Two digs, one hundred and fifty kilometres apart, tell a common story of singular purpose. One is near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where Israeli archaeologists have found two seals about a metre apart, dating from the era of King Hezekiah nearly three thousand years ago. They bear the names of the courtiers Yehucal and Gedaliah, hitherto unknown anywhere apart from in a single mention in the Book of Jeremiah in its account of the siege of the city by the Assyrians. In other words, the Bible was 100 per cent accurate. Nearby, archaeologists also found the Pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed the blind man.
Israeli Army engineers recently uncovered a tunnel from Lebanon into Israel. Eighty metres deep and a kilometre long, it took Hezbollah ten years to cut through crystalline granite. Like Hezekiah, Hezbollah engineers have a seriousness of purpose and a ruthless vision that tells us that Israel is faced with a perpetual war for survival along its Northern Border. It is hardly necessary to add that the EU has condemned the Jerusalem excavations. Meanwhile, the EU’s lucubrations on almost anything pour from Brussels like the stream into the Pool of Siloam. Thus last week’s headline: The EU is only now about to freeze €210 billion of Russian assets, which is rather like the British finally getting their hands on Hitler’s piggy bank in March 1943.
But we enter the world of Lewis Carroll after he snorted a line of crystal meth, with the words of Kaja Kallas, the EU’s “High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission”, phew: “In any peace agreement, we have to put the focus on how to get concessions from the Russian side, that they stop aggression for good and do not try to change borders by force.”
These words about not changing borders by force were not uttered by the schoolgirl Kaja Kallas, aged 14¾, on how she would rule the world, but by the EU’s foreign minister, about the captured Crimea and Donbas, which Russia will never give up. Next to go, Odessa, God help us. No wonder the citizens of the EU feel that it never reigns but it bores, or that Washington and Jerusalem contemplate it with a weary fusion of contempt and wonder. Why not? The EU is run by idiots with high IQs, the most dangerous form of stupidity there is, for the outcome invariably resembles what Lufthansa would look like if it was managed by clever moles.
It is not, which explains the following. I was in a Lufthansa Airbus 320 flying from Israel to Frankfurt last Friday. We were on the final stages of our flight-path when ground-control radar detetected a drone directly heading towards us. The pilot sheered away before accelerating upwards lest it be a “suicide” drone with a warhead. On landing, he got a much-deserved round of applause. This was just a day before the murderous attack in Bondi and the disruptions by Islamists of the Christmas markets in Belgium and Germany. Were they all connected? Possibly. After all, Germany is Israel’s closest ally in the EU, just as Ireland is its fiercest foe, and Islamic State/Muslim Brotherhood, lovely fellows, would be delighted to slaughter hundreds of Germans and Jews, plus me of course, before Islamifying Christmas in celebration.
Moreover, no lie is as valuable as the big lie conveyed with a one-word explanation, such as that Israel is an “apartheid” state. This fiction is endorsed by Palestinians and repeated ad nauseum by Israel’s enemies. So how it that an Arab judge in an Israeli court imprisoned a former president of Israel? Or that a Druse lieutenant-colonel in Special Forces serving with the Israeli Army was killed in action in Gaza? We hear a lot about “illegal” Israeli settlements on the West Bank – but are these complaints not a mark of Palestinian ambitions to build an apartheid, Jewless state? Ten percent of Israel’s population, with full civil rights, are Arab/Muslims, who live alongside Jews. So, why should Jews not similarly live in Palestinian-controlled territories?
The worst falsification about Israel is that its forces are committing genocide in Gaza. If that were so, why after two years of “genocide” are so may Gazans still alive, and being fed with the assistance of Israeli forces? Since food is being given by the UN, free of charge, why is Hamas selling it in markets? And why did Hamas not surrender when Israeli forces had siezed the entire perimeter of Gaza, but continued fighting from the rubble of the bombed buildings? Was surrender amid the rubble of Berlin not what the Nazis did in May 1945? Why keep fighting when the only possible outcome is the death of the Gazan civilians you have chosen to use as human shields? And finally, ask yourselves, if you were the commander in charge of those 19-year-old Israeli lads engaged in house-to-house fighting, possibly the most sordid and costly form of warfare possible, would you not prize their lives over those of the Palestinian civilians who hate you?
Instead of accepting these simple, human considerations, easy, cheap and invariably semi-racist terminology is offered to explain Israel’s conduct. If Israelis are angry – and they are – who would not be if 1,200 of your fellow-citizens were cold-bloodedly slaughtered in a single morning? The victims of the Nova concert and in the kibbutzim were almost all secular Jews. One of the hostages, 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, used to play the piano at the Nir Oz kibbutz for all visitors, Palestinians included, or would drive other Palestinians to Tel Aviv for hospital treatment. It was assumed that such a popular man would be returned alive. He returned in a coffin, as did Shiri Bibi (32) and her sons Ariel, (4) and Kfir, (nine months). Shiri’s husband Yarden was released after 484 days’ captivity, during which he was told he could always get another, better wife, yes, and children too. So all is well.
The main reason for these studied, brutal murders was to infuriate the people of Israel. That so many of them have remained calm and unbrutalised is a testament to Israel’s deeply civilised values. No other nation on earth would have been so restrained in their response to such cold-blooded mass-murders, and no-one else would then be so vilified. And why not? They’re only Jews, after all.
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
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