Not helping
Australian police said on Tuesday they were investigating a pro-Palestinian protest outside Sydney Opera House, after footage emerged of a small group appearing to chant anti-Semitic slogans at the demonstration.
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Unverified footage shared by the Australian Jewish Association and featured on Sky News appeared to show a small group outside the Opera House lighting flares and chanting “gas the Jews”.
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Protest organiser Palestine Action Group Sydney defended its right to protest “apartheid” in Israel but said a small number of “vile antisemitic attendees” had no place in their movement.
There was an interesting (and heated) discussion about Israel and apartheid on Start the Week yesterday.
This is just one of those hideous issues where everyone wants their own grievances discussed in terms of history and context, but every complaint issued by the other side is immediately phrased in a historical vacuum. Fact is, the conflict is a long history of mutual atrocities that are almost impossible to untangle at this point. There are days when I just want to evacuate the whole region, put the Israelis in eastern Nebraska and the Palestinians in western Utah, and then send in the bulldozers to dig up every last sacred rock and dump them in the Marianas Trench, and make Jordan a beachfront property. In the long run, it might STILL be cheaper in both blood and treasure, than the current bullshit.
Many decades ago I read a short story – probably in a sci-fi anthology – in which the narrator meets an exile off-world, realising that they were the peacekeeping General who had ordered the worst atrocity in Earth’s history. He’d been tasked with keeping peace in the Middle East, and had decided that the only way to stop religious factions from endlessly fighting over Jerusalem and surrounds, was to nuke it out of existence. He did this knowing that he would be reviled, a war criminal, responsible for vast death and destruction of priceless cultural artefacts and history. He judges that despite the horror of what he was about to do, that in the long term it would save lives and act as a circuit breaker, giving the warring parties a common enemy to revile and allow them to join together in mutual sorrow and anger. I can’t remember much else about the story at this remove, but it indicates that many a thoughtful person over the decades has looked at that part of the world and considered it an essentially insoluble problem.
Freemage, what did the Marianas Trench ever do to you that you want to fill it in?
Personally, though, they can have Nebraska. I can’t imagine they could do worse with it than the Republicans who have been in charge for decades. At least they wouldn’t likely defund schools to save a few pennies.
What Freemage said. I’m afraid I long ago gave up even trying to pick a side or figure out who was worst or imagine what a possible solution could look like or anything along those lines.
iknklast: Note: I just was talking about the debris from ‘sacred’ sites, like the Temple of the Mount and so forth, there. Sinking them to the depths of the ocean seems like the best way to prevent them from being turned into new pilgrimage sites that the two fight over access to. Other debris–be it construction remnants or just dug up dirt–would be used for other projects as needed.