the gauntlet of control, fear and domination.

This has led to massive economic etiolation, with $50 billion lost between 2000 and 2020 and a poverty rate 3 times higher than would been were it not for Israel’s draconian system of control.

This is the evisceration of a people in most every sense you look at it — physically, psychologically, economically, politically and spiritually. Their very being is dissected and dissociated on a daily basis, and they are second or third class citizens in their own land. Their lives are governed from on high by a god hostile to their very existence, their land is confiscated with little chance of getting it back, thousands upon thousands of their homes have been bulldozed, they are herded and cattle-prodded into submission, and their will to self-determine and strive for a common destiny is denied under Israeli Law.

The unprovoked

There are times when language reveals itself in the most unintended of ways, when words point not towards what they say but to what they seek to suppress.

When the word innocent is used one too many times, there’s someone somewhere desperate to hide their guilt.

And when you see media drowning in instances of the great lie of our age, the unprovoked, I suggest you take a nice long look in which way the signpost points. Then take a walk in the opposite direction — there you’ll find the guilty.