Calling Israel by its True Name

So, the US and Guatemala are, as of the time of writing, skipping ahead in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process and moving their diplomatic ties to Israel to the contended city of Jerusalem. And while Israel has claimed the city as their own for a long time, other nations haven’t dared to aknowledge such a move.

It’s a cluster fuck of no small proportions. Not a surprise, but clustery none the less. Even though the US are supposed to be leading the peace-talks, everyone with an ear to international news should be able to piece together that they are not only not impartial, but foreign-affairs-wise the same as Israel. The two countries are, by many foreign policy standards, the same. They’re USrael. And Guatemala was one of the very few nations in the UN that supported the US move to Jerusalem, which makes it reasonable that they’d double down with an embassy move of their own.

Now, the international community knows that Israel is an aggressive, apartheid state in the making. The joint USrael political agenda has tried forcefully to hide that realisation through political pressure and a feeble attempt to control the narrative. But seeing as how Israel are slowly creeping towards a greater and greater occupation and annexation of Palestinian terriroty, it’s really hard to hide their aggression.

It’s getting even harder to rationally justify it. There hasn’t been a Jewish state on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea for many millennia. And arguing that they were there first is ludicrous. If we decided who should govern or own what land based on who lived there first, well then… the US should capitulate almost all their territory to North American First Nation peoples. To really hammer home how ridiculous that argument is, Swedish vikings founded Moscow. How ’bout giving us back your capital after a thousand years, Russia? See? Unreasonable arguments.

Post-Ottoman colonial powers ceded some land to Jewish refugees. They called it Israel. Since then, Israel has been aggressively expanding their territory and influence. Do they have the right to do that? About as much right as any country ever has had in forcefully taking land and displacing residents. But whether or not you think they have the right to slowly swallow another nation state’s sovereign territory, like Russia’s trying to do to the Crimean peninsula, or how the US did over the course of two hundred years to the First Nations, you should call them by what they are. An aggressive, militaristic state that expands their terriroty on the premise of ancient religious rights and arrogant notions of supremacy. That’s modern day Zionism.

And I think that’s pretty shitty behaviour.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/12-2017

To See Yourself Become the Villain

The United Nations have gone done shat the bed. Again. Go figure. It’s not the first time. Sure as shit won’t be the last either.

So, what exactly have they done now? In record time, they pulled a published UN report. What was so bad about this particular report that the moral outrage alarms went wild? Well, it called Israel an “apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. The report had it’s reasons. There were enough reasons that the authors could number them off, one by one.

Who were the authors? A professor of political science, and a former UN observer. Who published the thing? The head of ESCWA (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, and yes I know that’s a mouthful), who resigned from her position when the Secretary General (her boss) demanded the report taken down. While slamming the door behind her as hard as she could, she said that the reason the report was pulled was Israeli pressure on the UN. The UN itself denounced the report because it hadn’t gone through “proper” authentication channels before being published under the UN brand. The Israeli UN envoy said that the report was an “attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy”.

Now, as far as we can see from the comfort of our living rooms, the situation for most Palestinians in the “Holy Land” (sarcastic quotation this time) looks pretty dire. They are being treated, by all apparent accounts, like second rate citizens. Sounds like apartheid to me. But the UN disagrees, after getting rid of the people who thought so. But why should the UN care what happens to the Palestinians? Well…

“We, the peoples of the United Nations, [are] determined to reaffirm the faith in the fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”.

That’s cited from the preamble of their Charter. Their mission statement. But I guess some people’s rights are more equal than others.

This is not an isolated incident of UN fuckery. In May of last year, UNESCO scrubbed their environmental report clear of any mention of Australia, due to pressure from the Aussie government who claimed that the report might negatively impact the country’s tourism. Recently, the UN have been forced into investigating rape and an assortment of other abuses committed by their “peacekeepers”, which they previously had tried to cover up by reprimanding the whistle blower.

Why cover up such a thing, you might wonder? Well, while most nations have joined the United Nations, the UN is only sanctioned to function on moral grounds. They are supposed to be the better people, be the better organization. The morality of the Charter is supposed to guide the world. Without moral authority, what good are they? And while they might still do more good than ill, the fact that they cover up their mistakes and dance to the tune of certain government interests, makes me suspect that the leadership of the harbingers of equality and justice is compromised to the core. And that their authority seems very questionable by now.

“And thus, I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen out of holy writ,
and seem a saint, when most I play the devil” – King Richard III (Act I), William Shakespeare

/Sebastian Lindberg 21/3-2017