Box cutter politics
This time the painting wasn’t protected by a glass screen.
A portrait of Lord Balfour, the former prime minister, at the University of Cambridge has been damaged by a pro-Palestinian protester.
In video posted on social media by Palestine Action, a member of the group is seen spray-painting and slashing the portrait at Trinity College. A woman can be seen defacing the work with red paint before slicing the canvas with a sharp object.
She didn’t “damage” the portrait, she destroyed it. She slashed it into shreds.
The good news is it wasn’t a Rembrandt or similar, but still, let’s be accurate.
Balfour was one of the chief supporters of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, cemented by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which gave British backing to the movement.
So denounce him. Hand out leaflets denouncing him. Write a book denouncing him. Use your words.
Update: That’s a pricey backpack the “activist” is sporting.
This painting, evidently.
“Palestine Action were contacted for comment.”
Oh, good policy. Next time there’s a bombing, the Telegraph should contact whatever jihadi claims responsibility and print a lengthy justification for that too.
Sorry, not seeing the connection between the act and the bag. Is there a price limit placed on bags to be used by protestors? Is protest the preserve of the poor?
Balfour, as a white colonist, made a declaration about how non-white people were to be colonised. That declaration has since been rolled out every time there is a clash between Israeli and Palestinian rights. It is treated by one side of the debate as holy scripture and as the work of a demon by the other.
It is the source of all enmity between Palestinians and the more recently arrived EuroJews.
When I look at the devastation Israel has wrought on Gaza, as well as its determination to carry this war into The Occupied Territories of the West Bank, to Lebanon, and beyond, a destroyed painting is a sideshow for the easily distracted.
Millions are being starved. Children are having limbs amputated without anesthesia. Hospitals are deliberately targeted and destroyed.
But look, a painting!
And Papito, your comparison of the destruction of a piece of cloth daubed with paint and a targeted bombing is beyond contempt.
(BTW – Irgun may not have been asked their opinions on the King David Hotel bombing, but their leaders all found jobs in the Israeli government or military. Terrorism can pay off).
David, I find your perennial antisemitism beyond contempt. So I guess we’re even there.
As to who the indigenous people of the land between the river and the sea are, it’s most Jews, plus those Palestinians whose ancestors were Jews (about half of them). Have some science on that:
https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry
The Jews were kicked out of Israel by the colonizers who renamed it Palestine – the Romans, that is. Now they’re back, some from Europe and most from elsewhere in the MIddle East and in Africa, and they’re not leaving. Cheer on the rapists and baby-choppers all you want, they’re not leaving.
The “EuroJews” is it. So that’s how they get moved into the “white” column? Funny how that didn’t work out for them in 1942.
Papito @4
Agreed. Thank you. Hear, hear.
Then, as I understand it, a bunch of people from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan arrived in the ’30s and ’40s to work on British and Zionist infrastructure projects–and their descendants are largely represented among those now insisting the land “from the river to the sea” is theirs and theirs alone.
In fairness that’s also the position of Netanyahu’s government, just in the reverse direction. Either way, they can have a murder or murder/suicide but not a divorce. No one’s going anywhere.
Funny how all these Hamas cheer-leaders have no memory of Gaza, and the ‘West Bank,’ spending decades under the occupation of Egypt and Jordan. The latter even attempted to legally annex the West Bank after conquering it in 1948. Oh…and the King of Jordan’s personal army was trained and officered by the British, and commanded by that Palestinian hero; Sir John Glubb.
Add to that, that the whole of Jordan was originally part of the Palestinian Mandate. Sliced off and put under a king imported from Arabia in 1921. No complaints about ‘colonial entities’ here.
At first I rolled my eyes and thought this another idiotic ‘activist’ destroying a random thing while shouting about their cause. But then I got to the description of Balfour, and recognised him from the Balfour Declaration, and it all made sense. The guy that made Zionism British and international policy. Still not an effective form of activism, but the connection between target and cause is sound.
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Papito,
Which statement of his was antisemitic? Was it the description of conditions in Gaza, or the description of Israel’s actions?
You have misread your source. The study shows common ancestry:
“More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.
…
[geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem]’s team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel in the past few generations; most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer.”
You seem to have read the bit about ‘matching historical accounts’ and thought that passage was derived from the study.
Incredible. You acknowledge that the Palestinians have had continuous occupation of the land for 2,000+ years, yet your phrasing seems to suggest their ownership is less legitimate than that of the Jews?? This is coming off as very… biblical.
Oh and the region was known as Palestine further back than the Roman period. The Romans merely called it a subregion of Syria, calling it Syria Palaestina. The Hebrew text even attests to this by the way; Philistine and Palestine are obvious cognates, and the scripture admits Philistines were there way back in those early days already.
Say, how does the scriptural texts say the Jews came into ownership of that land in the first place? Oh yes, wholesale genocide of the Philistines and Canaanites, retroactively justified as orders from an awful god (not that the Islamic god is any better). This resumption of ancient ownership claim is bunk.
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John,
Unfair. I have yet to see David or any other regular support the October 7 attack. And, did those other puppet leaders dominate Palestinians and corral them even to the present day? No, their impact came and went. No one is talking about them today because they are simply not relevant today.
One would think, reading this, that the Palestinians had nothing whatever to do with being “dominated” and “corralled.” They never had the option of their own independent state, and the mean ol’ Israelis have just randomly been securing their borders. No reason at all. Jihad? Never heard of it.
One more thing.
The support is implicit. Hamas were originally voted into power by the Palestinians. Hamas are presently, still, the bosses there.
There’s a factor in play in the Middle East that pro-Palestinians don’t acknowledge. That factor is culture.
One culture has overcome genocidal fantasies about slaughtering Philistines and centuries-long persecution. One hasn’t. This isn’t a matter of one group of humans being superior to the other. And it isn’t a matter of one being eternal innocent victims.
Here are brief clips of two children’s television shows. One is the Israeli version of Sesame Street, Rechov Sumsum. The other is Tomorrow’s Pioneers, a Palestinian program.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/911217644031571?s=yWDuG2&fs=e&mibextid=Nif5oz
Looks like the hyperlink for Rechov Sumsum didn’t work. Here’s the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechov_Sumsum
Oh yes, I forgot about the 3 link thing. I will split that comment in two, and the original giant comment can stay in the bin.
#10
Yes, pretty much. “In 1948, more than 700000 Palestinian Arabs – about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population – fled from their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and, later, the Israeli army during the 1948 Palestine war, following the Partition Plan for Palestine. The expulsion and flight was a central component of the fracturing, dispossession, and displacement of Palestinian society, known as the Nakba. Dozens of massacres were conducted by Israeli military forces and between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Village wells were poisoned [causing a typhoid epidemic] in a biological warfare programme and properties were looted to prevent Palestinian refugees from returning.”
‘Securing their borders’ my left foot, Israel was born in massacre – biblical time or modern, your choice – and has been an apartheid nation even in its relatively peaceful times.
#11
And Israeli governments have been happy to have them in power, even to the point of providing them with material aid. Many links here, but here is a sample quote:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.
Netanyahu explained that, in the past, the PA transferred the millions of dollars to Hamas in Gaza. He argued that it was better for Israel to serve as the pipeline to ensure the funds don’t go to terrorism.
“Now that we are supervising, we know it’s going to humanitarian causes,” the source said, paraphrasing Netanyahu.
The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.””
And then a video giving two very brief snippets of contrasting programming. I can do that too: Israeli tv programming, and hey why not also some footage from Israel’s school system. Though the wording of one of the exchanges implies this is specifically a religious school; hopefully the secular teaching is not nightmarish like that abomination.
Re “footage from Israel’s school system”–
Per Reddit:
“As an Israeli …it is important to note
“The children in the picture are ultra-Orthodox Jews from the ultra-Orthodox extremist faction.
That maybe 3% of the Jewish population in Israel”
So, an ultra-religious school; not “Israel’s school system.”
Snopes has the story on the video from Kan. It was shared, then deleted, on Kan’s online platforms–calling it “Israel tv programming” is misleading.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/20/israeli-children-singing-annihilate-gaza/
The snippets I posted were indeed brief; that’s why I also posted to the Wikipedia articles, so that people could find verification that these are both actual, mainstream television programs, and what we see in the snippets are likely characteristic of each. My point, of course, was not that “there are no Israelis who hate Palestinians” but that in only one of the two cultures is hatred of the Other taught to schoolchildren. Regularly. As part of the mainstream culture, which is a jihadist one.
I’m sure there are Palestinians who believe in secularism, pluralism, and Enlightenment values, but, unlike their counterparts in Israel, they are voiceless and powerless.