Colin Armstrong on Israel/Palestine

I came across this on journalist Andrew Marr's Facebook page, in a comment on what he said on LBC.

ME:

But the Lord God/Yahweh gave Jacob/Israel's descendants the land 3,000 years ago - for all time.  Soon, two lots of descendants of Abraham always wanted and still want the same land and are unable to share.  Are family rows always the worst kind?!

Tim

Colin supports a one state solution.

 

COLIN ARMSTRONG:

He (Andrew Marr) is right but the consequences for Israel will be terrible if they don't moderate their behaviour and accept that the Palestinians exist. 

Many of us came from the same position as Andrew Marr but since Oct 7th '23 and the disproportionate response of the Israelis our views regarding Israel have changed. 

We've looked at its history and we've realised that the European Jews who moved to Palestine in the 20th century didn't take over an empty land and make the desert bloom. They took over a land populated by an indigenous population who had lived there for thousands of years and from the beginning they systematically killed and ethnically cleansed that population in a ruthless, cruel, and illegal way and Gaza is just a continuation of that evil. 

There's no coming back for Israel. Its reputation has been destroyed by its own brutality and the only solution is a one state solution where everyone, living in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank has equal rights and live in a secular democratic state with protected rights. They managed it in N Ireland; let's hope a similar solution is possible in Palestine/Israel.

TO: Colin Armstrong 

Palestinians were invented in 1964 by Arafat as a political ploy against Israel, under the British Mandate of Palestine the Arabs didn’t call themselves Palestinians because it was associated with Jews. Read your history. The Jews are the indigenous people of that land and they started turning it into something and then the Arabs started coming in droves way before 1948!

TO: Phyllis Lane Sciborowski

There was a very small Jewish indigenous population in Palestine in the 19th century. The bulk of the population, also indigenous, was Arab and then the Austrian, Herzl invented zionism and the Palestinian Arabs miraculously disappeared according to the zionists and it was an " empty land", another lie. 

The Jewish population of Israel today is largely made up of European, Arab, and Russian Jews who colonised Palestine throughout the 20th century but the Arabs/ Palestinians were and are still there.

The facts of history are that Zionism and current day Israel is a racist supremacist colonial manifestation of a form of race based politics that prioritises one group over another and that the process of clearing the land of Arabs who have lived there for millennia has been ongoing since the inception of that state in 1948. 

Your reasoning that the Jews are the indigenous population of that land is ludicrous. We might as well say that the Anglo Saxons and the Celts have the right to the land that they controlled a few thousand years ago. Maybe we could search out the descendents of Boudica and demand the right of return for her clan. That's how ridiculous the zionist justification for stealing the land from the people that owned it actually is.

This current crisis and Israel's murderous behaviour has opened the eyes of millions who formerly supported it. There's no getting away from it and the myths of the "empty land" and "making the desert bloom" have been exposed for the lies they are. Israel was founded on theft, ethnic cleansing, and murder and that's the historical fact and it will be recorded as such in years to come.