by Alexander Baron

There is a missing dimension to the Israel/Palestine question, not the elephant in the room, ie something nobody will mention for fear of ostracism - Jewish power for example – but one no one mentions because they literally do not see it. Here, that dimension can be summed up in one word: race.

In the UK, all mention of race except on liberal/socialist terms has long been taboo due both to the stranglehold our enemies have over the media and other institutions, and to their none-too-subtle but extremely successful brainwashing campaign that involved associating all opposition to non-white immigration and then to forced race-mixing with a particularly bizarre form of sex shop Nazism.

On the other hand, the liberal/socialist hate campaign against South Africa never did try to evoke that spectre, and with good reason, the South African government never had any sympathy with Nazism, nor indeed with “racism” as it is usually understood. This may sound a curious claim to make, but anyone who has studied the contemporaneous South African press will realise that was indeed the case. White newspapers regularly featured stories about blacks, who even appeared in advertisements. Ordinary white South Africans did not regard themselves as “racists”, and had no time for people who tried to stir animosity between the races; they believed simply that the two races should develop separately, as the short-lived South African National Front discovered when its two leading lights Jack Noble and Ray Hill attempted some stirring.

By the same token, extremely few fanatical Zionists have any sympathy with Nazism – in spite of the oft’ used analogy – what they want is a Jewish state. By the same token, what the Palestinians want is a Palestinian state. And the basis of such a state is… race. What else? It is nothing less than absurd that nobody seems to realise this, including Jimmy Carter who wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he lamented Zionism moving towards a Greater Israel solution, yet advocated a two-state solution himself. How many solutions are there to the Israel Palestine question? Broadly speaking there are four.

Israel could be dismantled and Jews relocated elsewhere – the solution proposed by Michèle Renouf. Imaginative though this may sound, it is not going to happen. It is easy to argue that the Jews stole the land from the Palestinians, we all know that now, but sixty and more years on and with a burgeoning population, they’re not going to give it all back. If you advocate that, you might just as well say white Americans should give back the entire North American continent to the Red Man, or that Australia should be given back to the Aborigines. In short, we have to live in the real world and deal with real problems pragmatically.

The Palestinians could be relocated elsewhere. This is not quite so unthinkable as many of them have emigrated, including to the United States, but again it is not going to happen.

The two nations could be united as per the South African model. This is the solution favoured by “anti-racists”. Unlikely though that may sound, it happened in South Africa. That may have been a qualified success, but it did not result in the bloodbath many had predicted.

We, though, should support the two-state solution, but only one that includes a just settlement for the Palestinians. This would mean the unification of Gaza with the West Bank, which would also mean cutting Israel in half. How practicable is this? Let us add a further factor, as Jerusalem is of historic/religious significance to all three of the world’s great religions, how about putting it under international control? Arab denizens of Israel could then be relocated to the new Palestine - probably with generous subsidies from the American taxpayer. If a two-part Israel sounds unworkable or impractical, it would be no more so than a two-part Japan or a two-part New Zealand.

The Middle East is of strategic importance to the West largely because of oil. By developing alternative technologies we can reduce that importance. As for Palestine especially, what it will need more than anything else is investment.

There is one other thing, the mass murderers who make up the current Israeli Government should be held to account for their crimes. What we have just witnessed is not yet another war in Gaza; there is no Palestinian army, and now there is precious little in the way of infrastucture. The recent conflict was a cold-blooded act of mass murder by what Norman Finkelstein has called a lunatic state. It may be that Netanyahu and his gang will be put on trial in The Hague, but if and when that day arises, it should be for crimes against humanity, not for war crimes.