Slow-motion Genocide in Palestine: Palestinian civil war inevitable. Alan Johnston silent. Thurs 17th May

It is unbearable to listen to the news of genocide in action in Gaza! It always seemed to me that the demand of the Israelis that the Palestinians should ensure the security of Israel from their own extremists was a demand for civil war, so no surprise that civil war is what we've got. I listened to a Palestinian reported comment that he did not know why he was fighting, the others started it, and know the futility of seeking rationality in the midst of genocide and a proxy civil war. (Find out about the comparable proxy genocide of Maoris in the 19th century in my notes on The Archaeology of Warfare, or read the book of course.) The despairing voice of the Palestinian spokesman I heard on radio claiming the violence was all the fault of the occupation was spot on, but I have written about all that already. In fact civil war in Palestine is exactly what Israel requires to justify its occupation and it's very difficult not to believe that some at least are conscious of what they are doing. Some Israelis must be as aware of Gaza being a gigantic concentration camp as the Palestinian spokesman who articulated this, and if you remove guards from inside a prison violence and mayhem is inevitable: proxy genocide encouraged by occasional Israeli attacks. The ineffective mortar attacks on Israel are merely the automatic reflexive thrashings of a dying creature.

The invisible incarceration of Alan Johnston is perfectly comprehensible despite what the media may say. Just so the genocide in Palestine is "invisible" in plain sight. Alan Johnston's plight is just a variant of "kill the messenger", after all why pick on a messenger that no one listens to? In the midst of Palestinians living in unendurable oppression and hopelessness that, like Darfur, is unnamed as genocide and ethnic cleansing, Alan Johnston was making a good living "telling their story" as it truly was to public acclaim, "chest-beating" concern and zero response on the ground. This is not intended as a criticism of Alan Johnston nor a justification for his captors but now he is getting a real taste of what life is like in Palestine. The hypocrisy of those who read his articles is revealed by how much more effort is going into supporting and rescuing him than into genuine efforts to relieve the Palestinians' plight. What about a petition on the World Service website about Israel releasing the Palestinians own money into their hands so that they are at least raised to the level that prisoners in Western jails enjoy, the basic necessities of self-respect and a decent life? I'd want to put my name to that one! There are many more deserving innocent prisoners around the world than Alan Johnston.

Looking at the issue from my psychotherapists viewpoint, the Israelis have projected the suffering from the genocide enacted against them onto the Palestinian people and have turned them, as some other author noted some years ago, into the new "Jews", ethnically cleansed into a Diaspora around the world, permanent refugees exploited for political reasons by supposed friendly co-religionists. The European powers and USA colluded to assuage their guilt from their previous collusion with the Nazi genocide by projecting the "Jewish problem" onto Palestine -- "a faraway country of which they knew little" and cared less. Well they may have thought they knew quite a lot, but colonialists remain ignorant because shielded by barricades of prejudice. Of course it was the Zionists who imported terrorism into the region in order to gain the State whose survival is threatened by it. I remember from my childhood the news stories of Jewish terrorism against British forces in Palestine, and now hear of fundamentalist Orthodox Jews trying to impose the same restrictions on women as fundamentalist Muslims do with no surprise. In both Israel and Palestine severely stressed mothers are inevitably producing children with a deep unconscious hostility towards women, and the need control them. Powerful Anti-Libidinal Egos and deeply impressed Rejecting Objects are rife in psyches all over the Middle East.