Gaza again

Poor Palestinians! They are so bad at presenting their case. And how good the Israelis are! Have you noticed how many of them sound English or American or Australian or South African? It is because that is where they really were from before they came to colonize Palestine. It is all part of the plan to make Israelis seem like 'us', while the Plestinians are 'them', the 'aliens', the 'enemy'.

Anyway, here is what Hamas should be saying: "The Zionists came to settle in our country, without asking the permission of its people. Sixty years ago they drove three quarters of a million of us off our land and out of our homes, and they never accepted responsibility, let alone offered us the right to return or to claim compensation. Those of us from the South were driven into this large concentration camp of Gaza and forty years ago they sent in their settlers so that we could see how well they lived and how they filled their swimming pools with our water. Then they pulled out those settlers and expected us to regard that as a concession, though in fact it saved them a lot of money and made it easier to target us. They assassinated our leaders, and when we won an election they locked up most of our MPs and treated the opposition as if it represented us. When we retaliated with our home-made rockets they tried to starve our people into submission. When we respected a cease-fire they broke it on 4th November and accused us of breaking it. Now they have sent in their helicopters and tanks. They know that we have almost nothing except our human resources, yet they bomb our schools and our university and will not allow our students to take up their scholarships abroad. All we ask is to be recognized as human beings, treated as equals and allowed to talk about our future in the framework of international law."

I suppose the reason they don't say these things is that they think we know their history and don't need to be told it. In fact most English and Americans don't even know the history of their own countries. We do not realize that every Arab has heard about the Caliph Umar's guarantee of religious freedom to the people of Jerusalem, about the Crusades, about The Sykes-Picot agreement to divide the Middle East between Britain and France, about the Balfour Declaration, about the terrorist campaign of the Zionists after World War Two...