Op-Ed: The Palestinian Conflict

By AM Thursday, July 31, 2014

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An op-ed piece Peadar O'Maoileoin that featured in Lawson >> Mulvihill on 24 July 2014 and is reproduced by TPQ with the author's permission. 

For those interested, here’s a little history lesson regarding the Palestinian conflict. Zionists think Palestine is their promised land because their religion says so. Hamas think it’s their promised land because their religion says so. Both are idiots, hell bent on genocide.
Lets go back in time for a second.

The Palestinians Arabs have been there since the Roman Empire, which is a fairly long time. Zionism emerged in the late 1880s – Theodor Herzl founded it. Eretz Israel, the name for Palestine in the Jewish religion, had been revered throughout the centuries by generations of Jews as a place for holy pilgrimage, never as a future secular state. Jewish tradition and religion clearly instruct Jews to await the coming of the promised Messiah ‘at the end of times’ before they can return to Eretz Israel as a sovereign people in a Jewish theocracy.

As they saw it, Palestine was occupied by ‘strangers’ (aka not Jewish), despite the fact that the Palestinians were there since the Roman times. Zionists first arrived in 1882. Until the occupation of Palestine by Britain in 1918, Zionism was a blend of nationalist ideology and colonialist practice. Zionists made up no more than 5% of the country’s overall population at the time.

The religious people in the west regarded the return of Jews to Palestine as a chapter in the divine scheme, precipitating the second coming of Jesus. This religious zeal inspired Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister at the time, to act with greater commitment for the success of Zionism. Lloyd had a great disdain for Arabs, and he called Palestinians “Mohammedans”.

The more precise strategies of how to best take over Palestine as a whole and create a nation-state in the country, or in part of it, were a later development closely associated with British ideas of how best to solve the conflict Britain itself had done so much to exacerbate.

British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour gave the Zionist movement his promise in 1917 to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, he opened the door to the endless conflict that would soon engulf the country.



Arthur Balfour



By the end of the 1920s, the British made an attempt to solve the conflict. Until then the British had treated Palestine as a state within the British sphere of influence, not as a colony. They tried to put in place a political structure that would represent both communities on equal footing in the state’s parliament as well as government. The Palestinians made up the majority of between eighty and ninety percent of the total population, so they refused the British suggestion of parity. However, shortly after this they offered to accept it as a basis for negotiations but by this time the Zionist leaders rejected it. The Palestinian uprising in 1929 was a direct result of Britains refusal to implement at least their promise of parity after the Palestinians had been willing to set aside the democratic principal of majoritarian politics, which Britain had championed as the basis for negotiations in all the other Arab states within the sphere of influence.

After the 1929 uprising the Labour government in London appeared inclined to embrace the Palestinian demands, but the Zionist lobby succeeded in reorientating the British government back on the Balfourian track.

Another uprising took place in 1936. This forced the British to place more troops in Palestine. The Palestinian leadership was exiled at this time.

Between these two uprisings the Zionist leadership wasted no time in working out their plans for an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine. In 1937 they then accepted a modest portion of land, and then in 1942 they demanded all of Palestine for themselves. They announced that the Zionist project could only be realised through the creation of Palestine as a purely Jewish state.

The British allowed the Zionist movement to carve out an independent enclave for itself in Palestine in the late 1930s. It was one British officer Orde Charles Wingate who made Zionist leaders realise Jewish statehood had to be closely associated with militarism and an army to protect Jewish enclaves and colonies, but alsobecause of acts of armed aggression were an effective deterrent against the possible resistance of the local Palestinians.

Wingate had a very religious upbringing and he quickly became enchanted with the Zionist dream. He transformed paramilitary organisation of the Hagana (it means defense in Hebrew). Under Wingate, the Hagana quickly became the military arm of the Jewish Agency.

The Arab revolt gave the Hagana members a chance to practise the military tactics Wingate had taught. The main objective was to intimidate Palestinian communities who were in close proximity of Jewish settlements. The Hagana unit and a British company jointly attacked a village on the border between Israel and Lebanon and held it for a few hours.





The Hagana also gained valuable military experience in the second world war when they volunteered for the British war effort. Others stayed behind to infiltrate the 1200 Palestinian villages that had dotted the countryside for hundreds of years.

In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were uprooted and 531 villages destroyed. None of those would have happened if it wasn’t for British influence. The only reason Hamas exist, was because there was a need for a Palestinian defense. Hamas help out locally, and what they ask for in return is support for their terrorist organisation. They blackmail people; take the sick to hospital so that you owe them a favour. It’s very mobbish. They definitely need to be removed in order to allow a secular Palestinian country to prevail, but I completely condemn how Israel are going about this. They’re not really going after Hamas, they’re going after Hamas AND the innocent Palestinians who have more right to the land than they do, in my view. But at this point both communities are there now and it has to be shared. Zionism is Jewish religious fanaticism and it is disgusting. Hamas are the same but from an Arab standpoint. This is a religious “war”.

Israel didn’t exist before the genocide in 1948. The land was stolen and wanted exclusively for Jews because some bronze age book. This is sectarian.

Similarly, Hamas want the land exclusively for Arabs because of some bronze age book This is also sectarian.



If you support Israel, then you’re a religious sectarian bigot.
If you support Hamas, then you’re a religious sectarian bigot.

The only moral stance possible here is the support of the Palestinians, to want a secular future for them.

Extract from the Hamas 1988 charter: “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” (Article Six). Article Thirty-One of the Charter states:

Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism—to coexist in peace and quiet with each other.

That demonstrates that their goals are also religious.