The idea of government owes its heritage to the need to contain the harms which associated individuals must fear from one another. But government itself is not free from wrongs. It is bejewelled by a cathedral trail of political miscarriages which, once adopted, become principles. So it is not unforeseen to find prevarication prevailing where perjury has led the way. Nobel Peace Laureate Barak Obama approved in 2016, $3.8 billion in aid to strengthen the military capability of Israel — beginning in 2019 and through 2028.
The power of God or the weakness of man, religious fervour or the divine right of kings to govern wrong is responsible for the ruin of countries like Lebanon and the birth of others. The question of Palestine remains a challenge to the orthodox geography of history, which usually identifies national histories as discrete. But the French Revolution and the mutinies of Haiti’s Black Spartacus, Toussaint Louverture, criss-crossed and answered each other like voices in a fugue.
Toussaint ceremoniously ripped the white band from the French tricolour and made Haiti’s red and blue flag. The Black Jacobins, chained on plantations, charred European feudalism and dulled the glittering prosperity of Nantes and Dieppe built on the backs of slaves. The peasantry of France stiffened their resistance against domestic tyranny inevitably becoming abolitionists. Equally, St. Vincent’s Ralph Gonzales knows that the old G7 playbook of silence contributes to impunity. Germany now admits to the genocide of Herero and Nama peoples in Africa. At the genocide memorial in Rwanda, Macron confessed that France “valued silence over examination of the truth”.
Naftali Bennett has vowed to do “everything in my power, forever” to fight Palestinian statehood. A non-contiguous “Palestinian State” consisting of the Gaza controlled by Jihadist and a secular West Bank will never happen. Bennett supports unilateral annexation of 60% of the West Bank, under the terms of the Oslo Accords which is home to over 150,000 Palestinians and over 300,000 settlers. Bennet is lucid — Palestinians will never be allowed to create a state in the West Bank which remains the cradle of Israel’s water resources.
“What occupation?” Bennett asks. “The idea of forming a Palestinian state in Israel has reached a dead end,” Bennett said. Never in the history of the Jewish people has so much energy been invested in “something so pointless,” and “we should put the idea behind us,” he concluded. Bennett proposes that West Bank Palestinians be cuddled into enclaves and some offered Israeli citizenship or permanent residence to counter charges of apartheid. Bennett compares the conflict with Palestinians to bomb fragments that cannot be dislodged from the body; a two-state solution would permanently hobble the country, making annexation the lesser of two evils.
Returning Gaza to Egypt is an idea. Egypt controlled the Gaza in 1948. In June 2012, Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Two months later, his friend el-Sisi staged a coup d’état, jailed Morsi and became President. Morsi spoke for five minutes from a soundproof glass cage in a Cairo court, collapsed and died. Bennett said — Israel has no claims on the Gaza Strip since Israel withdrew its troops and settlers in 2005. Blockaded by Israel — by air, land and sea — since 2007, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Michael Lynk, described the Gaza as the world’s largest “Open-Air Prison”. The Gaza has seven border crossings. Israel sealed four commercial crossings in 2007 after Hamas wrested control of the strip from the Palestinian Authority.
A tightly sealed Rafah crossing is controlled by Egypt since Morsi was ousted. Inside a suite of the ornately decorated Hotel du Palais during a Group of Seven summit in Biarritz, Trump waited for el-Sisi. “Where’s my favourite dictator?” Mr. Trump called out in a flamboyant voice. Stunned silence followed. Biden continues a troubling “business as usual” partnership with el-Sisi. In a thinly veiled reference to el-Sisi, Biden said that there will be no more blank cheques for Trump’s “favourite dictator” who Trump touted as a “fantastic guy.” There is a tendency towards a personification of the social that makes great men merely or nearly instruments in the hands of economic destiny. Great men live in the moment of the limits of the necessities that enfold them, and the realisation, complete or partial, of all those possibilities allow them to write futures and henceforward histories. But only such histories as are possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is surrounded by the inevitabilities of their environments.
When Lod, a bitterly divided Arab-Jewish mixed-city, teetered on a knife’s edge, inching towards civil war as the battle brewed between Gaza and the Israeli army 40km away, Mansour Abbas journeyed to a burning synagogue to offer Bennett assistance. Abbas, leader of the United Arab List (UAL), like the froth of the Sea of Galilee, has now joined forces with Bennett to remove Netanyahu. But if Bennett decides to bomb the Gaza, Mansour is no Black Jacobin and Bennett is blunt. Bennett jogs the memory of Palestinians who grudge Jewish West Bank settlers — “When you were still swinging from trees, we had a Jewish state here.”
