This week, TFN published ablog from Sammy Stein of Glasgow Friends of Israel in which he argued that public opinion on the Israel/Palestine question has been unduly influenced by pro-Palestinian voices, leading to anti-Israeli sentiment. Here Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign puts the opposing case, arguing that pro-Israeli voices are much more likely to be heard.
As the Glasgow University Media Group has shown, pro-Israeli voices have dominated in the UK media for many years, even as the images and facts of Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians have led to Israel plummeting in public opinion across the UK and Europe.
The issue is not complex. There has been a theft and the thief must admit the crime and return the stolen property, or make restitution.
Zionists seized the land and property of Palestinians who are now in refugee camps, while Jewish-only towns and villages stand where they once lived. Conniving in such ethnic cleansing encourages malign forces worldwide to emulate Israel’s destruction and removal of the “wrong kind of people”.
The Church of Scotland has denounced Christian Zionism, denied that there can be any Biblical mandate to dispossess Palestinians or anyone else, and supports the right of Palestinian refugees, enshrined in international law, to return to their homes and villages, most of which remain empty to this day.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is still ongoing and Israel stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by human rights groups, including Amnesty International.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is still ongoing and Israel stands accused of war crimes
Mick Napier
Only its sponsorship by the US allows Israel to ignore world-wide condemnation of what the Scottish Government called the Israeli “depth of inhumanity that we have witnessed over civilian deaths in Gaza”, ie Israel’s killing of over 2,200 Palestinians last summer, the great majority civilians, including 550 children.
Such is Israel’s contempt for international opinion that it shelled and killed students at a UN school used as a shelter. One bomb that killed eleven members of a Glasgow man’s family in Gaza – five children and six adults - has a guidance system made by Raytheon in Fife.
Such slaughter of civilians led the UN agency for Palestinian refugees to say that “The world stands disgraced” but the world, including Scotland, still sends weapons to Israel and Glasgow even deploys an Israeli military-grade surveillance system in its city centre. A South African style boycott campaign is underway and needs to grow.
Israel is a state based on Jewish domination over the Palestinians whom it has displaced and now immures in Gaza and towns and villages in the West Bank. As with many colonising ventures, the settlers aim to eliminate the native population and have a built-in disposition to extreme violence to achieve this goal. What was carried out in the Americas and Africa under a Christian cross is being done in Palestine under a Star of David.
Israel now faces a world-wide wave of revulsion at its behaviour that is taking the form of a campaign of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) by civil society bodies who realise the need for such action given the ongoing violation of Palestinian rights, the brutal siege of Gaza, and the refusal of our governments to insist on the minimum observation of human rights from the EU stipulates before any country should qualify for the lucrative trade agreements Israeli has obtained from the EU.
