Gaza again and again!

Back to London yesterday for another demonstration - ten times bigger than last week's. The police estimate was 20,000, and you can safely double that, as usual, which means it agrees with my reckoning of 40,000. Anyway, the organizers had clearly not expected so many, so there were far too few stewards. Some of the demonstrators disobeyed instructions and stopped marching at the Israeli embassy. I just manged to squeeze through the resulting bottle-neck before it got rough and there were arrests. I deplore the violence, but I have to recognize it that the result was the number one spot on the BBC news. Terrible that people only take notice of things when they turn violent!

Today there were again cringing interviews with apologists for Israel - never with Hamas! They talk as if history began at the very earliest in 2001. What the public doesn't realize is that Zionists don't want to be loved; they need Israel to have enemies, because their founding myth is that Jews are always and everywhere at risk and can only be safe in a Jewish State. Their definition of Jews is explicitly racial, copied from the one used by the Nazis: it depends not on what religion you follow but who your parents and grandparents were.

Zionists have succeeded to some extent in spreading hatred of Jews, racially defined, to Muslims, against all the principles of Islam, which ignores ethnicity and respects all monotheists. The painful truth is that anti-Jewish sentiment has Christian origins. Once the Jewish Christianity of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans, a theology of rejection developed, seeing Jews as followers of the Devil, who "killed their God" and sacrificed Christian babies. For thirteen centuries, European Jews and Muslims suffered together from Christian persecution and sought refuge together in Muslim lands. The Zionist programme put an end to this long history of understanding, destroying the ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Egypt, North Africa and Yemen. Western support for Israel is also paradoxically destroying Christianity in Palestine and in the whole of Oriental Orthodox Christendom.